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Oct 31

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The Uptown Soul of Teddy Randazzo

Teddy Randazzo

What do we mean when we speak of Uptown Soul? A mixture of early-’60s R&B and lush pop that featured gospel-trained voices, big orchestral arrangements, often a Latin tinge to the rhythm, a hint of girl-group sweetness, and an echo of Broadway craftsmanship in the songwriting, all of it bathed in the neon glow of the city. A kind of grown-up music for teenagers, or possibly vice versa. Its presiding geniuses and their protégés included Burt Bacharach (Dionne Warwick and Lou Johnson ), Jerry Ragovoy (Garnet Mimms and Lorraine Ellison), Bert Berns (Solomon Burke and Barbara Lewis) and Teddy Randazzo, whose work is featured in a new Ace Records compilation called Yesterday Has Gone.

Like Bacharach, Randazzo wrote the melodies, created the arrangements, and produced the records. Other people wrote the words: among his regular collaborators were Bobby Weinstein on Little Anthony and the Imperials’ “I’m on the Outside (Looking In)” and “Goin’ Out of My Head” (the latter heard here in Warwick’s version), Weinstein and Lou Stallman for the Royalettes’ “It’s Gonna Take a Miracle” , and Victoria Pike for Mel Tormé’s “Better Use Your Head”.

Born on Brooklyn in 1935, Alessandro Carmelo Randazzo was a good-looking Italian-American boy who started out as a singer, first with vocal groups and then as a solo artist. He made records under his own name until the late ’60s (one of them, the excellent “You Don’t Need a Heart”, is included here), but he preferred the business of making records and in 1964 the commercial success of his work with Little Anthony Gourdine and the Imperials set him on his way.

The 25 tracks of the Ace album, recorded between 1964 and 1976, for a variety of labels, include nothing that is less than cherishable, from the soulful saloon-bar heartbreak of Derek Martin’s “You Better Go” through the froth of the Kane Triplets’ “Buttercup Days” and the proto-Northern Soul of Porgy and the Monarchs’ “Think Twice Before You Walk Away” to the gorgeous balladry of Frank Sinatra’s “Rain in My Heart”. Timi Yuro, Tony Orlando, Esther Phillips, Billy Fury and the Stylistics are among others to benefit from the attentions of a master of his craft.

At the moment my particular favourites from this set are Howard Guyton’s “I Watched You Slowly Slip Away”, a great 1966 dance track with an undertow of sadness, and the Manhattans’ lovely “A Million to One”, from five years later, both of them demonstrating the composer’s wonderful instinct for building into a song the sort of chord-changes that functioned as hooks. He may have been less overtly ambitious than Bacharach in musical terms, with more of a pop sensibility, but he never lacked sophistication.

Randazzo died in 2003, having retired to Hawaii and Florida with his family. It’s wonderful to have this anthology, compiled by Mick Patrick, as evidence of his contribution to a genre that continues to cast a spell.

* Yesterday Has Gone: The Songs of Teddy Randazzo is out now on the Ace label. The photograph of Randazzo is from the booklet accompanying the CD.

Oct 29

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Binker in the Round

Binker in the Round 1

It takes a brave bandleader to offer Sarah Tandy the first solo of the set. And when the pianist was presented with that opportunity while depping for Joe Armon-Jones in Binker Golding’s quartet at Jazz in the Round at the Cockpit Theatre on Monday night, she made the most of it. As she can do, she simply took flight, pulling together the strands of the opening theme, focusing the efforts of the whole band and raising the intensity to a level sustained for the next 40 minutes.

It took four of them to bring that off, of course. Not just Tandy or Golding, whose playing seems to have reached a new level of authority in the past year, but the band’s bassist, Dan Casimir, who deploys a huge tone and a massive drive, and its drummer, Sam Jones, who is loose and sharp at the sane time and has a lovely way of infusing eights with a triplet-based feel (and who managed to make an adroit recovery when his bass-drum pedal flew off just as Golding’s tenor solo was building in the climactic “Fluorescent Black”).

