Remembering Russell Malone, a Jazz Guitar Great With a Larger-Than-Life Personality

“We’ve Only Just Begun” is my favorite track by Russell Malone. It’s on his 2003 album “Playground,” but, more importantly, I heard him play it live; I think it was at Dizzy’s, and it must have been just after that club opened in 2004. If memory serves, the live performance was slightly slower than the one on the album. It begins with a funky riff, roughly the same as Dizzy Gillepsie would play in later years as kind of an introduction and countermelody to “A Night in Tunisia,” a basic lick that Gillespie would repeat a few times and chant, “I’ll never go back to Georgia.” Malone was playing with our expectations by starting with a piece of music wholly different from what he usually offered. Written by Paul Williams and immortalized by The Carpenters in 1970, “We’ve Only Just Begun” was omnipresent in the mid-1970s, when both Russell and I were youngsters. Like a lot of hits of the period, it was heard so often that it was almost like wallpaper, something I never paid attention to — and I was at first surprised that a “serious” jazzmen would even notice it.Malone starts in left field, and then leads us into the tune in such a way that we now have to pay attention. He forces us to think about what the song is about, what it’s trying to tell us. Malone is playing the notes, he’s playing the chords, he’s playing a swinging rhythm, but most of all, and more than many musicians of any era or any genre, he’s playing the song.Up to the moment of his death a few days ago, Russell Malone was my favorite living guitarist. As I say, with jazz guitarists of the relatively recent era, the big discussion is whether they play primarily single notes or chords. Lester Young famously said that he wouldn’t play a song unless he knew the words, and, likewise with Malone, it wasn’t about the minutiae, it was about the biggest possible picture: It was all about the song itself.No wonder that singers loved him, and that he had such a special relationship with Harry Connick Jr., and even more so with Diana Krall. Quite possibly the last time I heard him play was a few months ago, with the fine Chicago-based vocalist Tammy McCann, and we hung out most recently together at the Appel Room, to hear the great Catherine Russell. He was around long enough to forge a lasting friendship and musical relationship with a nascent jazz singer, 25-year-old Ekep Nkwelle, as she related during a set in the Charlie Parker Jazz Festival this past Sunday, two days after the announcement of Malone’s passing. Ms. Nkwelle, whose name is Cameroonian and somewhat difficult to pronounce for Americans, told the crowd Malone always called her “Kneecap.”I can testify to his propensity for colorful names for his friends: He always addressed me “Uncle Freeds,” which was a remnant from the early days of the internet — that’s how long I knew him — when that was my email address at AOL.com. (Don’t try to reach me there today.)It won’t be surprising if there are dozens, if not hundreds, of testimonials to Russell Malone like this one. He was a unique combination: a brilliant musician on any instrument — one of the greatest of the contemporary era — with an extroverted, larger-than-life personality that was rare even in the performing arts. A greeting from Russell invariably meant a few minutes of sharing the latest jokes he had heard, and he approached humor with the same competitive spirit that the best musicians bring to jam sessions. Any conversation with Russell was all about who could make the other laugh the hardest.I once had the pleasure and privilege to be backstage when the late Jon Hendricks was playing the Blue Note around 2001. Even though this exchange transpired in Jon’s dressing room, it was at least as entertaining as anything happening onstage, as Jon and Russell tried to out-pun, out-quip, and out-joke each other. It wasn’t so much a question of who could be funnier but who had the most nerve to crack the most egregiously horrendous one-liner. I piped up with a salient piece of intel, informing the two of them that I had just heard that rock star Rod Stewart was about to make an album of standards from the Great American Songbook. Before any of us could breathe, Russell beat us all to the punchline when he said, “I bet the first song will be, ‘Rod Bless the Child That’s Got His Own.’”Malone was a standard-bearer for musicians of his generation in another sense, in that he set an example for players to look beyond the more familiar tunes — Cole Porter, Irving Berlin, and Burt Bacharach were particularly well-served by him — and find the hidden gems, both from the traditional songbook as well as more contemporary pop, like the Carpenters song referenced above. He exhumed one vintage classic after another, like “Someone’s Rocking My Dreamboat,” a hit for the Ink Spots — also performed notably by Bugs Bunny — by a pair of early African-American songwriters and publishers, Leon and Otis Rene. Malone inspired Branford Marsalis to play a 1931 Boswell Sisters number, “When I Take My Sugar Tea,” and he even spun a jazz rhapsody out of the “Theme from ‘Gunsmoke’” on his 2007 “Live at Jazz Standard, Vol. 2.”More importantly, he was a master of the blues during a moment when many younger musicians seemed to be avoiding that all-essential building block of the jazz repertoire. Yet he never played with greater heart or devotion than when he essayed one of the classic spirituals: “Swing Low Sweet Chariot,” “What a Friend We Have In Jesus,” “Precious Lord.” Russell Malone was only 60 on August 23 when, as Ron Carter put it, “he suffered a massive heart attack upon completion of our performance at Blue Note Tokyo.” (In addition to singers, Malone had a special relationship with bassist-bandleaders like the late Ray Brown, Christian McBride, and Mr. Carter.) In the words of a mutual friend, the young clarinetist Adrian Galante, “he had so much music left in him.” For my part, I keep thinking about how, when Malone played “We’ve Only Just Begun” 20 years ago, it would have seemed even more poignant and moving had I realized that we were already closer to the end of his career than the beginning. Yet even with his “transition,” as Mr. McBride described it at a concert a few hours after the news reached New York, it’s clear that our love for Russell Malone has, in fact, only just begun.

Remembering Russell Malone, a Jazz Guitar Great With a Larger-Than-Life Personality

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