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Oct 30

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Other sounds 5: Feat. Arve Henriksen

A fugitive sound, soft, glancing, indirect: the Norwegian trumpeter Arve Henriksen has a signature I love, in pretty much whatever context it appears. It could be in his group Supersilent, or with Jan Bang, Christian Wallumrød, Dhafer Youssef, Terje Rypdal, Iain Ballamy or Trygve Seim, or on his own albums, particularly Places of Worship (Rune Grammofon, 2013), which I think of as this century’s Sketches of Spain.

He’s developed the European equivalent of Jon Hassell’s trumpet sound, using electronics and a natural tendency towards understatement to take the instrument out of its normal brassy universe and into somewhere more mysterious. And he finds two soulmates in the Danish drummer Daniel Sommer and the Swedish bassist Johannes Lundberg on Sounds & Sequences, a trio recording made in a Gothenburg studio.

A series of 11 pieces evolving from free improvisations subjected to post-production processes of editing and shaping, this is a very beautiful thing indeed. Sommer’s playing draws the ear throughout, pulling gentle grooves out of the air and adding the finest of detail. Lundberg and Henriksen both contribute electronic beds and textures (Henriksen also uses his counter-tenor voice from time to time), nudging the music towards something that touches the celestial sublime.

The trumpeter pops up in Triage, the new album from Erik Honoré, one of the founders of Kristiansand’s remix-based Punkt festival, which celebrated its 20th edition last month. Deploying colleagues including Sidsel Endresen, Eivind Aarset, Ingar Zach, Nils Petter Molvaer and Jan Bang, Honoré creates little tone poems, some of them used as settings for found texts.

These include Emily Dickinson’s poems “Hope Is a Thing With Feathers” and “Pain Has an Element of Blank”, portions of Ezra Pound’s Cantos — read by Bang — and a section from the US Surgeon General’s undated instructions on early care of combat wounds: “A not uncommon occurrence in the present war are those distressing wounds of the face and jawbones which have attracted particular attention not only on account of the disfigurement which they cause but even more so from the difficulty that was first encountered on dealing with them…”

The use of different readers adds variety and surprise, as if there were not already enough in the music itself, which also makes use of radio samples and field recordings. An instrumental piece called “Prague”, featuring Molvaer’s trumpet over Bjørn Charles Dreyer’s guitar and Mats Eilertsen’s treated double bass, is particularly striking, as is “In the Station of the Metro”, in which Henriksen’s breathy trumpet emerges between Pound’s lines and Honoré’s manipulated samples with typical probing grace.

Finally, Henriksen’s recent album of duets with the Dutch pianist Harmen Fraanje, Touch of Time, is more conventional in terms of exploitation of the available sonic materials, allowing a clearer view of the trumpeter’s playing, with only the occasional effective touch of electronics. Compositions by both men create music that is delicate, pensive, carefully weighted, devoid of affectation or allusion to outside worlds. The closer you listen, the stronger it gets.

* Sounds & Sequences is on the April Records label (www.aprilrecords.com). Triage is on Punkt Editions/Jazzland. Touch of Time is on ECM. All are out now.

Oct 28

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Phil Lesh 1940-2024

Phil Lesh wasn’t anything like the person I’d been expecting to meet when I turned up to interview him one Wednesday afternoon in the spring of 1970 at an apartment in Bayswater. Lesh, who died last week aged 84, was acting as the advance guard for the Grateful Dead, whose other members were due to fly into London the next day. The following Sunday they would make their British debut at a rock festival on a piece of Staffordshire farmland. They were bringing their Haight-Ashbury psychedelic legend to Newcastle-under-Lyme on the heels of the UK release of Live/Dead, including its epic 23-minute “Dark Star”, recorded a year earlier at the Fillmore in their native San Francisco.

Far from conforming to the acid-head stereotype, Lesh was alert, bright-eyed and responsive to everything . He was even happy to agree with my somewhat presumptuous suggestion that their first three studio albums had been disappointments, particularly to those who had only been able to read about their live appearances and for whom “Dark Star” was the first piece of conclusive evidence in support of all the claims of collective transcendental genius made on their behalf.

“We simply haven’t known how to make records,” he told me, “and we figured the only way to make them was to learn ourselves, because we tried recording with a producer at the beginning and it was really hopeless. It all sounded completely flat. Anthem Of The Sun is the most satisfying of the first three to me, because we had the almost impossible task of making an album from very little material.

