Nothing can happen more beautiful than death.

Walt Whitman

Several things about this album are going to scare people away. For one thing, the subtitle is "A Dark Opera Without Words," and who needs opera? For another, it ain't rock, it's jazz; and it doesn't groove, they keep shifting around the meter. And grimmest of all, it's about death.

In the liner notes the composer, Carla Bley, calls A Genuine Tong Funeral a "dramatic musical production based upon emotions towards death—from the most irreverent to those of the deepest loss."

Tiresome as it may be to catalog the faults of our society, the reality of contemporary experience is that we deny death. We are Americans: we are vital, fertile, young, we make it. It is bright and sunny here and we are God's immortal children. Only rarely do we actually stare the fellow in the bright nightgown (as W. C. Fields referred to death) in the eye—one of the Kennedy's gets his brains blown out—and we are shocked, as a people, beyond all logic.

And Mrs. Bley and Gary Burton have the audacity to hurl in our faces a work which reminds us that the business of life is dying! It works beautifully; and is as perfectly realized a composition/performance of new jazz as we are ever likely to receive, fully comparable, in its way, with Music From Big Pink.

There is as promised, no singing in this opera-funeral. But each of the horn players—especially tenor saxophonist Gato Barbieri, who is prominently featured—achieves a vocal quality and intensity in solo and ensemble. The effect often is of a wildly impassioned meeting of instrumental voices, barely able to contain their grief, their sorrow. With the titles of various passages (like "Grave Train" and "Death Rolls" and "Mother of the Dead Man") and the album cover (the silhouette of a man lying in state against a timeless sky) to spur your imagination, the music crystallizes into cinematic montages within the theater of your mind: a whole procession of horses—drawn wagons, rosy-cheeked dead men in caskets against walls of floral displays, steamy roomsful of mourners in black, impossibly pompous brass bands wailing insane dirges, skeletons swaying on distant horizons.

Funeral starts with "The End (Prologue)" and somber chords from the amassed horns (a rich blend of soprano sax, tenor sax, trumpet, bass trombone and tuba) with Mrs. Bley at the organ, and Burton's vibes-guitar-bass-drumc quartet laying down the foundation Everything Burton plays on this record is just right, unimprovable, as his very first skittery volley of notes in the opening passages illustrates.

A recurrent motif is the interlocked bass-tuba-and-kettle-drum bottom, which sounds exactly like a great, goofy drum corps trying to take a sad song and make it better. Carla Bley is masterful at devices like this, but also more importantly, at creating a musical atmosphere where solos are not so much individual improvisations as statements which (a) emerge from the fabric of the composition and (b) collectively forward its progress. Her melodies are varied, supple, memorable, but it is the grand design on her Funeral that is truly awesome.

In her brief liner notes, Mrs. Bley (wife of avant garde jazz pianist-composer Paul Bley, and a gifted composer in her own right) tells us that A Genuine Tong Funeral has nothing to do with Oriental music, except for the inherent underlying dramatic quality. And it is truly uncanny the way one movement grows into the next, the momentum she creates within Funeral, almost like—well, something akin to the approach of death itself, inexorable, inevitable, and joyous, in an odd way.

There are no weak moments, so maybe the best thing is to describe the peaks. There is the marvelous interplay of Barbieri's tenor, against Mike Mantler's trumpet, against Jimmy Knepper's trombone, on "Morning of a Death," a frightening, evil diffusion. "Lament": Burton's brisk, flowing, lovely vibes, his melodic slant suggesting an awful sorrow just beneath the superficial jauntiness. Barbieri's singing, granular tone on "Silent Spring," with Burton deftly floating clouds of notes toward the dark horns, and guitarist Larry Coryell's feedback building to a human moan. Burton's amazing bent-note ballad-like playing on "Mother of the Dead Man," soft, delicate—but jarring, because, as everybody knows, you can't make vibes bend notes. The gassy entry of the horns on "Some Dirge," like an exceedingly spooky bullring overture, coupled with something from The Phantom of the Opera, almost burlesque but so ominous it seems almost to assume physical dimension.

Throughout, Coryell and Burton weave behind, around and in front of each other and everybody else; all those incandescent country-jazz-rock-blues figures they seem to invent spontaneously. It is sad to know that this is their last recording together, at least for the time being, since Coryell has departed the Burton quartet to establish his own group. An indication that Coryell will probably do alright on his own is contained in the furious, mad-house solo he gets off during "The New National Anthem" (only to be swallowed up by a final screaming swirl of horns and vibes and percussion and organ that very nearly reaches critical mass nuclear explosion intensity).

Funeral is just an overwhelming 45 minutes of music, and when it is ended, its essence lingers like the cosmic bit of wisdom from someone named Paul Haines which is discreetly reprinted on the back of the jacket liner: "Only the survivors are dead." (RS 25)

JOHN BURKS