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May 12

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A farewell to Mike Westbrook

Summarising the long life and very eventful career of Mike Westbrook in a maximum of five minutes was not the easiest assignment I’ve ever been given. But that was the necessary limit placed on the tribute I was invited to deliver during the great composer and bandleader’s funeral in Exeter last week. The crematorium chapel was packed, and the music included the singing by the congregation of “Jerusalem” to the accompaniment of Karen Street’s accordion and of another William Blake lyric, “I See Thy Form”, by Phil Minton with Matthew Bourne at the piano. Here’s what I had to say.

For many years – in fact from the 1920s through the 1950s – the principal job of the British jazz musician was to learn the language of the great American originals and absorb it thoroughly enough to be able to produce a creditable facsimile.

But in the 1960s, something different happened. A group of young British-based musicians suddenly appeared with a new set of aims. They admired the American masters just as deeply as their predecessors had, but they were looking for something more. They were after a language of their own, an approach that would enable them to create a kind of jazz that wasn’t simply in thrall to someone else’s tradition.

From the moment Mike Westbrook arrived in London in 1963 and formed a new band, it became obvious that there was an unusual freshness and originality about his music. Mike’s personal heroes included Duke Ellington and Charles Mingus, but he managed to do what all great jazz musicians do, which is to move beyond his idols in order to find his own voice.

Like his heroes, he had the priceless gift of creating settings that brought the best out of his carefully chosen soloists, from John Surman and Mike Osborne in those early bands through countless other distinguished players.

The scale of Mike’s ambition as a composer became clear after he signed his first recording contract in 1967 and began writing extended works. They included the epic anti-war piece Marching Song and then Metropolis, written with the aid of an Arts Council bursary that enabled him to stop working as an art teacher and become a full-time musician.

Those longer pieces led to others – like Earthrise, a theatre piece produced in 1970 in collaboration with John Fox and the Welfare State. He wrote Citadel/Room 315 in 1974, at the time he met Kate, who became his wife and collaborator on pieces that made use of her voice, her lyric writing and their shared interest in cabaret, musical theatre, and poetry. That led in the 1980s to the vast multi-hued canvases of The Cortège and London Bridge Is Falling Down, with texts from Rimbaud, Lorca, Goethe, Sassoon and others, and to the suite called On Duke’s Birthday, a marvellous homage to Ellington.

At the other end of the scale came the Trio, with Kate and Chris Biscoe, and the Brass Band, a combo-sized unit that appeared at street festivals around continental Europe – where it has to be said he was often more profoundly appreciated than in his home country.

He was astonishingly prolific. There was a jazz cabaret piece called Mama Chicago, and several operas, including one based on Michael Ondaatje’s Comin’ Through Slaughter, and his big-band settings of Rossini, performed first in Italy and then at a BBC Prom concert in 1992. And much, much more.

In later years, he formed the Uncommon Orchestra and the smaller Band of Bands, featuring musicians from Devon, including one or two he’d played with in his earliest days. Towards the end of his life also gave spellbinding solo piano concerts in which he could wander gently through pieces from all the idioms he loved, exploring their affinities.

Mike’s legacy is one of great richness and diversity. But perhaps the most enduring of all his pieces will be his settings of William Blake’s poems. The Westbrook Blake began life in 1971 when the poet Adrian Mitchell invited him to provide the music for a Blake-themed show called Tyger.

The pieces then took on a life of their own, becoming a classic of contemporary English music, delivered in all sorts of places right up until last Christmas, when there was a very moving final performance with Mike at Blackheath Halls. Something in Blake spoke to Mike, and then spoke through him.

I wouldn’t want to slight any other musician, from any era, when I say that Mike’s place as the pre-eminent composer and bandleader of British jazz is hard to dispute. As is his role in enabling jazz made outside America to establish its right to an independent existence.

Most important of all, everything he did was based on a recognition that when a jazz group is working properly, it becomes a model for a decent society: a vehicle for individual expression in full and unselfish collaboration with others. 

How lucky we were to have him.

May 8

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Alex Hawkins at Cafe Oto

Alexander Hawkins played two nights at Cafe Oto this week with his new 11-piece band before spending two days recording the pieces they played, to which he gives the title Willow Music. If the set I heard on Tuesday is any guide, the resulting album will be worth considerable study.