“The way it went very tight from the compositional standpoint was pleasing, and it’s very coherent – I can still follow it all the way through. But still we all knew that it was a hundred per cent non-commercial, and I certainly don’t like the way it was mixed. I know we could have done it better, but we didn’t know how. It was strange because we took stuff from three studio sessions and eight or nine gigs and put it all together without thinking of levels or equalising. We just did it from a musical standpoint, which is not enough. Anyway, it took us four albums and untold thousands of dollars to learn how to record ourselves. The music, though, was really good, and deserved a better fate.

“Even the live album, which I like, was put out six months after it was recorded, and even longer in Britain, and we do all the numbers completely differently now. The music is constantly evolving, progressing and regressing on many different levels.

“We have a new one out in the States, called Workingman’s Dead, which I’m very pleased with. It’s certainly the best of any of our studio work, and I hope it’s a success because we want to stop touring. We’ve been on the road every weekend since October, and we really need a rest… if only to think up some new music.”

I liked Lesh a lot, and I wish I’d gone into the interview knowing more about him — about his background in classical music, his studies with Luciano Berio, his college friendship with Steve Reich. Then I might have asked him some more interesting questions. But there you go. Life is full of unknown answers to unasked questions.

The Dead’s performance in a field that Sunday afternoon was a mix of the countryish songs from Workingman’s Dead (I think they kicked off with “Casey Jones”), R&B standards (Pigpen’s “Turn on Your Lovelight”) and spacey improvisations, including “Dark Star”. Oddly, for a band by then obsessed with developing the best amplification, the sound was a bit weak, which in my memory reduced the impact of the unique contrapuntal interplay between the guitars of Jerry Garcia and Bob Weir and Lesh’s bass. Committed Deadheads (readers of IT and Frendz) loved them; others who’d come out of curiosity, or were there primarily to hear other artists, seemed a bit nonplussed. But I’m glad I saw them at that stage of their long, strange trip.

* Here’s the Guardian‘s obituary of Phil Lesh, by Adam Sweeting: https://www.theguardian.com/music/2024/oct/27/phil-lesh-obituary If you want to know more about the Grateful Dead’s British debut, there’s a website: https://www.ukrockfestivals.com/Holly-dead.70.html

Oct 25

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The lost genius of Albert Stinson

This is a piece about the bassist Albert Stinson (1944-1969). It’s something I’ve been meaning to write for a long time. The great drummer Jim Keltner was kind enough to talk to me about his boyhood friend, as was another drummer from Los Angeles, Doug Sides, who toured and recorded with him in John Handy’s band. I first heard Stinson in 1963 on Passin’ Thru, Chico Hamilton’s very striking Impulse album, recorded when the bassist was all of 18 years old. To my 16-year-old ears, he was exceptional even then; goodness knows what he might have become.

It’s the evening of Friday, April 7, 1967 in the Harmon Gymnasium at the University of California, Berkeley. Your name is Albert Stinson, you play the double bass, and you’re about to deputise for Ron Carter in what might be the greatest small jazz group of all time: the Miles Davis Quintet as constituted between the autumn of 1964, when Wayne Shorter arrived to join Davis, Carter, Herbie Hancock and Tony Williams, and the middle of 1968, when Carter became the first to leave. The greatest? Certainly the one applying new levels of freedom and near-telepathic interplay to the business of improvising on tunes.

So this group has been together and constantly evolving for the best part of three years and you’re being dropped into the middle of it. You’re only 22 years old but you’re ready, in the sense that you have the chops and the experience. You were a prodigy, and you’ve played alongside Charles Lloyd and Gábor Szabó in a brilliant Chico Hamilton Quintet, and with other heavyweights.

But to play in this band, at this stage, you had to be ready for anything. Accelerando or ritardando, not always synchronised. Stopping on a dime without warning, restarting at the merest twitch of a nerve-end, intuiting the leader’s moves but following without following, waiting out a silence, hitting the short, sharp ramp from triple-p to triple-f without a moment’s doubt. Playing against or through what someone else was doing.

You’re not the first bassist to deputise for Carter, a busy guy on call for many sessions. Gary Peacock was the first. Then Reggie Workman, then Richard Davis. After you, there’ll be Miroslav Vitous before Carter goes for good and Dave Holland becomes a permanent member. All great, great bassists. And now it’s your turn.

