Gary peacock rip...

[BLUESNIK'S REVOX]

News of this just breaking, Organissimo and as below...

"Jack DeJohnetteLike Page
58m
Gary Peacock.
It is with deep sadness that we mourn the passing of the great Gary Peacock. I had the good fortune to have spent over 30 years playing some amazing music with him both separately and the Trio with Keith Jarrett. Gary had a great sound, feel and highly creative imagination. It was Garys album on ECM, Tales of Another that brought us together, after that we decided to stay playing together, and the rest is history. I have a lot of love and gratitude for what he has contributed to the music we call Jazz. Lydia and I send our deepest love to the Peacock family you are in our hearts always."

Weirdly I have just been reading an old interview with Bud Shank where he praised GP from the time they played together in that very fine group of Shanks. "An exceptionally advanced player even then, before even Scot Lafaro... ". A long and fulfilled career.

RIP.

[Tenor Freak]

Was just about to post this as well, what a shame but Gary Peacock had as you say a long and glittering career. Will get my copy of his ECM LP "Guamba" out for a spin in his memory; it's one of my all-time favourites (and also a fave of Ethan Iverson's). RIP.

[Jazzrook]

Sad news. Will play my copy of Albert Ayler's 'Spiritual Unity' where I first heard him in the 1960s.
Here he is with Michel Petrucciani & Roy Haynes:

https://www.YouTube.com/watch?v=wVpp74M5Fh0

JR

[Serial_Apologist]

There was the phenomenal virtuosity, the listen-ability, and the keeness to expand the sonorous range of the instrument, and I've always felt that it was above all Gary Peacock who set the parameters for more advanced bass playing following Scott's death. Think of the great acoustic bass players who followed his innovations, especially abroad, starting with Niels-Orsted Peterson, then, in this country, Dave Holland, Barry Guy, Marcio Mattos, Paul Rogers, John Edwards.

[Ian Thumwood]

There are so many great records with Gary Peacock on. Not sure how you can actually select any one record because he was practically ubiquitous in the 80s and 90s. The Keith Jarrett trio was seminal and , with the passage of time, it is beginning to feel like one of the last truly great piano trios which swung in the traditional sense. I think it was a trio that could could be variable, largely due to Jarrett sometimes too keenly looking for the "moment" but it resolutely remains one of the great jazz groups of the 80s and 90s. That said, it probably represents Gary Peacock's most "mainstream" work. Hooking up with the likes of Paul Bley would appear to square him as amongst the great improvising bassists of the last quarter of the 20th century. You can see how he fitted in to Eicher's esthetic and also understand why he was often chosen for those groups where the musicians were not looking to rest within their comfort zones.

I have "Guamba" which also probably represents Jan Garbarek's last "true" appearance on record as a genuine jazz musician before he was claimed by New Age.

[BLUESNIK'S REVOX]

Gary Peacock (age c 25) with Bud Shank, Carmell Jones etc..."Liddedabilduya" from the very good 1961 "New Groove" album. A change of pace for Bud Shank and you can hear was he was so impressed by Peacock. Incidentally the drummer was supposed to be Frank Butler but he was busted on the morning of the date and so Mel Lewis stepped in. And played wonderfully...

http://youtu.be/zaKQuCik840

[Alison]

Yet another loss in your field. Poor Nik

[Tenor Freak]

I am reading reports that this is a hoax. I hope so.

[Jazzrook]

Paul Bley with Gary Peacock & Paul Motian playing Ornette Coleman's 'When Will The Blues Leave' recorded live in 1999:

https://www.YouTube.com/watch?v=8lOojxVY0eI

JR

[BLUESNIK'S REVOX]

I notice Wiki has gone from present tense to past, back to present again. If he is alive he'll have a load of reading to catch up with....tributes & career overviews from all over, including Dave Holland.

[BLUESNIK'S REVOX]

Confirmation...

NPR "Gary Peacock, a versatile bassist who collaborated with some of the 20th century's most notable jazz musicians, has died. He was 85.

