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Sep 28

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Miles à l’Olympia

Miles Davis arrived in Paris on the morning of November 30, 1957 for a tour booked by a local promoter, Marcel Romano. He was met at the airport by the singer and actress Juliette Gréco, whose lover he had become during his first visit to France, in 1949, and by the young film director Louis Malle, who wanted him to provide music for the soundtrack to his film Ascenseur pour l’échafaud.

That same night the tour began at the historic Olympia music hall on the Boulevard des Capucines, with Miles at the head of a band completed by the 20-year-old Franco-American tenor saxophone prodigy Barney Wilen, the great American drummer Kenny Clarke, and two excellent French musicians, the pianist René Urtreger and the bassist Pierre Michelot. They performed, as Urtreger told his biographer, Agnès Desarthe, “sans répétition” — without rehearsal.

The soundtrack was recorded on December 4, with the same quintet; it was a turning point in Miles’s music, representing a move away from the standard ballads-and-blues repertoire towards pieces of indeterminate length based on minimal harmonic information rather than closed-loop chord sequences, played live in fragments as Davis watched the film being projected on to a screen in the studio.

Meanwhile, however, the material was more conventional when the band played at the Olympia and at another concert in Amsterdam’s Concertgebouw a few days later, followed by a return to Paris for three weeks at the Club Saint-Germain, apparently arranged when Romano failed to secure the concert bookings across Europe for which he had been hoping. After a concert in Brussels on December 20, Miles flew back to New York, where he began putting together the sextet that would record Milestones early in the new year.

The Amsterdam concert was recorded for radio broadcast, and has been bootlegged several times, most recently on a CD on the Lone Hill label, with lamentably anachronistic packaging and a rather brittle, toppy sound. No complete recording of the Olympia concert was known to exist until, after Romano’s death, his nephew and heir found a set of reel-to-reel tapes among his possessions. He sold them to Jordi Pujol, the Barcelona-based specialist in historical reissues, who commissioned the audio engineer Marc Doutrepont to restore and master them. Doutrepont has achieved a sound as good as the best live recordings of the time: true, clear, warm and perfectly balanced.

Davis and Clarke were old friends and colleagues, and the trumpeter had played with Urtreger and Michelot during his second trip to Europe with the Birdland All Stars, 12 months earlier. Wilen was new to him, but the whole band sounds at ease from the start of their first appearance as a unit. They play a dozen pieces: “Solar”, “Four”, “What’s New”, “No Moe”, “Lady Bird”, “Tune Up”, “I’ll Remember April”, “Bags’ Groove”, “‘Round Midnight”, “Now’s the Time”, “Walkin'” and “The Theme”.

The American writer and musician Mike Zwerin, a steel baron’s son who had played trombone with Davis’s nonet at the Royal Roost in 1948 (aged 18!), was in the audience at the Olympia. Much later Zwerin wrote that the concert had begun with “Walkin'” and that — “in an entrance worthy of Nijinsky” — Miles appeared on stage only midway through that opening tune, to wild applause. No sign of any such thing here.

Miles’s tone and attack were at their most exquisite at this time, between the sessions for Miles Ahead and Milestones, the alertness of his mind ensuring that the poignancy of his sound never became self-indulgent. His solo on “Four” is the sort of thing, like his improvisations on the studio versions of “Milestones” and “So What”, that could be transcribed and studied for the details of its nuanced perfection. He takes “What’s New” as a solo ballad feature, producing elegant variations that can be listened to over and over again.

Wilen, precociously poised and inventive, gets Tadd Dameron’s “Lady Bird”, “I’ll Remember April” and a bouncy “Now’s the Time” to himself with the rhythm section. They are respectively the fifth, seventh and tenth tracks on the album, making me wonder if this is the same order as the actual set list. Would Miles have left the stage and returned so often? Given that he had only stepped off a transatlantic flight a few hours earlier, perhaps so.

Other joys include the trumpeter’s intense blues playing on “Bags’ Groove” and his relaxed exchanges with the immaculate Clarke on Sonny Rollins’s “No Moe”. A couple of fluffed phrases at the start of “Walkin'” are rare blemishes on a a release whose artistic value is the equal of its historical interest. If you love Miles, don’t miss this.

* The Miles Davis Quintet’s In Concert at the Olympia Paris 1957 is on Fresh Sound Records. The uncredited photo is from the booklet accompanying the album. If you want to know why the soundtrack to the Louis Malle movie — released in the UK as Lift to the Scaffold — was such a significant moment in Davis’s career, you might like to read the book after which this blog is named: The Blue Moment: Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue and the Remaking of Modern Music (Faber & Faber).

Sep 26

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Exhuming Nico

It was out of sheer curiosity that I went along to Café Oto last night to hear a performance of Nico’s The Marble Index by the string quartet Apartment House (Mira Benjamin and Chihiro Ono on violins, Bridget Carey on viola and Anton Lukoszevieze on cello) augmented by Kerry Yong on piano and other keyboards. The part of Nico was taken by the singer Francesca Fargion.

