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Apr 26

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Memories of the Boogie Man

John Lee Hooker 1

You might have trouble believing this little story, but here it is. On the Friday morning in June 1964 when John Lee Hooker’s “Dimples” was released in the UK, three of us — strangers to each other — were queuing up to buy it as a record store prepared to open its doors in the centre of Nottingham. This wasn’t the new Beatles or Stones single. This was a record made eight years earlier by a middle-aged American blues singer, and yet it seemed like the newest and most essential thing you could spent that week’s 6/8d on. And we three weren’t alone. “Dimples” made No 23 in the charts.

A few months later Hooker toured Britain, backed by the Groundhogs. They played the Elizabethan Rooms in Nottingham, a large space above the Co-op, and all five members of the local R&B band I was in made the pilgrimage to hear him. More than that, we clubbed together for a bottle of Johnnie Walker Red Label and persuaded him to sit down at a table with us between sets and listen to our naive questions about the blues. He was patient and good-natured but the whisky evidently spoke more clearly to him than we did and I don’t remember a thing he said.

But the proximity was more than enough, as it probably was for the Groundhogs. They clearly loved his music and did their best, but this was an early stage of English kids playing the blues and they were probably a little too refined and respectful for the music’s good (although, of course,  John Lee’s idea of how many bars made 12 created problems of its own). Musically speaking, it wasn’t great, but the chance to see him close up was priceless.

I thought about all that while watching John Lee Hooker: The Boogie Man, Todd Austin’s excellent documentary on BBC4 tonight. I listened to Van Morrison saying that he responded so directly to Hooker because of his working-class background, and to Eric Burdon talking about how it was because he left school unable to read or write that Hooker spoke to him. Fair enough. But I also thought that there was I, a middle-class boy, privately educated, to whom Hooker spoke just as directly and profoundly from the instant I heard him. And that was the magic.

“Boom Boom” was a big record for me when it came out on a Stateside 45 the year before “Dimples”, and so were “Tupelo” and “I’m Mad Again” from The Folk Lore of John Lee Hooker. But the record I really loved was Don’t Turn Me From Your Door, a collection of tracks from two sessions in 1953 and 1961 released on Atlantic’s Atco subsidiary in 1963, most of them featuring just Hooker’s voice and his guitar (and his boot-heel, of course). There was an elemental quality to these recordings that went back beyond the Chicago blues we were mostly listening to and yet, with its pulsing drones and sudden explosive note-clusters, seemed as free as the freest free jazz.

The Boogie Man is fine tribute, thanks not least to Charles Shaar Murray, one of its consultants, whose fine biography of John Lee gave the programme its title. Among others giving evidence are Elvin Bishop, Bonnie Raitt, Keith Richards, and three of Hooker’s very eloquent children. Robert Cray has the best story, telling us that this was one Delta-born bluesman who, whenever he went on the road, always travelled with satin sheets.

Apr 23

4 Comments

Homage to Celia

Celia Cruz

Celia Cruz was to Latin music as Aretha Franklin was to soul, Cesaria Evora to fado**, Mahalia Jackson to gospel and Bessie Smith to the blues. She was the queen. On the two occasions I saw her, I was left in no doubt of that. The first was in 1976, when she appeared at the Lyceum with the Fania All Stars, alongside Johnny Pacheco and Ray Barretto. The second was 10 years later, when she arrived at Hammersmith Palais on a sultry July night with Tito Puente’s eight-piece band, took the stage in a dress covered with black, silver and hot red sequins, and set the place on fire. Here’s what I wrote in The Times the next day:

“Most of her songs are constructed according to a formula that gets the verse out of the way before concentrating on the sequence in which the singer improvises over a mesmerising two-chord vamp. It is there, in the real heart of the music, as the polyrhythms of congas, bongos and timbales interlock with the fluid and deceptively simple stroll of the bass guitar, that Celia Cruz proves her greatness. The vamp section of the mid-tempo ‘Bemba Colora’ turned into a roller-coaster of successive crescendos and she shouted, chattered and crooned, the audience hardly needing her encouragement to chant the responses while attempting to dance in the sweaty crush at the foot of the stage. Her own dancing, involving brief bouts of spasms and convulsions that defined the Latin ability to retain control while discarding inhibitions, provided a further incitement to displays of ecstatic abandon.”

