Jazz composer-saxophonist Edward Wilkerson Jr. certainly has the critics listening.
In the recent Down Beat Critics Poll he was voted Composer Deserving Wider Recognition for the second year in a row. In a New York Village Voice poll of U.S. jazz critics to choose the outstanding jazz albums of the 1980s, Wilkerson`s ”Eight Bold Souls,” released in 1987 by the tiny, obscure Chicago label Sessoms, surprisingly won second place.
Despite the attention Wilkerson has received in recent years, he is not a jazz star. That may soon change, however, because his third album,
”Sideshow,” the second by the Eight Bold Souls, has been issued by the established, widely distributed Arabesque label.
But, says Wilkerson: ”A CD is like a brochure, or public relations-it`s an attempt to encourage people to come out and see you live. I stick to the ideal of live performance, of having the engagement of the audience.”
Wilkerson and the Eight Bold Souls won`t be able to see the audience when they perform Friday night at the Art Institute. They`ll be providing the music that accompanies the revival of pioneer black filmmaker Oscar Micheaux`s
”Within Our Gates,” a Blacklight film festival offering at the museum`s Chicago Film Center. When the lights go down, ”I`m going to let the movie direct the music,” Wilkerson says. ”A lot of it is going to be improvised. My idea is to perform this in concert more than once, and to gradually develop our interpretations, so we can refine it. We`re talking about trying to re-release the film with a soundtrack.”
Of his music, Wilkerson says: ”It takes a certain chemistry to make (it) come off-it didn`t just take somebody going off in his room and writing and writing. The way I arrange pieces and the way we end up playing them are usually completely different, because everybody puts their two cents in, and I usually end up liking what they do better. So especially with the Souls, we need to play the music for awhile for the interpretation to develop.”
That is, of course, the way the greatest jazz ensembles-the early Count Basie, Duke Ellington and Jelly Roll Morton bands, for instance-created music, and since the mid-`80s critics have been comparing Wilkerson with the great jazz masters. He began playing saxophone as a schoolboy in suburban Cleveland, and by the time he entered the University of Chicago in 1971 he knew music would be his life`s work.
He joined Chicago`s Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, studying under its founder, bandleader-composer Muhal Richard Abrams, and began playing in blues, rock, bop and free-jazz bands. In 1978 he joined the freewheeling Ethnic Heritage Ensemble, with which he has often toured America and Europe, and he`ll be playing with it next month at the Chicago Jazz Festival.
It was with his oversize big band Shadow Vignettes, beginning in 1983, and the Eight Bold Souls, two years later, that Wilkerson began attracting attention for his composing talents. The Souls have attracted more attention because an octet allows its players-including the lyric trombonist Isaiah Jackson; the complex, ironic trumpeter Robert Griffin; and the fiery clarinetist-multiple-saxophonist Mwata Bowden-more room for their distinctive voices to be heard.
Wilkerson may be the best of the Souls` soloists, playing fluent, blues-punchy, swaggering, tenor sax lines that sound like a `40s jump-band player reincarnated in a post-Ornette Coleman idiom. And Wilkerson`s multitheme compositions, with their unique cornbread-and-champagne character, are surely what swing masters such as Ellington and Fletcher Henderson would write if they were around.
As the great swing bands did, Wilkerson`s groups often go out on tour;
last month, for instance, the Souls played at festivals in Italy. These musicians come from diverse jazz, classical and pop backgrounds, and Wilkerson is aware that ”there are groups where there`s a lot of squabbling.
”When you`re on the road you`re only playing maybe two hours a night, and you spend the rest of the time interacting with each other,” he says.
”We`ve had a chance to develop an ensemble sound, and we have a vibe about the group that makes it fun to be on the road. Everybody in the group is friends, and that comes across in the music.”
