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Dec 22

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The man with the blue guitars

The thing about Chris Rea — who has just died, aged 74 — was that he didn’t fit anywhere, except with the people who loved his music. And sometimes they didn’t fit him, which caused a few problems. The people who bought “On the Beach” and “Driving Home for Christmas” made him rich, but their expectations could be frustrating. This was a man who also recorded pieces called “Green Shirt Blues (for George Russell)” and “Take the Mingus Train”, which seemed to show where his heart lay. Occasionally an envelope would arrive with a CD of rough mixes and things he’d been trying out in his studio; the last piece he sent me was called “Giverny and the Trenches”, an eight-minute instrumental mini-suite containing multitudes, including free-jazz saxophones.

But that wasn’t the only only place his heart lay. Occasionally he’d email about something or other. The exchanges were usually brief but always interesting. One was about the R&B singer Little Johnny Taylor, whose “Part Time Love” was a favourite with the sort of mods we both were in the ’60s. He must have been to see Taylor live, possibly at Newcastle’s Club A Go Go. “How good was he!… I could smell the sweat dripping on my mohair suit (14inch single vent).”

Another time, I sent him a link to James Jamerson’s isolated bass part on “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough”, on YouTube. “Fucking wow!” he replied, and said he’d just been listening to the Temptations. “The Temps have blown me away again, even after all these years. Re-reading Berry Gordy’s book… just to be there!  I must be going bonkers, got caught in the kitchen doing dance moves to ‘Get Ready’. Struggling to be bothered with what’s happening now. Only God seems to know the value of Motown.”

Chris had been a blues hound and a northern soul boy, and he never lost it, even when he seemed to be driving straight down the middle of the road. He was a proper musician, and he loved working with other proper musicians, like the keyboardist Max Middleton and the drummer Martin Ditcham, long-time associates. I doubt that this country has produced many better slide guitarists, too, but he was never flashy.

He wrote great pop songs, the sort that mean something to people, that speak to their emotions and become part of their lives: “Fool (If You Think It’s Over)”, “Josephine”, “Stainsby Girls”, “Let’s Dance”. There was always a bit more to them than just a pop song. He once told me that he’d been paid to come up with the first few lines of Hot Chocolate’s “It Started With a Kiss” — no credit, just a lot of money. Somebody else could finish it and get the publishing royalties. It’s a great song, thanks to those opening lines.

He loved to paint — cars, mountains, his collection of guitars. The Hofner violin bass above is one of his, used on the cover of an album called Hofner Blue Notes, a sequence of a dozen pieces for solo bass guitar and rhythm section. He released it in 2003 on JazzeeBlue, the label he set up in a fit of exasperation with the limits imposed by major record companies on artists who didn’t want to be forced into boxes. Artists like him.

That same year, also on JazzeeBlue, he released an album called Blue Street (Five Guitars), a beautiful series of tone poems inspired by, probably among other things, his love of Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue period. It contains a truncated version of a piece he once sent me in unfinished form, originally with the working title “Going to A Go Go”, in which he used the riff from the Miracles 1965 hit of that name to evoke the cherished memories of those happy days and in a second, slower section, to ask himself questions about what had happened to him since: “And your life is rolling over / A little faster every day / Better stop for a while and think it over / Because you know for sure you lost your way / Does what’s around you really matter / Is there something left undone /Now the truth has got you on the run…” Then he goes back to the original tempo: dancing, as he once put it, down the stony road.

The version on the album doesn’t have the sung part of the first section; maybe copyright problems got in the way. But, as much as all his greatly loved hits, Blue Street (Five Guitars) is a great testament to a man who earned the rewards of success but never quite the recognition he deserved.

The health problems he suffered over the last 25 years were hideous. The last time I saw him, he bought me dinner at a very good Italian restaurant on the Fulham Road. Italian food was another thing he knew a lot about, thanks to his dad, Camillo, who ran a chain of ice-cream parlours in and around Middlesbrough. And now I’m going to play his “Going to A Go Go”, over and over. So glad I knew him; so sad he’s gone.

