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Jun 25

A Soho creative

Tot Taylor has an interesting history. Back in the mid-’80s, from an office near Oxford Circus, his Compact Organisation threatened to become to the London pop scene what Brooklyn’s Daptone outfit would be to R&B in the next century: a clever, occasionally brilliant re-imagining of past euphoria, creating music that could sometimes rival the sounds from which it took its inspiration. Compact’s founders, Tot Taylor and Paul Kinder, released records by Mari Wilson, Virna Lindt and Cynthia Scott that recalled the great days of the ’60s girl groups, while “The Beautiful Americans”, the sole 45 released by a non-existent group called the Beautiful Americans, evoked the early Walker Brothers in their semi-operatic prime.

Then Taylor and Kinder went their separate ways, the former diversifying his career. He composed music for film, TV and theatre (including the eight-hour Picasso’s Women for the National Theatre). From 2004-19 he co-ran a cutting-edge Soho art gallery called Riflemaker (after the business that had once occupied the premises on Beak Street). And in 2017 he published a 900-page novel titled The Story of John Nightly, a kind of Carnaby Street War and Peace, set amid the Swinging London music scene, its protagonist a pop star called “the most beautiful man in England” by the Sunday Times. And then he started making records again.

A confession: although I was sent an early proof copy of The Story of John Nightly, I haven’t read it properly. But I extracted it from the unread pile the other day. The reason is that I’ve been listening to his last two albums, Frisbee (2021) and Studio Sounds (2023), and falling for them to the extent that I’ve started thinking that if a bloke capable of this music has written a novel, it’s probably going to be worth reading.

Taylor makes records with a (sometimes deceptive) air of light-hearted whimsy and a deft, flexible craftsmanship that seem to have disappeared from contemporary pop music, overwhelmed by the prevailing modes of communal ecstasy and personal trauma. Crudely, you could place what he does somewhere between the Beatles of 1965-66 and the Beach Boys of Sunflower, maybe the last evolutionary step in songwriting terms before the art-rock of Kevin Ayers and Syd Barrett, but nothing he does sounds dated.

Every song has to have its own subject, shape and mood, just like a Beatles album. The humour is wry, never far away in things like “This Boy’s Hair” and “Vanity Flares”, both from the new album, on which he sings in his light, pleasant voice while playing pretty much everything except for drums (Shawn Lee), some of the guitars (Paul Cuddeford and Lewis Durham) and harp (Alina Brhezhinska).

Studio Sounds is a very good album, but the earlier Frisbee is, I think, the classic. The opener came about when the Guardian asked him to write a song for National Music Day, which is what the song is called. “Fortune’s Child” is a great slice of power pop. “Do It the Hard Way” opens with the sort of quatrain you don’t find much in a pop lyric any more (except maybe from Taylor Swift): “I drive my car up a one-way street / Dirty looks from everyone I meet / I ask the Lord my soul to keep / No reply — must be asleep.” Then there’s something called “Yoko, Oh”: a homage to John Lennon in the form of a gentle, loving pastiche of the ex-Beatles at his most blissed-out. Titles like “The Action-Painting Blues”, “Baby, I Miss the Internet” and “Sunset Sound” suggest the breadth of the topics that get him writing. A song called “This New Abba Record” lives up to its title.

The eight-minute “American Baby (Two-Part Invention in C)” is the one to which I keep returning, hooked by a minor-key electric piano riff that finds the ground between the Zombies’ “She’s Not There” and the Doors’ “Riders on the Storm”, achieving a momentum almost as subtly relentless as Steely Dan’s “Do It Again”. As a song, there’s not much to it. But you could say that about many of the greatest pop records. And the potency of the groove somehow turns the blankness of its lyric into something mysterious and compelling.

* Tot Taylor’s Frisbee and Studio Sounds are on the Campus label. The photograph of Taylor is from the sleeve of Studio Sounds. The Story of John Nightly is published by Unbound.

Jun 17

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A stroll in the park

Although Wadada Leo Smith and Amina Claudine Myers are both longtime members of Chicago’s Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, they had never recorded together before going into the studio to make Central Park’s Mosaics of Reservoir, Lake, Paths and Gardens. Both are originally from the South — Wadada from Mississippi, Amina from Arkansas — but here they are in a suite of duets for trumpet and keyboards whose title refers to Manhattan’s 843-acre green space.

