From
their humble beginnings (I first saw the trio play in Montreal’s
Chapters bookstore), it was always The Susie Arioli Band featuring
Jordan Officer on guitar. Despite Susie’s A-major stage
charm and velvet voice that every lyric loves to linger in, Jordan
Officer's guitar work was deemed so essential to the group dynamic
that his name has always been highlighted in their programs and
CD covers – a decision that has been warmly embraced by
both listeners and label.
What
Jordan Officer does like no other guitarist is perform his accompaniment
and solos with a punctuation that is at once highly original,
bravely transparent and so simple it defies the mysteriously gratifying
result. Think of the first five notes of the middle movement of
Mozart’s Piano Concerto 26 and ask yourself how can this
be so exquisite, when it’s the same note played five times?
Or, what is it about the fifth note that reveals the meaning and
poignancy of the preceding four? Jordan Officer does for the bare
minimum of notes, in his time and genre, what Mozart and especially
Bach did for theirs, imbuing them with varying degrees of density
and motility, and the strength of character to create their personal
space, where the rendering, in context, perfectly bridges the
before and after. Through our encounters with these exceptional
acts of creation, we come to recognize what constitutes perfection
in the arts.
A typical
Jordan solo is an homage to quasi minimalist playing, replete
with elisions, oddly weighted clusters of notes, sudden hesitations
and dead stops, starts that begin after the beginning, halts that
come before the stop, and most significantly, just when you’re
expecting to hear a note or sequence of notes, his refusal to
play them – resulting in you, the listener, playing them
in your head, leaving you a fully engaged participant in a solo
of someone else’s making – and loving it. In an era
when note making by the millions (Al Dimeola, Bireli Lagrene and
their finger blurring epigones) has trumped the art of making
music, the arrival of Jordan Officer is not only refreshing, but
a lesson on how layers of meaning can be found in the simplest
of notes and the spaces between them -– and why the risks
of leaving one’s self so exposed are worth the taking.
Before
Officer turned 30, he had already discovered what few guitarists
are able to in a lifetime: his own style, comprised of a telltale
interval through which he reveals himself to the world as he interprets
it. But in Officer’s case, it’s not so much the defining
interval he exudes in his ascents and descents that we immediately
recognize, as with John Scofield when he first started up with
Miles Davis, but rather his devilishly tantalizing original punctuation
that features unpredictable sequences of aborted flourishes and
meaningful silences that never fail to inject new life into music
that was written in the 1930s and 40s. Like Bach (on harpsichord),
he knows how to weigh and place a note or chord like no other
guitarist today such that if 25 guitarists were asked to solo
on the same standard, it would require less than Usain Bolt’s
9.69 to identify the musical DNA that defines Officer as Officer.
So the
question I asked myself during the Jordan Officer concert at Guitarmania,
the mini-guitar festival that ran for three days inside the 2008
Montreal
International Jazz Festival, is why is Officer
getting away from doing what he does so singularly well? To be
sure, he played well enough, sang well enough, and his play list,
which included a few jazz inflected originals as well as Country
and covers, was agreeable to the ear. But that was it, and by
morning it was hard to recall what I heard. I was truly baffled
until it occurred to me that since Officer has been heading his
own band, he has felt compelled to fill in and deliver a fuller
-- code for more satisfying -- sound. Thus, the spare playing
for which he is celebrated disappears or gets lost in the conventional
delivery of what ends up sounding like a conventional product.
The more
I thought about it, despaired over it, I was forced to conclude
that Jordan Officer, still in his very early 30s, hasn’t
truly grasped the nature of his accomplishment, that being his
unforced original manner of punctuating his solos and support
playing so that the listener immediately seizes upon the style
that is inseparable from the musician, keeping in mind that style,
when forced, always ends up militating against what can only come
about as the unpracticed response and reaction to life and its
living.
If criticism,
in its best sense, is first and foremost a collaboration, where
the end goal is the evolution and enhancement of both the work
and its agency, I’m hopeful Jordan Officer will receive
these words with the deliberate pace and humility with which they
are intended. Who among us, in the course of a life time, doesn’t
make a misstep from 'time after time,' and who among us can say
they haven’t got by without 'a little help from their friends?'
I, for
one, am looking forward to Jordan Officer getting back to his
A-game because I’m totally convinced that by the time he
turns in his badge, he will merit serious consideration as one
of the significant jazz guitarists of his time.
Listen
to Mr. Officer at his very best playing Cole Porter’s Night and Day.