Dec 21

7 Comments

At Blackheath Halls

Yesterday, the eve of the winter solstice, turned out to be a good one for music. Looking for a Christmas present, I found myself in a clothes shop where the sound system was playing Al Green’s version of Kris Kristofferson’s “For the Good Times”, making me wonder for a moment if there had ever been a finer performance by a soul singer of a country ballad. Then, while I was having a cup of coffee, the café’s playlist surprised me by including Bob B. Soxx and the Blue Jeans’ soaring “The Bells of St Mary”, from Phil Spector’s Christmas Album, a piece of art which seems — unlike Gesualdo’s madrigals and Caravaggio’s paintings — to have been widely cancelled in the present era.

In the evening I took myself to Blackheath Halls, a really splendid venue for music, to hear The Westbrook Blake, a suite of pieces which has been in constant evolution since in 1971, when Adrian Mitchell invited Mike Westbrook to provide musical settings for some of William Blake’s poems, as part of a piece for the National Theatre called Tyger.

I’ve written about it before, here and here, so I won’t repeat myself, except to say that it’s one of the glories of contemporary English music, and the chance to see any performance of it is to be grabbed with some urgency. Last night the two wonderfully expressive solo singers (as always, Kate Westbrook and Phil Minton) and the five-piece band were joined by the 30 or so singers of the Blackheath Halls Community Singers, directed by Paul Ayers.

While Mike Westbrook’s place at the piano was taken by the brilliant Matthew Bourne, the composer himself took the stage in a wheelchair, from which he recited a couple of Blake’s more trenchant poems with clarity and feeling. The spectacular solos from the accordion of Karen Street, the violin of Billy Thompson and the alto saxophone of Chris Biscoe were more than worthy of the spontaneous applause they drew. It was an evening of proper music-making, full of communal warmth, often thought-provoking, and generally good for the soul.

Dec 19

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Antony Price 1945-2025

Of course there was the shock of the music, exquisite to some and befuddling to others. But it was the list of credit on the cover of the first Roxy Music album that really got people going. Concept by Bryan Ferry. Art by Nicholas de Ville. Photography by Karl Stoecker. Clothes, make-up and hair by Antony Price. Something different was going on here.

A lot of it had to do with Antony Price, a Yorkshire-born former Royal College of Art student who got together with Bryan Ferry to devise the group’s look. Price died this week, aged 80, having made a significant contribution to the way the culture around the music evolved in the 1970s. Price made the ruffled satin swimsuit in which Kari-Ann Moller posed on the wraparound gatefold cover image of that debut album, the strapless sheath dress that Amanda Lear wore on the front of For Your Pleasure, and so on all the way through Roxy’s eight studio albums.

Here’s Phil Manzanera, talking to me a few years ago about joining the band in 1972. “I remember getting on the 137 bus from Clapham to go to the photo session for the first album and of course I had no idea about style. My mum sewed some diamante on to a white shirt and I turned up at the session and Antony takes one look at me and says, ‘No, no, no!’ He hands me the bug-eye glasses. ‘Stick these on! And here’s a leather jacket!’ Job done. Fantastic. Antony was a bloody genius.”

Here’s how Ferry remembered putting that first cover together: “I think it was after the recording. Either we were still making, it, or just about finished. I remember calling Antony from a red phone box, I think in the King’s Road, which makes sense because I used to hang around EG (Management)’s offices. I was living in Battersea with Andy Mackay. I remember Antony saying, in his gruff way, ‘I want to hear what it sounds like!’ So I guess I went round to see him.

“Antony had this photographer friend who he’d already done a couple of things with, called Karl Stoecker, married to Errol Flynn’s daughter – a very handsome man, a real ladies’ man. We went to his studio and did this picture. Antony and I talked about it… (he) had this girl called Kari-Ann who he thought was ideal – I wanted a woman, dressed by him. It turned out to be the perfect thing to go with the music.”

What was the cover image saying? “All the ’50s references in the music, late ’50s, early ’60s, were being reflected. It wasn’t that long gone, but it seemed like an age. But although it was a cheesecake kind of thing, it was a bit more knowing. It was all in the details, I think… the make-up, everything, the gold disc – that was a conceit, a cheeky little thing. Yes, it was challenging – and she was looking in a challenging way. It was in the (pre-digital) days when you didn’t know if you had the picture at all. A week later you’d look at the prints. I was so excited.

“Then Andy Mackay found this piece of fabric which we used on the inside cover. Nick de Ville, I got him involved, he was a friend from art college. Finding typefaces and fiddling around with that. Then we liked the idea of the (band) pictures looking like postcards. It was a cottage industry, really. We did a session with Karl Stoecker and Antony, dolling us all up. Eno’s girlfriend made a shirt for him – Carol McNicoll, who was a really brilliant artist working in ceramics – she also did his outfits, the feather things later on. Great, like theatre costumes. Andy’s things were a bit more raunchy. Wendy Dagworthy did Phil’s outfit. And Paul was dressed like a caveman – his sound was quite primitive.”