All but one of the pieces were written by Wadada, who likes to tie his compositions to specific sources of inspiration. In the past, these have included Rosa Parks, Thelonious Monk, Emmett Till, Billie Holiday, Martin Luther King and America’s national parks. His six pieces on Central Park find the two musicians conjuring solemn meditations, perhaps informed by the knowledge that part of the vast acreage was seized by compulsory purchase from the inhabitants of Seneca Village, a largely black settlement on what is now the Upper West Side, with a population of just over 200 (some of them Native Americans and Irish immigrants) in about 50 houses when it was taken and razed in 1857.

Individual sections are named after the Conservatory Garden — formal gardens located near 105th street — and two water features: the Harlem Meer, a man-made lake in the north-eastern corner, created at the confluence of three streams, and the Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis Reservoir, a little further south, between 86th and 96th Streets. Two others are titled “Albert Ayler — A Meditation in Light” and “Imagine — A Mosaic for John Lennon”. Ayler lived mostly in Harlem between 1963 and his death in 1970. Lennon died outside the Dakota building, where he and Yoko Ono lived, on Central Park West.

There’s nothing programmatic about these pieces, nothing to provide an explicit reminder of Jackie O, Ayler, Lennon or large expanses of water, although I suppose “Central Park at Sunset”, the sixth piece, could be described as a tone poem, at a push. But there is a sense of weight and contemplation to them all, and a powerful continuity of mood. These are veterans — both are 82 — but their playing is poised, firm, probing and heartfelt. Variations are provided by Wadada’s occasional use of a mute and Amina’s switch to a Hammond B3 on the Jackie dedication. And at the midpoint of the album she gets five minutes to herself for a solo called “When Was”, the piano ringing with echoes of hymns and ragtime airs until she gathers them up and and shakes them out in a terse, pounding finale.

From Louis Armstrong with Earl Hines through Ruby Braff with Ellis Larkins to Arve Henriksen with Harmen Fraanje, trumpet and piano duets are a precious jazz tradition. This, from two of the elders, is a very special one.

* Central Park’s Mosaics of Reservoir, Lake, Paths and Gardens is on the Red Hook label. The composite photo of Wadada Leo Smith and Amina Claudine Myers is by Luke Marantz.

Jun 11

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Mod dreams

Q: Were there ways of walking?

A: Yeh. You walked speed-wise which is you put your hands in your mod jacket, in your Tonik jacket, which had three-inch lapels and a seven-inch centre vent, and breast pleats to give it enough tuck. It was a very solid cloth, a very heavy cloth, so you’d tuck your hands in there and you’d have flaps on the pockets. You’d have your jeans turned up and you’d have Hush Puppies with a pair of white socks. You’d be walking with three other friends up Great Windmill Street or Wardour Street at five or six in the morning just as light is coming up. Your head is bent against the wind, you’ve got your head down…

That’s Peter Meaden talking, interviewed by the writer Steve Turner in 1975, three years before he died at the age of 36, felled by barbiturates and vodka in his parents’ house in North London, where he had dreamed his mod dreams many years earlier, finding the Who and turning them from the Detours into the High Numbers — turned them into mods, getting them the French crop haircuts and the correct clothes, and writing the words for their first single — before accepting £500 to hand over their management to Kit Lambert and Chris Stamp.

Meaden was one of those people, like Guy Stevens, Andrew Oldham and Tony Hall, who shaped the London music scene in those vital years between 1963 and 1965. He deserves a book of his own, and now he has it. Steve Turner’s King Mod is his story, in all its slender, obsessive, doomed glory.

Once asked to define modism, Meaden came up with a much repeated phrase: “Clean living in difficult circumstances.” He provides another version here: “Mod is another aphorism for precision in life.” Romantic nonsense, of course. But part of the legend.

“Modism was my dream,” Meaden says in the unedited transcript of the interview that constitutes the second half of the book, after Turner has taken us through a relatively conventional narrative. Meaden’s words are rambling, repetitive, sometimes inaccurately recalled, the strange and touching testimony of a man who had a dream and saw it come more or less true but lacked, as Turner says, the business acumen and ruthlessness to profit from his vision as others did.

