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Jun 29

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The bending of headlights

“We have a new very quiet album out,” Rickie Lee Jones said as she greeted a packed Jazz Café in London last night. I bought Pieces of Treasure, the album in question, a few weeks ago, played it three times, and filed it next to the rest of the evidence of her long and remarkable life in music. It was certainly nice to see her reunited with Russ Titelman, the co-producer of her unforgettable debut album back in 1979 and a careful curator of this new collection of standard songs, but it didn’t make a huge initial impression. Last night she brought it to life.

She’s travelling with a three-piece band: Ben Rosenblum on electric piano doubling accordion, Paul Nowinski on string bass and Vilray Bolles on electric guitar. For the first half of the 75-minute set she just sang a selection of standards, starting with a pin-drop “The Second Time Around”, which she recorded on Pop Pop in 1991, and continuing with “Just in Time”, “One for My Baby” and “September Song”, which are on the new one, then “Up a Lazy River” from 2000’s It’s Like This, “Hi-lili, Hi-lo” from Pop Pop (with the accordionist not just exquisitely replicating but actually improving on Dino Saluzzi’s bandoneon part on the original recording), and “Nature Boy” from the new one.

It didn’t take long to appreciate not just how well she was singing but how beautifully her musicians were creating a matrix for the way she was so thoroughly inhabiting the songs. You might have heard “September Song” a million times, interpreted by some of the greatest singers in the history of popular music, but by bringing herself so close to the song, by eliminating the distance between song and singer, she made you think, as if for the first time, about what it meant.

Later on she did the same with another song worn threadbare by repetition. “There will be other lips that I may kiss / How could they thrill me like yours used to do? / Oh, I may dream a million dreams / But how will they come true? / For there will never be another you.” It was as though she’d just written it.

The groove changed with Steely Dan’s “Show Biz Kids”, which she recorded on It’s Like This. The slinky funk-lite keyboard riff summoned a whole universe of laid-back rock and roll hipness, and the audience enjoyed singing along: “Show business kids makin’ movies of themselves / You know they don’t give a fuck about anybody else.” (And how prophetic was that, written by Walter Becker and Donald Fagen 50 years ago?) She did her father’s song, the lullaby-ballad “The Moon is Made of Gold”, and her own much loved “Weasel and the White Boys Cool”, and finished by returning to the new album for “On the Sunny Side of the Street”, a song her dad taught her in the summer of 1963 (“a big year for me” — she would have been eight years old, and he also taught her “My Funny Valentine” and “Bye Bye Blackbird”). She left to an ovation, on a wave of profound affection.

But earlier, after about an hour, when she had strapped on a guitar, there had been “The Last Chance Texaco”. Those two gentle chords, instantly recognisable, then: “A long stretch of headlights / Bends into I-9…” It’s a movie. It’s a poem. It’s a confessional. It’s a communion. It’s the song that defines her. The one that most fully draws us into her world. “(It) wasn’t like anything I’d ever written,” she remembered in her wonderful 2021 autobiography. “It wasn’t like anything I’d ever heard.” As she sang it, once again the space between then and now collapsed. And when the sound of the car on the highway faded to silence, I might not have been alone in discovering that my cheeks were suddenly damp.

* The photo of Rickie Lee Jones at the Jazz Café is by me. Pieces of Treasure is on BMG/Modern. Her autobiography, Last Chance Texaco, is published in paperback by Grove Press. Thanks to Allan Chase (see Comments) for identifying the musicians.

Jun 26

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Peter Brötzmann 1941-2023

I’m listening to Catching Ghosts, a beautiful recording of Peter Brötzmann’s set at the 2022 Berlin jazz festival, in whch he was joined by the Moroccan guembri player Majid Bekkas and the American drummer Hamid Drake. Brötzmann died last week in Wuppertal, his hometown, aged 82; the cause was chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, from which he’d suffered for some time, exacerbated by the arrival of Covid-19. His final public appearances were earlier this year at Café Oto in London.

A formidable figure. Brötzmann was famous for the volume (in every sense) of his saxophone playing: not just the prodigious decibel level but the volume of notes and the volume of energy, urgency and passion that poured out of his alto and tenor saxophones, his clarinet and bass clarinet, and his Hungarian tarogato in countless live appearances and scores of recordings. He lived as hard as he blew, and there’s pathos in the thought that the ferocity of his playing over the course of 60-odd years may have contributed to his fatal illness.

I first set eyes on him in November 1969, when I took time off from covering the Berlin Jazztage to visit what most people referred to as the anti-festival: the second annual Total Music Meeting, held in the Litfass, a café in Charlottenburg. It was the brainchild of the New Artists Guild, a group of young German musicians who objected to the way the line-up of official festival (whose stars that year were Duke Ellington, Miles Davis, Stan Kenton, Sarah Vaughan and Lionel Hampton) was failing to include exponents of the new European free jazz.

I remember hearing the pianist Alex von Schlippenbach there for the first time, and the tenorist Rüdiger Carl. Brötzman was leading a band including three British musicians — Evan Parker, Paul Rutherford and Derek Bailey — along with the German bassist Buschi Niebergall, the Dutch drummer Han Bennink and the Belgian keyboards player Fred van Hove. Without disavowing its influences, this was becoming a truly European idiom.

