Playing the "Fourth Way"

Playing with color is The Way of the Sly Man

Dave Morgan admits he’s an egomaniac. That’s why the gifted composer and bassist was fortunate to hook up with the resolutely modest trumpet/flugelhorn player Jack Schantz. While Schantz doesn’t get a composer’s credit, The Way of the Sly Man, Morgan’s exceptional new album, wouldn’t have come about without him. Or without G.I. Gurdjieff, a spiritualist of the early 20th century, whose work Schantz reveres.

Released on Morgan’s Being Time label in mid-June, Sly Man is beginning to get some play. Dan Polletta interviewed Morgan and Schantz about it on Around Noon in early August, it’s starting to circulate among the jazzerati, and it’s already been performed several times.

Based on Gurdjieff’s writings, particularly his notion of a “fourth way”, Sly Man is a wildly ambitious work that features 13 of northeast Ohio’s finest musicians, many of them associated with the Jazz Unit, an on-again, off-again group that plays occasionally at the on-again, off-again Bop Stop. Sly Man was performed last October at Stambaugh Auditorium in Youngstown, the University of Akron, and the Gurdjieff Foundation on Broadway Avenue in Cleveland. There are no plans for further dates.

“It isn’t really practical to present it in a club,” says Morgan. Not only is it expensive to produce, assembling the many high-caliber musicians who play on the record is logistically and financially challenging. “It’s hard to get Dan Wall (the pianist) and Jamey Haddad (the world-beat percussionist) to come out and play for the door,” Morgan says. “It’s more of a concert-venue type of work than a Nighttown type of work.”

Also playing on Sly Man: wind master Howie Smith, ace guitarist Bob Fraser, trombonist Chris Anderson, saxophonist John Klayman and French horn player Bill Hoyt. Oh, yes: Nathan Douds is the main drummer, with Val Kent guesting on one track. This is an all-star album indeed.

The music explores the way of the fakir, attesting to mastery of the body; the way of the monk, for mastery of emotions and faith; the way of the yogi, for mastery of intellect; and the “fourth way,” or Way of the Sly Man, which puts all the others together, its practitioners engaged and in the moment. A complex cosmological system underpins all, but you don’t have to understand Gurdjieff to enjoy the music, which is by turns urgent, funny, tender and electrifying. Its nine movements span “The Search,” a brooding tone poem; the extraterrestrial stomp of “Karnak (Stop)”; “Identifyin’ (Blues for G),” a 12-bar blues featuring buttery Anderson and burry Klayman; and the hard-driving “The Law of Three,” pitting the velvety saxes of Smith and Klayman against Wall’s piano lacework.

“Gurdjieff's story of traveling around the world in search of esoteric knowledge is very compelling,” says Morgan. “He is one of the first to bring the ideas of the East to the West. He collected and remembered melodies from the Dervishes, Sayyids and monks that would have otherwise been lost.

“It was really hard to get the concept, to read all the Gurdjieff stuff,” says Morgan, who has been developing Sly Man for years. “It was a pretty tough piece to write, to incorporate all the other elements. 

“I’ve never had a collaboration with anybody like I’ve had with Jack,” he says. “He’s a visionary about what can happen, in making projects like this and the Zappa thing we did. (The Jazz Unit performed Zappa’s “Grand Wazoo” during the 2003 Tri-C JazzFest.) The thing with the Jazz Unit, the fact that the Cleveland Jazz Orchestra even lasted all these years…With him, it’s never about his ego, which is why I think he can collaborate with an egomaniac like myself. He just wants the projects to work.”

Schantz was artistic director of the Cleveland Jazz Orchestra for 17 years; Sean Jones succeeded him in 2009. He’s now trying to get Sly Man into the right hands and ears. 

“Usually, for me, once the music is done, I’m done” he says. “I’m just trying to get the word out, get the music out so people can hear it. I think the music is capable of being enjoyed without knowing anything about anything else, though if you understand some of the ideas, you’ll get richer impressions of the music.”

Why didn’t he write the music himself? “I’m not really a composer in that way,” says Schantz. “I don’t know like Dave knows. He’s a real composer, and I don’t have the skills that he has. When you have a composer like that around, you got to make use of him.”

But it was Schantz who conceptualized Sly Man, envisioning the “voices” of saxophonist Smith, guitarist Fraser, pianist Wall, percussionist Haddad, Morgan and himself. Smith represented the “physical mastery of the instrument,” the fakir; Schantz saw Fraser “as the intellectual culmination of music,” or the yogi; he saw himself in charge of the emotions, as the monk; Wall put it all together in the Way of the Sly Man. Haddad, meanwhile, gave the CD its Middle Eastern groove. Schantz and Morgan brought Haddad into Audio Recording Studios and let him loose, “recording him over and over again. Then we went back and decided which of the elements would fit best. There were four or five layers on every track, and we didn’t use them all.”

Schantz, of course, is “not crazy about my playing all the way through, but that’s the way it always is. But if you listen to it as a whole – it’s kind of unusual for anybody to sit down for a whole hour – I think that’s the way you start to get a sense of something.”

LISTEN: Dave Morgan - "Bhakti" (from The Way of the Sly Man)

The Way of the Sly Man is available on iTunes, at CDbaby.com and on Amazon.