They played tunes from Golding’s new album, Abstractions of Reality Past and Incredible Feathers, whose delightful title owed something, he said, to the poet Emily Dickinson: “‘Hope’ is the thing with feathers — That perches in the soul — And sings the tune without the words — And never stops — at all — ” It was, he added, the result of his desire to make something more melodic than the music he created in his duo with the drummer Moses Boyd and its various extensions.

How well he has succeeded. The album is like a modern version of a tenor-and-rhythm session by someone such as George Coleman or James Clay at the zenith of the hard-bop era: original themes that are strong and complex, full of immediately attractive twists and turns, blowing that is fierce but constantly aware of the need to build a narrative. Occasionally, as in “Exquisite She-Green”, there is a Monkish angularity that seeps into the solos. A ballad like “You, That Place, That Time” is not afraid to explore a glowing but always alert lyricism. Others, like “Fluorescent Black” and the Latin-inflected “I Forgot Santa Monica”, have a built-in swing that allows the musicians to take off and show us the extent of their old-school chops while making it clear that they have new things to say.

Tandy on the live gig provided a rewarding contrast with Armon-Jones’s work on the album: the former constantly launching her combination of soulfulness and rhapsody, fingers flying as she goes deeper and deeper, the latter a virtuoso of funky feeling, with a surprise in every bar and making each one count towards the whole.

The gig had the Cockpit audience roaring its approval. The album is a beautiful (and very beautifully recorded) document capturing a young London musician’s discovery that there’s more than one way for his generation to wreck the house. Most highly recommended.

* Abstractions of Reality Past and Incredible Feathers is out now on the Gearbox label.

Oct 26

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Ancestral voices

Coin Coin 4

 

Run, baby, run — run like the wind.

That phrase is a recurring motif of Coin Coin Chapter Four: Memphis, the latest instalment of Matana Roberts’ meditation on personal history and cultural memory. The words are those of “Daddy”, and they appear in various contexts, from schoolyard races to a sighting of men in strange robes and hoods.

The emotional loading of that phrase and the image of a black child running, whether out of pleasure or terror, is at the centre of Roberts’s latest piece of “panoramic sound quilting.” Each chapter so far (she plans an eventual total of 12) has had a different trajectory and texture, and this is no exception.

The narrative core is drawn from the story, told to Roberts by her maternal grandmother, of a Memphis woman named Liddie  — “who for moment of a long lifetime ago, lived in a Tennessee wood, alone, a small person yet ungrown/unknown… her father murdered by weak men in white hoods, her mother dying somewhere unknown… alone…”

Roberts is a beautiful reader and narrator, as anyone who has attended her solo concerts will know. Her strong, alert voice rises naturally out of the music and can render sombre material powerful but never portentous or hectoring. Here she devises settings that fall somewhere between the black country brass and string bands of the early 20th century — braying trombone, rollicking fiddle, wheezing accordion, twanging jaw harp — and the free jazz of the 1960s. There’s an Aylerish exultation to the use of traditional cadences, most obviously in the flights of Roberts’ own alto playing and the scrabbling, plicketing electric guitars of Hannah Marcus and Sam Shalabi. (The bassist Nicolas Caloia and the drummer/vibraphonist Ryan Sawyer are the other members of the core group.)

Snatches of folk songs and gospel hymns slip in and out of this sound-quilt, alongside hints of “St Louis Blues”, “This Little Light of Mine” and “Tennessee Waltz”. They are the ghosts of an unquiet past in a restless, troubled present, brilliantly evoked in the latest episode of this monumental work.

* The photograph is of Matana Roberts’s grandmother and is from the front cover of Coin Coin Chapter Four: Memphis. The album is out now on the Constellation label. I’ve made a couple of factual corrections to this piece in response to Matana Roberts’s comment.