I can still hear that “Bemba Colora”: it went on for a very long time and would still be going on now, if those of us who were there had been given a vote on the matter. It was a night when you wished you’d been born Latin, and one of the dozen most memorable gigs I can remember.

Inevitably, “Bemba Colora” is among the 10 songs associated with Cruz chosen by Angélique Kidjo, the great Beninese singer, for her new album, titled Celia. Or, as one might put it, this is Angélique Kpasseloko Hinto Hounsinou Kandjo Manta Zogbin Kidjo paying tribute to Úrsula Hilaria Celia de la Caridad Cruz Alfonso.

It’s no surprise that Kidjo and her producer, David Donatien, approached the project from an original perspective, choosing to take the songs on a journey back to Africa. This isn’t a salsa album: it’s an album of the African diaspora, bringing sounds and inflections from all over the continent to bear in a very organic and contemporary way. The musicians involved include Tony Allen, the great Afro-beat drummer, who partners the bassist Meshell Ndegeocello on several tracks, and the members of London’s Sons of Kemet, who provide the basis for a fine reading of “Bemba Colora”. Shabaka Hutchings, their tenor saxophonist, and Theon Cross, their tuba-player, contribute to several other tracks.

The one that really caught my ear is “Sahara”, a ballad of grand yearning recorded by Cruz in 1952. Written by Eligio Varela Mora, it’s given full value by Kidjo’s majestic delivery, languid but intense, over a beautiful arrangement featuring the unhurried ticking of Donatien’s percussion, the colourations of Xavier Tribolet’s piano and organ and Clément Petit’s overdubbed cellos, a kind of desert chamber ensemble. Every track has something interesting to offer, but this is where the project most fully realises its potential, both as a tribute and as a free-standing creation. Like that “Bemba Colora” in Hammersmith more than 30 years ago, it casts a spell you want never to end.

* Angélique Kidjo’s Celia is out now on the Verve label.

** See Vitor Fragoso’s comment.

Apr 18

11 Comments

Fat John & John Burch

Fat John Burch

In the UK between about 1962 and 1964 you could detect, beneath the excitement of the Beat Boom, the emergence of a music that made anything seemed possible. Largely inspired by the Charles Mingus of Blues & Roots and Oh Yeah!, a new generation of British musicians applied jazz techniques to the form and spirit of the blues in an effort to give their music a strong emotional impact. The nodal point for this was Alexis Korner’s Blues Incorporated, in which a guitarist who loved the music of the Delta chose to surround himself with a shifting cast of younger players who were listening to Mingus, Coltrane and Ornette. When these musicians moved on, some of them became a powerful force in the British rock movement of the late ’60s and early ’70s.

The transitional period didn’t last long. Some of its most interesting bands never got beyond the clubs and pubs and the occasional BBC radio broadcast, and didn’t even get as far as releasing a record. That’s partially rectified by the appearance of new collections of mostly unheard music from two of them: the Fat John Sextet, led by the drummer John Cox, and the octet of the pianist John Burch.

Cox, born in Bristol in 1933, wasn’t all that fat; he was useful drummer who started out as a bandleader in London with a group playing “half mainstream, half trad”. That changed quite quickly. In 1962, with John Mumford on trombone and Dave Castle on alto, they had a Monday-night residency at the Six Bells in Chelsea, playing music of a more contemporary cast. Art Blakey’s “Theme” was among the three tracks they recorded at the Railway Hotel in West Hampstead for a Decca compilation titled Hot Jazz, Cool Beer. In December 1963, when they recorded an unreleased session at the Pye studio just off Marble Arch, the line-up featured Chris Pyne on trombone, Ray Warleigh on alto and flute, Tony Roberts on tenor, Pete Lemer on piano and the great Danny Thompson on bass.

