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Jul 12

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Henry Lowther at 85

It seemed entirely typical of the trumpeter Henry Lowther that, during last night’s concert in celebration of his 85th birthday, he should wait to deliver his first solo until the third piece of the evening. As ever, his improvisation was beautifully conceived and perfectly flighted, with that perfect tone. But Henry is a man whose modesty is as deeply rooted as his talent, despite a career that has made him one of the most remarkable figures in contemporary British music.

Born in Leicester, Henry learned to play the cornet with a Salvation Army band. He came to London to study the violin at the Royal Academy of Music but gave up those studies in favour of a life in jazz and related fields. I wrote a bit about his remarkable CV five years ago, when he turned 80 and played the Vortex with his quintet, Still Waters, but here at the American International Church in Tottenham Court Road there was a chance to hear his compositions for large ensemble interpreted by the London Jazz Composers Orchestra, of which he has been a member for 30 years.

The 19-piece band — five trumpets, four trombones, five reeds, four rhythm — was last night conducted by Scott Stroman, the orchestra’s co-founder back in 1991 with Noel Langley, who was sitting next to Henry in the trumpet section. Other distiguished members and soloists included the saxophonists Pete Hurt and Tori Freestone, the bassist Callum Gourlay, the pianist Liam Noble, the drummer Paul Clarvis and the guitarist Nick Costley-White. The lead altoist, Matt Sulzmann, is the son of another founder member, the great Stan Sulzmann.

Having played in aggregations led by John Dankworth, Kurt Edelhagen, Mike Westbrook, Graham Collier, Mike Gibbs, Kenny Wheeler, Gil Evans, George Russell, Stan Tracey and others, Henry knows what makes a big-band arrangement work. It’s a field in which opportunities today are limited, to say the least, so this was a wonderful opportunity to hear compositions such as “Primetime”, “Shropshire Glad” and “Can’t Believe, Won’t Believe” in their fullest form. His familiarity with so many kinds of music, from free improvisation to the wonderful, unclassifiable albums of Talk Talk, isn’t in evidence in these compositions, which represent what we used to call modern jazz operating at an extremely level. There are a few brassy climaxes, but also woodwind passages of subtle grace along with some clever combinations, like a pair of muted trumpets and a pair of flugelhorns, or bass and bass clarinet. And there is always the spirit of Gil Evans, of whose London Orchestra he was a member, aerating the voicings.

His pieces tend to run between eight and 10 minutes, which allows space for introductions, variations, backgrounds, recapitulations and codas, with soloists carefully encouraged and deployed. At one point during a suite whose movements are titled “Jadran”, “Emona” and “Golovec”, Hurt’s alto and Freestone’s tenor engaged in a lengthy and particularly fruitful dialogue. But there was always something interesting going on and, on an unusually joyful occasion, the absence of amplification combined with the modern church’s friendly acoustic to enable us to hear it all.

* All the compositions I’ve mentioned, and some others, are contained in Primetime, a new vinyl double-album with basically the same personnel, released to coincide with Henry’s birthday. Recorded in 2022 at Morley College Studio, it’s on the Analogue October Records label, mastered and pressed to audiophile standards in an edition of 300 copies: https://analogueoctober.com/product/ljo-henry-lowther-primetime/. Henry’s 1970 debut album, Child Song, is due to reappear later this year as part of a Universal Music Group programme of vinyl reissues of British jazz albums on the Deram and Argo labels.

Jul 9

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Rubén Blades at the Roundhouse

A heatwave on the streets of Camden, tipping over 30 degrees. Inside the Roundhouse, the relief of air-conditioning. Until Rubén Blades took the stage, at which point the temperature soared even higher as a packed crowd welcomed the great singer, actor and sometime politician.

They cheered the opening strains of “Plasticó”, from Siembre, his 1978 collaboration with Willie Colón which became the biggest selling salsa album in history, a preface to a career which has brought Blades a dozen Grammys and countless other awards, and they never let up through a 20-song set in which every member of the audience appeared to be word-perfect.

