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Perry Robinson Trio
"From A to Z"
jazzwerkstatt CD JW85

There are always two sides to every story in life, and sometimes even more than that. The encyclopedic title of this album, for instance, suggests an ambition that seems impossible to live up to. At the same time, though, the undertaking it implies is an absolutely necessary one. The reason is identical in both cases: “Perry Robinson is one of the most important clarinetists alive today and one of the few players to take this instrument into the twenty-first century.” (Florence Wetzel: P. Robinson: The Traveller) ... [more]

Cover: K.Untiet, B.Göge

Perry Robinson - clarinet

Ed Schuller - bass

Ernst Bier - drums, percussion

Recorded at Fattoria Musica November 25, 2008

Recorded by Stephan van Wylick -www.fattoriamusica.de

Mixed and Mastered by Stefan Weeke

Executive Producer: Uli Blobel

Photos by Dominik Heer

Artwork: K.Untiet, B.Göge

Ernst Bier plays Pommerenke Drums - www.schlagzeugbetreuung.de

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Press

Walker's Japan April 2011

“The trio work by Perry Robinson, an accomplished clarinetist”
In1961 he made his album debut with “Funk Dumpling”. There are also brilliant recordings with Archie Shepp (ts), Charlie Haden (b) etc. ‘From A to Z’ is the latest recording by this practical clarinetist, who is well known as an avant-garde musician.

Ed Schuller and Ernst Bier, who have played with Perry since a long time, accompany him here in a total of 9 pieces, including 6 titles by Robinson and 3 by Schuller. As the title ‘From A to Z’ shows that the alphabet consists of many kinds of figures and tones, we can experience various music, sound and arrangement through their well-balanced playing - for instance free jazz, ethnic music, folk music and so on.

I would recommend listening to ‘Sooner than Before’ and ‘From A to Z’. You will find that Robinson has a fresh tone and Bier has a strong presence in the music.

                                                                                Masayuki Koito

The Guardian 01.07.2010

Some recordings are so unabashedly about the idiosyncrasies of the improvisers, specific references and the simplicity of the session that it's hard to see anyone but the faithful getting the point.

This set, featuring clarinettist Perry Robinson (one of the few modern-jazz practitioners of his instrument) might suggest that at first. Yet Robinson is a broadminded performer with klezmer and folk music associations (he's also worked with Pete Seeger), whose work is remarkably accessible. Bassist Ed Schuller's Sooner Than Before has much of Ornette Coleman's stop-start mischievousness and eruptions of boiling swing (Schuller also sings in his bass solos, but it's very musical and irritation-free).

There's a delicious exercise in clarinet tone-control of a bass drone on Funky Giora (which starts with a purr but eventually develops a klezmer bounce).

A song about the early 20th-century labour activist Joe Hill starts improv-abstract and turns into something close to a New Orleans strut. It all feels as if you are eavesdropping on three musicians having a whale of a time doing what they do best.

                                                                               John Fordham

www.jazztokyo.com 11./201

Perry Robinson is the one of the Pioneers, who has brought the clarinet as the star of swing jazz to that of free jazz; Unfortunately, people do not really make much of this. Maybe it is because of his beatnik character.

.......................................This album starts with "Sooner than Before," composed by Ed Schuller. The music has an impressive Theme, which reminds us of early works of Ornette Coleman; Perry's phrasing calls up Don Cherry. Of course, I do not mind the music is just a copy of the old days but sets "the mode" of those days. The base swings melodic, the drum taps smooth dancing-steps, and those stretch our imaginations of music. "Loose Nuts" was composed by Greg Robinson, Perry's cousin, a Pianist in Seattle and features a melody with pretty funky rhythm, constrasting activity with inactivity. "Unisphere" sounds as free jazz, recognized as an Hommage of Henry Grimes Trio (ESP). The seventh piece is "A.K.A Snake" by Schuller and has the almost same character as "Unispher." Despite its title [F. Giora has known well as a Jewish], the forth piece, "Funky Giora," is flavored as an exotic Middle Eastern music and performance. "Joe Hill," the best known work of Earl Robinson, the father of Perry, is dedicated to labor movement activists, who were framed up for murder and shot to death without fulfilling their life ambition. Its version, which Joan Baez have sung at the Woodstock Festival, is the most famous but the version of Perry is also amazing. To Schuller's arco accompaniment Perry reads the part of the text. Its following music shows an arrangement optimizing its folk character: I could explain it as "a reminiscent of Keith Jarret's My Back Pages." "Mountain Soup" begins with Perry's ocarina sounding pastoral and has struck me as "The Train And The River" by Jimmy Giuffre (reeds), which makes a start of the movie Jazz On A Summer's Day. In common with Giuffre, Perry has created music of avant-gardism and of naive lyricism. For, they both have been probably influenced by folk music. "From A To Z", which is also the title of their album, starts with atonal sounds and leads to a sweet melody, condensing wide varied musical styles of this album and giving lingering depth to its music. 
                                                                                 Nobu Stowe