In 1974, for the cover of Another Time, Another Place, Ferry’s second solo album, Antony made two identical white dinner jackets — single-breasted, shawl-collared — for the cover shoot, taken by Eric Boman against a swimming pool, with elegant people in the background. That summer I was going to an Island Records party in the big studio at Basing Street and needed something to wear. Bryan lent me one of those jackets. Nothing has ever felt quite like it.

Dec 17

8 Comments

2025: The best bits

The brutish reality of Donald Trump’s second term as president of the United States was beginning to emerge when Bruce Springsteen arrived for the first date of his 2025 European tour in Manchester on May 14. I wasn’t there, which meant I didn’t hear him perform, as his final encore, Bob Dylan’s “Chimes of Freedom”, a song that could be seen as the last, magnificent expression of its creator’s 1963-64 incarnation as a singer of protest ballads. The clip above shows that Springsteen, seeking to take a stand at another moment in history, gave it everything he had. In October, Al Stewart made a similarly fine choice when, during his farewell tour, he closed his London Palladium show with Dylan’s “Love Minus Zero/No Limit”, one of the compositions that had shaped his own career as a songwriter. With proper humility, but with their own creative spirit still demonstrably alive and alert, Springsteen and Stewart were reminding us of the enduring significance of the greatest artist of our time, whose own emergence was explored in the finest archival release of the year.

