Jack Wilkins Trio: Call Him Reckless

call him reckless liner notes

"Madame Curie" was on TV again last week, and for all its high-gloss Hollywoodisms in relating the saga of the discovery of radium, there's a relevant idea at its core: a small group of brilliant, intensely dedicated people sift through piles and piles of junk against enormous odds, to produce, or rather to find, the microscopic amount of precious material they suspect lies somewhere within. The ratio of what is wasted to what is used isn't quite as high in your average jazz album, but then the raw materials here are considerably more expensive. Two days and nights worth of recording went into the hour of music you're about to hear. Still, the sifting doesn't so much involve the time required to produce a session like this, but the mental effort required to bring creative individuals up to their peak levels. How they do it is quite beyond me. Lord knows, it's humanly possible to clear the mind and focus one's brain intently enough to produce teensy amounts of worthwhile matter. The modern recording studio is, in fact, designed precisely for the purpose of seamlessly splicing these minuscule bits together. But not so for the jazz musician. He reduces the microphones and recording machines to their most passive points, restricting them to serving as audience rather than participant in the performance process. Wilkins, Clark and LaSpina use the studio as a facsimile for the club and, as if they were performing for an audience, meet the goal marks set for them by Charlie Parker, Sonny Rollins and the "LP" concept in jazz, creating melodies that interest, entertain and occasionally even astound, which would be remarkable even were they not improvised. They don't start entirely from scratch. These men also have their own influences: Jack's long association with Buddy Rich (the two were drawn together, one suspects, primarily because of a common belief that all jazz styles are valid so long as they swing) and Mike's with Herbie Hancock are too crucial to their music to let pass without a mention.