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Jan 31

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Remembering Barrett Strong

The news of Barrett Strong’s death this week at the age of 81 (here’s my Guardian obituary) naturally sent me back to 1959 and “Money (That’s What I Want)”, but also to the masterpieces of psychedelic soul that Strong and Norman Whitfield created for the Temptations between 1967 and 1972. While “Cloud Nine” was the most surprising, “Ball of Confusion” the most intense and “Papa Was a Rolling Stone” the creative pinnacle of this response to the innovations of Jimi Hendrix and Sly Stone, my own favourite has always been the full 12 and a half minute version of “Smiling Faces Sometimes”, to be found on the Tempts’ 1971 album, Sky’s the Limit.

David Van DePitte, who orchestrated the track, deserves equal credit. In the first half-minute alone we’re introduced to four independent lines, one after another: James Jamerson’s stately bass guitar, a gentle bassoon, a piercing high line for violins doubled by a piano an octave down, and a nasty fuzz-tone guitar. They drift in and out before locking together, at which point a woodwind choir and French horn whoops usher in Eddie Kendricks’s lead vocal, his high tenor stripped of its usual swooning romantic urges, here quietly conveying a mess of paranoia: “Smiling faces sometimes / Pretend to be your friend / Smiling faces show no traces / Of the evil that lurks within…”

By this time there are also two rhythm guitars, one strumming open chords and another, slightly further back in the mix, using a wah-wah pedal: the sound of Blaxploitation movies. Coming up to the three-minute mark there’s a rattle of fingertips on a conga drum before the player (probably Eddie “Bongo” Brown) drops into the medium-paced groove alongside Jamerson’s running bass line. At 3:45 a single punch on a bass drum (sorry, kids: kick drum to you) prefaces the gradual entry of the kit drummer, probably Uriel Jones: just an almost subliminal 4/4 on the snare alongside the conga slaps, then fading away before returning as syncopated bass-drum beats.

The bassoon line is taken up by violas, there are flute and piccolo punctuations, and the fuzz-toned guitarist returns at 7:50 for a searing solo as the rhythm section simmers quietly. The strings swoop and dive. Then Jamerson, having explored all kinds of ornamentations and passing notes, is left alone to support Echoplexed voices before conga and strings join him, and suddenly there are two fuzz guitars — probably Melvin Ragin and Dennis Coffey — and a drummer stealing in, emphasising the first beat of each bar with a cymbal whoosh, raising the intensity. Then just bass and congas again as the singer’s voices echo off each other as they head for the horizon, towards some place into which you don’t want to follow them, fading to silence.

And that’s it. A symphony in E flat minor — the black keys. A track in which space and time expand and contract, where themes and textures are picked up, tossed around, recombined, dropped and rediscovered, all against a background of unswerving but infinitely flexible momentum. Something I’ve listened to countless times since 1971, and of which I’ll never tire. Soul music’s Sistine Chapel ceiling, if you ask me. So thank you for your creativity, Mr Van DePitte. Thank you for your virtuosity, Mr Kendricks and Mr Jamerson. Thank you for your vision, Mr Whitfield and Mr Strong. None of you, now, still with us.

Jan 25

5 Comments

Words and music

From Dorothy Baker’s Young Man with a Horn to Josef Skvorecky’s The Bass Saxophone and beyond, many novelists have made use of jazz in their stories. Jazz musicians, in turn, sometimes take inspiration from novels and plays, as with Duke Ellington’s Such Sweet Thunder and John Dankworth’s What the Dickens. Here are two new examples, coming from different angles and at different trajectories.

Jonathan Coe hoped for a career in music before becoming a celebrated novelist, playing keyboards in various bands before What a Carve-Up! established his career as a writer in 1994. The Rotters’ Club, a winner of the Wodehouse Prize in 2001, got its name from the title of an album by Hatfield and the North, giving a clue to his interest in the progressive rock and jazz-rock fusion music of the 1970s. He has collaborated with the High Lamas, Theo Travis and Louis Philippe, and now with Italy’s brilliant Artchipel Orchestra, whose previous projects have involved tackling the music of Soft Machine and Phil Miller.