NEW ALBUMS

1 Ambrose Akinmusire: Honey From a Winter Stone (Nonesuch)

2 Mavis Staples: Sad and Beautiful World (Anti-)

3 Arve Henriksen / Trygve Seim / Anders Jormin / Markku Ouaskari: Arcanum (ECM)

4 Masabumi Kikuchi: Hanamichi / The Final Studio Recording Vol II (Red Hook)

5 The Necks: Disquiet (Northern Spy)

6 Patricia Brennan: Of the Near and Far (Pyroclastic)

7 Amina Claudine Myers: Solace of the Mind (Red Hook)

8 The Waterboys: Life, Death and Dennis Hopper (Sun)

9 Peter Brötzmann: The Quartet (Okoroku)

10 Chris Ingham Quintet: Walter / Donald (Downhome)

11 Vilhelm Bromander Unfolding Orchestra: Jorden Vi Ärvde (Thanatosis)

12 Nels Cline: Consentrik Quartet (Blue Note)

13 Bryan Ferry & Amelia Barratt: Loose Talk (Dene Jesmond)

14 Lucy Railton: Blue Veil (Ideologic Organ)

15 Charles Lloyd: Figures in Blue (Blue Note)

REISSUE / ARCHIVE

1 Bob Dylan: Through the Open Window: The Bootleg Series Vol 18 1956-1963 (Columbia Legacy)

2 Charlie Parker: Bird in Kansas City (Verve)

3 Dionne Warwick: Make It Easy on Yourself — The Scepter Recordings 1962-1971 (SoulMusic)

4 Mike Westbrook Orchestra: The Cortège / Live at the BBC 1980 (Cadillac)

5 Pharoah Sanders: Izipho Zam (Strata East)

6 Tomasz Stanko Quartet: September Night (ECM)

7 Larry Stabbins, Keith Tippett, Louis Moholo-Moholo: Live in Foggia (Ogun)

8 A New Awakening: Adventures in British Jazz 1966-1971 (Strawberry)

9 Emahoy Tsege Mariam Gebru: Church of Kidane Mehret (Mississippi)

10 Irma Thomas: Wish Someone Would Care (Kent)

LIVE PERFORMANCE

1 The Weather Station (Islington Town Hall, March)

2 Tyshawn Sorey Trio (Cafe Oto, February)

3 Paul Brady (Bush Hall, April)

4 The Necks (Cafe Oto, May)

5 Maria Schneider / Oslo Jazz Ensemble (Barbican, March)

6 Tom Skinner (Queen Elizabeth Hall, November)

7 Patti Smith Plays Horses (London Palladium, October)

8 Schlippenbach Trio (Cafe Oto, Jan)

9 Bang on a Can All Stars: Terry Riley 80th birthday tribute (Barbican, May)

10 Wadada Leo Smith / Vijay Iyer (Wigmore Hall, October)

11 Olie Brice Quartet (Vortex, July)

12 Adrian Dunbar / Guildhall Sessions Orchestra: The Waste Land (Queen Elizabeth Hall, November)

13 Al Stewart (London Palladium, October)

14 Sebastian Rochford’s Finding Ways (Jazz in the Round, Cockpit Theatre, November)

15 Louis Moholo-Moholo Memorial (100 Club, August)

MUSIC BOOKS

1 Billy Hart w/Ethan Iverson: Oceans of Time (Cymbal Press)

2 Tom Piazza: Living in the Present with John Prine (Omnibus)

3 Jonathan Gould: Burning Down the House (Mariner Books)

4. Neil Storey (ed.): The Island Book of Records Vol 2, 1969-70 (Manchester University Press)

5 Sonny Simmons w/Marc Chaloin: Before You Die Later (Blank Forms)

FICTION

1 Vincenzo Latronico: Perfection (Fitzcarraldo)

2 Sam Sussman: Boy from the North Country (Grove Press)

3 Andrew Miller: The Land in Winter (Sceptre)

NON-FICTION

Paul Gorman: Granny Takes a Trip (White Rabbit)

FILMS

1 Nickel Boys (dir. RaMell Ross)

2 From Hilde, With Love (dir. Andreas Dresen)

3 Sinners (dir. Ryan Coogler)

4 The Ballad of Wallis Island (dir. James Griffiths)

5 A Complete Unknown (dir. James Mangold) 

DANCE

Quadrophenia: A Mod Ballet (Sadler’s Wells, July)

EXHIBITIONS

1 Noah Davis (Barbican, May)

2 Jean-François Millet (National Gallery, October)

3 Lee Miller (Tate Britain, December)

Dec 10

2 Comments

Kind of Dukish

The idea of jazz as a repertory music is so fraught with dangers that it tends to evoke my instinctive distrust. Sometimes, though, you can only give in and enjoy it. The Pocket Ellington, as the pianist Alex Webb calls his septet devoted to the music of the immortal Duke, turns out to be a very good idea.

This is not a recreation of the great Ellington splinter groups of the early 1940s, whose recordings were issued under the names of Johnny Hodges, Rex Stewart and Barney Bigard. At the Pizza Express in Soho last night the Pocket Ellington entertained a sold-out house with Webb’s artful arrangements of some of Duke’s (and Billy Strayhorn’s) best known compositions, rendered for the trumpet of Andy Davies, the trombone of David Lalljee, the alto and baritone saxophones and clarinet of Alan Barnes, the tenor saxophone of Tony Kofi, the double bass of Dave Green and the drums of Winston Clifford.

To miniaturise what were originally big-band compositions can have the effect of bringing unexpected facets into the light. I enjoyed the way the ensemble brought out an elliptical quality seeming to anticipate bebop in the melodies of Duke’s “Cotton Tail” and Strayhorn’s “Johnny Come Lately”, written in 1940 and 1942 respectively, an impression heightened by the work of the rhythm section behind Kofi’s solo on the former.

Webb resists the temptation to stretch the material to suit modern time-frames. Miniatures such as “Ko-Ko”, “Le Sucrier Velours” (from The Queen’s Suite, written in 1959 for Elizabeth II), the title piece from Such Sweet Thunder and “Chelsea Bridge” retained their original exquisite proportions. Even the medleys of “Main Stem”/”Rockin’ in Rhythm” and “Harlem Air Shaft”/”Drop Me Off in Harlem” remained brisk and crisp, leaving the listener wanting more.

The singer Marvin Muoneké joined the line-up for “Jump for Joy”, “I’m Beginning to See the Light” and other favourites, making an excellent job of Webb’s amusing lyric to “Johnny Come Lately” and handling the stately contours of “Sophisticated Lady” with appropriate delicacy.

Naturally, Webb’s chosen format can’t provide the heft and occasional lushness of a full big band. But there are plenty of compensations, including Kofi’s pensive unaccompanied coda to “Chelsea Bridge” and everything Barnes did, including an eloquent alto passage on “What Am I Here For”. And, of course, the presence of Dave Green, an important figure on the British jazz scene for six decades and still, at 83, keeping his bandmates honest.