As Blades observed during one of his between-songs monologues, no one is a success without the help of others, and the 20-piece band was sensational. Based in Panama City, where Blades himself was born 77 years ago to a Cuban mother and a Colombian father, and led by Roberto Delgado, the bass guitarist and arranger, they offered a widescreen version of every Latin orquesta you’ve ever dreamed of hearing. Piano and keyboards to the left, bass guitar and kit drummer to the right, three percussionists — bongos, timbales and congas — lined up in front of a stretched-out wall of horns: five saxophones (two altos, two tenors, baritone), four trombones, four trumpets. A majestic, magnificent noise, full of blare and clatter, overflowing with virtuosity, a giant expression of the clave rhythm come to life, with all the trimmings.

In his black suit, shirt and hat, Blades presented himself as one of the black-clad band, frequently retreating to add maracas to the percussion section during trumpet or piano solos, stepping forward again to swap vocal phrases in the long montuno sections with his coro, formed of the reed section and others. He was in wonderful voice, too. I found it impossible not to be reminded of the enduring vigour of Bruce Springsteen, and of a similarity in the way the two singers conduct their relationships with their musicians and their audiences.

Blades paid tribute to figures from his early career, including Colón (who played a farewell gig on the same stage almost 20 years ago), the flautist and bandleader Johnny Pacheco, the singer and percussionist Pete “El Conde” Rdoriguez, with whom he made his first recording in 1969, and Hector Lavoe, who made his song “El Cantante” a huge Latin hit in 1978. The only false note came with a very off-the-peg big band arrangement of Michel Legrand’s “Watch What Happens”, from the 2021 album Salswing!. Since he was in London, Blades observed, he felt he had to sing a song in English; honestly, there was no need.

But it was mostly a blazing set, two and a quarter hours long, its highlights including the song — “Emigrantes”, I think — in which he gave a shout-out to Central and South American nations, to be rewarded with loud cheers and waving of the appropriate flags. And around the fringes, on the floor and even in the balcony, couples danced together with that special Latin fluency and grace, lost in their own bliss.

Jul 7

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Raising John Brown

The only time I can remember seeing the 19th century abolitionist John Brown mentioned in a jazz context was in a piece called “The Day John Brown Was Hanged”, written by George Russell for the altoist Hal McKusick’s 1956 album Jazz Workshop. In that intricate seven-minute composition for quartet, Russell interpolated lines from the melody of “John Brown’s Body Lies a-Mouldering in His Grave”, the marching song sung by Union soldiers during the American Civil War, a conflict whose prefatory skirmishes included a Brown-led assault on a federal armoury at Harper’s Ferry, Virginia, in 1859.

A white man, and an evangelical Christian, Brown believed in the Declaration of Independence’s words about all men being created equal, and came to the conclusion that violence offered the only way to overthrow slavery and everything it represented. He had hidden escaped slaves and helped them along the Underground Railroad to freedom, and already led anti-slavery forces in several conflicts. The attack on the armoury, intended to capture weapons with which slaves could be armed for an insurrection, involved an elaborate plan devised with the support of Harriet Tubman (although not that of Frederick Douglass, who disapproved of the tactics). A bloody failure, it led to Brown’s capture and trial, after which he became the first man to be executed in the United States on a charge of treason.

He was hanged on the morning of December 2, 1859, in a small field in Charles Town, Virginia. Onlookers included the future Confederate generals Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson, John Wilkes Booth, the future assassin of Abraham Lincoln, and Walt Whitman, who mentioned it in his poem Year of the Meteors. In a speech in 1881, Frederick Douglass — an escaped slave become statesman and orator — said that whereas his own abolitionist zeal was “bounded by time, (Brown’s) stretched away to the boundless shores of eternity. I could live for the slave, but he could die for him.”

Now comes the distinguished American tenor saxophonist and composer Chris Potter with an album titled Alive With Ghosts Today, a suite of pieces for septet inspired by the continuing resonance of Brown’s story. There’s nothing programmatic about it — no quotes from the Battle Hymn of the Republic (except in the use of “Mine Eyes” as the title of one piece) — but it’s a work that seems somehow marinated in American history, from then to now, in the way jazz somehow always is, being perhaps that turblent story’s most remarkable single outgrowth.