AllAboutJazz Nov 2010

As his frank autobiography The Traveler attests, Perry Robinson has been one of jazz’ leading lights,specializing in clarinet since the ‘60s New Thing, playing with virtually all the major free jazz musicians in America and Europe. But he has also appeared with artists as diverse as Dave Brubeck, George Clinton and Ginger Baker, purveying folk, jazz, rock, world and free jazz. With a talent recognized by such illustrious
colleagues, he ought to be much better known. That he has flown under the critical radar stems from his almost willfully low-key approach and a reluctance tobe hamstrung by categorization. Taken together these two discs reveal Robinson’s ability to unite all those diverse arena and more within a syntax of unfettered swing.
In spite of Robinson’s long backstory, recordings under his own name have been relatively limited, so From A To Z is worthy of attention. Joining Robinson for a mainstream program comprising 9 tracks spanning 52 minutes are longtime associates Ed Schuller (bass) and Ernst Bier (drums). The three are in tempo, in tune and in touch hroughout this adventurous yet melodically charming album, their second as a group after Children’s Song (Konnex, 1990). Schuller and Bier are solid, supportive not flashy, and maintain thematic integrity by adroitly playing off the compositions.
Although nominally leader, Robinson is generous, allotting the bassist almost equal time in the spotlight on every number but the last, Schuller accompanying his supple and surefooted lines by scatting along in each of his solos. Though demonstrating impressive synchronicity between voice, brain and fingers, the effect might have greater impact if used more sparingly. There are no such qualms with Robinson’s mellifluous clarinet: he smoothly negotiates the transition from head to solo on the bassist’s bouncy “Sooner Then Before” while he chuckles against
Schuller’s counterpoint on “Loose Nuts” and lays down a muezzin call on the spacey-yet-klezmer- inflected “Funky Giora”. “Joe Hill” starts with
Robinson’s recitation of his father’s lyric (famous American composer Earl Robinson) before his woody clarinet combines with Schuller’s bowing for an Americana-tinged sketch, though his most beautiful
outing comes on the bassman’s closing title track.

                                                                             John Sharpe

Linernotes

Perry Robinson Trio - From A To Z

There are always two sides to every story in life, and sometimes even more than that. The encyclopedic title of this album, for instance, suggests an ambition that seems impossible to live up to. At the same time, though, the undertaking it implies is an absolutely necessary one. The reason is identical in both cases: “Perry Robinson is one of the most important clarinetists alive today and one of the few players to take this instrument into the twenty-first century.” (Florence Wetzel: P. Robinson: The Traveller)

Since his debut on “Funk Dumpling” in 1962 (with Kenny Barron on piano, Henry Grimes on bass, and Paul Motian on drums), Robinson has released only a few handfuls of albums under his own name. His discography adds about forty recordings, on which he played for leaders as diverse as Archie Shepp and Dave Brubeck; as a member of Charlie Haden’s Liberation Music Orchestra and Gunter Hampel’s Galaxie Dream Band; with the Licorice Factory (his own band that consisted of up to seven clarinets of all sizes); with Klezmokum; and, last but not least, as a studio musician for Pete Seeger and Allen Ginsberg. Incomplete as it is, even this brief selection from the alphabetized list is almost too large to come to grips with. At the same time, it is barely sufficient to describe the breadth of Perry Robinson’s horizon. The good news is that it’s all there in his music.

“You have always created everything in your whole world by yourself. You love to play, you love to fight, and most of all you love to tear up the old and turn it into something new. And what you love even more is to take totally destroyed remnants and use them to create something.” Perry Robinson was seven years old when he received this encouraging letter from Woody Guthrie, a friend of his father’s. Perry’s early childhood memories include visits to Hollywood film studios (where Earl Robinson worked as a film composer) and trips to picketed factories where the family mingled with the demonstrators. For Joe Hill, Robinson is like an older brother. His father composed the anthem of the American workers’ movement two years before Perry was born.

Much has been written about the expressive power of the clarinet and the similarity of its sound to the human voice. It is this quality that predestined the clarinet to become the main instrument of early jazz and of the exuberant music of the Klezmorim before the more powerful saxophone rose to predominance in both genres. And Klezmer, like jazz and folk music, is naturally one of the sources from which Perry Robinson draws his musical inspiration. His other sources include the classical avant-garde, whose protagonists were in exile on the west coast of the USA while he was a child. “Hearing Schönberg so early in my life was important for my free music later on,” Robinson recalls. “My first clarinet teacher played Schönberg. He made recordings of it and gave them to my father. I absolutely immersed myself in it.”

Archie Shepp said, “The clarinet is a wonderful instrument and I am proud of the contributions of black Americans to the versatile development of its sound. Perry Robinson (who, by the way, isn’t black) has been one of my favorite clarinetists ever since I first heard him at the World Youth Festival in 1962. His immeasurable ability inspired me to invite him to the recordings...” (Archie Shepp: Liner Notes zu Mama Too Tight, 1966)

Perry Robinson is a musician’s musician. He has been one of the most productive protagonists of the jazz scene for over half a century, and his creativity is still in demand internationally. If the public at large is less aware of his name than of his colleagues Ornette Coleman and Carla Bley, the reason may be that his instrument, the clarinet, is associated with the heyday of Benny Goodman, the king of swing. But Robinson’s roots run far deeper. They reach back into folk and blues, the ground water of American music, and to a time long before the division into oldtime vs. avant-garde and black vs. white. This is the basis out of which, over the decades, a mighty trunk grew up and put out a crown of widely spreading branches. In other words, Perry Robinson tells living stories in that most universal of languages, music. From A to Z.

The same applies to his colleagues in the Perry Robinson Trio. Ed Schuller, who studied bass, music theory, and clarinet, and Ernst Bier, a truly empathetic percussionist, have been Robinson’s partners in animated (and animating) musical dialogue since 1984. “What influenced me most was Perry’s aura and his way of dealing with things,” says Schuller “We talk about all sorts of things, from string theory to the philosophical meaning of God. Being around people like that keeps the juices flowing. Perry awakens the natural creativity within you. Not by forcing you to do anything – just by being there. If you think about it in terms of Arthurian legend, Perry would be Merlin the enchanter. Merlin had all the power, but he always remained in the background. He never fought a war, he just came by occasionally and did something. That’s what Perry’s like. He doesn’t lead his men into battle, but he’s there – and things develop the way he wants them to.”

                                                                        Tobias Richtsteig