Jazz Blue Notes

JAZZ IS ALL ABOUT CULTURAL AMALGAMATION, with musicians from different geographical locations, creeds, and generations uniting to create music uniquely the sum of their individual parts. Guitarist Jean-Paul Bourelly, a Chicago native of Haitian ancestry, who has lived extensively in Europe and has been shaped by gigs with Muhal Richard Abrams, Elvin Jones, and Chico Hamilton, embodies the diversity that makes jazz such an eclectic and personal art form. His "Boom Bop" (Jazz Magnet, Jan. 30, licensed from the Austrian PAO label for U.S. release) finds Haitian and African rhythms cohabitating with jazz improvisation, while uniting musicians from several countries and generations.

"When Western music is mixed with so-6called world music, there is often a layered effect that I hopefully avoided," says Bourelly. "It does not sound comfortable; it sounds like everything is sandwiched together. If you were hip to the early mixtures, like when Roy Ayers hooked up with Nigerian musicians maybe 25 years ago, you realize that the idea has not grown much."

Bourelly began integrating his Jimi Hendrix-inspired jazz guitar sounds with African rhythms during three years of jam sessions that originated in Berlin, which included Senegalese vocalist/percussionist Abdourahmane Diop, whose griot singing is featured prominently on "Boom Bop."

"Abdourahmane taught me about Sengalese music, and I taught him about blues and jazz," explains Bourelly. "We didn't play our individual styles together; we learned each other's musical languages and created something new.

"What happens with humans is funny. Something influences you, and it becomes a part of you, but when it is expressed on your instrument, it comes out as something totally different," Bourelly observes. "Your body and mind do mysterious things with it."

Bourelly's discography includes both straight-ahead jazz releases and funk/rock fusion projects, but "Boom Bop" is his first to fully integrate Haitian rhythms. (His 1993 release, "Ayibobo" [DIW], incorporated the music of his roots to a lesser degree). With its jazz improvisations, blues overtones, and soulful vocalizations, "Boom Bop" is a fascinating cultural melting pot, a point where divergent ideas commingle into a mosaic that is by turns familiar and wholly unexpected.

Joining the guitarist are American bassist Reggie Workman and avant-garde elder statesmen Archie Shepp and Henry Threadgill, both of whom add their own iconoclastic saxophone voices (the former on tenor, the latter on alto) to the album's rich sound palette. "Horn players who have lived a long time express their many experiences through their sound," says Bourelly. "Very few musicians have been through as many musical periods as Archie and Henry have and remained edgy."

According to Bourelly, jazz is a music that needs a constant well of ideas in order to grow. "The access of the Internet and the ease of travel allows people in the art world to be in closer contact with different cultures, which will provide new sources of ideas for jazz," he says. "This will make musical cross-pollination easier than ever. It is a very contemporary thing, very now."