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Oct 13

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The Island story, pt 3

Every year or so there’s a little reunion of people who worked at Island Records in its early and earlyish days, held in a pub near the offices in St Peter’s Square, Hammersmith, to which the company moved in 1973. The most recent of these family affairs was a week ago, and it coincided with the publication of the third volume of Neil Storey’s mammoth Island Book of Records, an illustrated oral history of just about everything that went on to make the label what it was and became. Mammoth in the depth of research that goes into documenting every release on the label and its associates, albums and singles, no matter how seemingly insignificant, and mammoth also in its sheer physical proportions.

Each volume is 12 inches by 12 inches, hardbound with sturdy covers and good paper. This one has 480 pages, and you would not want to carry it up too many flights of stairs. It covers only two years, 1971-72, when the company was headquartered in Basing Street, Notting Hill, but what years they were: Traffic’s John Barleycorn, King Crimson’s Islands, Fairport Convention’s John Babbacombe Lee, Free Live!, the first solo albums from Sandy Denny, Richard Thompson and Jim Capaldi, Cat Stevens’s Teaser and the Firecat and Catch Bull at Four, Nick Drake’s Bryter Later and Pink Moon, the Harder They Come soundtrack, and the debut of Roxy Music. Also a torrent of albums from the sort of bands that ZigZag readers loved: Spooky Tooth, Mott the Hoople, Free, Quintessence, Uriah Heep, the Incredible String Band, Vinegar Joe, Juicy Lucy and Bronco. Not to mention Claire Hamill, the Sutherland Brothers and Amazing Blondel. And Emerson, Lake & Palmer.

Storey’s interviewees range from musicians, backing singers and executives to promotion people and sales representatives, designers and photographers. Everyone has interesting stories to tell, be they founder Chris Blackwell, A&R chief Muff Winwood, the producers Joe Boyd and Paul Samwell-Smith, the art director Ann Sullivan (a rare woman at this stage of the story), the photographer Brian Cooke, the publisher Lionel Conway or the engineers in the label’s studios, including Phill Brown, Tony Platt and Richard Digby Smith. There are frequents shafts of illumination, like the great engineer/producer John Wood on John Martyn: “John always wanted to be something he wasn’t.” Or the late Mike Kellie of Spooky Tooth, summing up Island’s early-’70s vibe by describing the Basing Street offices, with their famous non-hierarchical round tables, as “a home away from home.”

These years also saw the birth of the HELP label, a cut-price line for compilations, live albums and experimental projects. It took its name from ELP, whose live recording of Pictures from an Exhibition was its first release, followed by Ashley Hutchings’ Morris On, King Crimson’s Earthbound, John Surman’s Westering Home (the forerunner of his ECM albums), Stomu Yamash’ta’s Come to the Edge, and others.

The one that interests me most is Tibetan Bells, a project by Henry Wolff, Nancy Hennings and Drew Gladstone, an unlikely project which ended up selling quite well. Tony Platt’s description of solving the problems involved in recording bells and bowls is both enlightening and entertaining. And David Betteridge, who took over as the company’s managing director in 1971 when Blackwell felt like spending less time in the UK, gives us a sharp little reminder of the modus operandi at even the most seemingly enlightened and progressive of record labels: “The sleeve was a damned indulgence with that special inner bag… but don’t forget that at the end of the day the costs of that were recouped. We weren’t that stupid. The artist paid out of the royalty for that sort of indulgence.”

There’s a delightful description of the 1972 visit of Johnny Nash and Bob Marley to a school in Peckham, South London, where they give the pupils an impromptu concert — and where Bob played football with the boys. And it’s Marley whose arrival gives the book its postscript: an account of Blackwell’s first meeting with the Wailers, of his decision to advance them the money (£12,000, as I recall) to make an album which he would then market as of they were a rock band, and of how he felt when he heard the first results of his gamble, at Harry J’s studio in Kingston, where a new future would begin.

* The Island Book of Records Vol 3: 1971-72 is published by Manchester University Press, price £85. The curious object sitting on the book is a ceramic by Bryan Ferry, who presented it to me with his tongue in his cheek and a little label (now lost) saying ‘Roxy Music Rock Critic of the Year Award 1972’. The piece of paper under the book is the original typescript of the feature I wrote for the Melody Maker that year on visiting Jamaica to listen, with Blackwell, to the first recordings from the Catch a Fire sessions. Normally I chucked the carbon copies of my typescripts away; this one I kept.