I have a special fondness for medium-sized groups, from seven to 10 pieces, led by people such as Charles Mingus, Slide Hampton, John Surman, Jef Gilson, George Coleman, Keith Tippett, Steve Lehmann and Vijay Iyer. In the right hands, they combine power with flexibility and a range of tone colour. Potter says he was looking for the sound of a “slightly unruly village band”, and besides himself the group is completed by Rane Moore on clarinet, Zekkereya El-Magharbel on trombone, Bill Frisell on guitar, Sara Caswell on violin, Burniss Travis on bass and Nate Smith on drums. It’s an unusual line-up, and a perfect one for his purposes, which was to have “Copland, blues and gospel and African rhythm all living in the same space.”

The eight tracks are carefully wrought, making fine use of the individual timbres, and inevitably of Frisell’s ability to use his guitar and pedals as an orchestral resource, colouring the backgrounds with purpose and restraint. In fact the album that Alive With Ghosts Today most reminds me of is Frisell’s Blues Dream, his classic septet album from 2001, and praise doesn’t come much higher than that. A sense of conciseness in endemic to Potter’s writing, but also a sense of space; density is counterbalanced by ease of delivery. The mood ranges from sombre to playful. sometimes within the same piece. On “Mine Eyes”, Potter produces his finest solo over lively backgrounds before an interlude for trombone, guitar and drums leads to a hymn-like ensemble passage prefacing a return to the nimble theme.

There’s nothing hectoring about Potter’s album, despite its origins. The musical atmosphere is warm and companionable, with just enough surprise to keep you on your toes. But thinking about the source of his inspiration, the parallels with our own world are unavoidable. Acknowledging the complexity of the story, Potter concludes: “I have no easy answers, I only feel that ours is a beautiful, heartbreaking country, where we are still living with these ghosts.” This music, rather than firework displays, military flypasts or cage-fighting contests on the White House lawn, might represent a better way to commemorate America’s 250th birthday.

* Chris Potter’s Alive With Ghosts Today is out now on the Edition label. The photograph of Potter is by Dave Stapleton. Bandscamp link: https://chrispotterjazz.bandcamp.com/album/alive-with-ghosts-today

Jul 2

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John Hiatt says goodbye (maybe)

Last night’s gig at the O2’s Indigo was prominently billed, John Hiatt pointed out, as being part of his Farewell Tour. “If I come back next year,” he said, “what are we going to call it?” Or words to that effect.

I’m inclined to think that whoever thought up the title might have been correct. At 73, quite frankly, Hiatt doesn’t have much of a voice left. The straining to hit the higher notes wasn’t helped, early in the set, when his tuning gizmo misled him into tweaking his whole guitar a semitone high. It wasn’t until a dozen of the 20 songs had gone by that his use of a harmonica revealed the error. Somebody came up with a replacement gizmo, the tuning was corrected, and the last run of songs sounded more comfortable.

So perhaps he will be back, encouraged by the warmth of the response from those who had made the journey to the ghastly O2’s more intimate performance space and who feel an enormous fondness towards a man who may never have achieved the solo stardom many forecast as he went from label to label during his early years but who, despite all the many successful covers his songs have racked up, remains the best interpreter of songs that tend to stay in the heart.

Here we had a selection of compositions dating from 1987 to 2010, plus a brand-new one, the sentimental ballad “Weightless in My Arms”. His choice included the title tracks of the albums Slow Turning, Perfectly Good Guitar, Riding with the King, Crossing Muddy Waters, Master of Disaster and The Open Road. There were the big earners: “Thing Called Love”, “Have a Little Faith in Me” and “Tennessee Plates”, which Ridley Scott used in the soundtrack to Thelma & Louise. There were beauties like “Miles to Go”, “Real Fine Love”, “Long Time Comin'”, “Thunderbird”, “The River Knows Your Name”, “Lift Up Every Stone”, “Adios to California” and “Feels Like Rain”. There was a special welcome for “Memphis in the Meantime”, from Bring the Family, the 1987 album which, with accompaniment by Ry Cooder, Nick Lowe and Jim Keltner, really established his reputation.