There’s a buzz in the Harmon Gymnasium. For starters, Miles calls “Gingerbread Boy”, the brusque, flaring Jimmy Heath tune featured on Miles Smiles, the quintet’s second studio album, the one that made everyone realise something different was happening here. At a rocket-propelled 80 bars a minute, the theme hurtles past, with Williams’s drums at their most volcanic. You play time, straight. You survive, although you miss the cue at the end and the piece finishes with your phrase trailing off, as if surprised by the sudden silence around you.

Miles leads into “Stella by Starlight”, his tone at its purest, the trumpet holding a long note into what feels like infinity as you join Hancock in a free background that seems to be inventing itself outside the tune. Eventually you move into a walking medium 4/4, deploying your big, strong tone but keeping the elasticity that enables you to move with the others when the tempo doubles and Williams starts to force the issue. You’re okay, and a little more than that when you respond to the wind-down of Shorter’s solo with something that shows you’re getting the hang of this particular freedom of narrative. Hancock’s solo begins out of tempo and you invent figures to support him before you slide back into the 4/4, seamlessly.

And then, on Shorter’s “Dolores”, a post-bop epigram also from Miles Smiles, the tempo goes back up, and now you’re no longer feeling your way but fully contributing, the equal of these four giants as they charge through a warp-speed exercise in musical plasticity, in aural geometry, in listening, hearing and responding at some Zen level of intuitiveness. In fact you’re almost too ready when Miles creates the silence from which he goes into “Round Midnight”, and you let your lower-register notes bloom in a way that Carter would probably consider excessive. But you’re part of the excitement as Williams’s snare-drum fusillades overwhelm the two-horn fanfares and soon you’re shifting the time around behind the flickering, nudging phrases of Shorter’s solo.

And now you’re home, riding the waves as the set continues with something based on the bones of “So What” and concludes with “Walkin'”. After just under an hour, it ends with an ovation.

—ooOoo—

“Albert brought something different to that band,” the drummer Jim Keltner told me when I asked him to talk about his longtime friend. “Ron Carter is one of the greatest musicians ever, but Albert brought a different kind of fire. They were so highly evolved, and Albert was one of them. I don’t really want to talk about genius-this and genius-that, but I do believe that he was a genius. He came back and told us that Miles had asked him to join the band, but he said he couldn’t because he had too many gigs lined up with Chico. That’s mind-boggling. But it’s the kind of player and person he was.”

Keltner, who would go on to play with Bob Dylan, John Lennon, George Harrison, Ry Cooder, Neil Young and countless others, was in his last year at the mostly white Pasadena High School when he met Stinson, who was two years younger and attending the mostly black John Muir HS. They were neighbours in the Altadena. “I was always aware that I was older than Albert,” Keltner said, “but I knew that I would never be as smart as him. A very, very smart cat. A very high IQ.” Another neighbour, the vibraphonist Bobby Hutcherson, had just graduated from John Muir, and the three played together constantly.

“Albert lived in a kind of cul-de-sac about five minutes from my house. It was a very diverse community, very well integrated. White people had black or Asian neighbours, and there were a lot of Mexicans around. And I’m half-Mexican.”

He remembered that Stinson lived with his mother, a former dancer, and her steady flow of boyfriends. His father had left the family early. When Keltner got married young, to a girl he’d known in high school, Stinson envied him. “He always loved the fact that Cynthia, my wife, and me, we made the long haul, which is very unusual for musicians. I think he wanted that and thought he could have it, but it wasn’t to be. I can’t really bring myself to talk about his personal life, but he was hurt badly by his relationship. His very first girlfriend was really young, a young beautiful black girl, and he was young, too… he was in love with her. I can’t speak for her but he was really in love with her. They were a little team. At some point he married and had a baby. He’s called Ian Stinson. He looks just like Albert, but with dreads… a beautiful kid. He’s a drummer and lives up north.”

Keltner remembered an early visit to the Stinson house on Shelly Street. “One afternoon I went over and he was sitting on the floor with his cigarette and ashtray and his weed and a little half-smoked doobie and a glass of cheap Ripple white wine, with a newspaper and glue and a huge massive book. He was making his own bass from a library book. I’m not sure how he did it, but the bass that he built himself was the one that I used to put in my car, because I would drive him everywhere. An upright bass and my drums in a Volkswagen.”

But before long they’d all hooked up with another young star of the future, the saxophonist and flautist Charles Lloyd. “I told Charles Lloyd about Albert when we were driving down from a little gig in a country club up in the mountains,” Keltner said. He was subbing for Mike Romero, Lloyd’s regular drummer. Hutcherson was already in the band, along with the pianist Terry Trotter and the bassist George Morrow. Soon Stinson would be replacing Morrow and also persuading Keltner, who thought he would never be as good as Romero, out of giving up music altogether.