Oct 11

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Birdsong in Dalston

After spending some of the morning reading a piece on biodiversity by Simon Barnes in the Observer, I felt properly primed for the second of Evan Parker’s four matinees at Cafe Oto. Simon, an old colleague at The Times, was writing brilliantly about species diversity. His special subject is birds; he can tell the song of a willow warbler from that of a chiffchaff, just as I can (I hope) tell the sound of Fats Navarro from that of Clifford Brown. Whereas the dawn chorus around my suburban home vanished several years ago, in rural Suffolk he is able to log the sounds of 21 different bird species before breakfast.

This afternoon’s performance in Dalston was billed as Evan Parker / John Coxon / Ashley Wales: “With Birds”. Together, Coxon and Wales are known as Spring Heel Jack, manipulating electronics and turntables in order to provide unorthodox and stimulating settings for free improvisers of the first generation (their album John Tchicai with Strings, released on their own Treader label in 2005, is a classic). They have collaborated with Evan on many occasions, and today’s concert was a live iteration of another Treader album, Evan Parker with Birds, released in 2004.

Today Parker had brought his soprano saxophone and was flanked by Coxon at one table, stage right, and Wales at another, stage left. Wales seemed to trigger most of the birdsong during the one-hour set, but he and Coxon both contributed to the electronic sound bed that supported and encouraged Evan’s improvisations.

To begin with, Evan seemed to be responding directly to the calls of various birds. But when, with about 20 minutes gone, Coxon began striking a small handbell and a xylophone with a light mallet, Evan reacted by turning on the afterburners and delivering quite the most astonishing extended solo I can remember hearing from him: one of those improvisations of his in which each phrase seems to overlap the one before it (and, thanks to his use of circular breathing, there are no breaks between them).

It was astonishingly powerful, and I got the feeling that it transfixed everyone else in the crowded room, too. And then over the remainder of the set he did it twice more, not quite with the same degree of intensity but varying his attack and trajectory as first Coxon set up a repeated figure on a little kalimba (thumb piano) and then, in the final section, used kalimba, handbell and xylophone over a drone from Wales that sounded like an organ powered by waves. Eventually Evan fell silent and the xylophone and waves slowly faded into a silence that was anything but empty.

* The third of Evan Parker’s series of Sunday matinees at Cafe Oto is on November 8, featuring Henry Dagg. The fourth is on December 13, featuring Pat Thomas and Thurston Moore. Treader’s albums are available as digital downloads: https://treader-recordings.bandcamp.com/

Oct 5

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Another Lifetime

Fifty-odd years later, the original version of Tony Williams’ Lifetime remains the most exciting band I ever saw. At Ungano’s in New York in the autumn of 1970, the three-piece Lifetime, with Larry Young on Hammond organ and John McLaughlin on guitar, produced a howling noise that seemed to take music into the next dimension.

It was jazz, it was rock, it was somehow psychedelic, it was all of those things and none of them, with the burners turned right up. In that time and place, made by a trio of innovators, it was the sort of music that made you reach for the word ‘beyond’. It also made everyone else’s attempts at some kind of jazz-rock fusion sound like Muzak.

Their double-album, Emergency!, had created a bit of a stir, but its appeal was seriously undermined by very dubious sound quality, as if they’d used poor-quality equipment and had left the final mix to the studio cat, and then pressed the result on twice-recycled vinyl. Listening to it was a bit of an ordeal, which is not how it should have been at all.

The day after I saw them, I interviewed Tony in his manager’s office. He was less than communicative, something I reflected in the piece I wrote for the Melody Maker, suggesting that it might have been at least in part the fault of my stupid questions. He was reading the newspaper as I walked in and said hello, and he barely looked up from it for the duration of our talk.

It wasn’t a lack of sympathy on my part. I’d been an admirer since he became the drummer in the Miles Davis Quintet seven years earlier, aged 17. I’d devoured the albums he’d made for Blue Note, both under his own name and with people such as Jackie McLean, Eric Dolphy and Andrew Hill.