Those two sessions make up Honesty, a new 2CD set that is, I think, the only memorial to John Cox’s career. The 75-minute Pye session includes such standards-to-be as Herbie Hancock’s “Watermelon Man”, Horace Silver’s “Sister Sadie”,  Benny Golson’s “Whisper Not” and Junior Mance’s lovely “Jubilation”, indicating that the prevailing wind was blowing from a hard-bop direction, with occasional gusts of soul. More than half a century later, it holds up well. And while any opportunity to hear Warleigh’s eloquence is not to be missed, it’s also good to be reminded of what a very expressive player Tony Roberts has always been, and how scantily represented he is on record (Henry Lowther’s Child Song and Danny Thompson’s Whatever and Whatever Next being the only examples that spring to my mind). This is fine post-bop jazz with a hint, in Mingus’s “My Jelly Roll Soul” and the Latin rhythms of which Cox was fond, of how the music would have sounded in a more informal live setting .

Pyne, Warleigh and Thompson had all been members of Blues Incorporated. So had Graham Bond, Jack Bruce and Ginger Baker, who appear on Jazz Beat, by the Johnny Burch Octet. A fourth member of both Burch’s and Korner’s bands, the saxophonist Dick Heckstall-Smith, was committed elsewhere when the band recorded a BBC Jazz Club session in 1963. Stan Robinson depped for him, joining a front completed by Mike Falana (trumpet), John Mumford (trombone), Bond (alto) and Miff Moule (baritone), with a rhythm section of Burch (piano), Bruce (double bass) and Baker (drums).

The music here has a rougher edge (and has survived with an appropriately raw sound quality) and at times it can be electrifying. I remember hearing this broadcast, and the version of “Early in the Morning” — a work song borrowed from Murderers Home, the Alan Lomax recording of prisoners’ songs at Parchman Farm — stayed with me through the decades until I heard it again. Apparently arranged (very effectively) by Baker, it was also in Blues Incorporated’s repertoire. Here it inspires good solos from all the horns and an absolutely incendiary one from Bond, very much on the form he showed a year or two earlier on Don Rendell’s Roarin’. Brewing up a fusion of Cannonball Adderley’s soulfulness and Eric Dolphy’s out-there angularity, he shows here what was lost when his instincts and appetites led him elsewhere. Burch’s nice arrangements of Bobby Timmons’ “Moanin'” and Jimmy Heath’s “All Members” are other highlights of this session. Two years later Burch led a different line-up on a BBC Band Beat session. The mood on tracks like “The Champ”, “Oleo”, “Milestones” and “Stolen Moments” is relatively restrained by comparison with that of the Bond/Bruce/Baker line-up, but there is fine work from Hank Shaw (trumpet), Ken Wray (trombone), Ray Swinfield (alto) and Peter King on tenor, and the bass is in the hands of the young Jeff Clyne. The approach is more polished, and the fidelity is higher.

The vinyl version of Jazz Beat has eight tracks, three from the first session and five from the second. The CD has six from 1963 and lots of outtakes from the later broadcast, including Tony Hall’s introductions. I wrote the sleeve note but since no money changed hands I feel no embarrassment in drawing your attention to a release that, along with the Fat John CD, helps to fill an important gap in the history of British jazz. Within a short time, of course, some of the people featured on these records were taking their place in bands heard around the world.

Neither of the leaders is still with us. To judge from Simon Spillett’s notes for Honesty, Fat John led an eventful life after his career in jazz came to an end. Burch, a year older than Cox, died in 2006, his life having been made reasonably secure by the royalties from a song called “Preach and Teach”, which appeared on the B-side of “Yeh Yeh”, Georgie Fame’s No 1 hit, earning as much in songwriting royalties as the A-side. Many deserve a break like that; few get it.

* Honesty is out now on Turtle Records. Jazz Beat is on the Rhythm and Blues label: the LP came out on Record Store Day and the CD is released on April 26.

Apr 12

29 Comments

A thought on ‘Rock Island Line’

Rock Island LineWhile watching Billy Bragg’s enjoyable BBC4 documentary on “Rock Island Line” this evening, and listening to his interviewees talking about what it was that made Lonnie Donegan’s recording so compelling back in 1956 that it inspired and facilitated an entire musical revolution, I found myself trying to isolate the qualities that had so inflamed my own imagination as a nine-year-old.