“Mike Romero would come into the music store where I worked and I just thought he was the coolest guy in the world. One day he said to me, ‘You want to sub for me for half a set?’ I acted very confident and yet I was scared shitless. So I played, then I stayed and watched Mike, and I was so demoralised. Albert lit into me and told me how dumb I was. He said, ‘I would rather play with you any day than with Mike Romero.’ I said, you’re just saying that because you’re my friend. But I never forgot it. It carried me through.”

Of Stinson’s six albums with Chico Hamilton, recorded between 1962 and 1965, Passin’ Thru is the one that made a deep impression on me at the time. On pieces like “Lady Gabor” and the title track, he seemed to have metabolised the deep-groove drone effects created by the multiple bassists on such John Coltrane recordings as Olé and Africa/Brass. Barely 18, his strength and maturity were extraordinary.

He’d also recorded for Pacific Jazz with the pianist Clare Fischer (Surging Ahead, 1962), the guitarist Joe Pass (Catch Me!, 1963) and Charles Lloyd (Nirvana, 1965). He’d played (although not recorded) with Gerald Wilson’s mighty big band in Los Angeles. In 1964 he’d visited London with Hamilton, Szabó and the altoist/flautist Jimmy Woods to record the soundtrack for Roman Polanski’s Repulsion. He’d been in Rudy Van Gelder’s famous studio in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, one day in 1967 to record a quartet session for Blue Note under Hutcherson’s leadership, with Hancock on piano and Joe Chambers on drums, featuring a fantastic Stinson solo on a piece called “My Joy”, although the album wouldn’t be released until 1980, under the title Oblique.

“Albert loved playing music and he loved jazz,” Keltner said. “He was a thorough jazz musician. All of our friends, jazz players, were completely inspired by him. He was a leader, a ringleader. I was always round at his house, listening to music. We listened to Bartók, we listened to Coltrane. Everything I heard, I heard it first with Albert. Bobby Hutcherson lived even closer to him than I did. Those 3 a.m. calls to rescue Albert, it was always Bobby and me who went to save him.”

Those 3 a.m. calls came when he’d overdosed on heroin, something that had existed in his life alongside music well before, in 1967, he, Hutcherson and Keltner joined the band of the altoist John Handy, whose reputation had been made by an incendiary performance at the 1965 Monterey Jazz Festival. “Albert got me that gig,” Keltner said. “It was a fantastic time for me. It was at a club in San Francisco called the Both/And. I don’t remember playing very good, just hanging on and trying to get it right. I didn’t have the confidence. Jazz playing is a huge amount about confidence. Not like rock and roll, where you do your thing. Not that I’m belittling it. But jazz is a different thing. And even though I wasn’t cutting it, and I knew it, Albert would make it right.”

By the time the new line-up made a well received album, New View, recorded live at the Village Gate in New York for Columbia, featuring a wonderful version of Coltrane’s “Naima”, Keltner had been replaced by Doug Sides, another young musician from Los Angeles.

“Albert was one of these kids who just had a glorious talent, and he was a person that almost anybody would love,” Handy told David Brett Johnson, a deejay on Indiana University’s radio station, in 2008. “A very easy, sweet young guy, and his playing was just incredible. He seemed to have a bunch of natural ability, which I understood because I came that way myself, without that much experience, but just kind of knew how to do it. However, I was afraid — even with those guys in my band, there were drugs. They kept it away from me. They were younger, they kind of… you know, when you‘re the bandleader the little cliques kind of take place, and they weren‘t vicious, they just… I could see the half-generation difference in age and all.”

Doug Sides, who moved to the UK in 2010 and died at his home in Kent this month (October 2024), aged 81, remembered meeting Stinson at jam sessions in an LA place known as the Snake House — actually the home of a musician who kept pet snakes.

“Albert a very special human being,” he told me. “He was one of the nicest guys I ever met. He didn’t have animosity toward anybody. He just liked to have fun. But he had one problem. He liked to get high and he liked to shoot up with the junkies. And he tried to keep up with them, which caused him to overdose a few times before he died in New York doing the same thing.

“He was a really great player. He had a big sound, too, and he could play any tempo. For a small cat – he was short – but he was very strong, strong like somebody who was 6’5 or something, he had that kind of strength. In those days they had beer cans that you couldn’t crush very easily, not like the modern ones where you just squeeze and they fold up. He used to crush them like they were the modern ones.”