Maybe it was me, maybe it was the day, maybe (as I took the liberty of suggesting in my piece) he was still learning how to handle fame. Whatever, I left in disappointment but with just about enough to turn into something publishable.

When I asked him about the murky sound quality of Emergency!, mentioning that someone close enough to know had told me it came out exactly the way he wanted, he gave a somewhat puzzling response: ‘Oh no, that’s not true. Wait a minute. Did someone tell you that? Well, write down that it’s true. I got tired of clear things — everyone was recording with the same sound, and I didn’t have time to experiment before going in there, and that was the best way to get a different sound. Just distort it and make it fuzzy.’

But now, finally, 56 years later, someone has sorted it out. For its release on the Reference series of reissues from Werner Uehlinger’s Thingamajig label, Emergency! has been subjected to a process of sonic restoration and mastering by the Swiss engineer Michael Brändli which reveals, for the first time, the music that was always there. Clearing away the fog while leaving some of the distortion and fuzz has turned it into what I heard at Ungano’s, and what Tony must have had in his head, if that’s not too presumptuous a claim.

If you ever shared my reservations, listen to the way McLaughlin’s epic guitar flights, Young’s completely original approach to the organ and Tony’s dramatic contribution to the three-way conversation (which sounds as if he might have been listening in a very creative way to Keith Moon) now emerge with light shining on every component part. It’s still not polished — this was never going to be polished music — but it’s much easier to appreciate.

During our conversation, Tony also mentioned that Jack Bruce was joining the group. In London two years earlier, after Cream had broken up, Bruce recorded a quartet album with McLaughlin on guitar, released in 1970 as Things We Like. Now he seemed to have found a perfect berth, and during Lifetime’s UK tour that November they stripped the paint from the walls of the Marquee in front of an audience containing many well-known musicians, who were suitably gobsmacked.

Jack was now doing the singing, as well as playing bass. Tony had sung with the three-piece line-up, and he wanted to keep a vocal element in the band. He told me that he’d sung doo-wop as a kid in Boston, and made the rather surprising claim that his own vocal efforts were inspired by Arthur Prysock, Nat King Cole and Billy Eckstine. But then Lifetime was a surprising band on every level. I wish we’d got on better that day, but nothing has ever dimmed the memory of the night at Ungano’s, which now has its perfect souvenir.

* Emergency! is reissued on the Thingamajig label, containing the uncredited photograph used above.

Oct 1

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‘An Unexpected Pleasure’

The Jazz Couriers (left to right): Ronnie Scott, Bill Eyden, Tubby Hayes, Colin Bates, Terry Shannon

In his heyday, Tubby Hayes was universally accepted as the the finest jazz musician Britain had produced. Good enough to perform at the Half Note in New York in 1961 (in front of an opening-night audience including Miles Davis) and to take the place of an indisposed Paul Gonsalves in Duke Ellington’s saxophone section at the Royal Festival Hall in 1964: these were the sort of accolades that entered local legend.

There have been several generations of British jazz musicians since Hayes died in 1973, aged 38, after a heart operation, and it’s no longer unusual to hear world-class music from local players. There’s also no shortage of recordings from remind us how good Hayes really was, and now there’s a new three-CD box, titled An Unexpected Pleasure, containing unreleased studio and live sessions from 1958 to 1972, full of further evidence of his stature.

It was co-compiled and annotated by Simon Spillett, a tenor saxophonist who is the appointed curator of the Hayes story and published a definitive biography, The Long Shadow of the Little Giant, back in 2015. As long as Spillett is around, time will be not be allowed to erase Hayes’s name from the historical record, and the new box does a useful supporting job in that regard.

Based largely on sessions for BBC’s weekly Jazz Club, it opens with half a dozen crackling tracks from 1958 by the Jazz Couriers, the two-tenor quintet co-led by Hayes and Ronnie Scott, with the young Jeff Clyne replacing Colin Bates on bass in the line-up seen in the photo above. Their version of “Just One of Those Things” is about as hip as such things got back then, its rocket-propelled tempo suiting Hayes perfectly. Three tracks recorded as a guest with the Kurt Edelhagen Big Band at a German festival the following year include a gorgeous arrangement of “Round Midnight”. A jump to 1962 shows the influence of Kind of Blue on “Modes and Blues”, a Hayes original from a fine BBC session with his quintet, with Jimmy Deuchar on trumpet, augmented by three extra brass, and the leader doubling on vibes.