The opening bars of the first piece the group played made me smile. For a minute I thought that I’d stepped back in time to the Royal Roost in 1948, and here was the Miles Davis Nonet — which became known as the Birth of the Cool band — playing a Gil Evans arrangement of a bebop standard. The feeling didn’t last because the music soon changed into something more identifiably itself, but it was oddly exhilarating while it lasted.

Davis’s nonet was constructed to reflect the range of the human voice, from the top end of the trumpet and the alto saxophone to the bottom of a tuba and a string bass. The Willow Music band achieves a similar spread, but even wider. Here were Alicia Gardener-Trejo on flute, bass flute and bass clarinet; Tom Challenger on flute and alto saxophone; Xhosa Cole on flute and tenor saxophone; George Crowley on flute, tenor saxophone and bass clarinet; Alex Ward on clarinet; Charlotte Keeffe on trumpet; Alex Paxton on trombone; Olivia Hughes on tuba; Neil Charles on bass and Stephen Davis on drums. With Hawkins himself on piano, of course.

With earlier projects, Hawkins has shown himself adept at handling larger ensembles; this one constantly engages the attention through the sheer variety of textures and timbres he draws from it. I was particularly beguiled by a piece that concentrated on the five woodwind players on flutes and clarinets, at first acappella; it reminded me of some of the West Coast recordings of the ’50s by people like Bob Cooper, Bud Shank and Jimmy Giuffre (themselves all inspired by the Birth of the Cool band), but again brought right up into contemporary practice.

It proved to be a perfect platform for soloists who integrate the vocabulary of free jazz into their improvisations. There were outstanding individual contributions, particularly from a rampaging Cole on tenor, the blustery Keeffe and the astonishingly agile Ward, but Challenger, Crowley, Paxton and Gardener-Trejo also made their mark, and there was outstanding work from Hughes, often in unison with Charles, and the infinitely subtle Davis. The composer mostly sat in front of the band, ready to cue and conduct these brand-new pieces when necessary, but he also made the space for some fine piano solos, particularly one on which he used various devices to alter the instrument’s sound, something in which he now specialises.

By the end of a set that lasted well over an hour, I was convinced that Hawkins has come up with something remarkable: a format that encourages him to make new discoveries.

He also has a new album on release, with a different line up. No Nation But Imagination features him on piano, synthesiser and sampler with Nicole Mitchell on flute, Rhodri Davis on harp, Hamid Drake on drums and Matthew Wright on turntables and live sampling. This is a very different sound: an intricately worked open-weave web of softer sounds, with a different balance of composition and arrangement, full of surprises and with a powerful undertow to remove any hint of passivity, and a wonderful gospel-inspired finale. It’s another stage in a remarkable career that is already taking its next step.

* No Nation But Imagination is out now on the Intakt label.

May 2

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The return of Kenny Wheeler

‘What Was’ (from left): Ray Warleigh, Stan Sulzmann, Tony Levin, Kenny Wheeler, John Parricelli, Chris Laurence (photo by Caroline Forbes)

The Toronto-born trumpeter and composer Kenny Wheeler left a big hole when he died in London in 2014, aged 84, after more than 60 years in the UK. A quiet and almost pathologically self-effacing man, he was hugely admired by his peers, who recognised not just the originality of his conception as a player and writer but the quality of his vision, which embraced both purity and open-mindedness. He made the music he wanted to make.

And he hasn’t really gone away. Last year some of his big-band charts were recorded for an album called Some Days Are Better by the Royal Academy of Music’s jazz orchestra and guest soloists, conducted by Nick Smart, Wheeler’s co-biographer; rather wonderfully, it received a Grammy nomination. And there’s also a new album called Vital Spark in which the bassist Dave Holland and the singer Norma Winstone collaborate with the London Vocal Project under Pete Churchill’s direction on performances of Wheeler’s unrecorded settings of poems by Langston Hughes, Stevie Smith, William Blake and Lewis Carroll, with new lyrics by Winstone completing some of Kenny’s late compositions.

Of course many of Wheeler’s own albums, particularly the ECM classics Gnu High (1975), Music for Large and Small Ensembles (1990) and Angel Song (1997), remain available. And now there’s an important new addition to his discography with the appearance of What Was, a sextet album originally recorded by Evan Parker for his Psi label in 1995 at Gateway Studio in Kingston upon Thames and now finely packaged for release.