Oct 23

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Terry Riley’s ‘Sun Rings’

Kronos Sun Rings

Back in 2002 I was fortunate enough to be present when Sun Rings, an extended composition written by Terry Riley for the Kronos Quartet and a 60-voice choir, was given its world premiere in the University of Iowa’s Hancher Auditorium. The partnership between the composer and the quartet celebrates its fortieth anniversary next year; among Riley’s works premiered and recorded by the group have been Sunrise of the Planetary Dream Collector, Cadenza on the Night Plain, Salome Dances for Peace, The Cusp of Magic and Requiem for Adam. But Sun Rings was something different: the musicians and singers were accompanied by sounds harvested from space by the scientists at NASA as their Voyager probes hurtled past Saturn, Uranus and Neptune.

The sounds of space — strange chattering, howling and chirruping — was originally captured by Don Gurnett, a research scientist at the university in Iowa City who designed the plasma-wave equipment carried by the probes to record the noises — called “whistlers” — made by electrons whizzing about in the magnetic fields surrounding the planets. Gurnett told me that while their existence had been detected by a German scientist during the First World War, he was the first person to retrieve them from space and to turn the signals into sound.

He had given cassettes of the recordings to Riley, divided under headings like “auroral hiss”, “electron plasma oscillation” and “electron cyclotron harmonic emissions”. The composer chose the ones he liked and made them an integral part of the piece, triggered in real time by the four members of Kronos using fibre-optic wands. The hour-long work, commissioned as part of NASA’s long-standing arts programme, featured lighting and back-projections created by Willie Williams, a Yorkshireman who worked with Deaf School, Stiff Little Fingers and others before joining U2 for the Zoo TV tour and then moving on to collaborate with the Stones and Bowie.

After the Iowa concert, which was quite an experience, the work was given its European premiere at the Barbican. Now an album, recorded in a studio in 2017, makes the piece available to everyone.

Here’s what David Harrington, Kronos’s leader, has to say about Riley in the notes to Sun Rings: “There is no other composer who has added so many new musical words to our vocabulary, words from many corners of the musical world. Terry introduced Kronos to Pandit Pran Nath, Zakir Hussein, Bruce Connor, La Monte Young, Anna Halprin, Hamza El Din, Jon Hassell, Gil Evans… I have never once heard him say an unkind word about another musician. In a crazed world laced with violence and destruction, he has consistently been a force for peace. Through his gentle leadership, a path has emerged. Terry sets the standard for what it means to be a musician in our time.”

All that is apparent in the 10th and final section of Sun Rings, titled “One Earth, One People, One Love”. Those words belong to the writer Alice Walker, and a recording of her voice intoning them is the leitmotif of a piece which begins with a description of the astronaut’s experience of looking at Earth from space by Eugene Cernan, the commander of the Apollo 17 mission. This extraordinarily beautiful nine-minute piece is slow-paced, the strings moving gently through the sounds of space, with Sunny Yang’s lyrical cello prominent as the passing of time is marked by what might be a tuned drum and a damped bell. Bringing us back home, this is music that speaks to everyone.

* Sun Rings is out now on the Nonesuch label. The photograph of the Kronos Quartet performing the piece in Krakow in 2014 is from the accompanying booklet and was taken by Wojciech Wandzel.

Oct 18

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Ronnie Scott’s at 60

Ronnie's

It was in search of some old and occasionally neglected jazz feelings that I went to Ronnie Scott’s this week to hear Joey DeFrancesco’s trio. Temporarily, I’d had enough of watching brilliant young conservatory-trained jazz musicians squinting at sheet music. And enough of entire evenings of jazz without a single bar in a swinging 4/4. A temporary condition, as I say. But it demanded a fix of something different.

I was also thinking about the club’s 60th anniversary, which falls on October 30. I never went inside the original Gerrard Street basement premises, although as a teenager on a trip to London I was able to stand on the street one night, by the top of the stairs, and listen to the sound of Sonny Rollins whenever the door opened. From 1969 on, however, I was a regular visitor to 47 Frith Street, usually on Monday nights, when a new band would begin its season of two, three or sometimes four weeks and I’d be along to review it for the Melody Maker or The Times.