Artchipel’s members arranged and performed several of Coe’s compositions at a festival in Milan in 2021, with the writer as a guest musician. A recording of the concert appeared recently as a CD included with an issue of Italy’s Musica Jazz magazine, and it turns out to be very enjoyable. The five pieces engage the senses in a twisty-turny Canterbury Scene kind of way, full of neat bits of melodic and rhythmic invention, adroitly fleshed out by the arrangers (including Ferdinando Faraò, Artchipel’s founder and leader).

Once or twice a tricky time signature gets in the way, but the music relaxes over the course of almost an hour, giving plenty of room for fine improvisations from the tenor saxophonist Germano Zenga on “I Would If I Could (But I Can’t)”, the flautist Carlo Nicita and the trombonist Alberto Bolettieri on “Erbalunga”, and the pianist Luca Pedeferri on “Spring in My Step”. Coe’s own solos, on electric piano on “Suspended Moment” and organ on a groovy closing passage in “Looking for Cicely”, are more than creditable. Two female singers, Naima Faraò and Francesca Sabatino, add a welcome extra texture.

Ten of the 11 pieces on Two Moons, a new album by the German pianist Sebastian Gahler, are inspired by the novels and short stories of Haruki Murakami, whose work often alludes to jazz, as well as pop and classical music. The eleventh piece is “Norwegian Wood”, the song which gave its title to Murakami’s breakthrough novel in 1987 and turned the author into something of a pop star himself.

I share Gahler’s interest in Murakami (I interviewed him for the Guardian here in 2003) and I like very much what he’s done with the idea, which is to make an album that might have come out on Blue Note in the early 1960s, alongside the contemporaneous work of people like Herbie Hancock and Freddie Hubbard. This is a timeless form of music, so even though no boundaries are being stretched, equally nothing sounds tired or dated.

Fans of the books will recognise titles like “Girl with Magical Ears”, “Aomame” and “Crow”, but there’s nothing explicit in the music itself to indicate the presence of Murakami in the minds of the composer and his fellow musicians: Denis Gäbel on tenor and soprano saxophones, Matthias Akeo Nowak on double bass, Ralf Gessler on drums and, on two tracks, the trumpeter Ryan Carniaux. Here’s the trailer: nice to see that two-inch tape rolling on a Studer machine.

* To get hold of the Artchipel/Coe CD, you’ll probably have to buy a copy of the November 2022 issue of Musica Jazz (musicajazz.it). But YouTube has extracts from the Milan concert here and here and from a subsequent concert in Turin last summer here. Sebastian Gahler’s Two Moons is on the JazzSick label.

Jan 17

Songs for his father

The drummer Sebastian Rochford is one of the ten children of the poet Gerard Rochford, who died in 2019, aged 87. In memory of his father, Seb sat down at his grandfather’s piano in his childhood home in Aberdeen and composed seven short piano pieces, adding an eighth written by his father, and then recorded them with his friend Kit Downes playing the piano and Seb himself occasionally adding a discreet commentary from the drum kit. The resulting album, titled A Short Diary, is the son’s remembrance of his father, a gathering of thoughts and feelings.

Unsurprisingly, the result can feel like a distillation of songs and perhaps hymns heard in childhood, filtered through retrospection and lamentation while quietly radiating a sense of joy and gratitude. The music is spare but not austere, simple yet profound, elegiac but never passive, drifting but not diffuse, melodic but not banal. Sometimes the sounds seem muffled, like the drums in a funeral parade, while clear in tone and articulation; at other times the overtones hang in the air, curling like smoke. ECM’s Manfred Eicher mixed the results, bringing the music — as Seb puts it — into focus, using his studio tools to make the piano sound like itself, allowing its natural resonance to sing out.

The eighth piece, “Even Now I Think of Her”, was initially recorded by Gerard Rochford on his phone and sent to his son, who gave it to Downes. It’s a thing of exquisite beauty, the lovely melody and its gentle harmonic underpinning held aloft by a gentle rustling of brushes and cymbals.

Seb is best known for his work with Polar Bear, Acoustic Ladyland, Sons of Kemet, Adele, Leafcutter John, Brian Eno, Ingrid Laubrock, Damon Albarn and many others. He is a virtuoso. The virtuosity on show here, however, is not of technique but of something deeper and more valuable: the ability to take the deepest, most personal feelings and turn them into wordless music in which everyone can share. This is music without rhetoric or ostentation, in which delicacy and strength find an ideal balance. A quiet masterpiece, I think.

* The photograph of Sebastian Rochford is by Rosie Reed Gold. A Short Diary is released on ECM on January 20.