The room was sold out and the audience expectant. The original album, in which John Cale added his viola, other instruments and post-production touches to Nico’s seven songs, has a special status within the history of rock: barely half an hour long, it arrived as a message from a different world, seemingly shaped by the sensibility of European art-song and the practices of the American classical avant-garde, completely uncompromising in the challenge it offered the listener in 1968.

I suppose the nearest it ever came to being played in concert in its original form during Nico’s lifetime was when she performed a couple of its songs with accompaniment by Cale and Brian Eno at the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin in 1974, where they were received with the mixture of applause and outright derision that had greeted the album’s release six years earlier. I certainly never expected to hear the music performed live again after her death in Ibiza 35 years ago.

It was brave of Yong to attempt a modified transcription of the full work, and of Fargion to deliver Nico’s words and melodies. Of course it wasn’t remotely like hearing Nico herself, whose strong, unabashed, wilfully inflexible and uninflected voice defined the music every bit as much as the sound of her harmonium and her strangely memorable melodies, with their echoes of folk tunes and lullabies.

Very wisely, Fargion did not attempt an imitation. But although she is a fine, classically trained singer with a pleasant tone, her interpretations seemed colourless, fading into the strings rather than dominating them. Only “Frozen Warnings”, where the string writing was at its most economical, and “Nibelungen”, a lovely acappella song unreleased until Elektra put out an expanded edition in 1991, allowed the emergence of an attractive poignancy at a worthwhile creative variance from that of the original.

If you wanted to do something really interesting with The Marble Index, to try and match its own inherent challenge, you’d probably have to take it apart and reconstruct it in a different form. This was a careful and respectful performance, observing some of the details of the original, such as the tiny vocal echo on “No One Is There” and a modest version of the pealing piano on “Evening of Light”, although the sound of the harmonium was not heard until “Julius Caesar (Memento Hodie)”, the fifth song in the sequence.

The audience listened intently, and the warmth of their response spoke of the veneration in which this extraordinary piece is now held. In the end, though, what was completely missing was the sense of outright shock and enigmatic purpose that the original artifact itself still conveys, 55 years later, and which is such a part of its eternally untranslatable meaning.

Sep 25

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Requiem for a soft-rocker

Terry Kirkman (extreme left) with the Association at the Monterey Pop Festival

The members of the Association were still wearing suits and ties when they played the Monterey Pop Festival in 1967, the opening act on a bill including Jimi Hendrix, the Who, Jefferson Airplane, Big Brother and the Holding Company and other heroes of the new counter-culture. Their qualification for inclusion might have been their first Top 10 single, “Along Comes Mary”, a three-minute proto-psychedelic masterpiece written by Tandyn Almer.

The follow-up, “Cherish”, a No. 1, had swiftly recast them as purveyors of soft-rock before the great “Pandora’s Golden Heebie Jeebies”, with its koto intro and inner-light lyric, earned praise from no less a psychedelic authority than Dr Timothy Leary, despite going no higher than No. 35. But then “Windy” (another No. 1) and “Never My Love” (No. 2) put them firmly back in the middle of the road, where they have remained in the public mind ever since.

Anyone interested enough to turn over “Never My Love”, however, found a B-side that restated their claim to hippie credibility. It was called “Requiem for the Masses” and it begins with military snare drum rolls introducing a choir singing acappella: “Requiem aeternam, requiem aeternam…” Then a young man’s voice sings the opening lines against an acoustic guitar: “Mama, mama, forget your pies / Have faith they won’t get cold / And turn your eyes to the bloodshot sky / Your flag is flying full / At half-mast…” The snare drum tattoo continues behind the second verse: “Red was the colour of his blood flowing thin / Pallid white was the colour of his lifeless skin / Blue was the colour of the morning sky / He saw looking up from the ground where he died / It was the last thing every seen by him…” The backing falls away and the unaccompanied choir returns: “Kyrie eleison, kyrie eleison…”

And here’s the chorus: “Black and white were the figures that recorded him / Black and white was the newsprint he was mentioned in / Black and white was the question that so bothered him / He never asked, he was taught not to ask / But was on his lips as they buried him.” The song ends with a lonely bugle against snare drum and muffled tom-tom.

In 1967 this song could be about only one thing: the war in Vietnam. Of course there already had been “Masters of War” from Dylan, “Universal Soldier” from Buffy Sainte-Marie and “Eve of Destruction” from P. F. Sloan. And perhaps “Requiem for the Masses” is not a truly great record, but it stands alongside things like Country Joe and the Fish’s “I-Feel-Like-I’m-Fixin’-to-Die Rag” and Earth Opera’s “The Great American Eagle Tragedy” as an ambitious and powerful contemporary statement from the world of white rock music.

Its composer was Terry Kirkman, a founder member of the group, who sang, played percussion and brass and woodwind instruments (maybe including the bugle part). Before “Requiem for the Masses”, he had written “Cherish” and another soft-rock classic, “Everything That Touches You”. Born in rural Kansas, he was brought up in Los Angeles, where he studied music, but it was while working as a salesman in Hawaii that he met Jules Alexander, with whom he would go on to found several groups in LA, including the Inner Tubes (with Mama Cass and David Crosby), before the Association came together as a six-piece band in 1965. He left for the first time in 1972, returned in 1979, left again in 1984, and thereafter took part in various reunion concerts while working as an addiction counsellor.