The line-up is Wheeler on flugelhorn with Ray Warleigh on alto saxophone and flute, Stan Sulzmann on tenor, John Parricelli on guitar, Chris Laurence on double bass and Tony Levin on drums — an A-team of the Canadian’s regular partners. There are seven tracks, amounting to 64 minutes of music, all recorded within a single day in a room that had originally been built by Kingston University as a rehearsal space for the London Sinfonietta before being repurposed as a studio. The sextet sounds both lustrous and sinewy; thanks to the resident engineer, Steve Lowe, the tonal quality and balance are unimpeachable.

As is the music. In the sleeve notes, Sulzmann says this: “It was an old-school recording date where we all turned up on the day, no rehearsals, and we all brought a tune or two to try.” The brilliance of the players ensures that there are few dropped stitches, but the spontaneous nature of the session surely accounts for the freshness that the music radiates.

There are two compositions by Warleigh, two by Sulzmann and one by the pianist Mike Pyne before we reach Wheeler’s own two contributions. It’s fascinating to hear what a difference Parricelli’s imaginative background textures can make to a relatively standard post-bop piece, particularly to Warleigh’s Latin-inflected “Blue Nile”, which draws a fantastically inventive alto solo from the composer — one the finest on record, I’d say, from another figure sadly missed since his death in 2015.

It’s all first-class, until we get to the two Wheeler tunes, where things go up another level again. “What Was” glides teasingly through unpredictable changes, distantly related to the standard “What Is This Thing Called Love”, that provoke these master improvisers into compelling solos, with superlative support from Laurence and Levin, and a marvellous series of exchanges between the flugelhorn and the drummer, wittily leading into a closing statement of “Subconscious-Lee”, Lee Konitz’s take on the same source material. “Kind Folk” is a tune Wheeler returned to in various forms, and is the only previously released track in this set (it appeared in 2003 on Dream Sequence, a Psi album compiled from various Gateway sessions); here it slides in and out of tempo, like water flowing from one pool to another, with Sulzmann in particular benefitting from the reflective mood.

I said there were few dropped stitches. The ones you spot — a tiny hesitation here, a truncated thought there — merely confirm that this music was being made in the moment, with full collective commitment. A precious document indeed.

* What Was is out now on the False Walls label: http://www.falsewalls.co.uk. Some Days Are Better and Vital Spark are on the Greenleaf and Edition labels respectively.

Apr 26

10 Comments

Keeping it tight

Tiny Sun: Jonathan Goldsmith, Martina Sorbara, Don Rooke (photo: Greg Pacek)

Brevity, a friend of mine once remarked, can contain most things. Two of my favourite pieces of music are “Stay” by Maurice Williams and the Zodiacs and “Desireless” by Don Cherry, which clocked in at 1 minute 36 seconds and 1 minute 22 seconds respectively on their appearances in 1960 and 1973 but lack nothing in richness and enduring fascination. Now comes a Canadian trio calling itself Tiny Sun with an album which consists of 18 pieces, none of them lasting more than two minutes.

I’m aware of Tiny Sun because their guitarist, Don Rooke, is a musician whose career I’ve followed with interest and admiration for many years through his work with Mary Margaret O’Hara and the Henrys. The other members of the line-up, all Toronto-based, are the film and TV composer Jonathan Goldsmith, who plays keyboards, guitar and bass here, and the singer Martina Sorbara, better known as Dragonette for her electropop work.

By contrast with the scale of these miniatures, the gestation of the album was protracted. Tiny Sun began when Rooke sent Sorbara one of several “postcard-sized” pieces of instrumental music he had recorded with Goldsmith and invited her to complete it. That was in 2014, and the pieces have been accumulating ever since.

There are echoes of folk music here, and country music, blended into something always familiar but never classifiable. Sorbara is a wonderfully flexible and expressive singer; the range of material reveals her fine technique and highlights her subtle switches of emotional register. At times I was reminded of the underrated Karla Bonoff. She makes me wonder what there must be in the water of Ontario to produce her as well as MMO’H and Tamara Lindeman. Rooke’s gentle mastery of various guitars — including his beloved Weissenborn lap steel — is employed with his usual economy and immaculate feeling for the moment. Goldsmith supplies transparent textures and warm colours that give each piece its own distinctive atmosphere, holding the shards of emotion that comprise Sorbara’s lyrics in elegant suspension.

Needless to say, nothing outstays its welcome. The conciseness adds point to the soulfulness of “Imagined Love”, the bright bluegrass of “Don’t Fault the Stars for Falling”, the rubato flow of “Fledgling Land”, the unexpected junkyard grunge of “Hieroglyphics”, the delicate balladry of “Silly Way the World Got Spun”, the diaphanous waltz of “Float on the Sea”, and the wry reverie of “Nobody Won’t”. Less is more, it’s sometimes said, and here’s proof.