His seven months with Handy included a stint in San Francisco performing an opera, The Visitation, written by Gunther Schuller for 19 voices, woodwind and string sections and a jazz quartet, applying ideas from Kafka’s The Trial to the world of civil rights in America, and blending 12-tone composition with jazz.

“Albert had never played with a conductor,” Handy told David Brent Johnson. “Well, man, he learned those parts by just — with one or two rehearsals, and they were very difficult, as you can imagine if you know anything about Gunther Schuller‘s music. And at one point Gunther Schuller stopped the rehearsal and said to the bass players, ‘Do you hear this bass player? He sounds as big as almost all of those guys put together back there!’ And poor Albert was so sick, I didn‘t realise it, from doing crazy things, you know, and vomiting during the breaks because he was taking drugs… I didn‘t know that. He kept it away from me. All I know is he played his butt off.”

Jim Keltner said he thought one of the reasons Stinson turned down Miles Davis’s offer was that he didn’t want to leave Altadena, where his mother had left him their house on Shelly Street. “My own life had really changed by that time,” the drummer recalled. “I’d done rock and roll with Gary Lewis and the Playboys in 1965. Albert thought that was cool. He wasn’t judgmental. Some of the others were jazz snobs. By 1968-69 I was playing in a couple of bands and Albert was travelling more so I was seeing him less, but I’d hear things.”

Stinson joined the band of the guitarist Larry Coryell, whose popularity had taken off during his time with Gary Burton’s quartet. “When I heard he’d joined Coryell,” Keltner continued, “someone said he was playing electric bass, or thinking about it. I thought, oh wow, that’s incredible. He’ll burn that thing up. He’ll make it his own and he’ll be one of the baddest cats and maybe at some point we’ll play together again. But then, bam.”

On the road in June 1969, a few weeks short of his 25th birthday, Stinson overdosed again in a New York hotel room. This time he would not be saved. “It wasn’t a shock,” Keltner said, “but it was incredibly sad. Then I started hearing stories about the guys he was getting high with. Instead of trying to save him, they got scared and ran away. That’s one of the things I learned in the earlier days, one of the sad, dumb things, about how you don’t do that. You’ve got to save them. Which then, in turn, I got saved two times later. Bobby and I weren’t there to save him.

“Because of that rumour, I remember just hating Larry Coryell and everything about him. It was a misplaced anger. I didn’t know the details or anything. Eventually I had to let go of blaming him for Albert’s death.”

Whatever his habits, and the problems they may have caused for himself and others, Albert Stinson was someone who inspired powerful feelings of love and loss in fellow musicians. In Keltner and Sides, obviously, and also in Charles Lloyd, who cherishes his memory. Four months after Stinson’s death, Bobby Hutcherson wrote and recorded a lament called “Now”, dedicated to his late friend, with a lyric by Gene McDaniels delivered by the soprano Christine Spencer: “At the end, no more need…”

“Later in life,” Keltner told me, “I came to appreciate that although people will compliment you on your talent, generally speaking your talent is based on who you’re playing with. Every time I played with Albert, under any situation, whether it was some little silly gig like a bar mitzvah or whatever, it was incredible. It was always great. I always felt like I was somebody.

“It shows how amazing Albert was. He was so soulful. And he was too sensitive a cat for the world. A sensitive, beautiful old soul.”

* The fine photograph of Albert Stinson is by Ave Pildas, whose work in jazz and many other fields can be seen at http://www.avepildas.com. A bootleg of the radio broadcast of the Miles Davis Quintet’s Harmon Gymnasium concert was released on a CD some years ago by the recordJet label.

Oct 21

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Other sounds 4: ‘Za Górami’

Ladino is a language spoken by Sephardic Jews, with its origins in medieval Spanish, Hebrew and Aramaic. In her wonderful book Ornament of the World, subtitled “How Muslims, Jews and Christians Created a Culture of Tolerance in Medieval Spain”, María Rosa Menocal describes it and its equally Romance language-based Muslim equivalent, Aljamiado, as not just “languages of exile and persecution” but as “quixotically defiant memory palaces”.

Five traditional Ladino songs are included in Za Górami, a new album by Alice Zawadzki, Fred Thomas and Misha Mullov-Abbado, providing a kind of structure for the 11-track sequence featuring Zawadski’s voice, violin and viola, Mullov-Abbado’s double bass and Thomas’s piano, drums and vielle (a fiddle favoured by French troubadours between the 11th and 13th centuries). The remainder of the programme consists of songs taken from a variety of sources.

