Mark Turner on "Along Came Betty" (Two Versions)

Mark Turner in full "jackhammer" at The Jazz Gallery (YouTube screen-capture via Radhika Philip)

Drummer Johnathan Blake leads a powerhouse chordless quartet featuring tenor saxophonists Mark Turner and Chris Potter, with Ben Street on bass. The band has released one album, Gone, But Not Forgotten (Criss Cross, 2014), and most recently performed last weekend at Newport. I caught the band live at the Jazz Standard back in May, but unfortunately missed them when they performed at The Jazz Gallery at the very start of my senior year of college. Radhika Philip, author of the invaluable Being Here, a collection of recent interviews with leading creative improvisors on the New York scene, captured this video from the show, which has since been watched over 25,000, a pretty respectable number of eyeballs for the jazz web.

Through the shadowy jazz bootleg network, I managed to get a rendition of "Along Came Betty," whose richly chromatic harmonic scheme is a more than suitable match for Mark Turner's voice-leading explorations. 

It's been two weeks now since my Music & Literature essay on Mark was published (pt. II is here), and I think this is the last Mark I'll be transcribing and publishing to the blog for a while—at least that's what I hope, for now. The past week's Mark transcription series (a slow blues, the changes of "One Finger Snap," "The Man I Love," and a disarming "Moment's Notice") has been my makeshift, metaphorical enema that Henry Threadgill alluded to in his BBC interview, and I'm hoping to move back into digging into some older players.

Mark's catholicity of tastes in tenor players (and music in general) is widely attested to, and I was pleased to come across the following quote by the great tenorist Eddie Harris in liner notes to a compilation I picked up yesterday. From the liner notes to The Tender Storm, by Michael Morgan:

One of the clues to Harris' individuality can be found in a statement he once made concerning his influences: "I like Miles for choice of notes, Milt Jackson for feeling, Stan Getz for timbre and sound, Charlie Parker and Clifford Brown for smoothness and articulation, Rollins and Coltrane for their skips and intervals," he said.

There you have it. Embrace the plethora.

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I also discovered two other versions of "Along Came Betty" on YouTube (of course). One is a live MT Quartet performance from 2014, and another is a solo performance at a conservatory in Israel. I was originally going to transcribe both, but then decided it'd probably be best for me to just pick one. The performance with the quartet is notably quicker than the version from the Gallery, but the playing itself is unremarkably consistent; tempo isn't really an issue for Mark, as you'd expect. Here's that solo (view/listen here):

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