* Tiny Sun’s album is on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/artist/33kB8m7192adroRg69n4bA They play their debut concert, with guest musicians, at Koerner Hall in Toronto on May 14.

Apr 10

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Keith Altham 1941-2026

Next to their manager and their record producer, the most important person in a rock star’s life in the second half of the 20th century was their PR man or woman. Between 1969, when I joined the Melody Maker, and the end of the ’80s, I knew a bunch of them. Some I liked a lot and found easy to deal with. The trickier ones were easy to identify and not hard to avoid. Keith Altham, who has died aged 84, was definitely in the former camp.

There’s a very good obit by the Guardian‘s Robin Denselow here, telling the story of how Keith got into the music business, first as a writer for Fabulous magazine. He’d moved on to the NME by the time I met him, but a couple of years later he transitioned to the dark side and set up his own PR company.

He never lost his feeling for journalism or his ability to be objective about the stars he was now dealing with on a very different basis and whose antics fed his wonderful sense of humour. His book No More Mr Nice Guy!, a memoir in the form of open letters to some of his famous clients, was written and published in 1999, after his retirement; he always told great stories, and some of the funniest are here. Keith gives you a very different view of famous people, since he was capable of appreciating the talent of his clients while remaining clear-eyed about their human foibles and appreciating their contradictions.

Van Morrison: “What a talent. What a singer. What a songwriter. What a pain in the arse.”

Rod Stewart: “Having declared your great passions as ‘soccer, drinking and women, in that order’, none of them seem to have made you hugely happy.”

Mick Jagger: “…do you remember anything without the aid of Bill Wyman’s diaries? Very mean of him not to let you plagiarise them for the benefit of your own autobiography, I thought. After all, what are friends for, if not to be used? Giving back the million-dollar advance must have hurt.”

Ray Davies: “There is something of the rock and roll Howard Hughes about you. I would not be entirely surprised if you wound up a lonely old man with vast wealth in a huge house with one light bulb, growing your nails and wiping your fingers with Kleenex after shaking hands.”

By contrast, there’s the real fondness for such disparate characters as Noddy Holder, Donovan, Eric Burdon, Sting, Reg Presley (whose surname was bestowed by Keith), Justin Hayward and Marc Bolan (“Your heart was always in the right place even when you mislaid your head”). And Eddy Grant: “You are a perfect role model for any aspiring young popular musician trying to make it on their own terms, and having done so while remaining a decent human being first and a gifted artist second.”

And maybe most of all there was Pete Townshend. Despite enduring years of heavy-duty tantrums and frequently being fired from his role as the PR for the Who, the band he loved more than any other, Keith could write this: “When you were going through the hell of drug addiction and we were all at our wits’ end trying to stop you turning into the person you had always warned us not to become, I swore then that if this killer of a business destroyed you, then I would quit and become a postman or a milkman or anything. Fortunately you had sufficient mental strength to drag yourself back — and you also fortunately had friends and family who were not content to see you destroy yourself.”

About 25 years ago, Keith’s chance encounter with Tom McGuinness at an exhibition of old Eel Pie Island posters in Richmond led to a lunch date, to which each of them invited a friend from the business. In turn, that led to the biannual Strummers, Thumpers and Scribblers lunches, held in Barnes and still going strong, albeit with numerous changes of cast over the years. I’ve been attending them for two decades and treasure some happy memories, such as seeing P. P. Arnold and Linda Thompson sitting next to each other at one lunch, or earwigging a drummers’ conversation between Clem Cattini, Brian Bennett, Don Powell and Rob Townshend at another.

Keith could, of course, have written an equally remarkable book about the journalists with whom he came into contact (but who’d want to read that?). Here, they remain anonymous. But thinking about trying to get members of the national press interested in talking to one of his clients, he writes: “Most of my conversations with them went like this: ‘How would you like to interview Eddy Grant?’ ‘Latest single isn’t doing much.’ ‘How would you like to interview Eddy Grant in Barbados?’ ‘When do we leave?'”