Terry Kirkman died this week, aged 83. It would be absolutely wrong to underestimate the courage it must have taken for a band famous for their soft-rock hits to record such an unequivocal song of protest during a year in which the B52s were pounding Hanoi and Lyndon Johnson was sending ever more ground troops into the fight against the Vietcong, still with support from the majority of the American public. Respect to him, then.

Sep 24

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Mike Westbrook’s Band of Bands

From left: Mike Westbrook, Kate Westbrook, Karen Street, Pete Whyman, Chris Biscoe, Marcus Vergette (out of shot: Coach York)

You might have noticed, Mike Westbrook said as the second of today’s two lunchtime sets at the Pizza Express drew to a close, that a lot of this music we’ve been playing has something to do with the blues. And then he quoted Duke Ellington: “When times get tough, I write another blues.” That, Westbrook said, is what he found himself doing rather a lot these days. And then he and the new septet he calls his Band of Bands played “Gas, Dust, Stone”, which he described as “a blues for the planet”.

Its slowly wandering theme, first sung by Kate Westbrook and then voiced for the alto saxophones of Chris Biscoe and Pete Whyman and the accordion of Karen Street, reminded me at times of Ellington’s world-weary “4:30 Blues” before the mood switched, charging into the 12/8 of Charles Mingus’s “Wednesday Night Prayer Meeting”, powered by Marcus Vergette’s bass and Coach York’s drums, with a beautiful Street solo.

Westbrook, who is 87, formed his first band in Plymouth in 1958, and the Band of Bands celebrates longevity. Mike and Kate have been working, writing and performing together for 50 years. Biscoe first joined them 40 years ago, to create the Westbrook Trio. Street and Whyman have been with them on various projects for 30 years. Vergette and York, the newcomers, were called to the colours a mere 20 years ago, and are now the heartbeat of the Uncommon Orchestra.

The septet is both an expansion of the trio and a reduction of the big band, capable of handling everything from the fast bebop of the opening “Glad Day”, one of Westbrook’s pieces inspired by William Blake, through a brilliantly recast version of Billy Strayhorn’s “Johnny Come Lately” to the slow-rolling gospel cadences of “Blues for Terenzi” and the open spaces of “Unsigned Panorama”, with marvellous unaccompanied solos by Whyman (on clarinet) and Street.

Several songs from Fine ‘n’ Yellow, their 2010 song cycle, made an impression. Throughout “Yellow Dog”, York maintained a pulse (on his beautifully clear Murat Diril ride cymbal) three times that of the rest of the band, allowing Biscoe to float in his typically expressive solo between the drummer’s tempo, the much slower one being paced by Vergette, and the unstated one in between. “My Lover’s Coat”, finely sung, seemed to have “Blue Monk” in its bones.

If there were frequent reminders of how thoroughly Westbrook has metabolised his love of Ellington, Mingus and Monk, there was also evidence of a new enthusiasm for the songs of Frederick Hollander, a German composer of film music. Born Friedrich Hollaender in London in 1896 and brought up in Berlin, he wrote for Max Reinhardt’s theatre productions, accompanied artists in the Weimar-era cabarets, and wrote the music for Josef von Sternberg’s The Blue Angel, including “Falling in Love Again”, delivered by the film’s star, Marlene Dietrich. Leaving Germany when the Nazis took power, he arrived in Hollywood in 1934, anglicised his name, and had written for more than 100 films before his return to Germany in 1956, where he died in 1976.

One of those Hollywood films was A Foreign Affair, a 1948 comedy-drama set in post-war Berlin, directed by Billy Wilder and again starring Dietrich. Kate Westbrook delivered two of Hollander’s songs from that film, both concerned with the perils of emotional and sexual transactions: the sardonic “Black Market”, a Weill-esque piece on which she departed from the text to display her command of vocal effects, and “Illusions”, a gorgeous ballad on which she was exquisitely supported by Street and Biscoe.

Pointing out to the audience that this was the first public appearance of the Band of Bands, Westbrook expressed the hope that there would many more. An album devoted to the music of Frederick Hollander might not be such a bad next step*.

* See a comment below.

Sep 23

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Fire of London

The flight of Mike Osborne’s alto saxophone was like that of the swift: its entire existence was spent on the wing, soaring high or swooping in shallow dives, twisting back on itself before arcing again towards the heavens, as if desperate to avoid contact with the ground.

Something remarkable was happening in London in the early ’70s, at places like the 100 Club, the Phoenix in Cavendish Square, the Plough in Stockwell, and Peanuts, a regular session run by Osborne at a place near Liverpool Street station. A few dozen young musicians, most of whom had emerged late in the previous decade as sidemen in the bands of Mike Westbrook, Chris McGregor, Graham Collier and John Stevens, were now playing together in shifting combinations. The economics of jazz dictated a preference for small groups, and one of the most remarkable was Osborne’s trio, completed by two South African emigrés, Harry Miller on bass and Louis Moholo on drums.