His family confirmed in a statement to NPR that Peacock died peacefully Friday, Sept. 4, at his home in upstate New York. No cause of death was provided."

[Tenor Freak]

And now ECM has put forward its tribute (copied from Facebook dot com if you don't want to visit that hellsite):

Gary Peacock (1935-2020)
Bassist Gary Peacock has died, aged 85. An inspired contributor to music over the last half-century, he was already featured on ECM’s third album, “Paul Bley With Gary Peacock”, issued in 1970.
Manfred Eicher: “I’ve lost a life-long friend, and a musician whom I had admired greatly since the first time I heard him. We were so pleased and proud to be able to feature him so early in our programme. Along with Scott La Faro, Steve Swallow and Charlie Haden, Gary was one of the bassists I most appreciated, and I loved his playing on Albert Ayler’s ‘Spiritual Unity’ and Bill Evans’s ‘Trio ‘64’. We started working together more closely with ‘Tales of Another’, in retrospect an influential album. It laid the groundwork for one of the longest-lasting groups in jazz…”

Born in Burley, Idaho, Peacock studied piano, vibraphone and drums before settling, at the age of 20, on the double bass, the instrument with which he would leave his mark on jazz history. He honed his playing while stationed with the US army in Germany, participating in many jam sessions in clubs around Frankfurt and Dortmund. By the early 1960s, Peacock’s imaginative, alert, and elegantly singing bass was heard across the full spectrum of creative jazz in New York – from the trios of Paul Bley and Bill Evans to the groups of Tony Williams, Lowell Davidson and Albert Ayler. Gary was steadfast in his view that creativity could not be limited or defined by an idiom or a style. The point of music-making, he insisted, was to locate and follow the freedoms that each context revealed, a mindset that made him the ideal bassist for the trio with Keith Jarrett and Jack DeJohnette, where he was equally happy to mine the chord changes of jazz standards for fresh information or to abandon the security of song forms altogether.

The Jarrett/Peacock/DeJohnette trio had been assembled originally for Gary’s “Tales of Another” in 1977. This album of Peacock pieces was effectively Gary’s “comeback album”, recorded after an extended period in Japan, where he had met Masabumi Kikuchi, an important ally, and immersed himself in Eastern culture. A nonpareil improviser – no one was more committed to the notion of playing in the present moment - Peacock was also a composer of strikingly original tunes. Some of them, like “Moor”, “Vignette”, “Gaya”, December Greenwings” and “Requiem”, their themes concise as haikus, were returned to frequently throughout his long artistic life, and covered by many musicians.

Gary’s ECM recordings as a leader – primarily produced in Oslo - include “December Poems” (mostly solo bass, plus duets with Jan Garbarek), “Voice from the Past – Paradigm” (with Garbarek, Tomasz Stanko and Jack DeJohnette), and “Guamba” (with Garbarek, Palle Mikkelborg and Peter Erskine), as well as duo albums with Ralph Towner (“A Closer View”, “Oracle”), and collaborative recordings with John Surman, Paul Bley and Tony Oxley (“Adventure Playground”, “In The Evenings Out There”). “Shift In The Wind”, featuring Gary’s trio with Art Lande and Eliot Zigmund, was produced in New York.
In the 1990s it was Gary who brought about a reunion of the Paul Bley trio with Paul Motian for the New York-recorded album “Not Two, Not One”, leading to tours and, eventually, the Swiss concert recording “When Will The Blues Leave”. Collaboration with Marilyn Crispell – another long-term association - was initiated with the album “Nothing Ever Was, Anyway”, an exploration of the music of Annette Peacock. In his last years Gary was enthusiastic about his trio with Marc Copland and Joey Baron, particularly enjoying the way the sound of his bass and the sound of the group meshed and resonated in the acoustics of the Lugano studio on the album “Tangents.”

Gary Peacock - Photo (C) Eliott Peacock

NP: Tales of Another, the first trio with Jarrett and De Johnette