Had he written that book, he might have included an episode from 1978 in which, as editor of the Melody Maker, I accepted his invitation to send John Pidgeon to the US to write about what I guess was the Police’s first American tour. I never promised covers, but I think that might have been the understanding. Anyway, John came back with a very good piece, and the Police were extremely hot at the time, but I also had what I thought were some good pictures of the Cramps to go with an interview, so Ivy Rorschach and Lux Interior ended up on the front of the MM that week. It was one of the most stupid editorial decisions I ever made. Keith was tight-lipped, as I recall. He’d be amused to know that, almost 50 years later, I still wake up in a sweat over it.

Cheers, old friend. See you down the road.

* The photo of Keith with Pete Townshend is from No More Mr Nice Guy!, reprinted by Blake Publishing in 2001 as The PR Strikes Back.

Apr 1

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Mark Sanders at Cafe Oto

A three-night season at a place where he has made so many distinguished contributions was no more than Mark Sanders’ due. I was only able to make it to one of the nights, each of which featured a different line-up, and then only to hear the opening set. But what I heard was more than enough to remind me of Mark’s qualities both as a drummer/percussionist and as a dynamic component in any free-improvising group.

The set I heard teamed him with two German musicians, the distinguished and vastly experienced pianist, composer and educator Georg Graewe and a newer name, the viola-player Laura Strobl. It began as collective free improvisation sometimes does, with the feeling of waiting for something to happen. The three of them were playing at the same time, all busy enough, but with little apparent sense of connection.

Then, however, that thing happened that can only happen with free improvisation. An entire music emerged. A real collective creation began to take shape, as if from nowhere (although not from nowhere, of course). Gradually the sounds they made together acquired proportion and a pulse, momentum and direction, an abstract narrative.

A long crescendo was more than just a question of getting louder. A sudden halt was more than just a red light. Graewe’s scurries, Strobl’s scrapes and Sanders’ extraordinarily deft manipulation of a panoply of sound-making devices — gongs, bells and small cymbals as well as the regular trap set — fused into something living and breathing.

* Tonight, Wednesday April 1, is the last of Mark Sanders’ three nights at Cafe Oto. He’ll be joined by Adrian Utley, Larry Stabbins and Neil Charles.

Mar 31

4 Comments

Alto voices: Art Pepper & Karsten Vogel

1.

Alto is just such a hard instrument; there are so few people that play it really well. I feel it’s the best one, too, now. At first I didn’t feel that way — I wanted to be a tenor player. It took a long time for me to feel that alto was the most expressive of the saxophones.

That’s Art Pepper, talking to Les Tomkins in an interview for Crescendo magazine in 1979. And it’s certainly true that when he got his first alto at the age of 12, Pepper found his voice, one that continues to beguile listeners today, four decades after his death in 1982, aged 56. Something about the horn’s register and the weight of its sound helped him to expose his emotions.

Pepper was 34 years old and had already lived several lifetimes when he travelled from Los Angeles to Vancouver in September 1959 to fulfil a 10-night engagement at a club called the Cellar, where American jazz musicians were regularly featured. The format was a familiar one in those days: a visiting soloist with a local rhythm section, using a repertoire built from Broadway tunes, jazz standards and perhaps one or two originals from the guest. Pepper had first appeared there in 1957, when he was in a bad way; he was in better condition for this return engagement, as we can hear in a new four-CD box set called Everything Happens to Me, comprising previously unheard recordings made on a mono tape machine

He was a player of special qualities. In the liner notes to a Pepper album (Gettin’ Together, 1960), the critic Martin Williams wrote that he would use the example of Pepper’s improvisations to persuade a square friend that jazz musicians can create melodies better than the ones they started with. Listen to “What’s New” here, or the two versions of “Over the Rainbow”, or particularly the title track of the set, see what Williams meant, as Pepper switches between broad spontaneous melodies and triple-time flurries that deserve to be slowed down, transcribed and studied.

The people who went to hear him at the Cellar in the summer of 1959 were very fortunate. They caught him at his best, with sympathetic accompanists. The pianist Chris Gage, the bassist Tony Clitheroe and the drummer George Ursan may never have established wider reputations, but they knew enough to provide thoughtful and sensitive support, whether on the ballads or the jazz pieces like “Allen’s Alley”, “Yardbird Suite” and Pepper’s own “Brown Gold”.

The sound is not studio-quality, but it’s exactly as you would have expectecd it to be in a club in 1959. The vibe is preserved through introductions and false starts, as when Pepper calls a halt after a few bars of “I Surrender Dear” and apologises to the audience: “As you know we’ve never rehearsed or anything, so if we should goof at any time, please bear with us. It’s just one of those things. We’ll get it, we’ll get it.” One or two tunes are incomplete and have to be faded. But none of that matters. This is how it was.