What I remember from that scene is the absolute lack of pretension. There was no interest in surfaces or self-presentation. The musicians appeared before the audience wearing the clothes they’d arrived in. There wasn’t much in the way of introducing or explaining — but neither was there the kind of self-conscious detachment that even someone as natural as the bassist Dave Holland, once a member of that London scene, felt compelled to adopt on stage when he crossed the Atlantic and joined Miles Davis.

On the bandstand, the Mike Osborne Trio was typical of its time and milieu in that there was only one priority: to burn. Strategies learnt from Coltrane, Coleman and Ayler were bent to their own ends, creating a platform for their own individual voices. Osborne loved Ornette and Jackie McLean, his fellow altoists (I remember a copy of the latter’s great Blue Note LP Destination…Out! propped beside the record player in his flat when I interviewed him in 1970), but he became one of the era’s great originals on his instrument.

Sadly, his own era didn’t last long. In 1959 he arrived from Hereford as an 18-year-old to study at the Guildhall in London. Fifteen years later he suffered a breakdown at the end of a six-week gig at the Paris Opéra, where he had played onstage for a ballet alongside the other two members of the group SOS, his fellow saxophonists Alan Skidmore and John Surman. Prolonged treatment meant that there would be only sporadic gigs until 1982, when he returned to Hereford, his playing days at an end. He died of cancer in 2007, aged 65.

His discography is not huge, but it is of extraordinary quality, whether in sessions with Westbrook, SOS, the one-off quartet of the trumpeter Ric Colbeck, Surman’s octet, the big bands of Kenny Wheeler and John Warren, Miller’s Isipingo, McGregor’s Brotherhood of Breath, or a duo with Stan Tracey. And now there’s a wonderful addition in the shape of a session said to have been recorded (surprisingly well) at the 100 Club in December 1970, where Ossie, Harry and Louis were joined by Skidmore to make a fire-breathing quartet of ferocious intensity but immaculate balance.

As I remember him, Ossie always played with his eyes closed, everything else shut out. His tone is at its most beautiful on this session, whether making an assembly of staccato phrases or, more frequently, sliding through faster-than-light near-glissandi that never lose coherence or a sense of proportion. At this stage of his life, his emotions had located the perfect musical register. No wonder, after he had dropped out of SOS, Surman and Skidmore found him impossible to replace, and the group’s own short life was over.

On a winter’s night in an Oxford Street basement in 1970, Skidmore, Miller and Moholo matched him every step of the way, and Starting Fires is a very appropriate title for an album containing 40 minutes of music that never lacks light and shade but is driven by its unwavering sense of purpose. Short, epigrammatic themes appear and then dissolve, giving shape to the performance. Near the beginning and again towards the end, the two horns improvise together quite brilliantly, twining and tangling with complete commitment. It’s life-and-death stuff, which is how so much of this music felt at the time, and never more so than when Mike Osborne was on the stand.

* Mike Osborne’s Starting Fires: Live at the 100 Club 1970 is out now on the British Progressive Jazz label. I don’t know who took the photograph. My Guardian obituary of Osborne is here.

Sep 21

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The voices of Thom Bell

On November 5 in Brooklyn, the Spinners will be be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Known to British fans first as the Motown Spinners and then as the Detroit Spinners, in order to distinguish them from a Liverpool folk group active between 1958 and 1989 under the same name, their string of hits began with “I’ll Be Around”, “Could It Be I’m Falling in Love”, “Ghetto Child” and “One of a Kind (Love Affair)”. All four were plucked from their self-titled first album for the Atlantic label, after they had moved from Motown and came under the supervision of the producer, arranger, pianist, songwriter and genius Thom Bell. Subsequent successes included “Mighty Love”, “I’m Coming Home”, “The Rubberband Man”, “Then Came You” (with Dionne Warwick) and “They Just Can’t Stop It (The Games People Play)”.

Only one member survives from the original quintet, formed in 1954, and its Bell-produced incarnation of the 1970s. Henry Fambrough, their baritone singer, will have to stand in for the rest of them: Pervis Jackson, Billy Henderson, C. P. Spencer, Bobbie Smith, Philippé “Soul” Wynne and John Edwards are all gone, along with several others who passed through the ranks at other times (and, of course, Bell himself, who died in December 2022: obit here). There is still a group of younger men legitimately touring as the Spinners, but Fambrough, who is 85, retired earlier this year.

Several other R&B vocal groups of their era, such as the Dells and the Temptations, used more than one lead singer, occasionally within the same song. None, however, pulled it off with as much ease and elegance as the Spinners. On “Could It I’m Falling in Love” and “Mighty Love”, the smooth-toned Smith started off before Wynne took over to add a rougher, more gospel-hued and improvisatory delivery. Such combinations were still working in 1976 when Jackson’s bass introduction gave way first to Smith and Henderson and finally to Wynne on “I Must Be Living for a Broken Heart” on their sixth album, Yesterday and Today.