Here’s what the three London-based musicians say, in a jointly authored sleeve note: “Collected on our travels and taughgt to us by our friends, these are songs we have learnt and loved together. Though our musical and cultural backgrounds encompass Europe, Russia and South America, we were all three born in England. This happenstance was the product of love, war, exile, the arbitrariness of borders and the yearning for a new life.” All those themes, they say, are woven through the songs.

Za Górami is Polish for “behind the mountains”. Other songs come from Argentina (Gustavo Santaolalla’s “Suéltate Las Cintas”), Venezuela (Simón Diaz’s “Tonada De Luna Llena”) and medieval France (“Je Suis Trop Jeunette”). “Gentle Lady” is Fred Thomas’s setting of a text by James Joyce: “Gentle lady, do not sing / Sad songs about the end of love / Lay aside sadness and sing / How love that passes is enough.”

Recorded in Lugano and produced by Manfred Eicher, the music could be said to be a perfect manifesto for the ECM philosophy: the creation of a frontierless chamber music based on the instincts and practices of jazz but entirely porous in its acceptance of other cultures and idioms.

The Ladino lyrics are interesting for their closeness to more familiar languages: “Arvoles lloran por lluvias / Y montañas por aire / Ansi lloran los mis ojos / Por tí querido amante” translates as “The trees weep for rain / And the mountains for air / So weep my eyes / For you, my love.” That’s the closing track, a restrained lament consisting of three haiku-like verses that concludes: “I turn and ask — what will become of me? / I will die in foreign lands.” These are lieder for a modern world in which echoes of the past are inescapable.

If, as it happens, nothing here sounds much like jazz, it couldn’t exist without jazz, either. The clarity and subtle shadings of Zawadzki’s soprano, the handsomely shaped bass sound and calm phrasing of Mullov-Abbado, and Thomas’s reflective piano and subtle percussion work together to create a pan-national music in which elegance, economy and ardour are held in perfect balance. In its quiet way, this is one of the year’s outstanding albums.

* Za Górami is out now on the ECM label: the trio will perform at Kings Place on November 23 as part of the EFG London Jazz Festival. The photo of Mullov-Abbado, Zawadzki and Thomas is by Monika Jakubowska.

Oct 19

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Springsteen’s road movie

About halfway through Road Diary, Thom Zimny’s new film of Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band returning to action in 2023, Patti Scialfa steps forward to talk about the diagnosis of early-stage multiple myeloma she received in 2018. Treatment for the rare form of blood cancer has compromised her immune system and kept her from appearing on stage on all but rare occasions.

And that’s where we’re at. Deep into an eighth decade, with more future behind than ahead. The girl you took to both shows at Hammersmith Odeon in 1975 is dead. Your parents have gone, which — depending on your relationships — may be a loss that doesn’t fade. (Adele Springsteen, who was in her eighties when she sashayed across a stage in her son’s arms to “Dancing in the Dark”, died this year at 94.) Your husband or wife — or you — have health issues. Your kids are suddenly what you once were. And priorities change. But some stuff doesn’t.

That stuff includes the feeling of joy that Springsteen can still bring you, and there’s a big helping of it in Zimny’s 90-minute documentary, which blends together contemporary and archive footage of rehearsals and performances with interviews: Springsteen himself, Steve Van Zandt and the other members of the band, from those now gone — the eternally missed Danny Federici and Clarence Clemons — to recent arrivals, such as the very engaging percussionist Anthony Almonte. And we hear the voices of others, from dedicated fans in Italy, Norway and the UK to his manager of almost 50 years, the erstwhile rock critic Jon Landau, who broadened his cultural horizons while guarding his interests.

Bruce turned 75 this year and he looked a little stiffer as he mounted the short flight of steps to the stage for a Q&A after an advance screening of the film in London last night. He spoke very touchingly about keeping a band together for so long. It’s hard enough with just two guys, he said: Simon hates Garfunkel, Sam hates Dave, Hall hates Oates, Don hates Phil. Can you imagine having four friends at school and then spending every day for the rest of your life with those same guys? That takes some good decisions at critical moments.

The keystones of the 2023 shows were two newer songs: “Last Man Standing”, about the realisation that he is the now last survivor of his teenage band, the Castiles, and “I’ll See You in My Dreams”, the final solo encore, about George Theiss, that band’s other guitarist and singer, who died in 2018. Mortality is more than just the subtext of the film.