* Art Pepper’s Everything Happen to Me: 1959 — Live at the Cellar is released on the Omnivore label: http://www.omnivorerecordings.com The photo of Pepper is by Ray Avery.

2.

My life in music is based on the saxophone. In the busy years with Burnin Red Ivanhoe and Secret Oyster most of my time was taken by composing, arranging, holding the bands together, logistics and trying to get the economical side to function for the bands (which in fact never did). My alto saxophone – the reason for the whole thing – came third. And I regret that a lot. With a few exceptions I don’t like to hear the recordings with my soloing from these days. In the past like 35 years I have tried to compensate for that and somehow I have succeeded. I’m still working on that project.

And that’s Karsten Vogel, the Danish alto saxophonist and composer, talking in 2024 to the Slovenian writer Klemens Breznikar in an interview for the online magazine It’s Psychedelic Baby!. Vogel was in the process of recording a quartet album that has just been released under the title Late Night Ballads. It seems very fair to suggest, on this evidence, that he’s made up all of that lost time, and then some.

I’ve always had a special fondness for Karsten’s playing, whether with his regular bands or alongside John Tchicai in Cadentia Nova Danica, solo in an art gallery in London, in a duo in cave by the sea on the Faroe Islands, or with the Indian violinist L. Subramaniam. But I think I like him best in the basic “alto with rhythm accompaniment” format, heard on the album called My Old Flame in 2009 and now on Late Night Ballads.

The two altoists to whom he’s perhaps closest in terms of the emotional climate of his playing are Tchicai, with whom he played in Copenhagen in the late ’60s, and Lee Konitz in his latter years. He has a light sound, favouring the instrument’s upper register, with phrasing that — like Art Pepper’s — is agile without drawing attention to itself. Like both of those, he can summon a kind of pathos without descending into sentimentality.

Karsten is 83 now, so there’s a temptation for a critic to interpret this new album as “late work” (like the live albums of Konitz with Brad Mehldau and Charlie Haden released by Blue Note). But the seeming fragility of his sound is not a consequence of the ageing process: it’s something he’s always had, and it’s certainly nothing to do with weakness. He is also a master of phrasing, manipulating notes into weightless clusters, with the gift of making the unpredictable sound inevitable.

As the album’s title suggests, the mood is relaxed and contemplative, the tempos ranging from slow-medium to medium-slow but never feeling passive. It’s a little bit noirish, although that impression may be just caused by the fact that the opening track is David Raksin’s title song from Otto Preminger’s Laura. The other chosen standards include “I Remember You”, “You Go to My Head” and “Don’t Explain”, and Dave Brubeck’s “In Your Own Sweet Way”, with one original, “Open 24 Hrs”, cut from the same cloth. Throughout, the leader receives fine support from Mads Søndergaard on piano, Peter Hansen on double bass and Klaus Menzer on drums.

I sometimes think of the alto saxophone as the poet’s instrument. Here, as Vogel loops and soars above the contours of “Laura” or “You Go to My Head”, transcending but not quite detaching himself from the source material, is persuasive evidence.

* Karsten Vogel’s Late Night Ballads is on the Storyville label: http://www.storyvillerecords.com

Mar 27

22 Comments

‘A Night for Neil’

Kokomo at Bush Hall

Neil Hubbard’s guitar was a thread that ran through British rock in the late ’60s and throughout the subsequent decades as a member of Bluesology, Wynder K. Frog, Joe Cocker’s Grease Band, Juicy Lucy, Kokomo and others, and as a hired gun all the way from Jesus Christ Superstar and Evita via Alvin Lee and Robert Palmer to Roxy Music’s Avalon and Bryan Ferry’s “Slave to Love”. He could play a storming solo, as Paul Carrack reminded the audience at Bush Hall last night, but he really excelled as a rhythm player: a master of the groove. Carrack recalled the remark of B. B. King, who met Hubbard on the sessions for his Deuces Wild album in 1997, that “you could set your watch by him.”

Last night’s sold-out event was a fundraiser for the charity researching the disease — Lewy body dementia — from which Hubbard is suffering, and which kept him away from this celebration of his career. The all-star bill opened with Hamish Stuart, once of the Average White Band, putting out some admirably funky stuff with a fine version of Al Green’s “Love and Happiness” and an arrangement of “Pick Up the Pieces” concocted for AWB’s appearance at the Montreux Jazz Festival by their great producer/arranger, Arif Mardin, and featuring the non-nonsense tenor saxophone of Jim Hunt.