This sophisticated update of a 1950s doo-wop vocal strategy was typical of Bell, who made great records with the Delfonics and the Stylistics before reaching his peak with the Spinners. The early hits were characterised by an adaptation of the thudding tom-tom backbeat heard on Al Green’s Willie Mitchell-produced hits, again given an extra coat of luxury varnish. Recorded at Sigma Sound in Philadelphia, with the great studio engineer Joe Tarsia, they benefitted from the musicians who became known known as MFSB: Roland Chambers, Bobby Eli and Norman Harris on guitars, Ronnie Baker on bass guitar, Earl Young on drums, Larry Washington on percussion and Vince Montana on vibes, with Bell himself on piano.

One of his trademarks was a subtle use of syncopation and uneven meters: the clipping of a beat from a single bar here, the addition of a couple of extra beats at the end of a line, or the shuffling of stresses that could make it sound, on the choruses of “Then Came You” and “Are You Ready For Love” (written for Elton John), as though he’d turned the beat around when in fact he hadn’t. These little things both seized and satisfied the ear. And no one, not even Burt Bacharach, could integrate a concert harp or an oboe into an R&B record as smoothly as Bell.

Smoothness without blandness was his trademark, as can be heard throughout the eight albums he made with the group, now included intact on a seven-CD box compiled by Joe Marchese and the veteran British journalist David Nathan. You can hit the button on just about any track and find something nourishing (perhaps with the exception of an ill-advised big band jazz version of “Don’t Let the Green Grass Fool You” on that first album, an experiment not repeated). And occasionally you’ll find a masterpiece.

Two of them are on the second album, Mighty Love. The first, written by Charles Simmons, Joseph Jefferson and Bruce Hawes, three of Bell’s regular songwriters is “Love Don’t Love Nobody”, Wynne’s finest seven minutes on a deep-soul track I’ve written about at some length before (here). The second, penned by Bunny Sigler, James Sigler and Morris Bailey, is “He’ll Never Love You Like I Do”, one of those songs about a poor boy pressing his claim on the object of his affection: “His standard of living, his social rating / There’s nothing he can’t afford / He made you think I ain’t it / But when it’s love, I can give you more…”

It opens with an octave guitar, Wes Montgomery-style, accompanied by piano, soon doubled by a muted trumpet and cushioned by a purring bass and Don Renaldo’s gentle strings. Bobbie Smith begins the song, delivering the opening lines in a confiding croon before Wynne takes over halfway through the first verse, the two reversing the sequence in the second verse, with the joins at first barely audible (although Wynne’s ad libs give him away). And just as Motown’s Holland-Dozier-Holland had used the female chorus of the Andantes to lend an extra emotional dimension to the Four Tops’ records in the ’60s, so Bell adds the voices of Barbara Ingram, Yvette Benson, Carla Benton and Linda Creed, his frequent co-composer, to create a refined blend with those of the Spinners themselves.

Like so much of Bell’s output, this track demonstrates the power of restraint, a quality evident throughout these fine albums. Even after the advent of disco, bringing adjustments to rhythmic emphases and the occasional flicker of wah-wah guitar, and with the arrival of John Edwards to replace Wynne halfway through the making of Yesterday and Today in 1977, the combination remained, and remains, exemplary.

* The Spinners’ Ain’t No Price on Happiness: The Thom Bell Studio Recordings (1972-79) is out on 29 September on SoulMusic Records. If anyone knows who took the fine photograph of Bell at the top of this piece, I’d be very pleased to add a credit.

Sep 16

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Re-Focus

No single organisation has exerted a more profound or beneficial influence on jazz in Britain than Tomorrow’s Warriors, founded as an outgrowth of the Jazz Warriors big band 30 years ago by Janine Irons and her husband, the bassist Gary Crosby, with the ambition of giving young people from diverse and usually unprivileged backgrounds a chance to play and learn about this music. A few days after the historic Mercury Prize win by Ezra Collective, whose five members first came together in their free workshops, another celebrated Tomorrow’s Warriors graduate, the tenor saxophonist Nubya Garcia, took the stage at the Royal Festival Hall last night in front of a 32-piece all-string version of the Nu Civilisation Orchestra, TW’s shape-shifting large ensemble. Their mission was to perform the music written by Eddie Sauter for Stan Getz in 1961, recorded by Creed Taylor for the Verve label and released as the album titled Focus, instantly setting a new standard for the creative use of a string orchestra in jazz.

Crosby told me that the idea came to him soon after his first encounter with Garcia, 14 or 15 years ago, when she was in her teens. Something about her sound, he said, made him think the combination would work on a reinterpretation of work he’d long admired. Garcia knew about Getz but had never heard Focus. Last night she filled what Sauter called “the holes I left for Stan” with her own sound and style, while fully respecting the tone and approach of the original, a task probably eased by her own early training as a classical violinist.