Jazz mustn’t become a museum, and more fine young musicians than ever need the world to pay attention as they try to move the music forward. But when the past is respectfully addressed and reinvigorated with such skill as that shown by Webb and his colleagues, principles can happily be suspended.

Dec 5

6 Comments

Steve Cropper 1941-2025

You don’t expect the people you interview to write thank-you letters, but it’s quite nice when they do. Particularly when it comes from someone like Steve Cropper, as happened to me in 1971 after I’d interviewed him for the Melody Maker at his new studio in Memphis on a break from a session he was producing for his old friend Eddie Floyd. I kept the letter, of course, as you would.

Cropper died this week, aged 84. Here’s the obituary I wrote yesterday for the Guardian. I hope I did him some kind of justice. He was a hero of mine, as were the other members of the MGs, ever since I first heard “Green Onions” in 1962. I have all their albums, all the way up to 1994’s That’s the Way It Should Be, and they’re among the last things I’d part with. My favourite is probably Soul Dressing, from 1965, even thought it was the one whose mediocre sales persuaded them that instrumental albums needed covers of familiar tunes in order to attract buyers.

Hence, on subsequent albums, things like their fine versions of the Temptations’ “Get Ready”, Gershwin’s “Summertime”, Cliff Nobles’ “The Horse”, the Delfonics’ “La-La Means I Love You” and Aretha’s “(Sweet Sweet Baby) Since You’ve Been Gone”. I listen to those alongside the MGs’ originals I love: “Big Train”, “Soul Sanction”, “Double or Nothing”, “Kinda Easy Like”, “Last Tango in Memphis”, “Cruisin'”, “Sarasota Sunset” and the rest. It was nice of Steve to take the trouble to express his thanks all those years ago. So now I’ll say thank you back to him, for all of it.

Nov 27

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Voces humanae

Amazing, isn’t it, that even in this Tower of Babel an individual human voice can be unmistakeable. Mavis Staples sounds like Mavis Staples. Boz Scaggs sounds like Boz Scaggs. No one else. And over the decades those voices become trusted friends. Each of them has a new album out that suggests, as they head towards the inevitable end of long careers (Mavis is 86, Boz is 81), that they could never outstay their welcome.

After albums with Ry Cooder, Jeff Tweedy and Ben Harper in the producer’s chair, it’s the turn of Brad Cook, whose credits include Bon Iver and Nathaniel Rateliff and the Night Sweats, to supervise Mavis’s new album. He doesn’t let her down.

The song selection on Sad and Beautiful World is thoughtful and empathetic, starting with the conscious boogie-shuffle of Tom Waits and Kathleen Brennan’s “Chicago” and proceeding through Gillian Welch and David Rawlings’ “Hard Times”, Curtis Mayfield’s “We Got to Have Peace” and Leonard Cohen’s “Anthem” to Eddie Hinton’s “Everybody Needs Love” via material less familiar to me. The most striking of those is Frank Ocean and James Ho’s “Godspeed”, set in a dense instrumental weave that summons all the best elements of Americana into one perfect arrangement.

There’s no showing off by the many fine players involved on the 10 tracks, but I love Derek Trucks’ beautiful slide guitar decorating “Hard Times” and the glinting pedal steel of Colin Croom on “A Satisfied Mind”, the gorgeous country song by Red Hayes and Jack Rhodes, whose many cover versions go back to 1954 and Mahalia Jackson — perhaps the exemplar Mavis had in mind. And to take us out, there’s a backing choir on “Everybody Needs Love” consisting of Bonnie Raitt, Patterson Hood, Kate Crutchfield and Nathaniel Rateliff. Everybody loves Mavis, don’t they?

For Detour, Boz Scaggs returns to the sort of American standards he investigated on But Beautiful in 2003 and Speak Low in 2008, although it sells a dummy straight away by opening with a night-club version of Allen Toussaint’s “It”s Raining” before settling into the likes of “Angel Eyes”, “The Very Thought of You” and “We’ll Be Together Again”. After the very fine arrangements by Gil Goldstein that helped make Speak Low such a success, here Scaggs favours the more stripped-back setting of a piano trio with the lightest touches of string arrangements here and there.

OK, you could say that his “Angel Eyes” and “Once I Loved” don’t match those of, say, Sinatra and Shirley Horn respectively, but if you like Scaggs’ voice as much as I do, you won’t be worried by that — and you’ll be delighted to hear him excavate “I’ll Be Long Gone”, a waltz-time song from his very first solo album back in 1969, refurbishing it with a deeper, richer, more controlled approach.