Next came Kokomo, their five original members — singer Frankie Collins, singer-pianist Tony O’Malley, saxophonist Mel Collins, guitarist Jim Mullen and percussionist Jody Linscott — supplemented by those who have replaced the fallen along the way, including the singers Charlotte Churchman and Helena May Harrison and bass guitarist Jennifer Maidman. This was a classic Kokomo mini-set, including Quincy Jones’s “Stuff Like That”, Stevie Wonder’s “So What the Fuss”, the band original “Third Time Around” and Bobby Womack’s “I Can Understand It”.

Attention turned to the screen behind the musicians, where we were shown a little film of Hubbard in the home where he is currently living, playing his Gibson ES-355 with a young friend on an acoustic guitar. As Neil’s golden retriever lay at his feet, he strummed the intro to Bill Withers’ “Lovely Day” — which the live band picked up and flew with.

Carrack was next, with “How Sweet It Is (To Be Loved By You”, “Stand By Me” and, of course, Ace’s immortal “How Long”, pub rock’s finest hour, its chorus sung back at him by the audience. By this point, the love in the room was overflowing.

Finally the stage was cleared for Roxy Music — two original members, Andy Mackay and Phil Manzanera, joined by Chris Spedding and Chester Kamen on guitars, Guy Fletcher on keys, Guy Pratt on bass guitar, Andy Newmark on drums and Jody Linscott, the night’s Most Valuable Player, plus the Kokomo singers, with Dionne Collins replacing Churchman. Kamen sang “Love Is the Drug”, Louise Marshall arrived to deliver “Avalon” and Mackay’s soprano saxophone was featured on a sultry instrumental that I think might have been “Tara”.

Then came a real coup de théâtre as we watched back-projected film of a Roxy concert from Fréjus in 1982, with Hubbard featured alongside Ferry, doing “My Only Love”, synched up (via a click track in Newmark’s headphones, I’d guess) to the live band. Two people who were unable to be with us on the night were nevertheless making their contribution. The technical manipulation worked beautifully.

To close, almost the entire company crowded on to the stage to go back almost to where Neil’s story began, with Joe Cocker’s gospellised version of “With a Little Help from My Friends”, the lead vocal bravely taken by O’Malley. The perfect end to a night that felt like a meeting of old friends, an evocation of old glories and an affirmation of… well, something or other. Something good, anyway.

Roxy Music 1982/2026 at Bush Hall

Mar 25

12 Comments

The other Fab Four

Between 1965 and 1968, the Lovin’ Spoonful were the nearest America came to producing a Beatles of their very own. Their string of hits took in irresistibly winsome folk-rock jingle-jangle (“Do You Believe in Magic”, “Did You Ever Have to Make Up Your Mind”, “Younger Girl”, “You Didn’t Have to Be So Nice”), wistful sunshine pop (“Daydream”, “Rain on the Roof”), a brilliant homage to then-unfashionable country pickers (“Nashville Cats”), and a widescreen urban anthem that lives with the finest and most ambitious 45s of the mid-’60s (“Summer in the City”).

Where the Beatles came from skiffle, the Spoonful took their initial inspiration from jug bands. But they shared an inquisitive spirit and a breadth of range that made their early albums, released on the newly formed Kama Sutra label, full of pleasant surprises. Unlike the Beatles, at that stage they only had one main songwriter: John Sebastian, who was always rather more than the tie-dyed cartoon figure of Woodstock legend. It was Sebastian who laced his songs with lines such as “It’s like trying to tell a stranger about rock and roll”, “You didn’t have to be so nice / I would have liked you anyway” and “The more I see, the more I see there is to see”, and could come up with the entire brilliant lyric of “Nashville Cats”.

They also had an eccentric in the ranks: Zal Yanovsky, the Canadian lead guitarist with the goofy Ringo-type presence who blotted his copybook in 1966 after he and Steve Boone, the bass guitarist, had been busted for marijuana possession. Threatened with deportation, he co-operated with the police. The fact that it happened in San Francisco, headquarters of the counter-culture, only deepened the disfavour into which the group as a whole suddenly fell with the influential alternative press. They were from New York, too, which probably didn’t help.

