by Frank van Herk, De Volkskrant, June 8, 2000
"When he was forty, sax and flute player Thomas Chapin died. His recordings for Knitting Factory have now been collected on eight cd’s. With pounding rock, Asian scales en scorching outbursts by the Thomas Chapin Trio.
An early death has seldom been more tragic than that of the American sax and flute player Thomas Chapin, who succumbed to leukemia in February 1998, forty years old. The tragedy lies not only in the fact that Chapin – just like for instance Eric Dolphy, who also passed away prematurely – was a clean living, modest and amiable man, but also in the realization that he, again just like Dolphy, had just made one of the most beautiful records of his career. Chapin was still passionately developing his music. How far he had already progressed can be heard on the recordings he made for the Knitting Factory label; they have been collected in an eight-cd box set with the rather wry but, when it comes to his music, also fitting title Alive.
There are more similarities with Dolphy. Both of them played a wide range of instruments with impressive craftsmanship, not with the intent to show off, but in the service of spirituality. Both players also had a sharp ear for the music in nature and the environment; Chapin as well as Dolphy were fascinated by birdsong.
But the main connection between them was their ability to work both within and without the conventions of jazz. They were both familiar with the tradition, the blues and bebop changes, and they were both able to leave the beaten track without shaking off the listener. No matter how abstractly they sometimes played, you could always follow them, and thereby share in a blissful freedom.
The gate to jazz was opened for Chapin by flautist-saxophonist Roland Kirk, another musician who could play anything he heard, and another undogmatic spirit. Kirk heard the beauty in historic jazz, in experiments that explored the boundaries of tonality, as well as in popular dance music and exotic sounds. Just like Kirk, Chapin made room in his music for high as well as low art. He wasn’t above performing a boogie like Iddly, steaming ahead with exhilirated cries, on Third Force, the first cd in this collection. When he inserted a number like that, he knew what he was doing. After all, for six years he’d been first alto and musical director for Lionel Hampton, who could drive an audience crazy with joy with his red hot mixture of swing and rhythm & blues.
All influences, including that of Hampton, came together in his main group: the trio with Mario Pavone on double bass and initially Steve Johns and then Michael Sarin on drums, that can be heard on all of Alive’s discs. In the seven years they were together it developed into the smallest big band in jazz, with three sections operating on equal levels, that could provoke and spur each other on with riffs, countermelodies and contrasting effects. Their ego’s blended into a whole that intuitively chose the right timing and phrasing – in the exuberant swingers, the solemn, chamber music-like ballads, the capers through space when they played ‘outside’. Pavone’s ever purposeful, expressive plucking and bowing and the richly textured hues and timbres of Sarin’s percussion worked together with the creamy, robust but mellifluous sax and flute of the leader to keep things moving in every area: rhythmically, harmonically and melodically.
Not that everything depended on intuition: Chapin guided even the most reckless improvisations with memorable, richly contrasted compositions. They also provided room for anything that had moved him, such as pounding rock, African grooves, Asian scales, or the flamenco rhythm in Night Bird Song, one of his strongest and most characteristic pieces.
On two of the cd’s that have now been rereleased, he augmented the trio with brass (on Insomnia) and string players (Haywire). The arrangements he wrote for them show once again how effectively he used his material: the larger line-ups brought a wider variety of color, stronger rhythmic excitement, deeper harmonic layers and an even greater wealth of beautifully sculpted melodies. A third project, the trio with added woodwinds, had to be abandoned because of his illness.
The last studio recordings of the Thomas Chapin Trio are preserved on Sky Piece, a heartwarming document and an artistic highlight. The integration of the three voices and different styles is practically perfect. In spite of the wide range of moods, from scorching altosax outbursts to serene flute meditations, everything is well-balanced. That control, even in the midst of a musical hurricane, also typifies the live-recordings that have been added to this release as a considerable bonus, along with a a video of the trio performing Night Bird Song at the Newport Jazz festival. For fifty minutes joy, passion, creative exultation and humor come bursting out of the speakers. The spirit of Thomas Chapin is still alive."