The second disc opens with four tracks the quintet in 1964, Hayes now adding flute to his armoury, before the scene switches to Oslo and a 1966 version of “100% Proof”, Hayes’s 12-minute multi-themed big-band tour de force, here performed with the orchestra of Thorleif Østereng — well played if indifferently recorded, showing glimpses of an engagement with the avant-garde in some of the tenor work. The disc closes with four standards recorded by a new quartet with Mike Pyne on piano, Bruce Cale on bass and Tony Levin on drums.

Finally, the third disc covers the period between his arrest and conviction for possession of heroin in 1968, for which he was given a suspended prison sentence and put into a rehabilitation programme, and his death five years later. It begins with an exhilarating — asome might say slightly overexcited — remake of “100% Proof”, now retitled “200% Proof”, with his own big band, packed with British talent, including Kenny Wheeler and Peter King, and a thunderous double bass-and-drums team of Ron Matthewson, Jeff Clyne, Spike Wells and Tony Levin. Two closing quartet sessions, from 1969 and 1972, provide evidence of his interest in the work of John Coltrane and, particularly, Joe Henderson.

The set is a reminder of the days when the BBC recorded jazz groups at such places as the Aeolian Hall in Bond Street, the Paris Theatre in Bond Street, the Maida Vale Studios and the Hippodrome in Golders Green, with sympathetic producers and skilled sound engineers. It’s a blessing that many of these recordings, some of them taken home after the sessions by the musicians as copy tapes, are being brought into the light once again.

Hayes also features — along with Scott, Stan Tracey, Ronnie Ross, Dudley Moore, Tony Coe and many others — in Spillett’s latest book, Further Shadows. Subtitled “Essays on British Modern Jazz 1950-1975” and rich in anecdotes, it’s out this month, published by Jazz in Britain, on whose label An Unexpected Pleasure also appears. The book is accompanied by a two-CD set of its own featuring the stars of the time in various BBC and club locations, providing glimpses of many whose reputations might not match that of Hayes, but who were certainly worth their place alongside him.

Sep 28

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Bluegrass and Billy Strings

Somewhere in my head, I carry a little list of bands that represent perfect self-contained mechanisms, regardless of category: the Modern Jazz Quartet, Astor Piazzolla’s Tango Nuevo Quintet, and the Chieftains. Now there’s another: the band led by the bluegrass singer, guitarist and songwriter Billy Strings.

I’m late to Billy Strings; three Grammys late, to be exact, all for best bluegrass album of the year in 2021, 2025 and 2026. He’s been around for a while but I didn’t catch up until his new album, So Much for Goodbyes, which is one of the most enjoyable things I’ve heard this year — particularly a wonderful track called “Lucid Daydream”, which bends the bluegrass format in a very compelling way.

Last year Strings was invited to support Bob Dylan and Willie Nelson on a few dates of their Outlaws tour, and cancelled his own summer dates in order to do so. I found a clip of his cover of “Tangled Up in Blue”, not from the Outlaws shows but from his own gig in Hartford, Connecticut in July of this year, and I think it’s completely brilliant — nothing radical in terms of reinterpretation, but in sheer spirit and love of the material it’s up there with the very best of Dylan covers.

Like “Lucid Daydream”, it’s also a great demonstration of how good he and his band can be in what is anyway an idiom rooted in the joyous expression of instrumental virtuosity. He’s a superfine picker, kind of a turbocharged bluegrass Mark Knopfler, as the short solos on the Dylan song demonstrate, but he’s matched every step of the way by Alex Hargreaves on fiddle, Billy Falling on banjo, Jarrod Walker on mandolin, and Royal Masat on string bass.

Together they show how an old-time diasporic music form can be brought right up to the present. I’m just sorry it took me a while, in this instance, to find that out. But better late than never.

* The photo of Billy Strings, taken at a gig this summer by an uncredited photographer, is from his Facebook page. So Much for Goodbyes is out now on the Reprise label.

