Ronnie Mathews (1935 - 2008)

Straight-ahead jazz loses another keeper of the flame. 

I am far away from my record collection, but three things come to mind about Mathews:

1) Mathews (like John Hicks, Kenny Barron, Harold Mabern, and others) took the “energy style” comping of McCoy Tyner in the 1960's and made it work in more straight-ahead contexts from the 1970’s on.  Dexter Gordon’s Homecoming is a good place to hear this, as are other albums with Woody Shaw and Louis Hayes featuring Mathews.

2) There is a distinctive rhythmic tradition in jazz that comes out of Dizzy Gillespie, specifically the Gillespie big-band music of the 1940’s.  I am aware of this tradition but don’t know too much about it except that you can hear it somewhere on any Miles Davis record of the 1950’s.  One time when watching Mathews play at a European festival, I began noticing that all of his rhythms could have been played by the Gillespie big band.  Billy Hart then confirmed to me that Mathews was considered one of the “professors” of this approach.

3) The late John Hicks and Ronnie Mathews shared something similar in touch and piano attitude. (They could easily have subbed for each other on most of their gigs.)  At its best, it felt like “the real thing.”  I firmly believe that their style - and indeed, most straight-ahead jazz since the death of John Coltrane - is hard to capture on record.  The music that Hicks and Mathews represent is too dependent on a communal feeling for it to be documented.  It has less to do with Art than Culture.  You need to be there, close to the bandstand, preferably in a small club, hopefully surrounded by other patrons who really love and understand the language.

So, the moral is, go see the older straight-ahead masters now.  When they are gone, it is done.