Later last night, on Graham Norton’s BBC1 chat show, he was an amiable presence alongside the actress Amy Adams, the singer Vanessa Williams and the comedian Bill Bailey: a very congenial lineup. When he and Bailey got into a discussion about Fender guitars, Norton might have said, “Come on, girls, let’s leave the boys to talk about their hobby.” But then Bruce called Adams “my second-favourite redhead”, which was very sweet and turned this viewer’s thoughts back to Patti. And although we know the outline of that part of the story, the reality of it is theirs alone.

At the screening I was sitting next to Damien Morris, who writes for the Observer. Before the film started we were chatting about Springsteen gigs. He asked me which song that Bruce doesn’t normally play in concert would be the one I’d ask him for, if I had a request. That was easy. “Thundercrack”, which he actually played on his return to Asbury Park in September. But later, when I thought about it some more, there were other answers. “Santa Ana” or “The Promise”. “Rendezvous”, of course. “Wreck on the Highway”. “Brilliant Disguise”. “One Step Up”. “Let’s Be Friends (Skin to Skin)”. There’s so much, isn’t there? All of it resting on the unshakeable twin pillars of “Born to Run” and “Thunder Road”. Such depth and richness.

Or there’s “Fire”. During the film Zimny suddenly cuts to Bruce and Patti on stage together somewhere or other last year, leaning into each other as they croon that song into a single microphone. “Romeo and Juliet, Samson and Delilah / Baby, you can bet, a love they couldn’t deny…” His favourite redhead.

During the Q&A, he was asked how long he saw himself continuing to make music. “Until the wheels fall off,” he said.

* Road Diary is on Disney+ from October 25.

Oct 14

3 Comments

Lady Blackbird’s ‘The City’

It begins with a piano tinkling against background chatter. Uptown jazz in a cocktail bar at the top of a skyscraper, its windows overlooking over the rainy nighttime streets. There’s a sighs of strings, and then a pause before a bass riff comes in against a rattle of congas. And then the voice of Lady Blackbird.

Born Marley Munroe in New Mexico 39 years ago, she now makes records with the guitarist/producer Chris Seefried. They wrote this song together. It’s on her new album and it’s called “The City”.

This is a story-song: “Lucille was a mother workin’ for the man / Hard-workin’ women always got a plan / She’ll get there (We’ll get there) / Gettin’ money for the kids and collect the pay / Save their money, gonna move away / To get there (We’ll get there)…” Her voice is strong — toughened by pain, although not unyielding, with a discreet use of fast vibrato, distinctive but subtle.

But then the chorus kicks in — “Show me the joy in the city / No time for pity…” — and the mood is instantly lifted by a groove that defines the way a driving four-four snare drum (here played by Tamir Barzilay) and a freer-floating bass guitar (Jon Flaugher) can together created an irresistible momentum based on the intuitive microsecond differences in their timing, the way Benny Benjamin and James Jamerson used to do at Motown. It sweeps you along, sweeps you away.

“The City” is on Lady Blackbird’s Slang Spirituals, the follow-up to 2021’s highly acclaimed Black Acid Soul. It’s 4:27 of the kind of soul music that blends a shout of triumph and defiance with an undertow of melancholy — so much more compelling than mere euphoria. Gladys Knight’s “Taste of Bitter Love” and Odyssey’s “Native New Yorker”: it’s one of those. And I suspect that it, too, will be with me for a long time.

* Lady Blackbird’s Slang Spirituals is on the BMG label.

Oct 12

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Other sounds 3: The Henrys

The instrument in the photograph is a harmonium, sometimes known as a reed organ, or pump organ. Its earliest ancestor was invented by Gabriel-Joseph Grenié in France at the start of the 19th century. It has a sound I love, and this particular example is heard a lot throughout the new album by the Henrys, the Canadian band convened by the guitarist Don Rooke.

No single sound dominates Secular Hymns & Border Songs, although Rooke’s 1920 Weissenborn guitar and Michael White’s plaintive trumpet are prominent voices, but the gentle wheeze of the harmonium underlies it all, even when it isn’t actually present, like the layers of undercoat Mark Rothko applied to his canvases before beginning to paint his blocks of colour, sometimes allowing a little of the background to bleed out at the edge of the finished work.

I’ve been trying to think about how this music sounds. Handmade would be one word. Acoustic, too, in the sense that you’re unusually aware that these gentle, sometimes fugitive sounds are made by vibrations in the air. The listener notes the intimacy but also the feeling of uncrowded space. Most of all, I like the sense that it feels assembled — like something made by a skilled carpenter, working by eye and experience with familiar tools.