Of course there was that thrilling rhythm, imitating the gathering momentum of a locomotive. And there was the urgent informality of Donegan’s vocal delivery, so different from the crooners who dominated the airwaves in the middle 1950s. But there was something deeper at work, and I think it was this: a dominant feature of the song’s melody is the interval between the tonic and the flattened third. The tonic is the note you hear several times as he follows “Well, the Rock Island…” — all sung on the tonic — by rising to the flattened third on the next word, sung with a heavy emphasis: “…Line…”

A little later on in our musical education, we learnt that the flattened third is one of the two “blue notes” in a major scale (the other being the flattened seventh). In this case, since Donegan sings “Rock Island Line” in the key of D, the flattened third is F natural. And that F natural, I reckon, is the first blue note most of my generation ever heard, or at least noticed, and its impact was immense. For all of us, from everyone who joined a skiffle group, whether they quickly found another hobby or became John Lennon, that note was the portal to everything that followed, for within it was encoded the sound, the flavour, the spirit and the soul of the blues, the music that, in all its forms, would shape a new culture.

My theory, anyway.

Apr 7

5 Comments

Guidi plays Ferré

Giovanni Guidi Avec le Temps

From left: Francesco Bearzatti, Giovanni Guidi, Thomas Morgan, João Lobo and Roberto Cecchetto (photo: Clément Puig)

Léo Ferré’s “Avec le temps” is one of the most exquisite sad songs ever written (Avec le temps va tout s’en va / On oublie le visage et l’on oublie la voix…). Giovanni Guidi is a lyric poet of the piano. The combination of the two, assembled for the title track of Guidi’s new album, is a natural. The pianist’s touch is at its most effecting on a piece like this, with never a note wasted as he searches for the song’s essence. But it’s not just him and Ferré. It’s Thomas Morgan, the double bassist who combines Gary Peacock’s ardent fluidity with Charlie Haden’s deep soul, suffused with a pensive quality that is all his own. It’s also João Lobo, who adds a dimension that makes this group something more than a conventional piano trio, his discreet splashes, scrapes and sussurations disrupting the perfection in a subtle and highly creative way.

It’s a seductive start, but the album has much more to offer. On the second track, guests appear. The first is the guitarist Roberto Cecchetto, whose opening duet with Morgan on the modal “15th of August” reminds me of Gabor Szabo and Al Stinson in that great Chico Hamilton group of the early ’60s. The comparison extends to the other guest, Francesco Bearzatti, who turns up later in the same piece, playing tenor saxophone with some of the contemplative quality of the mature Charles Lloyd, like a Coltrane who finally found that inner peace. Lobo’s playing behind Morgan’s thrumming figures on the closing section of this is so stunning that you just don’t want it to stop.

Gradually the album travels further out, very interestingly so as Bearzatti’s Aylerish squalls on “Postludium and a Kiss” add another disruptive element to roil the prevailing balladry before, in a thrilling process, the other musicians rise to match his energy. “No Taxi”, by the trio, turns in another direction, towards a meeting of Thelonious Monk’s angles and Lennie Tristano’s seamless flow, with Bearzatti playing the Charlie Rouse/Warne Marsh role. “Caino” is a pre-dawn tone poem, with fine shading from Cecchetto’s guitar, and “Johnny the Liar” feels like a continuation of the same dream-state. “Ti Stimo”, a Guidi favourite, has a lovely rustic simplicity that Bill Frisell would enjoy, and “Tomasz” — a dedication to the late trumpeter Tomasz Stanko — finds the trio summoning the ravishing beauty heard on their previous albums, City of Broken Dreams and This Is The Day, both released, like this new one, on ECM.

As far as I know, Guidi, Morgan and Lobo have played together in London only twice, both times at the Rosenfeld Porcini art gallery. Someone should bring them back as soon as possible. This is one of the finest groups in contemporary jazz, and Avec le temps is not to be missed.