Stevens, who played records from his collection of red-hot R&B obscurities at the Scene Club in Ham Yard, just off Great Windmill Street, and had the 45s from which Meaden borrowed the music for his High Numbers songs, went on to involvement with Island Records, Spooky Tooth, Mott the Hoople, Free and the Clash. Oldham, who had partnered Meaden in a short-lived PR company, managed the Stones until they were taken from him, and created the Immediate label. Hall was one of the great promotion men of the British music business, a cool cat who moved smooth from the bebop ’50s to whatever came next, and who once threw Meaden out of a reception for Ben E. King with the words, “You’re a pilled-up mod!”

Which Meaden certainly was, as he goes to some lengths to explain in his descriptions of the virtues of Drinamyl — “good old Purple Hearts” — particularly when mixed, as was his preference, with cider. “It was bliss. Cocaine they say is bliss these days but it’s not bliss like a bit of speed in you, a couple of pints of cider maybe, down there bopping round from Friday night through until Sunday morning. Say no more!” One of the things he liked about Drinamyl was that it suppressed the libido. “You no longer have to worry about pulling a chick and making it because that’s what you feel the world made you for.” With girls out of the picture, there would be more time for the purer pursuits of choosing the right shirt at Austin’s on Shaftesbury Avenue or the right boots from Anello and Davide on Charing Cross Road.

Then acid arrived on the scene, and the picture — once so sharp and precise — started to go fuzzy. Some, like Townshend, who gave Meaden his first trip, could cope. Meaden was one who couldn’t, spending chunks of the years before his death in psychiatric care, as much of a casualty as Nick Drake or Syd Barrett.

It’s a curious book. More meticulous editing would have removed a plethora of irritating misspellings and inconsistencies: Kingley Street, vocal chords, Petula Clarke, Roger Daltry and Rick Gunnell are just a few of them, while a Miracles song that the High Numbers covered appears on the same page as “You Gotta Dance to Keep from Crying” (in the text) and “I Gotta Dance to Keep from Crying” (in a caption). And there is the increasingly common habit, infuriating to me, habit of capitalising the definite article in references to The Who, The Beach Boys, The Goldhawk Social Club, and so on.

But it’s clearly a labour of love by an author whose previous works have dealt with the Beatles, U2, Marvin Gaye, Johnny Cash, Van Morrison and religion in rock, and it’s very well illustrated. For anyone to whom the all too short era of modism — to use Meaden’s term — was something precious, its historical value in unquestionable.

* Steve Turner’s King Mod: The Story of Peter Meaden, the Who, and the Birth of a British Subculture is published by Red Planet Books (£25).

Jun 9

Croeso y Cafe Oto

Cafe Oto, 8/6/24. From left: Melvin Gibbs, Eadyth Crawford, Mark O’Connor, Tomos Williams, Mared Williams and Nguyen Le

A welcome in Welsh from the trumpeter, composer and bandleader Tomos Williams prefaced the performance in Dalston of the third part of his Cwmwl Tystion series: Empathy, to follow the live recordings of Witness (released in 2021) and Riot! (2023) made during earlier tours. In all three, Williams blends the language of contemporary jazz with stories from the last 200 years of Welsh history.

For each part, he deployed different resources: the harp of Rhodri Davies and the voice of Francesca Simmons on Witness, the saxophone of Soweto Kinch and the vibes of Orphy Robinson on Riot!. For Empathy, he retained the voice of Eadyth Crawford and the drums of Mark O’Connor and added the Vietnamese guitarist Nguyen Le, the American bass guitarist Melvin Gibbs and a second voice, that of Mared Williams.

The two non-Welsh guests, both virtuosos of effects-enhanced stringed instruments, played powerful roles in setting the tone and trajectory of the music chosen and written to accompany pieces inspired by Paul Robeson’s recital to the mining families of Aberpennar (Mountain Ash) in 1938, the eviction of the villagers of Mynydd Epynt in Powys by the Ministry of Defence in 1940, the Aberfan disaster of 1966 and the miners’ strike of 1984. All these were accompanied by Simon Proffitt’s back-projected visuals.