For a while they pressed ahead with soundtracks to two movies by young directors, Woody Allen’s What’s Up, Tiger Lily? and Francis Ford Coppola’s You’re a Big Boy Now, the latter including two classics in Sebastian’s swooning “Darling Be Home Soon” and the title song, with its interludes of Michel Legrand-style orchestration. And there was a brilliant third album, Hums of the Lovin’ Spoonful, on which Joe Butler, the drummer, stepped forward to take the lead vocal on a power-pop classic called “Full Measure”, which ended up on the B-side of “Nashville Cats”. But Yanovsky soon left, to be replaced by Jerry Yester, formerly of the Modern Folk Quartet, an old associate who had actually played piano on theie first hit, “Do You Believe in Magic”.

With Yester on board, they recorded a fourth album, called Everything Playing, that sank without trace on its release at the end of 1967 despite being crammed with absolute gems, including Sebastian’s “She Is Still a Mystery”, “Six O’Clock”, “Younger Generation” and “Money”, Boone’s lovely “Forever”, Butler’s poignant “Old Folks”, Sebastian and Yester’s “Close Your Eyes” and, most impressive of all, Butler and Yester’s “Only Pretty, What a Pity”. If Hums was their Rubber Soul, this was their Revolver. But it had been a year since their last album, the bad smell from the bust lingered, and soon Sebastian was gone, claiming that his experience of the group had been “two glorious years and a tedious one.”

All that remained was Yanovsky’s wacky solo album, titled Alive and Well in Argentina and full of psychedelic whimsy, and a strange effort called Revelation Revolution ’69 by “the Lovin’ Spoonful featuring Joe Butler”, which included a powerful anti-war sound collage called “War Games” and a gorgeously lush version of “Me About You”, written by Garry Bonner and Alan Gordon (of “Happy Together” fame), which outdoes other treatments of the ballad by the Turtles, Jackie DeShannon, the Mojo Men, the Walker Brothers and others.

All of this and more — including the four tracks they recorded as a kind of audition tape for Elektra in 1965, and which got released the following year alongside tracks by Paul Butterfield, Eric Clapton, Al Kooper and Tom Rush on an album titled What’s Shakin’ — can be found in a new seven-CD box set called What a Day for a Daydream: The Complete Recordings 1965-69. Not the least of the set’s merits is a thorough sleeve note by Mojo‘s Lois Wilson. If you’ve forgotten about the Lovin’ Spoonful, or never really got beyond the hits, I can’t recommend it too highly.

* The Lovin’ Spoonful’s What a Day for a Daydream box set is on Strawberry Records. The photo of the original group — (from left) Yanovsky, Butler, Sebastian and Boone — was taken in 1965 by Henry Diltz.

Mar 21

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Mike Westbrook at 90

Mike Westbrook turns 90 today. To celebrate that milestone, the master of long-form compositions for large ensemble has released the latest in a series of solo piano albums in which he explores music that means a great deal to him, in the process exposing the roots of his own creative journey.

Some of those albums — Paris, Starcross Bridge, the several volumes of The Piano and Me — juxtapose jazz standards, gospel tunes, melodies from the opera, Broadway hits and more recent pop tunes — in combinations that sometimes seem surprising but always work. The latest of them is devoted to a single theme made explicit in its title: The Piano in the Room and the Blues.

Assembled from recordings made in 2006 at Falmouth Arts Centre in Devon, where the paintings of Mike’s wife Kate were on show, this is a homage to the blues at its most plain-spoken, taking Bessie Smith and Jimmy Yancey as its reference points: the former’s “Young Woman’s Blues” and “Good Old Wagon” and the latter’s “Death Letter Blues” are used as texts, on each of which Westbrook builds several variations.

Given a Steinway grand and unlimited time to set his thoughts down on a Sony DAT Walkman, with no live audience to think about, the pianist settles into a mood of calm reflection, using the tonality and cadences of the blues to explore an emotional register ranging from stoicism to quiet joy. There are no sharp edges here, no attempt to bend the material into unfamiliar forms, and most of all no hurry. A gentle pace enables Westbrook to distill a lifetime’s attention to the blues and what its deep song has meant to him.

* Mike Westbrook’s The Piano in the Room and the Blues is released on the Thingamajig label and is available via Bandcamp: https://mikewestbrook.bandcamp.com/album/the-piano-in-the-room-and-the-blues The photograph of Westbrook at Falmouth Arts Centre is by Kate Westbrook.

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