I was particularly grateful for “Across the Borderline”, the song he wrote in 1982 with Cooder and Jim Dickinson for Tony Richardson’s film The Border. I remember him singing it at Hammersmith Odeon with Cooder, Lowe and Keltner in 1992, when they were known as Little Village, and the effect it had. It was covered in concert by Dylan and Springsteen, and I wrote a long piece about it at the time, which gave birth in the Independent on Sunday (thanks to Tim de Lisle, then the paper’s arts editor) to a much-imitated series called Lives of the Great Songs. It’s a song to rank with Woody Guthrie’s “Deportee (Plane Wreck at Los Gatos)” for its poignancy and enduring relevance.

Had this been a request show, what would I have asked for that Hiatt didn’t select from his reportoire of songs about cars, rivers and the mysteries of human heart? Oh, “Icy Blue Heart”, “Lipstick Sunset”, “Unoriginal Sin”. “The Way We Make a Broken Heart”. And “All the Lilacs in Ohio”, from his last album, Leftover Feelings, with the great Jerry Douglas.

If you were there last night without knowing anything about him, which seems unlikely, you might have been made uncomfortable by the frailty of the singing and the lengthy tuning difficulties. (But you might have enjoyed his joke about adopting Guy Clark’s approach to tuning, which involves selecting the one string that’s definitely out and tuning the rest to that.) Mostly I think, we were just grateful to see him, to hear those wonderful songs from the man who wrote them, and to say hello. Or goodbye. Or whatever it was.

Jun 23

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Tyshawn Sorey at St Giles’ Cripplegate

“Monochromatic Light (Afterlife)” is a composition commissioned from Tyshawn Sorey to mark the 50th anniversary of the opening of the Rothko Chapel in Houston, Texas, where 14 of Mark Rothko’s canvases, in varying shades of black, are housed in a non-denominational modernist building. Having worked with the various architects on the design of the octagonal building, Rothko died in 1970, the year before before it was completed, so he was able neither to see the finished chapel nor to hear the 25-minute piece for chorus, viola and percussion composed by the master minimalist Morton Feldman to celebrate its opening.

Sorey’s piece is a homage to his predecessor, employing the same resources but three times longer, with the addition of a solo singer — the bass-baritone Davóne Tines — and a pianist doubling on celesta. It was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Music in 2023, which he won a year later for his “Adagio (for Wadada Leo Smith)”, and a few months after the Houston première it was given a staged performance, with a dance troupe and paintings by Julie Mehretu, in New York. For its London premiére, at the ancient church of St Giles’ Cripplegate, the composition was presented without those additions.

Conducted from a raised seat by the composer, clad in black robes, it began with the sound of tubular bells, played by George Barton, before Ruth Gibson’s viola slid into view, the first hint of what would be a remarkable performance in which she transitioned from ardent (and sometimes paradoxically harrowing) bel canto melodies to tissue-thin harmonics and unsettling shivers of sound. Soon the pianist Siwan Rhys was adding punctuation, sometimes deploying the brighter, more urgent sound of the celesta, while Barton moved between an array of tympani, a vibraphone, a gong and a gran cassa, carefully underlining or italicising what was going on elsewhere with looming rolls or soft strikes.

Already it had become apparent that this was music with a rare sense of space (Feldman’s influence there, of course), a gift to an audience prepared to sit and wait for the composition to assume its overall shape and to take hold. For such listeners, an apparently austere methodology could not disguise the warmth beneath the contemplative surface.

A quarter of an hour had gone, I think, before the entry of the choir. The 20 voices of the BBC Singers, equally divided between women and men, were given a wordless score, all elongated vowels, their collective hums and drones floating like clouds through the music. In one quietly spectacular passage, around the midpoint, they seemed to hang motionless on a cushion of air above a firm but gentle roll on the gran cassa, showing Sorey’s ability to create drama without making a fuss. Harmonically, the frequent use of minor seconds seemed intended not to startle or unsettle but to provoke deeper engagement.