Sep 23

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Coltrane at 100

I loved jazz as soon as I discovered it, but it was when I heard John Coltrane that I realised it could take me to a different place. That would have been around 1960, and the first thing I heard was his solo on Miles Davis’s “Milestones”, on an EP. Then I used the money from my paper round to buy another EP, this time released under Coltrane’s own name.

Issued in the UK on the Esquire label, it paired “Bass Blues” and “You Leave Me Breathless” from his third studio album for Prestige, recorded in 1957. These were fairly conventional performances but I already knew, from reading Down Beat, that he was heading somewhere else. Soon there would be Coltrane Plays the Blues and Olé, which made that new direction very clear.

From the very start, though, there was that sound. You can hear it in the opening notes of his solo on “Bass Blues”. It was like nothing you’d ever heard before. Nothing like Lester Young or Dexter Gordon or Sonny Rollins. It spoke in a different way, to a different part of the brain. It wasn’t pretty in any normal sense. But it was immediately and transcendentally beautiful. Even then, it seemed to be searching for something beyond the tune, beyond the notes. I couldn’t put it into words then and I still can’t. I’ve never read anybody who really could.

Today, 23 September 2026, is the centenary of Coltrane’s birth. I could have listened to any of the favourites — the album with Monk from Carnegie Hall, “Mr Syms”, “Impressions”, “Africa”, “Alabama”, the whole of A Love Supreme, Crescent and Expressions — but instead I chose to honour his memory by listening to two of his most challenging albums, Om and Kulu Se Mama, both from 1965, They’re the sort of thing that gave critics the ammunition with which to attack his entire career, and 60 years later they still sound chaotic, beyond all structure and restraint and explanation, the product of a man searching for something beyond himself.

His death in 1967 robbed us of the chance to get answers from Coltrane himself, either in words or in his playing, to the questions raised by his later music. What did it all mean? That’s something we have to work out for ourselves. What I can give is my own interpretation of that thing he once said about wanting to create music that started in the middle and then proceeded in both directions simultaneously. To me, those directions are inward and outward, at the same time. That’s what his sound said, and still does.

* The photograph was taken by Chuck Stewart in 1964 is from the cover of Coltrane: The Definitive Visual Celebration of the Legend by Ravi Coltrane and Wayne Coyne, published this month by Ten Speed Press.

Sep 22

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Dialogue at Wigmore Hall

For 50 minutes at Wigmore Hall last night, the bassist Linda May Han Oh and the tenor saxophonist Melissa Aldana delivered a lesson in how to take the finest material from the past and weave it into something that belongs firmly to the present. The Australian (born in Malaysia, of Chinese heritage) is the current answer to any question about which bassist you would choose to add energy and invention to your contemporary jazz group. The Chilean specialises in an unstoppable flow of creativity, her ideas developed with an unassuming virtuosity that places her at the forefront of the current generation of saxophonists.

They were re-examining material from their new duo album, Beneath Lifted Skies, starting with Sam Rivers’ “Cyclic Episode”, which quickly revealed the nimbleness and intimacy of their musical partnership: lines were wrapped around each other in a constantly evolving double-helix. “I’ll Be Seeing You”, a standard rescued from a flop 1938 musical, enabled Aldana to display the inspiration of Sonny Rollins in her improvising, manifesting a kind of serious playfulness expressed via a lovely middleweight tone and seemingly effortless fluidity of execution, matched by Oh in a solo full of a deep lyricism that also irradiated the bassist’s playing, from a different perspective, on Charles Mingus’s “Duke Ellington’s Sound of Love”. Bebop was taken for a 21st century ride on Bud Powell’s “Hallucinations” and a staggering, jet-propelled “Anthropology”, the unison statements of Charlie Parker’s tune taking the breath away.

It was a wonderful demonstration both of what remains possible with extensions of what we still call modern jazz and of the possibilities inherent in the conventional language of the two instruments. The album is terrific, but this performance stretched the tunes further in all sorts of interesting and compelling ways. This complex, brainy, sometimes witty, fundamentally interactive music created a world of its own, carrying the audience along its unfolding narrative, and it seemed a pity when they chose to disrupt the carefully built dramatic tension by introducing a couple of guest musicians, the altoist Will Vinson and the singer Jo Lawry. Both were excellent, in their ways, but I was glad to have the memory of those spellbinding 50 minutes of intense dialogue to take away with me.