The suite in seven movements begins with the hectic flurry of “I’m Late, I’m Late”, one of the most arresting album openings imaginable. Last night the part of Roy Haynes, whose urgent brushwork so memorably sparred with Getz, was deftly taken by Romana Campbell. Garcia grew into the performance, adding weight and character to her improvisations as the sequence flowed through “Her”, “Pan”, “I Remember When”, “Night Rider”, “Once Upon a Time” and “A Summer Afternoon”. Her sound reminded me less of Getz’s feathery ethereality than of the firmer tone of his fellow Lester Young disciple Jimmy Giuffre; there was even a passage — during “Pan”, I think — when the combination of the tenor with a folkish motif unexpectedly reminded me of a greatly expanded version of Giuffre’s celebrated “Train and the River” trio. Led by the violinist Rebekah Reid, the strings were immaculate, remarkably so considering that a family illness had prevented the scheduled conductor, Peter Edwards, from taking part. Scott Stroman, the Guildhall School’s professor of jazz, stepped into the breach.

Maybe Focus doesn’t sound as bracingly different today as it did 60 years ago, when it so boldly broke away from the conservative tradition that had dominated the string arrangements for Charlie Parker (by Jimmy Carroll and Joe Lipman) and Clifford Brown (by Neal Hefti). Like George Handy, George Russell, the film composer Bernard Herrmann and one or two others, Sauter’s study of Bartók and Stravinsky had inspired the desire to bring some of their techniques to his own writing. But the result still sounds spectacular, and the London crew more than did it justice in a performance that mixed care and joy in admirable proportion.

* A few days before the concert, Nubya Garcia and the Nu Civilisation Orchestra recorded two of the pieces for Jamie Callum’s Jazz Show on BBC Radio 2. They can be heard here (interview from 17:00, music from 37:00): https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m001q5gy — and if you want to give money to help Tomorrow’s Warriors with their valuable work, go here: tomorrowswarriors.org/iamwarrior

Sep 14

17 Comments

Defying gravity

It’s easy to imagine the director Dorsay Alavi going all the way through an alphabetical list of Wayne Shorter’s compositions while looking for a suitable title for her three-part documentary on the life and work of the great saxophonist and composer, and knowing when she reached “Zero Gravity” that she’d got it. As such bio-docs on jazz musicians go, Wayne Shorter: Zero Gravity is something of a masterpiece. The title expresses the subject’s unique characteristic, present in his music and in his conversation, as I found while interviewing him in his London hotel room for the Melody Maker in 1972, during Weather Report’s three-week season at Ronnie Scott’s. Here’s how the piece started:

“I hate to talk about music,” Wayne Shorter said. So we didn’t — at least, not really. For instance, we talked about the navigation of ships. Wayne showed me several large books on the subject, told me he was hoping to study it seriously, and then unrolled a sheet of score-paper on which he’d written a new composition called “Celestial Navigator”, based on the feelings gathered from his discoveries.

We talked about the sacred figures of Brazil — like the Lady of the Sea. If you see her, Wayne said, she she sees you, then you don’t live to tell the tale. But she serves people from the sea, too, and every Brazilian home contains her picture. And he showed me another piece, named after her.

And so it went on, through an hour or so of conversation which I can only compare to the experience of talking to Ornette Coleman, Don Van Vliet (Captain Beefheart) or Van Dyke Parks. The interviewee is operating on a different plane of thought and expression, and your best plan is to keep out of the way and let their logic take its own trajectory. Of course that doesn’t always work. Sometimes you can’t help trying to drag them back to earth. Yet at such moments Shorter remained gracious. Here’s more:

Although he didn’t really want to discuss it, I asked him why he left Miles Davis. “After six years with Miles it was becoming… that living cycle, that seven-year itch thing, came around. I knew had to take a year off, at least. My wife and I moved around, spending the summer in a town house in New York, where I could think about how to get rid of that sound I had with Miles, to get the sound of the musicians, and the compositions I wrote during that time, out of my head.

“I wanted to rid myself of any one association — so that people can look at anything new that I do with a bit of objectivity, without connecting me with Miles or Art Blakey, as everyone always has.” It wasn’t always easy for him to take his sabbatical. “Miles would call me up and ask if I wanted to make a record date, or write something for his band, and I had to refuse because it was necessary for me to break that connection completely.”

He talked about his most recent Blue Note album, Super Nova, and its projected successor, Odyssey of Iska, dedicated to his younger daughter, and about his enthusiasm for the Brazilian singer Milton Nascimento (who would be featured on Native Dancer, his first album for Columbia, in 1975). And he spoke warmly, of course, about Weather Report:

“I’d always had the feeling that it would be nice to have a band in which everybody would hold their own and have a leader’s responsibility. We’re all responsible to many different obligations, which is much better than when one man is responsible for everyone’s obligations. We can do more, musically. It was hard to find a bunch of musicians who were prepared to stop playing like they used to.”

That last remark is the kind of thing that pops up throughout Zero Gravity: little maxims, like Zen koans, that open the mind to new ways of thinking about old subjects, some of them adapted from Davis, his former boss. “Play like you don’t know how to play” is one. Search for “music that doesn’t sound like music” and “Jazz means, ‘I dare you'” are others. Danilo Perez, the pianist with his quartet, remembers being given a large pile of new compositions, and on asking Shorter when they were going to find the time to rehearse them, getting the reply: “You can’t rehearse the unknown.”