As a late-arriving second voice, a foil for the viola, Tines suddenly emerged as a huge presence within the piece, There were no words from him, just sounds, producing a great range of timbres and showing extraordinary flexibility, until right at the end. Where Feldman placed a “Hebrewesque melody” written when he was a teenager, Sorey added something different: with a leap up the registers, Tines delivered a free variation on the spiritual “Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child”, a staple of black American music since the Fisk Jubilee Singers began performing it in the 1870s before handing it on to Paul Robeson, Mahalia Jackson, Odetta, Richie Havens, Jimmy Scott and countless others.

Twisting the syllables, making the vowels veer and plunge, taking the song to places it had never been before against a rising clamour of tolling piano and clanging bells, the singer and the composer used the final moments to cast the work in a different light. Surely this was a salute to Rothko, who died by his own hand, the victim of untreatable depression, having once expressed a desire to raise painting to the expressive power of music and poetry, and whose work is more widely loved now than it has ever been. An unforgettable evening was given its surprising but perfect closure.

* A recording of Tyshawn Sorey’s “Monochromatic Light (Afterlife)” is available from Dacamera Editions via Bandcamp: https://dacameraeditions.bandcamp.com/album/monochromatic-light-afterlife

Jun 18

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Looking for Mr Moonlight

While listening to Philip Norman discussing his new biography of Brian Epstein last night, during a recording of the Books Podcast at the Owl bookshop in Kentish Town, I started thinking not about the author’s revelations — for instance that the Kray twins had once expressed an interest taking over the Beatles’ management — but about the suggestion that Epstein had erected and maintained a protective wall around the group. On the way home I thought about it some more, and it began to seem clear that Epstein’s real impact was of a far greater, although less easily definable, kind.

He may have been a deficient manager in certain important respects, accepting a poor (although industry-standard) recording contract with EMI in 1962 and failing to renegotiate it at the height of Beatlemania, and then royally screwing up the US merchandising rights to Beatle product (wigs, plastic guitars, etc), for which he gave away 90 per cent of the gross. When the producers of A Hard Day’s Night, preparing to offer the group 25 per cent of the film’s receipts, asked him what he wanted, he tentatively suggested seven and a half per cent, which they accepted with alacrity.

But he did give the Beatles something in exchange for his own 10 per cent of their earnings (rising to 15 per cent once they were each making £120 a week). And that something was class.

Not that they didn’t have it, individually and collectively. Their varied but always inquisitive intellects and their shared sense of humour (sardonic, surrealistic, but also warm) were among the aspects of the group that appealed to him, along with their attractive appearance and the irresistible energy of their stage performance. But it was perhaps partly because he came to them as an outsider, with no experience of what he was about to undertake, that he was able to add, without thinking about it, a veneer of sophistication to the presentation that they made to a surprised world between the release of “Love Me Do” in October 1962 and the Ed Sullivan Show in February 1964.

For all Epstein’s commercial missteps, what he never did was cheapen them. He didn’t reduce them to mere members of a stable of acts, like that run by Larry Parnes. He didn’t derail their musical progress by prioritising a series of duff Hollywood movies, as Tom Parker did with Elvis. Having recognised their inherent specialness, he treated them in a way that enhanced it.

A man who loved the theatre and classical music, he understood their adventurous creative instincts. When they made that first film, it was directed by the innovative Dick Lester rather than a Wardour Street hack. When the sleeve art of their second album was being prepared, he guided them towards Robert Freeman, whose photos of John Coltrane he had admired and who listened to the group when they showed him Astrid Kirchherr’s black and white chiaroscuro Hamburg photographs as a potential template. In both cases, Epstein got the Nouvelle Vague resonance and didn’t insist on something more garish or blatantly commercial. And they, in turn, knew that although he was a bit older than them, had short hair and wore a suit and tie, he understood what they were trying to do.

Somehow, partly through the existence as their manager of a hitherto unknown figure who had not risen through the ranks of the London pop scene but was a privately educated member of a well-to-do family from Liverpool’s Jewish community, the world accepted that this group’s ascent to pop stardom was not the result of manipulation, and that Beatlemania was a natural thing. Which, if you happened to be around at the time, you’ll know it was.

Brian Epstein wasn’t the Fifth Beatle. His terrible deals cost them a great deal of money at the time and would lead, after his death in 1967, to schisms and unhappiness. But what he contributed to their rise is worth reconsidering.