* Beneath Lifted Skies is available via Bandcamp: https://lindamayhanoh.bandcamp.com/album/beneath-lifted-skies

Sep 17

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Woody Guthrie in Soho

At a few minutes after eight o’clock last night, in an upstairs theatre on a Soho alley, you’d have had a job persuading me that Woody Guthrie’s “Deportee (Plane Wreck at Los Gatos)” is not the greatest song produced by the 20th century. Its performance came towards the end of Woody Sez, a stage show devoted to the life and work of the great poet-troubadour of America’s working class.

David M. Lutken, a Texan actor-musician who once studied in London, devised the four-person show (with its director, Nick Corley) and was playing the part of Guthrie, his lean frame and likeable delivery making him a good fit. “Deportee”, which Guthrie wrote in 1948 after reading a newspaper report about the crash in California of a plane in which 28 migrant farm workers were being deported back to Mexico, was sung as a duet with Raquel Chavez, and I don’t think I’ve ever heard a more affecting version.

But it wasn’t alone as a highlight of the evening. With Lutken delivering Guthrie’s story as a between-songs first-person narrative, we were also treated to rousing versions of “Pastures of Plenty”, “Ain’t Got No Home”, “This Train Is Bound for Glory”, “Jolly Banker”, “Vigilante Man” and several others, with “This Land Is Your Land” delivered as a closing singalong.

Chavez, Nyssa Grant and David Finch took occasional lead vocals and sang harmonies while switching between a variety of instruments: duelling fiddles, mandolin, dulcimer, autoharp, string bass, penny whistle, spoons, harmonica, Jew’s harp, banjo, six- and 12-string guitars and a dobro. Their deftness and enthusiasm, and some clever stage movement, ensured that the 80-minute show never dragged.

“Deportee” may have moistened the eyes, but elsewhere there was a lot of humour and fun. It was good to be reminded of a key source of inspiration for Bob Dylan, Ry Cooder, Bruce Springsteen, Rhiannon Giddens and many more, and also of the need for resistance in times when the greed and cruelty of the vigilantes and the jolly bankers threaten the common good.

* There are further performances of Woody Sez tonight, tomorrow and Saturday (17-19 September) at Underbelly Boulevard Soho, 6 Walker’s Court, London W1F 0BT: underbellyboulevard.com

Sep 14

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‘A Ritual for John Coltrane’

The centenary of John Coltrane’s birth in Hamlet, North Carolina falls later this month; many commemorative events will take place. Yesterday afternoon at Cafe Oto, in the first of four monthly Sunday matinee concerts, Evan Parker led something he titled ‘A Ritual for John Coltrane’, which turned out to be the sort of tribute that summons the spirit of the dedicatee without trying to mimic the substance.

I may have mentioned before that the first time I interviewed Evan, at his home in the early ’70s, I was impressed by a shelf of LPs with orange and black spines: Coltrane’s albums on Impulse, of course, in their original US editions. Over the years I learned more about his love of the great man’s work, and the inspirational effect it had on the development of his own playing.

Yesterday Evan sat at the centre of an expanded performance space, with his soprano saxophone and a suspended gong. He was flanked by Matt Wright, his partner in Trance Map, at a table with a laptop and a turntable, and by Filipe Gomes of Ramsgate’s Arco Barco studio, also with a laptop and other electronic devices. At the four corners of the space were a quartet of percussionists assembled by Mark Sanders, himself standing at an array of larger gongs, cymbals and small upturned bass drums, with Miles Levin, Jim Bashford and Tymek Jozwiak each seated at minimal kits of varying configurations.

After the room had fallen silent, Evan began proceedings by striking the gong. His strokes precipitated a very gradual accretion of sounds from the other players, creating an abstract tapestry of rustles, taps, pings and other noises, with the subtle infiltration of electronic sounds at its base. After many minutes of this, and a fade to a silence in which we heard Coltrane’s voice speaking about his desire for growth as a person, Evan picked up his soprano and began the first of several improvisations against the constantly shifting sound-quilt.