The first of countless memorable nights there was to hear the star-studded Thad Jones-Mel Lewis Big Band. Another early one, in July 1971, was the opening of a fortnight by Herbie Hancock’s Mwandishi sextet: a night no one present is likely to have forgotten. First for the exalted music produced by a group rounded out by Eddie Henderson (trumpet and flugel), Julian Priester (trombone), Benny Maupin (tenor), Buster Williams (bass) and Billy Hart (drums), second for the Swahili names Hancock had persuaded them to adopt, and third for the fact that they were the first jazz group to travel with their own sound system and mixing engineer. The sound at Ronnie’s was always decent, but this, in terms of subtle gradations of individual and collective timbre, was on another level.

So there was a nice historical echo in seeing the great Billy Hart at the drums with DeFrancesco this week, doing exactly what I hoped and knew he’d do, which was to swing like mad. It made me think of all the great drummers I’d seen on that stage, from Kenny Clarke through Art Blakey and Elvin Jones to Billy Higgins, while standing beside the bar that used to run alongside the left-hand wall of the club.

That bar isn’t there any more. Neither are Ronnie or Pete King or the other members of staff, front of house and backroom, who were fixtures in those days. The club went through a bad time when Pete sold it to Sally Greene and her partners after Ronnie died, but the new owners saw it through some difficult years and kept the faith. The booking policy gradually recovered its integrity and the audiences came back. Now it’s full just about every night with listeners who — unlike many of the expense-account businessmen of the ’70s — respect the music, respond with enthusiasm and don’t chatter during the quiet bits.

Inevitably, it’s more expensive than it used to be. But have you tried running a jazz club in Soho, where cherished institutions disappear every week, thanks to the greed and ignorance of landlords and developers? The fact that it’s not just surviving but flourishing is remarkable, as is the willingness of the management to supplement the main programme with jam sessions and showcases for younger musicians — something that Ronnie and Pete always tried to do. I’m not sure I’ll ever quite get used to having to sit down in a place where I spent several decades leaning against the bar, but it’s no great hardship.

The pianist Robert Glasper was making a serious point a couple of years ago when he said that by filling the walls of a jazz club with framed photos of dead musicians, you kill the music’s spirit. You can see why a young musician would come to that conclusion. But when I walk in from Frith Street nowadays, I can still feel the spirits of Ronnie and Pete and the disturbingly glamorous Roxy Beaujolais on the front desk and dapper Jimmy Parsons the greeter and Martin the maitre d’ and Fat Henry Cohen in the cloakroom and Gypsy Larry, whose role was a mystery, as well as those of the musicians in the pictures, all of whom went to make it what it was — and, quite miraculously, still is.

Oct 16

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Bill Frisell at Cadogan Hall

BillSolo_Adjusted

“If somebody makes a so-called mistake,” Bill Frisell says near the end of the promotional film for his new album, “that can be the most beautiful thing that happens all night, if everybody’s open to what that sound is and embraces it and makes it sound good. If everyone’s watching out for each other and everyone feels like they can take a risk, it gives the music a chance to keep going and evolving.”

Last night at Cadogan Hall it was his turn to flub an ending, the mistake quickly finessed by his three colleagues — the singer Petra Haden, the cellist Hank Roberts and the bass guitarist Luke Bergman — with grace and smiles. And right there was the humanity of any music in which Frisell has a hand.

His mission to demonstrate and explore the consanguinity of all forms of American vernacular music — from Charles Ives to Thelonious Monk, from Hank Williams to Henry Mancini, from Muddy Waters to the Beach Boys — was accomplished many years ago, but with Harmony, the title of his first album on the Blue Note label, it seems to have reached another peak. The empathy, flexibility and modesty of this quartet make it an ideal vehicle for another exercise in creative juxtaposition.

The concert began quietly, with Haden’s beautifully plain voice enunciating the wandering, wordless, childlike line of Frisell’s “Everywhere”. The first high point came with Stephen Foster’s “Hard Times”, on which Roberts and Bergman joined Haden in the sort of three-part Appalachian harmonies guaranteed to strike instantly at a special place in the emotions. There was a wholehearted ovation for that. “Lush Life”, fiendishly difficult to sing, was another highlight; also included in last year’s solo concert at the same venue and on Epistrophy, his recent live duo album with the bassist Thomas Morgan, Billy Strayhorn’s great ballad is clearly a preoccupation, and its intense chromaticism brought out the Jim Hall influence in Frisell’s work on his double-cutaway semi-acoustic instrument.