* Philip Norman’s Mr Moonlight: Brian Epstein and the Making of the Beatles is published by Simon & Schuster (£30).

Jun 9

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The mundane and the sublime

It’s hard to imagine a Beach Boys fan — a real Beach Boys fan, that is — who doesn’t have a warm place in his or her heart for 15 Big Ones and The Beach Boys Love You, the two widely ignored and often derided albums they recorded and released in 1976 and ’77 respectively in their new Brother Records studio in Santa Monica. The superficial view took them as acts of desperation following years in which only greatest-hits albums like Spirit of America and Endless Summer kept their name alive.

The first was an album of mostly covers, the second an attempt to haul Brian Wilson back into a role front and centre of the group’s activities in the studio. Both were recorded in an atmosphere of uncertainty over what they needed to do in order to reassert themselves as a creative and commercial force.

Neither album had a lot of polish, certainly not at the level of Surf’s Up or Holland, their studio predecessors. And there were certainly few vestiges of the rapt introspection of Pet Sounds or the fascinating brainstorms of Smiley Smile. Instead, 15 Big Ones and Love You came from a place between Little Deuce Coupe and Beach Boys’ Party! — only made by guys a decade older, with all the tensions the intervening years had introduced.

I liked both albums a lot, for all their rough edges, and play them often. The doo-wop/R&B covers on 15 Big Ones — the Five Satins’ “In the Still of the Night”, the Six Teens’ “A Casual Look” and Little Willie John’s “Talk to Me” — are in the class of their earlier versions of the Students’ “I’m So Young” and Bobby Freeman’s “Do You Want to Dance”. The originals on Love You — “Let Us Go On This Way”, “The Night Was So Young”, the lovelorn “I’ll Bet He’s Nice”, the witty “Johnny Carson”, the duet between Brian and his first wife on “Let’s Put Our Hearts Together” — match the quality of those on, say, Sunflower.

A new three-CD package called We Gotta Groove: The Brother Studio Years collects outtakes from 15 Big Ones, the original masters and outtakes from Love You, various cassette demos made by Brian, plus tracks recorded later in for Adult/Child, an aborted album planned by Brian as a sort of tribute to the Four Freshmen, one of his original inspirations.

Most of the Love You outtakes and alternate mixes are scarcely worth the trouble: they include a cover of “Ruby Baby” that can’t live with the Drifters, Dion or Donald Fagen, a charming-but-silly two-minute ditty called “Marilyn Rovell” dedicated to Brian’s aforementioned first wife, and an attempt to create a one-man “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feeling”, with Brian doing all the singing and all the playing, from drums and jingle bells to Minimoog bass and electric harpsichord. A vocals-only mix of “The Night Was So Young” exposes the beauty of Carl Wilson’s lead. “We Gotta Groove” is a very tedious track, and making it the title of the album is an idea so bad it must have come from Mike Love, who sings lead on the song. As for the 15 Big Ones outtakes, the versions of “Mony Mony”, “Running Bear”, “On Broadway”, “Sea Cruise” and others were correctly omitted from the final release.

The handful of Adult/Child tracks are curiosities and nothing more. The arrangements are by Dick Reynolds, who orchestrated the Four Freshmen albums that Brian enjoyed in his youth and who contributed charts to the Beach Boys’s 1964 Christmas album. The first of these tracks, “Live Is For the Living”, an upbeat Brian original, is almost a parody of a lounge singer’s mannerisms. A version of “Deep Purple” has nothing to recommend it. Two lovely Brian ballads, “It’s Over Now” and “Still I Dream of It”, fare worse than in their solo demo versions. As a project, it was a mistake — and it’s useful to have the proof that this was not another long-buried masterpiece.

But here’s the good news: Brian’s cassette demos for Adult/Child and Love You are something else altogether. It’s very moving to hear him at the piano singing “It’s Over Now”, “Let’s Put Our Hearts Together”, “I’ll Bet He’s Nice” and “Still I Dream of It”, all ballads, and each of which he wrote without the aid of a lyricist — no Roger Christian or Tony Asher or Van Dyke Parks. They’re almost heartbreaking in that he sounds so alone, but they’re also hugely affirming of the extraordinary creativity of his songwriting, which finds the perfect spot between Broadway-era chromatic invention and pure pop chord changes.