Several of these musicians had been involved in the recording of Machine Gun, the octet album released the previous year on Brötzmann’s own label. Taking its cue from John Coltrane’s Ascension and Albert Ayler’s Bells, but raising the collective intensity to unprecedented levels, Machine Gun acted as a manifesto. Today it retains, like Jimi Hendrix’s Woodstock version of “The Star Spangled Banner”, its ability to shock and amaze in real time while also carrying the mind back to the conflicts and social turbulence of the time and place in which it was made.

“We saw our task as building a different foundation for music,” Brötzmann told Reinhard Köchl of Zeit Online early this month, in his last interview. Out of that second Total Music Meeting in 1969 came a label called FMP (Free Music Production), the brainchild of Brötzmann and the producer Jost Gebers. Starting a few months later with Manfred Schoof’s European Echoes, FMP went on to release more than 200 albums on vinyl and/or CD — including, in 1971, the first of several reissues of Machine Gun.

It was also the home of several albums by one of my favourite Brötzmann groups, a quartet with the trumpeter Toshinori Kondo, the bassist William Parker and Hamid Drake on drums. Die Like a Dog was the name of their first album, subtitled “Fragments of Music, Life and Death of Albert Ayler”, and it became the name of the band. My favourite of the quartet’s albums is a 1999 session recorded in Berlin and released under the title Aoyama Crows. In an interview included with that album, Brötzmann reflected on mortality. “We’ll just play until we drop,” he said. “It’s not because we’re heroes. We have to. There isn’t much else for us to do but to carry on playing.”

He was not necessarily the easiest person to deal with, even for someone who admired him greatly. When Tyshawn Sorey agreed to be my artist in residence at Jazzfest Berlin in 2017, we discussed possible projects. I suggested that a duo with Brötzmann might be a good idea. Tyshawn was immediately enthusiastic. I made the approach, only to receive a message from Brötzmann saying that he had no intention of being part of “a circus”. That was a pity; it could have been a colossal meeting. Perhaps it was me. Anyway, I’m glad my successor, Nadin Deventer, had better luck in 2022.

By that time the onset of physical limitations may have shorn Brötzmann’s playing of some of the Sturm und Drang elements that characterised his prime years. But exposed to a clearer view in Catching Ghosts is a kind of lyricism which entwines beautifully around Majid Bekkas’s traditional Gnawa chants and the sprung rhythms set up by the guembri (a three-stringed bass lute) and the drums. Brötzmann gave us late work worthy of his long and extraordinary career.

* The photograph of Peter Brötzmann is by Anna Niedermeier. Catching Ghosts is out now on the ACT label.

Jun 20

13 Comments

Nick Drake: The Life

You had to wonder, looking around the October Gallery in London last night, what Nick Drake would have made of the gathering arranged to mark the publication of Richard Morton Jack’s account of his short life. As his sister, the actress Gabrielle Drake, remarked in her elegantly moving speech, he might have taken it as a vindication of his own belief in his talent.

Among those present last night were many who had spoken to the author about their encounters with Drake. Among those I knew were Simon Crocker, Chris Blackwell and Jerry Gilbert. Crocker played drums at Marlborough in a band in which Drake played saxophone and later travelled with him on expeditions to Aix and Saint-Tropez; their final encounter, a few months before Drake’s death, is recounted in the book. Blackwell, the founder of Island Records, had liked Drake’s demos — and Drake himself — when he heard them at the end of Nick’s first term at Cambridge in 1967; a year later he signed him to the label at the behest of Joe Boyd, who became his producer. Gilbert, my colleague at the Melody Maker for a few months in 1970, secured the only real interview Drake ever gave, published in Sounds later that year**.

And, of course, there was Gabrielle, to whom the extraordinary way her younger brother’s posthumous reputation and record sales eventually took off must have been the source of such complex emotions: joy that he had finally been recognised, regret that he could not see and be part of it, all filtered through the memory of the mixed happiness and pain that marked his 26 years.

As she writes in the book’s foreword, this is not an authorised biography in the sense that the author’s approach or his final manuscript were formally approved by Nick’s estate or his surviving family. But Richard Morton Jack was given such generous access to all relevant sources and material, and has treated this opaque, enigmatic life with such care and skill, and with such a calm, understated ability to evoke time and place, that his 550-page volume can be considered definitive — a dangerous word when it comes to biography, or indeed any non-fiction work, but in this case almost certainly justified.

* Richard Morton Jack’s Nick Drake: The Life is published by John Murray.

** Not quite the only one, as it turns out: during his research for the book, Richard Morton Jack unearthed a 1970 interview given to a writer from, amazingly, Jackie, a magazine for teenage girls.