There was an interesting recasting of “On the Street Where You Live” (from My Fair Lady) and a lovely harmonised version of the traditional “Red River Valley”, interspersed with little instrumental pieces making sparing use of the guitarist’s loops and effects. The set ended with a segue from Pete Seeger’s “Where Have All the Flowers Gone” into David Bowie’s “Space Oddity”, rendered in full and apparently without ironic intent. For an encore, demanded with fervent enthusiasm, they returned to stand at the microphones and deliver “We Shall Overcome”, inviting us to join in; well, at least now they know what English hymn-singing sounds like.

It was a mystery that, for the latest project from this great musician, a hall which was packed for his solo appearance a year ago should be so thinly populated last night. Perhaps the concert was badly advertised. The album is not yet out, which probably didn’t help. But anyone who wasn’t there missed a quietly remarkable night.

* Harmony is out on November 1. Epistrophy was released by ECM earlier this year. The photograph of Bill Frisell is by Monica Frisell.

Oct 12

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Seeing ‘Western Stars’

Western Stars

“This is my 19th album,” Bruce Springsteen says towards the beginning of the film Western Stars, “and I’m still writing songs about cars.” But then he excuses himself by explaining how cars can become a metaphor for all kinds of things, including travelling without getting anywhere.

Western Stars is a performance film, but much more than that. Recorded over two days in front of a small audience in the hayloft of the 19th century wooden barn on his property in New Jersey, it features the 13 songs from the recent album of the same name, played by around 30 musicians: a basic band of various guitars, keyboards, bass and drums, plus two trumpets, two French horns, a string orchestra of violins, violas and cellos, and four or five female backing singers, discreetly directed by the album’s orchestrator, Rob Mathes.

There are a few differences from the album versions, but the sound of Bob Clearmountain’s mix is so close to the lush Californian warmth of the original recordings that I found myself frequently checking for signs that the musicians were miming. An inability to spot anyone playing the glockenspiel part on “Drive Fast” provided the only evidence that post-production work had been undertaken.

Having seen the trailer, I worried in advance that the film — directed by Springsteen with his long-term collaborator Thom Zimny — would include too much footage of wild ponies cantering in slow-motion through desert landscapes beneath spectacular open skies, close-ups of silver and turquoise jewellery on weathered hands, and El Camino pick-ups raising dust on long, lonesome dirt roads. There’s some of that, particularly in the early sequences, but the visual clichés recede as more serious matters come to the fore in what Springsteen calls “interstitial material”, the snatches of home movies and found footage with voiceovers in which he introduces the songs and reflects on their themes of life, love, loss and longing.

On the face of it, the songs on Western Stars aren’t about Springsteen. One protagonist is a stuntman, another a fading movie actor. But, as he said during a Q&A session that followed the screening I attended this morning, “When I write a song in character, it’s a way of exploring your own life and struggles.”

After feeling initially indifferent towards much of the album, it came as a surprise to discover how rewardingly the film illuminates their qualities, both via Springsteen’s commentary and the performances. “Sleepy Joe’s Café” was a song I quite disliked until seeing it contextualised in a social setting. “Somewhere North of Nashville” acquires greater depth. “Stones”, sung as a duet with Patti Scialfa, his wife of 30 years, is now almost unbearably moving in its evocation of the undercurrents of a long marriage. (“I should have had Patti on the record,” Springsteen said during the Q&A.)

The songs I already liked gain a new lustre. “Moonlight Motel” adds a couple more shades of gorgeous soul-weariness. The soaring “There Goes My Miracle” is introduced with a rumination on “losing the best thing you ever had — the perfect formula for a pop song.” Or maybe it was “the formula for a perfect pop song”, which it is. Watching the string players tear into it with such joy, I thought of how I’ve always believed the special E Street secret is making every person in the audience feel as though they’re up on stage, playing in the band, sharing that special exhilaration; this lot made me wish I’d carried on with violin lessons.

