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Mar 22

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Some universal truths

Back in 1982, Billy Valentine and his brother John recorded a song called “Money’s Too Tight (To Mention)”, a slice of disco-funk that made the lower regions of the R&B chart. Its lyric reminded me of Jimmy Witherspoon’s “Money’s Gettin’ Cheaper” and I liked it enough to buy the 12-inch from Groove Records on the corner of Greek Street and Bateman Street in Soho. Three years later it was covered by the Manchester band Simply Red, for whom it provided a first hit and the basis of a rather more successful career than was granted to the Valentine Brothers.

Now Billy returns with what will certainly end up among my albums of the year: Billy Valentine and the Universal Truth, a collection of rearrangements of eight well-known songs united by a certain social relevance. In age they range from the spiritual “Wade in the Water” to Prince’s “Sign of the Times”, first recorded by its composer in 1987. In between come songs written by Curtis Mayfield, Stevie Wonder, Gil Scott-Heron, Pharoah Sanders and Leon Thomas, the members of War, and Leonard Caston and Anita Poree.

Valentine brings the wisdom of his years to these “message” songs. The softened edge to his tone reminds me of the great southern soul singer O. V. Wright, but his vocal agility enables him to handle the rapid-fire phrasing of the Prince song with ease. The anguish in “Home Is Where the Hatred Is” matches that of Esther Phillips’s famous 1972 version.

The arrangements here are modern and imaginative, often making use of jazz gestures. There’s the eloquent improvising of the new star saxophonist Immanuel Wilkins on Mayfield’s “We the People Who Are Darker Than Blue”, sensitively accompanied by Larry Goldings on piano, Linda May Han Oh on bass and Abe Rounds on drums. There’s Claire Daly’s barely controlled baritone saxophone, preaching the spiritual jazz message on Sanders’ “The Creator Has a Master Plan”, and Theo Croker’s elegant trumpet on “Sign of the Times”. There’s Goldings again, reincarnating the spirit of mid-’60s Ramsey Lewis on “Wade in the Water” and a beautiful opening-up of Wonder’s scathingly political “You Haven’t Done Nothin'”. Other featured players include the vibraphonist Joel Ross, the percussionist Alex Acuña and the guitarist Jeff Parker.

Produced by Bob Thiele Jr, the son of the man who produced John Coltrane’s Impulse albums and recorded Ornette Coleman on his own Flying Dutchman label, this isn’t a jazz record any more than it’s a soul record, a funk record or an R&B record (some of the tracks have a rhythm section of Pino Palladino on bass guitar and James Gadson on drums). It’s all of them, mixed together in perfect proportions. And if the message of these songs isn’t new, it’s never a bad thing to be reminded of the continuing urgency of what they have to say. In a post-truth world, they hit even harder.

* Billy Valentine and the Universal Truth is released on 24 March on the Acid Jazz/Flying Dutchman label: http://www.acidjazz.co.uk. The photograph is by Atiba Jefferson.

Mar 7

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Picasso & Monk in Paris

In a room devoted to Pablo Picasso in the 1950s, there’s something unexpected: the sound of Thelonious Monk, alone at the piano, ruminating on “I’m Getting Sentimental Over You”. The rest of Thelonious Himself, the 1957 album consisting of seven solo tracks plus “Monk’s Mood” with John Coltrane and Wilbur Ware, is playing on a continuous loop, quietly and unobtrusively, conditioning the mood in which a handful of masterpieces, including Jacqueline aux mains croisées (1954), can be examined as part of a new exhibition in the Musée Picasso in Paris.

It’s one of several surprises introduced by the British designer Paul Smith, invited by the museum’s director to create a show commemoraing the fiftieth anniversary of Picasso’s death. His brief was to bring a fresh eye to bear on the selection and presentation of items from the 5,000 assorted artworks in the permanent collection, most of them acquired by the nation as part of an inheritance-tax settlement with the artist’s family.

I first met Paul in 1965, when we were still in our teens and he’d just begun managing the menswear department on the upper floor of a boutique in Nottingham. Called Birdcage, it was a minute’s walk away from the tiny premises in which, five years later, he would open the first shop bearing his own name. Now there are more than 120 Paul Smith shops in 60 countries around the world. Back then he was full of imagination, enthusiasm and a love of silly humour, all qualities that time, a knighthood and membership of the Légion d’honneur have done nothing to erode.

His instinctive response to the museum’s invitation was to emphasise the role of colour in the artist’s career, from the pink period of 1904-1906 to the blue and white stripes of the Breton sailors’ shirt Picasso was wearing when the photographer Robert Doisneau turned up to capture some famous images at his house in Vallauris in Provence in 1952, including the shot where sausage-shaped bread rolls — petits pains — take the place of his fingers.