Jun 14

4 Comments

Old and New Dreams

I may have said this before, but jazz tributes and reunions don’t do much for me. I’d rather hear the music moving on, using its past as the basis for further development. There are exceptions, including the welcome rediscoveries and reinterpretations of Herbie Nichols’ compositions by various musicians, Ryan Truesdell’s meticulous reconstruction of Gil Evans’s lesser known pieces, Alan Skidmore’s lifelong homage to John Coltrane and — of course — Old and New Dreams, four players who convened in 1976 to continue the work they’d done as members of Ornette Coleman’s acoustic quartets.

The trumpeter Don Cherry, the tenor saxophonist Dewey Redman, the bassist Charlie Haden and the drummer Ed Blackwell made three albums together, all for European companies. The first was for Italy’s Black Saint label. The second and third were for ECM, and the first of those will shortly reappear as part of the German company’s vinyl series under the general rubric ‘Luminessence’, along with Gary Burton’s New Quartet. (The first two albums in the series were Kenny Wheeler’s Gnu High and Nana Vasconcelos’s Saudades.)

In the case of Old and New Dreams, it’s good to have the album’s cover, designed by Barbara Wojirsch around the photograph by Herbert Wenn, back in 12-inch form: the calm austerity of the image and the controlled informality of the hand lettering are echt ECM. So is the sound, engineered by Jan Erik Kongshaug at Oslo’s Talent Studio under the supervision of Manfred Eicher, a combination that produced some of the label’s finest recordings throughout the 1970s.

The album begins with a 12-minute version of “Lonely Woman”, the classic ballad Coleman first recorded in Los Angeles in 1959 for The Shape of Jazz to Come, to which it also provided the lead-off track. Cherry and Haden were present for that momentous session (Billy Higgins was the drummer), and their historic connection to the song contributes to the extraordinary richness of this interpretation. If the original was a five-minute miniature in which every note could be committed to memory, here the framework is stretched to incorporate new perspectives. If I could only keep half a dozen tracks from the five decades of ECM, this would be one of them.

The remainder of the album maintains the standard: another Coleman tune (the previously unknown bounce-tempo “Open or Close”) plus Blackwell’s African-flavoured “Togo”, Cherry’s lyrical desert-blues “Guinea”, Redman’s musette feature “Orbit of La-Ba”, and Haden’s eco-anthem “Song of the Whales”, the bassist using his bow to create the sound of the endangered marine leviathans as an introduction to his gorgeous descending theme, which manages to be simultaneously mournful and uplifting.

All four of these musicians are gone now, as are Ornette and Higgins. But the unique music they made lives on, not least in this priceless reincarnation and the epic “Lonely Woman” it contains.

* Old and New Dreams is out in a vinyl edition on the ECM label on June 23. I don’t know who took the photo of the quartet — Charlie Haden, Don Cherry, Ed Blackwell and Dewey Redman — playing together; if anyone has that information, please tell me and I’ll provide a credit.

Jun 6

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Astrud (& Gil)

By the time Astrud Gilberto got to sing with Gil Evans, the great arranger had slowed his pace of working. Eventually he would take as long to compose eight bars as some writers took to complete a symphony, but in 1965 he was still able to write 11 arrangements to order for the singer who had shot to unexpected, almost accidental fame with “The Girl from Ipanema” alongside Stan Getz the previous year.

Those 11 pieces, however, amounted to less than 25 minutes of music — enough for one side of a 12-inch LP. Creed Taylor, supervising the album for Verve Records, knew all about Gil’s working habits, having produced two of his classics, Out of the Cool in 1961 and Individualism in 1964. Probably in desperation, he hired the reliable Al Cohn to arrange two more songs which padded the album out to a total of 32 minutes: 15 minutes on one side, 17 on the other, barely respectable.

But you don’t weight the value of Evans’s music with a set of scales, and there were sublime moments on the album, titled Look to the Rainbow and released in 1966. The opening track, “Berimbau”, featured Dom Um Romao — later to join Weather Report — on the eponymous single-string percussion instrument. “Once Upon a Summertime” is a gorgeous ballad that Evans had arranged for Miles Davis on the Quiet Nights album three years earlier (another LP that had to be bulked out, this time with a six-minute quintet track). “A Felicidade” has Evans finding subtle colours to accompany Tom Jobim’s song: listen to the opening unisons and momentary dissonances in the writing for brass and woodwind, and wonder at the combinations. And “I Will Wait For You” is the diaphanous highlight: Evans in excelsis, featuring one of those moments in which he prepared the ground with exquisite care for an incoming improviser, in this case the trumpeter Johnny Coles, one of his favourite soloists.

Astrud wasn’t a great singer, or even a good one in a technical sense; what she had was a presence that transferred itself to tape, apparent to everyone who heard “The Girl from Ipanema” for the first time in 1964, cherishing its evocation of a certain sun-splashed insouciance that suited the times.

When I heard the news today of her death at the age of 83, I thought immediately of my friend George Taylor, who died a couple of years ago. It was George who bought “The Girl from Ipanema” and The Astrud Gilberto Album when they were brand-new, for us to listen to with our girlfriends on warm summer evenings.

* You can get an expanded CD of Look to the Rainbow on Amazon for practically nothing these days. If anyone knows who took the lovely portrait above, I’d be grateful for the information.