GARY PEACOCK — Eastward (review)

GARY PEACOCK — Eastward album cover Album · 1970 · Post Bop Buy this album from MMA partners
3/5 ·
Sean Trane
While studying Eastern philosophy in Japan in the later-60’s, long after getting out of the army (where he was a jazz musician stationed in Germany), then playing on scene with the Paul Bley and Shorty Rogers in California then the more avant-garde Rashaan and Ayler in NYC, contrabassist Gary Peacock participated in some recording sessions in Tokyo around the turn of the decade and made his first album under his own name, namely Eastward. Here formed as a piano-led trio with two local jazzmen such as pianist Kikuchi and drummer Murakami, they explore the rather-standard vein of jazz, which might have seemed a tad dated, compared with the more-actual and challenging releases of the times. All the compositions are penned by the leader Peacock, bar Little Abi, which is written by the pianist.

Don’t expect Eastward to venture in anything else than very familiar grounds, but it’s got its own share of charm, most notably the lengthy and engaged Changing and One Up, but they’re definitely nothing groundbreaking either. If you’re expecting the 14-mins title track to take you to uncharted territories, you can not be anything else than deceived, thiough, as it is a just a riff endlessly repeated with too little variations to make it interesting. Kikuchi’s sonwriting on Abi doesn’t change much he album’s tranquil course, just as the closing Moor will not ruffle many feathers, even though it’s the flipside’s highlight.

Of course, Gary is also known to have married the lovely Annette Coleman and helped kick-start her career, and later on would move on to ECM-type of jazz with Jarrett and Garbarek, but here we’re still in a very trad jazz, which might be a tad of a deception, when knowing his Ayler antecedents. Still worthy of a spin, though.
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