As brilliant an arranger and producer as he was, as innovative an assembler of choral resources and previously unheard instrumental combinations, his genius is evident even in these completely stripped-down, unadorned performances. In many of these songs (as when “Still I Dream of It” opens with the singer feeling peckish at the end of a long day before evolving quite naturally into a meditation on the eternal), he could somehow find a link between the mundane and the sublime. It’s a process that began with “Surfer Girl”, and never really stopped.

* Not wanting a version of We Gotta Groove (released by Capitol Records) that involved two CDs and a vinyl LP in a 12×12 package, I spent 40-odd quid on a Japanese three-CD release. A warning: the downside is that the accompanying booklet is scaled down, and the useful sleeve essay and very interesting recording details are therefore in minuscule type. The uncredited photograph is taken from the brochure.

Jun 3

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Sarah Tandy at Ronnie Scott’s

From left: Binker Golding, Jihad Darwish, Tee Peters, Sarah Tandy, Jamie Murray, Poppy Daniels (photo: Paul Pace/Ronnie Scott’s Club)

All Sarah Tandy has to do to make me happy is sit down at a good piano and play a standard ballad. But she’s an ambitious bandleader and composer, and it was those aspects of her musical journey that were explored at Ronnie Scott’s last night. As she did when her debut album, Infection in the Sentence, came out seven years ago, she brought her quintet to the Frith Street temple to showcase some of the material from its successor, to be released later this year.

Now with Poppy Daniels on trumpet, Binker Golding on tenor saxophone, Jihad Darwish on bass and Jamie Murray on drums, the band launched the first set with “Unleash the Beast”, whose introduction quickly gave way to a raging up-tempo blast over what sounded like a modern variation on the structure of Miles Davis’s “Milestones”. Tandy’s opening solo set the tone, chorus after dizzying chorus, like a dancer leaping and pirouetting across a tightrope with no safety net, laying down the challenge for Golding and Daniels to meet.

The next new piece, “Aftermath”, began with Darwish switching to bass guitar and using loops and other effects on an unaccompanied introduction before the band settled into a late-night funk groove, like something you might find on one of the better CTI albums. The piece ended with the dying fall of Daniels’ nicely poised solo — no recapitulation of the theme or arranged coda, which is typical of Tandy’s interesting approach to the architecture of her compositions.

By contrast, the set ended with the thunder of Murray’s drum improvisation at the conclusion of “Bradbury Street”, from the first album, a witty exercise in staccato syncopation which seem to have tilted over the years in favour of the Second Line rhythms of New Orleans and gave Murray the chance to demonstrate how to employ formidable chops with discretion.

After the break, Tandy turned to her electric piano and synthesiser for two new funk-based instrumental pieces, “Princess Peachy” and “Keep Dreaming”. The former featured a Daniels solo in which the trumpeter set aside her liking for extended multi-noted flurries in favour of well-shaped phrases with a tone that reminded me of the young Donald Byrd, while the latter showed Golding at his most trenchant. Then Tandy introduced an MC, the good-natured Tee Peters, who rapped with impressive flow over compositions called “You Need to Heal” and “Rematch”, the latter apparently inspired — to the delight of at least a portion of the audience — by Arsenal FC’s recent exploits.

Tandy likes to have fun making and sharing music. To close the evening, she announced that they were going to play some jazz. Not, she added, that everything they’d already played hadn’t been jazz. But you could see what she meant as soon as she launched into a gloriously unfettered stride-piano introduction to “On the Sunny Side of the Street”, kicking the band into one last burst of high-energy two-beat action, with Golding front and centre.

On the night of a Tube strike, it was good to see the main room at Ronnie’s packed full for this young London-based band. Full, that is, not just of patrons but of attention and enthusiasm, of response to the nuances as well as to the roof-raising bits, with enough of both elements to satisfy just about everyone.

* Sarah Tandy’s new album, titled Delicious Capricious, will be released in the autumn, distributed via Kartel.