The first of Zero Gravity‘s three hour-long episodes deals with his early years, from a New Jersey childhood to the great Davis Quintet, the director taking the chance of using two young actors in wordless imaginative reconstructions of his boyhood with his brother Al. The second part examines with the period of Weather Report’s great success, the reasons behind the group’s dissolution, his work with Joni Mitchell, and the personal tragedies he encountered during those years, including the deaths of Iska and her mother, Ana Maria Patricio, his second wife, and of Al, his brother.

The final part deals with the music of his last 20 years: the wonderful quartet with Perez, the bassist John Patitucci and the drummer Brian Blade, the orchestral pieces, and the opera, Iphigenia, written and performed with Esperanza Spalding. Her presence in the film, along with that of Mitchell and the drummer Terri Lyne Carrington, reminds us that few jazz musicians of his generation were as comfortable as Shorter with the idea that female musicians could have equal standing within the music.

Shorter’s love of fairy tales and science fiction, in part ignited by early exposure to Charles Kingsley’s The Water Babies, is also featured as part of an exploration of the character of a man who retained a child’s sense of wonder throughout the life that ended last March, in his 90th year on the planet. The animations and flights of visual imagination that appear throughout the film, alongside many fine clips of the Jazz Messengers, the Davis band and the Shorter quartet, make complete sense. Filmed and edited while he was still alive, and thus preserving him in the present tense. Zero Gravity is pretty much the perfect tribute to an extraordinary human being.

* The film Wayne Shorter: Zero Gravity is available on Amazon Prime.

Sep 8

4 Comments

Tension and release

While writing about Nik Bärtsch recently, I mentioned his practice of giving all his compositions the same title — each is called “Modul”, with a distinguishing number attached, thereby establishing no preconceptions in the listener’s mind. In that respect Darcy James Argue, the Canadian-born, New York-based composer, could hardly be more different. In the past, the pieces on his albums with his big band, Secret Society, have variously directed our attention towards an imagined dystopian Brooklyn, a philosopher of ancient Greece and a distinctly realistic dystopian deep state. His latest, a 2CD set called Dynamic Maximum Tension, consists of pieces inspired by specific individuals, ideas and events, bearing dedications clearly signposting their themes, and reflecting those origins in their sound and structures.

This can be almost literal in something like “Codebreaker”, dedicated to Alan Turing, in which the staccato brass phrases evoke the chatter of an Enigma decoding machine, opening up for a lovely soft-toned alto saxophone solo by Rob Wilkerson. Or it can be implied, as in “Tensile Curves”, a multipart work dedicated to Duke Ellington, with seven individual soloists and lasting 35 minutes, which in past times would have been a respectable length for a single long-playing album. It was inspired by the unorthodox extended structure of Ellington’s “Diminuendo and Crescendo in Blue”; there is nothing particularly Ducal about the sound, but he would surely have appreciated the grace with which the piece, having opened with shrill brass fanfares against Jon Wiken’s galloping drums, creates a kaleidoscope of moods before it winds down through a passage featuring Sara Caswell’s hardanger d’amore (a modern Norwegian fiddle with 10 strings, five of them sympathetic), Adam Birnbaum’s sombre piano chords and a Mingus-like passage of collective polyphony, with Sam Sadigursky’s clarinet closing a darkly glowing coda.

More unexpected is “Last Waltz for Levon”, a tribute to Levon Helm — the only member of the Band, of course, who was not Canadian — which summons as much backwoods spirit as a 20-piece band can, with the trombonist Mike Fahle as its featured soloist (over mellow writing for clarinets) and incorporating sidelong quotes from “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down”, introduced by Mike Clohesy’s bass guitar. Cécile McLorin Salvant pops up to do a turn on “Mae West: Advice”, singing a jolly lyric based on a sort-of-Dadist poem by Paisley Reckdal: Ban tobacco: do bacon abed, be delectable, collectible, a decent debacle. Décolleté don’t conceal; acne, do...

The title of the opening track, “Dymaxion”, is the short form of Dynamic Maximum Tension, the principle on which the engineer-architect Buckminster Fuller, the dedicatee, created his structures, including the geodesic dome before which Argue is standing in the picture above. You can sense in the writing the measured use of tension to ensure that an unreinforced structure retains its shape, while Carl Maraghi’s gorgeous baritone saxophone improvisation reminds us that Fuller worked with people and nature as well as geometric formulae in mind. At times such as this, Argue’s confident manipulation of his resources makes me think that finally someone has taken the theory behind Bob Graettinger’s controversial modernistic Third Steam pieces of the early ’50s (such as City of Glass, written for Stan Kenton) and turned it into actual music.

But out of this densely packed sequence of 11 compositions and 110 minutes of music, “Your Enemies Are Asleep” is the piece that will stay with me longest. Here Argue metabolises his debt to Gil Evans quite brilliantly in the opening passage: a slow, well-spaced string bass figure to set an ominous mood, spare woodwind voicings, a half-concealed bass clarinet beneath lightly sketched brass. Then the bass figure is augmented, the brass becomes a choir, and Ingrid Jensen — another Canadian — enters for a solo which, for the subtlety of its entry and the enthralling development of its trajectory over an increasingly dense and emphatic orchestration, reminds me of nothing less than the way Evans turned “The Barbara Song” into a concerto for Wayne Shorter 60 years ago. Jensen’s improvisation is a masterpiece in its own right: flaring, squeezing, dodging, soaring and fluttering around the contours of the writing. The closing passage is another example of Argue’s gift for ending a piece on a quietly dramatic note of reflection.