Mounted with wit and zest, avoiding the reverence with which such retrospectives are traditionally mounted, some of the show is eye-popping. In one of the 24 themed rooms, originals are mounted on walls papered with posters from Picasso exhibitions around the world. His variations on Manet’s Le Dejeuner sur l’herbe are ranged in the greenest green room you’ve ever seen. A wall of pale blue and yellow lozenges echoes the harlequin costume worn by the painter’s three-year-old son Paul as he posed for his father in 1924. The abundance of floral and striped wallpaper makes the rooms in which a more sober approach is appropriate — the Blue and Rose periods, or the poignantly understated finale of Le Jeune peintre, from Picasso’s last year on earth, in a room washed in pale sunlight — even more effective.

Not just paintings, either. A dozen of Picasso’s one-off decorated dinner plates are mounted in the middle of a wall of plain white plates, which seem to be waiting for him to get up in the morning, grab his paints and start daubing fishbones or minotaur’s heads. The famous bull’s head fashioned in 1942 from a discarded pair of dropped handlebars and a bicycle saddle is hung high on one wall of the very first room, confronting a herd of cows on the opposite wall assembled from their modern equivalents, with the bars turned downwards, presumably to signify bovine submission in the face of taurean power. There’s a sense of semi-surrealistic comedy at work here that mirrors Picasso’s own sense of humour but also offers a quiet comment.

Perhaps purists will be relieved to have their Picassos restored to more neutral surroundings after the exhibition in the beautiful hôtel particulier in the Marais ends in August, but Paul’s inclusion of the sound of Monk’s piano — apart from giving me an excuse to devote a piece to the show in a blog about music — seemed to symbolise the benign and sympathetic creativity at work in the exhibition as a whole.

* Célébration Picasso: Le collection prend ses couleurs! is at the Musée Picasso, 5 Rue de Thorigny, Paris 75003, from 7 March to 27 August 2023.

Mar 3

25 Comments

At the Marquee

Was the Marquee Club really the world’s greatest music venue, as the subtitle to a new history of the club suggests? There might be arguments from Carnegie Hall, the Olympia music hall in Paris, Ronnie Scott’s, the Berlin Philharmonie, the Village Vanguard and a few others. But from its opening in 1958 to the closure in 2006 of the last club to bear that name, it had a fair claim to the title, given that its attractions over the years went from Dexter Gordon, Chris Barber and Dudley Moore through Alexis Korner and Long John Baldry, the Stones, the Yardbirds, Manfred Mann, Graham Bond, Little Stevie Wonder, the Who, David Jones/Bowie, Sonny Boy Williamson, Rod Stewart, Jimi Hendrix, King Crimson, Led Zeppelin, Fela Kuti, Genesis, Dr Feelgood and Dire Straits all the way through the Damned, the Sex Pistols (supporting Eddie and the Hot Rods), the Jam, the Police, Motorhead to REM and Guns N’ Roses and hundreds and hundreds of others, most of them still in their formative stages, including seemingly every British blues band and prog rock outfit assembled via the Musicians Wanted columns of the Melody Maker.

It began as a jazz club at 165 Oxford Street, in a basement ballroom beneath the Academy Cinema. In 1964, as R&B took over, it moved a couple of hundred yards south, to the ground floor of 90 Wardour Street, bang in the middle of Soho. That was its classic location, which it occupied until the summer of 1988, when it moved around the corner to 105-107 Charing Cross Road, which had been a cinema between 1911 and 1987. The Marquee was there for seven years, hosting Spiritualised, Aerosmith, Megadeath and others until it closed and the name was sold to people who briefly ran clubs exploiting its renown in Leicester Square and Upper St Martin’s Lane until the final closure in 2006.

Among many other things, the new history of the Marquee, by Robert Sellars with Nick Pendleton, told me that a contributory factor to the move out of Wardour Street was the crumbling detected in the façade of the building, an effect of the loud music being played within. One night that may have done more than most to shake the walls was 6 October 1970, the second night of a 36-date tour of Britain by Tony Williams’s Lifetime, recently expanded to a quartet with Jack Bruce joining Larry Young and John McLaughlin. If forced to nominate the greatest gig I’ve ever attended, that would probably be the one. For some of the many musicians who were present, it was a life-changing experience.

The club’s story is well told, with plenty of detail and a cast of characters that changes constantly as the decades whizz by. Not just the musicians but the people who ran the place, starting with Harold Pendleton (Nick’s father), a jazz-mad accountant who became president of the National Jazz Federation, and his wife Barbara, and including the lavishly toupéed manager John C. Gee and his assistant Jack Barrie, along with characters such as Tony Stratton-Smith, the founder of Charisma Records, whose acts often started their careers there. And not just the club itself but ancillary premises like The Ship, the pub a few yards up Wardour Street, where members of the audience could have a beer before going down to the non-licensed Marquee, or La Chasse, the first-floor drinking club where musicians and other music business types did likewise. If you were there during any of the club’s many eras, and even if you weren’t but wish you had been, the book will provide much enjoyment.

* Marquee: The Story of the World’s Greatest Music Venue is published by Paradise Road (320pp, £22). The photograph of the audience waiting outside 90 Wardour Street is from the book and is uncredited.