Sometimes these American Songbook projects work (Bob Dylan) and sometimes they don’t (Rod Stewart), their success largely dependent on what their significance is to the singers and how much real appreciation they have of the art of the men wrote the melodies and lyrics. I don’t think there’s much doubt on which side of the divide Boz Scaggs falls.

Nov 24

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Twang. Thump. Crash. More twang.

Finding Ways is the name of the drummer/composer Seb Rochford’s new band. It’s also the title of their debut album, which they played at the Cockpit Theatre in north-west London last night, as part of the Jazz in the Round series. It was one of the events featured on the closing night of the 2025 EFG London Jazz Festival, and I couldn’t imagine a happier way of ending the 10-day programme.

Rochford has made some intriguing choices in his career, but probably none more surprising than this. Finding Ways is a guitar-instrumental band: three guitarists, to be precise, plus bass guitar and drums. I don’t think I’ve seen such a line-up live since an early incarnation of Fleetwood Mac with Peter Green, Danny Kirwan and Jeremy Spencer back In 1968. Or at least not one so memorable.

Last night’s guitarists were David Preston, Tara Cunningham and Matt Hurley, joined by Anders Christensen on bass guitar. One thing that stuck out straight away was the absence of pedal boards or other effects. No wah-wahs, no phasing, no tremolo arms. This, apparently, was at Rochford’s insistence. So what we heard was three versions of the sort of sound you made when you got your first electric guitar, hit an E major chord and then looked for a way to make the strings twang. A sound with innocence intact. And an interesting approach to apply to three very sophisticated players.

So what was the result? Surf music in space, maybe. The Ventures or Dick Dale and the Del-Tones with Derek Bailey or Sonny Sharrock sitting in. Rochford’s tunes for this line-up are sometimes based on simple two-bar chord modules reminiscent of the twangtastic “Walk, Don’t Run” or “Misirlou” (and occasionally finding beguiling elaborations of the format, as on the soaring “People Say Stuff, Don’t Be Disheartened”). Also springing to mind: the free-form guitar conversations of Jerry Garcia and Bob Weir in the Grateful Dead and of Tom Verlaine and Richard Lloyd in Television: “Dark Star” or “Marquee Moon” but with different perspectives.

It was great to see the band in this environment, arranged in a circle, the musicians locked into each other, watching for cues, tidying up small errors but letting rough edges show as they exploited the spaces left for spontaneity within the structures. Furiously loud in some places (driven by Rochford’s brutal energy), it was surprisingly lyrical in others; I don’t think I’ve ever heard three electric guitars played as softly as in the filigreed three-way conversation between Cunningham, Hurley and Preston that formed the delightfully unexpected coda to “Community”, which had started out as a reggae piece.

In this intimate setting, the musicians’ very visible sharing of their pleasure extended to the audience and was washed back in return. They were having fun, and so were we.

* Finding Ways is out now on Edition Records. The photos of Sebastian Rochford and Tara Cunningham at the Cockpit were taken by Steven Cropper and are used by kind permission.

Nov 22

2 Comments

Tom Skinner at the QEH

The trouble with the EFG London Jazz Festival is that it’s all too much. Given 300 gigs in 10 days, there’s always going to be something you regret missing. Last night I badly wanted to hear the Weather Station — the marvellous Canadian singer-songwriter Tamara Lindeman — with a string quartet at EartH in Dalston. But I also wanted to hear the drummer-composer Tom Skinner and his band perform their new album, Kaleidoscopic Visions, at the Queen Elizabeth Hall. I’d seen the Weather Station in Islington at the start of this year. I hadn’t seen Skinner since 2022. So that’s how my decision was made.

In the end, any regrets were overwhelmed by events. Skinner and his six colleagues — Chelsea Carmichael (flute and tenor saxophone), Robert Stillman (soprano and tenor saxophones), Yaffra (keyboards, voice and percussion), Adrian Utley (guitar), Kareem Dayes (cello) and Caius Williams (bass) — started the concert with watchful discretion. But over the course of 90 minutes they built the music until it had become a living, pulsing thing, full of narratives, individual and collective.