He is 82 now, more than twice as old as Coltrane was when he died in 1967. Yet his playing is still mesmerising in its unquenchable flow of invention, based on all the techniques of blowing and fingering developed over the decades and powered by circular breathing as well as a constantly active imagination. I suppose you could trace it back to Coltrane’s three-minute unaccompanied tenor cadenza on the version of “I Want to Talk About You” released on Live at Birdland in 1964 — staggering at the time, and still inspiring awe.

The use of the soprano saxophone recalled how Coltrane, once he had taken up the instrument, must have heard in it echoes of the double-reed rhiatas of the Sufi musicians of Jajouka and the shenai of South Asia. The tapestry of percussion effects, rising and falling in waves as the intensity surged, abated and then surged again, was a reminder of how, in his later years, Coltrane loved adding drummers to his ensemble — Rashied Ali, J. C. Moses, Algie DeWitt, Jumma Santos, Ray Appleton, Juno Lewis, Umar Ali, Joe Brazil, Babatunde Olatunji — in the attempt to realise the vision of a music that, as he once said, would start in the middle and move outwards in both directions.

As Evan and his colleagues made their way through a magnificent performance that lasted well over an hour before returning to silence, it was impossible not to hear in the saxophone’s flutters and skeins and multiphonics a direct evolution — entirely personal to Parker — of what Coltrane began more than 60 years ago. As I said, the best kind of tribute.

* ‘A Ritual for John Coltrane’ will be performed again this Friday evening, September 18, at Foyle’s Studio in the Midlands Arts Centre, Birmingham.

Sep 13

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‘Everybody Digs Bill Evans’

On its own terms, Grant Gee’s Everybody Digs Bill Evans is an extraordinary film, fully deserving the accolades and awards coming its way. Adapted from Intermission, the 2013 novella by the Welsh writer Owen Martell, it concentrates on the months in 1961 following the car crash that took the life of the bassist Scott LaFaro, depriving Evans of his closest musical partner and throwing him into a a severe depression. The Norwegian actor Anders Danielsen Lie delivers a finely drawn portrait of Evans’s sometimes mute anguish, compounded by his addiction to heroin and complex relationships with a lover and with his family.

Bringing the famous cover photo of Sunday at the Village Vanguard (the artist as ascetic, bespectacled intellectual) to life, his performance is fully supported by Valene Kane as Ellaine Schulz, Evans’s girlfriend, Barry Ward as his older brother, Katie McGrath as his sister-in-law, Bill Pullman as his father, and Laurie Metcalf,as his mother. All are superb, but Pullman and Ward are particularly adept at suggesting the mixture of concern, incomprehension and envy that makes this a compelling family drama.

Mark O’Halloran’s spare screenplay, Piers McGrail’s high-contrast black and white cinematography (erupting into saturated colour for sequences set in 1973 and 1979), the razor-sharp editing of Adam Biskupski and the wonderfully subtle score by Roger Goula are all of the highest quality, helping Gee to create as fine a cinematic depiction of a real-life jazz musician as I can remember. We get just enough of Evans’s music, in an opening sequence recreating the great trio — Evans, LaFaro and the drummer Paul Motian — playing a snatch of “Gloria’s Step” at the Village Vanguard in June 1961, to give those who don’t know the music a clear idea of what it was all about. The subtle use of archive footage artfully enhances the sense of period and place.

Although I’d recommend everyone to see it, and hope it achieves lasting recognition for the outstanding piece of work it is, I do have a lingering sense of disquiet. Is this actually the film that Bill Evans deserves? By concentrating on one harrowing episode of his life, certainly a legitimate subject for a novella, will it unfairly distort an appreciation of his place in the world? It’s a bit like reading Martell’s book without first having first read How My Heart Sings, Peter Pettinger’s definitive biography of Evans, published in 1998. Looking at the full arc of Evans’s career, there are questions that remain open. But Gee’s five-star film, so carefully focused and sensitively pitched, can really only be greeted with the warmest applause.

* The still from Everybody Digs Bill Evans shows Anders Danielsen Lie as Evans and Will Sach as Scott LaFaro. The film is in cinemas now.

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