May 27

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Rickie Lee Jones at the Barbican

Like Bob Dylan, Rickie Lee Jones gives a great deal of ongoing thought to how she presents her songs in terms of musical arrangement. Such care is never allowed to outweigh the feeling of freshness and spontaneity, even when the material concerned is getting on for half a century old, as were the five songs from her debut album, written when she was barely into her twenties, included in last night’s 90-minute set.

Her current touring band includes the brilliant Ben Rosenblum on accordion, piano and harmony vocals, the divine Petra Haden on violin, percussion and harmony vocals, and the very fine Vilray Bolles on Fender Telecaster. It’s a beautifully dextrous and flexible unit, capable of handling the way Jones likes to stretch songs such as the opening “Weasel and the White Boys Cool”, “We Belong Together” and “Living It Up” into woozy mini-symphonies.

Just about everything about the evening was deeply enjoyable, including her very funny introductions and digressions and a couple of wonderful extended solos on the standards she inserted in the middle of the set: deft jazz guitar from Bolles on “On the Sunny Side of the Street”, swooning accordion from Rosenblum on “Hi-Lilli, Hi-Lo”. When Haden and Rosenblum joined Jones for the high harmonies, particularly on “Weasel” and “We Belong Together”, the effect was spine-tingling.

Gradually she drew the audience into a closer involvement, which seemed to deepen when she talked about when she sang “Bonfires”, the very plain, folk-based break-up song which was written for 2009’s Balm in Gilead but sounds about a thousand years old.

The last half-hour was a beautiful slide through “The Horses”, written at the end of the 1980s for her infant daughter, the emotional exposure of “Coolsville”, the gorgeous “A Tree on Allenford” (from 2003’s The Evening of My Best Day), and, as a valediction, the immortal “Last Chance Texaco”. Pretty close to a perfect night.

* Rickie Lee Jones is at the Apex, Bury St. Edmunds, tonight (May 27), Warwick Arts Centre, Coventry on May 29 and the RNCM Theatre in Manchester on May 30.

May 26

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Miles at 100

There’s so much Miles Davis around just now, in celebration of today’s centenary of his birth on May 26, 1926. There are stage plays (I went to one in Southwark, starring the trumpeter Jay Phelps), orchestral concerts at the Cheltenham Jazz Festival and the BBC Proms starring Guy Barker and Ambrose Akimusire respectively, tribute albums like A Supreme Blue by Nicholas Payton and Butcher Brown, and audiophile editions of landmarks such as Birth of the Cool and the soundtrack to Lous Malle’s Ascenseur pur l’echafaud. And there’s Radio Three’s composer of the week slot, presented by Kate Molleson, which began very promisingly on Monday. Good. He deserves it all.

I’ve written a lot about him in the past (including a couple of books), and although I want to mark this occasion, I don’t really have anything new to add to the debate. So here’s an unpublished photo I took of him at Montreux on July 7, 1991, during rehearsals for the following day’s concert, when he played Gil Evans’s historic charts in front of a specially assembled large ensemble conducted by Quincy Jones.

He didn’t look strong and his playing was fragile, but the spirit was still there in his eyes and his manner. He wanted to make it good, of course, particularly after overcoming his lifelong aversion to looking in the rear-view mirror. Just under three months later, in a hospital in Santa Monica, he died from a combination of factors, including bronchial pneumonia and a cerebral haemorrhage. He was 65.

I fell in love with his music when I heard “Milestones” — the one with Cannonball Adderley, John Coltrane, Red Garland, Paul Chambers and Philly Joe Jones — at my school’s jazz society in, I think, 1960. An older boy had brought it on a UK Fontana EP for us to absorb while clustered around the gramophone. Pretty soon I came to think of what it contains in five minutes and 42 seconds as a rare example of perfection in art, and I’ve never seen a reason to resile from that opinion. The one little trumpet fluff on the bridge of the final theme statement is the dropped stitch in the Persian rug, included by the weaver in acknowledgment that true perfection belongs only to Allah.

Well, I don’t really know about that. But if I could take only one piece of music with me, whether on the next road trip or the final voyage to eternity, that would still be it.

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