Skinner writes deceptively simple, sometimes folk-like melodies that exist in essential dialogue with the riffs and other figures devised to help form a unified matrix. The textures are airy, with room for light and shade. (That’s a reflection of his superbly flexible drumming, in which power is used with restraint.) There are solos on top of prepared accompaniment — those from Utley and Carmichael, cutting loose on tenor, were quite remarkable — but often the improvising is done in small groupings.

A string trio of Williams’s bowed bass, Dayes’ pizzicato cello and the guitar of Utley, making use of sustain and the volume pedal to eliminate attack, was beautifully realised, as was an unaccompanied tenor saxophone duet by Stillman and Carmichael. I’d been listening to their spontaneous interlocking pointilliste figures for a couple of minutes before I realised that the dialogue sounded like a solo tenor improvisation by Evan Parker, its components broken down and distributed between the two players to create an actual version of the conversation that Parker’s playing often resembles. And there was also a real conversation between Skinner and Yaffra, who moved from his keyboards to play a pair of tom-toms with tympani beaters, the two of them sending a gentle thunder rolling around the hall.

I wrote with some enthusiasm about the album a few weeks ago, but the concert did what concerts should do: it warmed the blood in the music’s veins, allowing it to grow. I’d have been very sad to miss it. Now I hope Skinner follows the practice he established with his earlier project, Voices of Bishara, and releases the live version of Kaleidoscopic Visions. Last night’s, if possible.

Nov 19

5 Comments

In the Unreal City

Snow fell in London yesterday morning. It seemed the right sort of day for a performance of T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land at the Queen Elizabeth Hall. Although the poem contains all kinds of weather in all kinds of places, from the cracked earth of endless plains to thunder in the mountains and a summer shower on a Bavarian lake, taking the short walk from Waterloo station in a cold and dark London (the poet’s “Unreal City”) was like strolling straight into its heart.

Mounted as part of the EFG London Jazz Festival, the performance offered an expanded version of the treatment commissioned 10 years ago by the Beckett festival in Enniskillen from the Irish actor Adrian Dunbar. With the permission of the famously strict Eliot estate, Dunbar was able to devise an arrangement of the poem for four actors (two women and two men) plus a jazz quintet playing music by the saxophonist and composer Nick Roth.

I was 15 when an English teacher named Keith Yorke took us through The Waste Land, decoding its mysteries. I could never thank him enough. Dunbar, introducing last night’s performance, in which the quintet was augmented by a 25-piece orchestra, said he had encountered it while studying at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama 40 years ago; clearly, its impact on him was similarly profound. My previous experience of a live performance of the poem was the actress Fiona Shaw reciting it from memory beneath a single bare lightbulb on stage at the historic Wilton’s Music Hall in the East End on New Year’s Eve, 1998. In my eyes, that gave Dunbar and his crew a lot to live up to.

The readers were Anna Nygh, Orla Charlton, Frank McCusker and Stanley Townsend. Dunbar divided the lines between them, as appropriate to Eliot’s shifting cast of characters. Passages were rendered with German, Irish, American and Cockney accents. I was worried to begin that it might all seem a bit contrived, a bit stagey. That unease evaporated within a few minutes. The polyphony of the reading brought a different kind of life to an already highly polyphonic poem.

Ross’s music was used as an overture and as interludes between the five episodes. The overture, scored for the Guildhall Sessions Orchestra, evoked the European modernist classical music of the inter-war years: bold gestures, hints of dissonance. The first interlude had a ragtime flavour (“that Shakespeherian Rag… so elegant… so intelligent”). For the second, the quintet — Alex Bonney (trumpet), Roth (saxophones), Alex Hawkins (piano), Oli Hayhurst (bass) and Simon Roth (drums) — brilliantly created something that sounded like one of Charles Mingus’s bands paying homage to the pre-war Ellington small groups, or possibly vice versa. The third found the group moving towards free jazz, with Hawkins flailing the keyboard à la Cecil Taylor. The fourth exploited Bonney’s expert manipulation of electronic sound. Did that chronological progression echo something buried within the text? If certainly added a new perspective and a contemporaneity.

Nothing will ever dim the memory of Shaw’s spellbindingly majestic recitation, but Dunbar’s gamble paid off. The drama intensified until, by the time the closing lines of the fifth and final section were reached — “These fragments have I shored against my ruins / Why then Ile fit you / Hieronymo’s mad againe / Datta. Dayadhvam. Damyata. / Shantih shantih shantih” — the words and sounds had transformed the climate of a well-warmed hall and I felt a shiver run through me.

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