Know It? I Wrote It!
James Keepnews’ liner notes

Visit the home where Paul Kogut grew up in the suburbs of Utica, NY and, among the many family photos you'll find one of young Paul, in karate uniform and stance. The skull-wide grin that graces his adult punim is already fully formed, a marked contrast to the martial setting (albeit false -- it was taken at Halloween) of the picture.

Then, as now, that's Paul Kogut, happy warrior. The picture, which I haven't seen for years, came to mind repeatedly during listens to this album, his first date as a leader. The seriousness of his achievement on this date scarcely conceals the joy Paul and his fellow musicians -- Rick Montalbano on Hammond B3 and Jim Johns on drums -- demonstrate in their playing on these pieces, playing that's equal parts masterful refinement and giddy ass-whupping.

I'm honored to write these notes, not the least of which because of the opportunity it provides me to reflect how Paul's playing has developed over the nearly twenty years of our friendship, cemented quickly over tap beer and a passion for music at Hamilton College, where we both got our undergraduate degrees. Paul was several years ahead of me in his guitar studies, and light years ahead in talent. He shedded strenuously throughout college, splitting time between between playing in jam bands and studying jazz guitar and theory. It may seem unusual to suggest that those jazz studies were well served by living in the greater Utica area -- nonetheless, Utican jazz giants there were, and are. Utica has been home to such players as the late saxophonist J.R. Monterose and the criminally underrated master of chord-melody jazz guitar, Carmen Caramanica, both of whom Paul studied with extensively.

Paul majored in computer science at Hamilton, but fortunately for music fans generally and owners of this compact disc specifically, generating machine code just wasn't going to pan out for Paul, who ultimately got his masters degree from Manhattan School of Music." In the ensuing years, Paul has studied with more widely-known guitar giants, such as Pat Martino, and Mick Goodrick, while playing with jazzers like keyboardist Charles Earland in Chicago (where Paul is now located), in jam bands like the Utica-based Ant Ester and eventually returned to Hamilton for a stint as a guitar and jazz ensemble instructor.

Paul's accomplishments as a guitarist, then, have been well-honed over several decades, and his superb playing is maybe the least surprising aspect of this CD. Much more impressive, and surprising, has been Paul's development as a composer. The vast majority of tunes featured on this date are Kogut originals, each of them marvels of melodic economy -- no scales-over-chords, tune-free tunes that distinguish the work of many in this generation of post-boppers -- and intriguing, unconventional resolutions. You wouldn't want to call Paul a slyboots (he'd be the first to tell you that slyboots lose favor) but these heads demonstrate a compositional facility that's at once canny and uncanny, and I can easily imagine jazzers wanting to add some of these works to their own books, and quickly.

As suggested above, well before such noted crossovers from jazz into the land of the funky jam like John Scofield, Charlie Hunter and Medseki, Martin and Wood, Paul was himself doing double-duty, working out altered 7th scales on standards here, and deepening his familiarity with the dorian mode while memorializing Elizabeth Reed there. This CD is the assured marriage of these two tendencies in Paul's playing. The marriage is celebrated early on the first slow funk-bop number, "Know It? I Wrote It!" (not the first, and surely not the last, punchline-as-title in the Kogut oeuvre), as the dissonant clash between sharp ninth and natural third give way to both held notes and more discursive lines over changes as offhand as they are unique. Paul's solo introduces his lightly phased tone and emphatic, tasteful use of distortion, which almost creates the illusion of another instrument taking a separate solo on tracks like this. Montalbano's comping moves the piece along in smart, knotty chord stabs. Johns, here as elsewhere on the CD, effortlessly keeps the groove swinging while providing a generally spare accompaniment that affords the occasional rhythmic accent greater relief and "air time" than a busier drummer's playing would permit.

The fleet swing continues on Paul's "Jay Walk", a upbeat midtempo number that throws the odd "c" and "d" into the more conventional a-a-b-a form of the piece -- not that "a" or "b" don't have a few twisty contours, themselves. Montalbano takes the first solo here, again finding a pure, bluesy melody tucked away in the idiosyncratic changes, which, like any good martial arts master, land in a manner that allows them to get up again quickly and move in any direction. The tempo picks up speed on "Small Doses" whose stacked fourths and hard blowing puts me in the mind of Wes Montgomery's faster pieces for organ trio. Paul sounds resolutely like himself, however, and on a tear.

The pace ratchets down a bit for "Especially When It Rains" my favorite tune on the album, and one of two winning tracks on the album in waltz-time. The elegant, singing line expresses a wide range of emotions with the bare minimum of material -- put this one on when it rains and see if you don't agree. From here, we get the trio's take on the standard "Stella by Starlight" based around Paul's solo intro and savvy re-arrangement of the melody, both of which, in their death-defying chord-melodic acrobatics and their strong favoring of those hard-to-reach off-beat rhythms, are inadvertent homages to Caramanica's own signature command of these tendencies in his own playing. The otherwise untitled "Ballad" is the most brooding track here, powerfully slow and haunting, with Montalbano's quiescent organ and John's subdued brushwork adding to the sense of mystery, where Paul's soloing strikes a balance between dark and light.

Things get up on the downstroke again for the most funky "Fat Cat," featuring some of Paul's most unhinged playing and dramatic intervallic leaps. Montalbano is equally up, punctuating searing runs with tough-minded jabs and Johns rocking hard throughout. We hear a waltz again in Paul's "Now You've Done It" and another lovely example of Paul's facility in crafting memorably sonant lines, dancing through the thoughtful changes to a near-ambient conclusion. Dave Brubeck's "In Your Own Sweet Way" follows, and the trio's take shows off their control over dynamics and a thoroughly individual, airy-yet-grounded ensemble sensibility. The classic Beatles track "Can't Buy Me Love" closes the album, the blues in the original melody boiled down to a tougher essence that also offers greater swing than the fab lads originally offered. Embracing his inner rocker, Paul leads the trio into! a excursion of the song's tuneful harmonies that's as down-home and mojo-woikin' as it intelligent and probing.

It's a perfect way to end this memorable first date, one that will appeal to the taciturn jazzbo and the festival twirler alike. Prepare for sensei Kogut's beat-down...and prepare to smile back.

-- James Keepnews

James Keepnews lives in Jersey City.