Gibbs, once a member of Defunkt, has few equals in turning a five-string bass guitarist into an electronic orchestra. Le is one of the most adept of post-Hendrix guitarists. They found a willing accomplice in the powerful and dextrous O’Connor. At times I was reminded of Miles Davis’s Tutu period, of Jon Hassell’s Fourth World Music, and of Terje Rypdal at his wildest. One late passage raised the volume to death-metal levels.

That made the use of the two voices, sometimes combined in folk-like materials, even more valuable as a contrast, along with the sudden and very moving insertion, during the Aberfan passage, of the pre-recorded sound of a pipe organ and a chapel choir, and Williams’s use of Donald Byrd’s “Cristo Redentor” as a healing balm towards the conclusion. Earlier, the trumpeter had excelled in a tightly muted solo over a lovely habanera rhythm.

After six concerts at various venues around Wales in the preceding days, this visit to Llundain represented the tour’s finale: the final performance of this particular work by this particular band. As they laid down their instruments and stepped back from microphones, the sense of exhilaration had a special resonance.

* Parts one and two of Cwmwl Tystion are available on the Ty Cerdd label.

Jun 2

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Artistry in algorithm

This morning’s newspaper headlines included one suggesting that artificial intelligence will play a significant role in the UK’s coming general election. My first response was that, given the mess humans have made of selecting the last four prime ministers, maybe the machines should be given a chance.

Music, though — well, that’s something else. Who, for example, wants the unique voice of Steve Marriott, 30-plus years dead, sliced and diced by AI algorithms and applied to songs he never sang, apparently with the endorsement of his widow?

But there are other applications of this slightly terrifying technology that may have a different and more benign outcome. At the Vortex last night, two sold-out houses heard France’s Orchestra National de Jazz play the compositions of Steve Lehman and Frédéric Maurin, specially written to make use of AI software developed by Jérôme Nika, a researcher at the celebrated IRCAM — the Institute for Research and Co-ordination in Acoustics/Music, founded in Paris by Pierre Boulez in 1977, at the request of Georges Pompidou, and now housed in the centre bearing the former president’s name.

The music was recorded last year as a live performance in the Tonstudio Bauer in Ludwigsburg and released as an album titled Ex Machina. It comes with extensive sleeve notes which I’ve read twice without really coming close to an idea of what the software actually does. But I do know that Lehman, who played the alto saxophone parts on the album and in London, and Maurin, the orchestra’s director and conductor, also based their compositions on prolonged study of the movement known as spectral music, in which such post-Messaien composers as Gérard Grisey and Tristan Murail experimented with creating microtonal ambiances.

I found the album interesting but not, on early hearings, as stimulating as Lehman’s work with his great octet or in his multilingual rap group, Sélébéyone. At the Vortex, however, where they were stopping off en route to performing tonight at Southampton University’s AI Arts Festival in Winchester, the music exploded into three dimensions and full colour, retaining all its complexity and subtlety while grabbing the audience and refusing to let them go until the final shimmer of a quarter-tone vibraphone had faded to silence.

Much of this had to do with the vigour of the playing, which ensured that the compositions never sounded dry or academic. Textures vibrated, rhythms were sprung. The shifting syncopations and abrupt stop-time figures had the excitement of James Brown’s band meeting Sun Ra in some distant galaxy.

The individual playing was uniformly brilliant in its response to the material. As well as Lehman’s serpentine, sweet-and-sour alto and the vibraphone of his octet colleague Chris Dingman (the only other American in the band), powerful impressions were left by improvisations from the bass trombone of Christiane Bopp, the tenor saxophone of Julian Soro, the clarinet of Cathérine Delaunay, the flute of Fanny Ménégoz, the baritone saxophone of Fabien Debellefontaine, and the trumpets of Fabien Norbert and Olivier Laisney. But what really fired the orchestra was the rhythm team: the deep power and agility of the double bassist, Sarah Murcia, in collaboration with the magnificent drive and awe-inspiring precision of the drummer, Rafaël Koerner. Thanks to them, the music never flagged.

It made me recall the last time I heard a largeish ensemble playing music that took the composition/improvisation dialogue in such a stimulating new direction. That was in 2016, when I first heard the White Desert Orchestra, led by the French composer/pianist Eve Risser — a graduate of the Orchestre National de Jazz. Obviously not a coincidence.

* Ex Machina by Steve Lehman and the Orchestra National de Jazz is on the Pi Recordings label.