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