Remembering John Abercrombie

News, John Abercrombie, Jack DeJohnette, Joe Lovano, John McLaughlin

By Dan Ouellette I Aug. 23, 2017

John Abercrombie (1944–2017)
(Photo: John Rogers/ECM Records)

There weren’t many opportunities to play in public, so at first Abercrombie did that more in private. He was hired to play in the Danny White Orchestra r&b/blues band, whose gigs included playing at Air Force and Army bases. There repertoire included r&b standards as well as arrangements of Horace Silver’s and Ray Charles’ music. That led to Abercrombie being enlisted by Hammond B3 player John “Hammond” Smith.

“John was looking for a young guitar player whom he could abuse and pay the least amount of money possible,” he says with a laugh. It was a funky, jazz-tinged job in the organ tradition that kept the young guitarist busy for seven nights a week plus a Sunday matinee. Abercrombie later made his first recording with Smith in 1968, The Soulful Blues, in a band that included saxophonist Houston Person and drummer Grady Tate.

During this time, two seminal events were taking place in the outside world. First was the rise in popularity of rock music, precipitated by The Beatles and enlarged upon by bands that Abercrombie listened to, including Cream and later Hendrix. But the most immediate backdrop was the Vietnam War. Abercrombie attended Berklee from 1962–’66, which sheltered him from the draft, then graduated in 1967. If he had pushed to teach, he would have avoided conscription, but he opted not to go that route. “I didn’t want to teach,” he says. “I was too young. I wanted to play.”

Two days after graduation he received his notice to report to the induction center in New Haven, Connecticut, to take his physical. “I flunked,” says Abercrombie with a big smile. “It’s a true story. I was born with a short right leg that required me to wear a lift in my shoe. Of course, it was embarrassing as a kid. It looked weird. Kids at school would call me Frankenstein. So I stopped wearing it. But when I got my draft notice, my mother suggested getting new shoes with a lift. And my doctor wrote a letter that said something like, ‘Please excuse John from killing and maiming today. He’s not feeling well.’ So I took the physical and I was rejected.”

Abercrombie soon jumped into the jazz- rock fire by joining the pioneering fusion band Dreams, which included Randy and Michael Brecker, Billy Cobham (then Bill Cobham Jr.) and others. “It was an assorted group of maniacs,” Abercrombie says. “That was the beginning of me not playing straightahead jazz for many years.”

While the band largely fizzled in the fusion zone, it did help launch Cobham’s career. The drummer played with Davis, joined up with John McLaughlin’s Mahavishnu Orchestra, and into the early-to-mid-’70s helmed his own fusion band, to which Abercrombie was enlisted. It was exciting, and Abercrombie loved his bandmates, but the gig ultimately took him away from his jazz roots.

“I was playing with a wah-wah pedal and other effects,” he recalls. “I could play this music and still play a standard like ‘Stella By Starlight,’ which a lot of the guys couldn’t go near. I knew Billy could play with a beautiful swing, but he was playing rock rhythms in odd meters and always funky. The harmonies didn’t go very far. The solos were played on a vamp. Something was missing.”

When Cobham’s band went on tour as the opening act for the Doobie Brothers, Abercrombie’s dissatisfaction grew. It climaxed when they played the Spectrum in Philadelphia. “They play football there,” he says in mock exasperation. “And I thought, ‘What the hell am I doing here? Wait a minute—this isn’t what I set out to do.’ I needed an out.”

The big turning point, Abercrombie says, came when he got a call out of the blue: “The phone rang and it’s, ‘Hey man, this is Jack DeJohnette. I got your number from a friend, and I’ve been hearing good things about you. I’m starting a band. Would you like to come to my house with Miroslav Vitous and jam?’”

Abercrombie agreed, they set up in DeJohnette’s backyard (at this time the drummer was living in Flemington, New Jersey) and played free improvisations. “All of sudden,” Abercrombie says, “we hear someone playing a soprano saxophone off in the distance. It was Steve Marcus, who lived across this field. As he got closer and closer, we were playing along with him. It was a mind-blowing hippie experience. That was how I got out of hard-core fusion into something that was way more expansive.”

Around this same time, Abercrombie linked up with ECM label founder Manfred Eicher, who knew the guitarist from his appearance on trumpeter Enrico Rava’s 1973 album Katchapari Rava (on the Italian label BASF) and invited him to make a recording as a leader. Initially Abercrombie told Eicher that he was just a sideman and hadn’t written much of his own music.

But Eicher persisted. They corresponded by mail, and finally the guitarist said that he was ready. His vision for a trio included DeJohnette and organist/pianist Jan Hammer. “I hired two ridiculous guys who were so good, so wide open, so exploratory, so full of amazing chops, it was all I could do to keep up with them to make the record,” he says. The result was Abercrombie’s Timeless, which teems with a rare blend of spirited fusion, gripping rhythms and acoustic jazz, including two ballads that Abercrombie wrote specifically for the session.