Oh yes, and Martin Johnson’s sleeve essay informs us that “Your Enemies Are Asleep” is dedicated to Ukraine’s resistance to Russia’s invasion, its title taken from a 19th century Ukrainian poem set to music by Vasyl Ovchynnikov, a bandura player who disappeared during the Stalinist terror of the 1930s. The notes beyond the notes add another layer of resonance to this outstanding album of completely modern music whose precision — whether of conception or execution — never excludes the human component.

* Dynamic Maximum Tension by Darcy James Argue’s Secret Society is released on the Nonesuch label: https://darcyjamesargue.bandcamp.com/album/dynamic-maximum-tension. The photograph of Argue is by Lindsay Beyerstein.

Sep 5

30 Comments

A Lifetime ago

Here, out of the blue, is something of historical importance: a piece of film showing Tony Williams’ Lifetime — with Larry Young, John McLaughlin and Jack Bruce — in Bremen, recording for the popular Beat Club TV show during their European tour in late 1970 but never broadcast. This nine-minute extract from that 30-minute performance, which appeared on the programme’s YouTube channel this week, is the only filmed record of the existence of one of the key bands of its decade.

It’s particularly important to me since I saw them twice that year, and it provides evidence, up to a point, of what I’ve been saying ever since. They were extraordinary both times, but the second appearance — at the Marquee on Tuesday 6 October — still lives in the memory as the most electrifying gig I’ve ever attended.

The first time was at Ungano’s, a club on West 70th Street in NYC, where they spent most of August, having done a week at Slugs’ Saloon in the East Village in April and then played concerts in Pennsylvania, Detroit, Cincinnati and elsewhere. They were still a three-piece, just drums, organ and guitar, as they had been on Emergency!, their remarkable debut album, and already they were staggeringly different from anything else around. (One thing I remember about that night is Miles Davis leaning against the bar, wearing a tan patchwork suede suit, listening hard. Outside his silver Lamborghini Miura was parked at the kerb.)

The next day I went to interview Tony at the office of Polydor, his record company. The conversation was not productive. He was reading the New York Times while I asked my questions, and he carried on reading while he gave his answers in surly monosyllables. I don’t think I even wrote it up. His manager later conveyed his apologies. As it happened, I didn’t mind. A lot of the younger musicians who’d worked with Miles in the ’60s had picked his refusal to be ingratiating, either with audiences or journalists. Being cool was the priority. That was kind of all right with me.

And anyway I’d more or less worshipped Tony Williams since he’d joined Miles in 1963, aged 17. He was 15 months older than me, and I was trying to be a drummer at the time. To have someone of just about my age joining Miles was mindblowing. The dimension of his genius — and genius is what it was — somehow softened the blow when I decided that I wasn’t going to make a career of it. I was happy just to listen to him, whatever he did and whoever he did it with. And however he chose to conduct his public relations, which was really not important.

Bruce had joined to make it a quartet by the time they arrived in Europe for two months later for a 40-date tour. The Marquee was the third of those dates; they’d already played at Lancaster University and the Roadhouse in Dagenham. I stood there with Robert Fripp among the audience of about 200 as they played and he was as blown away as I was by the cascades and tidal waves of sound they produced. That’s what the Beat Club clip, magnificent though it is, doesn’t capture: it gets the complexity of the music but not the intensity, which had less to do with volume — although they were very loud — than with intention. The overriding sensation was that they were on a collective journey of discovery, there and then.

Larry Young was the least known of the four to a British rock audience, but in a way his playing defined the music that night. His Blue Note albums — Into Somethin’ and Unity — had shown that he had a very different approach to the Hammond organ from Jimmy Smith, Jack McDuff or John Patton. He brought the instrument into the sphere of the New Thing. But with Lifetime he took it somewhere completely different, into a realm of almost pure texture (although that’s not an adequate word).

I’m indebted to the drummer Vinnie Sperrazza for teasing out, in his excellent Chronicles blog, the identity of the snatches of four themes heard in the clip: three McLaughlin pieces, “Devotion” and two that he would later record with the Mahavishnu Orchestra,”Trilogy” and “The Dance of Maya”; and the Jack Bruce/Pete Brown “Smiles and Grins”, which would appear on Jack’s solo album Harmony Row a year later. There’s a lot of 7/4 in there.

For me, this was the band of the era. To a far greater extent than Weather Report, Return to Forever, Headhunters or Mahavishnu, they realised the promise of In a Silent Way and Bitches Brew. Only Hendrix, at his very best, could match them. And they were together not even a year. It’s painful to think of what they might have gone on to achieve. But sometimes, even now, you can hear a band clearly marked by their influence, and it still sounds like the future.

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