* This weekend’s London Film Festival screenings of Western Stars are sold out. It will be in cinemas around the UK on October 28, three days after the release of the soundtrack album.

Oct 9

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Another me, another way

Another me 3

The self-portrait above was painted by an inmate of Vinney Green Secure Unit, a young offenders’ facility in Bristol. It’s part of “Another Me”, an exhibition of artworks by people incarcerated within the criminal justice system, currently on show in the Spirit Level rooms at the South Bank centre, below the Festival Hall. It caught my attention when I noticed that it had been curated for the Koestler Arts foundation by Soweto Kinch, the brilliant composer, saxophonist and bandleader. Anything Kinch is involved in tends to be worth your time, and “Another Me” is no exception.

At Koestler Arts’ building in Wormwood Scrubs, he went through 7,610 entries submitted in 52 categories from UK prisons and British prisoners abroad. His selection spans a range of media, from conventional painting and photography to wall-poetry, music of various genres (which you can hear through headphones), all ranging from the sombre to the defiantly whimsical. There’s a particularly extraordinary piece made from used nitrous oxide canisters found in various London locations — outside a school, an off-licence, a night club, a hospital — and labelled and framed in the style of Victorian museum objects under the title “Nitrouonites: Future Fossils”. As you walk around, you’ll hear the sound of drifting saxophones and electronics: a non-invasive but gently atmospheric sound installation specially devised by the curator.

Many of the works display great technical skill, but I was struck by the one at the top of this piece, a particularly eloquent and moving articulation of the exhibition’s theme. As another of the artists writes in a commentary on his own self-portrait, the title of show “suggest(s) so many possibilities, reflecting on past actions or future selves. It speaks of the masks we all use in our day-to-day lives. Our best selves, our worst. Perhaps most powerfully it suggests change is possible — there can always be another me, another way.”

* Another Me is at the Spirit Level exhibition space of the Royal Festival Hall until November 3. Soweto Kinch performs his new work The Black Peril at Hackney EartH on November 22 with an ensemble including the drummer Makaya McCraven, the bassist Junius Paul and members of the LSO, as part of the EFG London Jazz Festival.

Oct 3

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Punkt.Vrt.Plastik (What?)

Punkt.Vrt.Plastik Vortex

When I first encountered Punkt.Vrt.Plastik two years ago in Berlin, I thought they were making the most intellectually challenging piano-trio music I’d ever heard. Their late-night concert, in a darkened auditorium, was an intense experience, highly rewarding but perhaps more impressive than enjoyable. At the Vortex last night, without changing any of the components of their music, they managed to reverse that response.

They are the Slovenian pianist Kaja Draksler, the Swedish bassist Petter Eldh and the German drummer Christian Lillinger, three of the most compelling young musicians in Europe. It was Eldh who explained their name to me: “Punkt means ‘dot’ in Swedish. Vrt means ‘garden’ in Slovenian. Christian represents the Plastik.” All clear?

There are no standard tunes, no Radiohead covers. Their original compositions, contributed by all three members, can sometimes proceed from the deliberate simplicity of a repeated single note, but they tend to emphasise the dense and knotty, which made the pronounced variations of density heard in last night’s performance all the more effective. It’s often hard to tell what is is written and what is being improvised; the occasional loose end left by these three virtuosi is a sign that spontaneous creativity is being exercised within the essential framework.

Draksler plays without affectation or stylistic gesture. The purity of what she does is one point of the triangle: the others are Eldh’s power and flexibility and Lillinger’s sense of space and timbre. At the end of their second set they returned for an encore: a version of Eldh’s “Life Is Transient” which glowed like a vision of rapture. It’s the closing track of their fine album, but last night’s reading showed how far they’ve since come in infusing a sometimes daunting complexity with human warmth. The prolonged ovation suggested that no one present will forget it quickly.

* The album Punkt.Vrt.Plastik is on the Intakt label.