John Abercrombie
Jazz guitarist with a gift for musical understatement
JOHN ABERCROMBIE, the jazz guitarist and composer, who has died aged 72, was described as “one of the most highly individual voices of the post-coltrane era”.
His mature style contained elements of rock and free-form improvisation, but its predominant influence was modern jazz of the 1970s and later. He had a talent for musical understatement which matched his dry sense of humour, and always seemed to find the exact moment to interpose a brief but telling phrase.
John Laird Abercrombie was born in Port Chester, New York, on December 22 1944, to parents who had emigrated from Scotland. He took up the guitar as a teenager, at first imitating rock stars like Chuck Berry, but gradually falling under the spell of jazz players such as Barney Kessel and Jim Hall.
From 1962 to 1966 he attended the Berklee School of Music in Boston, at the same time playing his first professional dates around Boston with the organist Johnny “Hammond” Smith. In 1969 he moved to New York to join the band led by the drummer Chico Hamilton. Once there, he met many young contemporaries with similar musical ideas and worked briefly with the jazz-rock bands Dreams and Spectrum.
His own interests, however, were tending more towards smaller groups and more subtle music, and in 1974 he met Manfred Eicher, proprietor of ECM, the Munichbased record label which would provide him with a sympathetic recording ambience for the rest of his career.
Abercrombie’s first ECM album, Timeless (1975), with Jan Hammer (keyboard) and Jack Dejohnette (drums), established him at once as a major new artist. It was immediately followed by Gateway, with Dejohnette and bassist Dave Holland. In all, Abercrombie appears on around 50 ECM albums, more than half of them as leader. His last, Up And Coming, was released in January this year.
The variety of music contained in this enormous body of work is mindboggling. He led a long series of small bands – trios, quartets – each with its own distinctive approach. The 1980s found him experimenting with a guitar-synthesizer, with mixed success but always coherent.
In the late 1990s, he abandoned the use of a plectrum in favour of the unaided thumb. This softened the sound of the guitar and imparted a new intimacy to his 2003 album, Class Trip. He even revived the old trio format of guitar, Hammond organ and drums for several albums and occasionally reverted to improvising on venerable standard tunes. As he once observed, “you don’t have to keep inventing new kinds of music to play, just bring fresh ideas to what you already know”.
Meanwhile, he was also pursuing a busy touring schedule, notably as a duet with his fellow guitarist, Ralph Towner, with Gateway – the trio which had recorded the album of that title, and, in the early 1990s, with several bands, large and small, under the leadership of trumpeter Kenny Wheeler, making many appearances in both the US and Europe.
Perhaps the biggest live performance in which he took part was the jazz event of 1989, a concert of Charles Mingus’s work, Epitaph, scored for 30 musicians and staged on the tenth anniversary of the composer’s death.
In 2003 a fire at his home destroyed most of Abercrombie’s possessions, including his guitars, scores and recordings. He was remarkably philosophical about it. “If you’ve got 12 or 13 guitars, you can’t play them all,” he remarked at the time. The loss of his cat, he said, upset him more.
Abercrombie’s health had deteriorated in recent times, and he had aged visibly. He suffered a stroke earlier this year. He is survived by Lisa, his wife of 31 years.
John Abercrombie, born December 22 1944, died August 22 2017