Rooke’s slide guitar is the first thing you hear on the opening track, “Garland”. Its tentative phrases barely disturb the air before others join in: Leanna Rutt’s cello, White’s trumpet, Maggie Keogh’s wordless voice, Andrew Downing’s double bass and John Sheard’s harmonium. That’s the basic ensemble, and collectively it has a lovely unfinished, almost skeletal quality: like something produced by a random bunch of musicians left over from a rehearsal by a much larger group, continuing to explore a common store of tunes because their bus home isn’t due for another hour, and because they like it.

There are 11 tracks, and each has its own character, but they move from one to another without significant breaks or changes of attack, just a pause for a breath, so that the whole thing sounds like a single semi-improvised composition. Occasionally, as when you reach “Fairground”, the fifth track, the ensemble coalesces on a melody that rises out of the surrounding mist, and the effect is gorgeous. Same thing on “Parish” (the one that sounds most like a hymn) and “Cortège” (the one that seems to exist most obviously on a border between cultures).

The informality of the music disguises the effort and skill that went into its creation, which is as it should be. As modern music goes, some would probably think it understated almost to a fault. But in the modern world, how could that possibly be a fault?

* The Henrys’ Secular Hymns & Border Songs is released on November 1, available via https://thehenrys.bandcamp.com/album/secular-hymns-and-border-songs

Oct 4

Other sounds 2: Vazesh

The Persian tar is a cousin of the lute, the saz and the oud, a long-necked instrument with three double courses of strings — sort of like half a 12-string guitar, another relative — and an unusual double bowl made of mulberry wood with a membrane of stretched lambskin. Perhaps you already knew that, but I didn’t until I encountered the playing of the Iranian-born tar virtuoso Hamed Sadeghi in Vazesh, a trio in which he’s joined by two Aussies, the saxophonist and clarinetist Jeremy Rose and the bassist Lloyd Swanton.

Their first album, released in 2021, was a live recording at Sydney Opera House and won awards. Its successor, Tapestry, was recorded during a single night of improvisation at an arts centre in Annandale, a suburb of Sydney. Just under an hour long, Tapestry seems to be an unbroken performance, although on the sleeve it’s divided into 14 tracks, each jointly credited and given a single-word title that might be the result of a game in which the three members contributed their favourite words: “Lilac”, “Pagoda”, “Calabash”, “Demitasse”, “Musk” and so on.

It’s a beautiful and unclassifiable record. The individual sounds are exquisite — the tar strummed and plucked with a tiny hint of twang, the reeds (bass clarinet, soprano and tenor saxophones) elegant, the double bass resonant (Swanton, of course, is also one-third of the Necks). But the point is the sense of conversation, ebbing and flowing without rhetoric or exhibition meditative but never passive. When musicians from different cultures can do this together, with so much ease and naturalness, maybe we’re not in such a terrible state after all.

* Vazesh’s Tapestry is released on October 25 on the Earshift Music label: https://vazesh.bandcamp.com/album/tapestry

Oct 1

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Other sounds 1: Rachel Musson

Olie Brice’s new quartet made a very promising debut at Café Oto last night, and one the reasons was Rachel Musson, whose tenor saxophone traced and explored the contours of the bassist’s characteristically intriguing themes (and Don Cherry’s perky “Awake Nu”) with alert and graceful lyricism. The piano of Alexander Hawkins and the drums of Will Glaser rounded out a group that was heading into a studio the next day to record what will surely be a most interesting album.

A fellow listener observed that Musson’s playing in this context made quite a contrast with her work in her more familiar setting of free improvisation, where multiphonics and other techniques come into play. Last night her fibrous tone and mobile phrasing suggested that she’d located a very fruitful spot within an area defined by Sam Rivers and Pharoah Sanders (at his most songlike). I was reminded, too, that one of her early inspirations was Lee Konitz.

At the merch table during the interval I bought her new CD, titled Ashes and Dust, Earth and Sky in English and Lludw a Llwch, Daear a Nef in Welsh. To be honest, I bought it not just because I’d been enjoying her playing in the first half, or because of the Welsh element, but because I liked the look and feel of the packaging. Sometimes a sleeve design really can tell you about what’s inside.

Inspired during lockdown by researches into her family’s history in Pembrokeshire/Sir Benfro during lockdown, the album was recorded and mixed in 2021. It combines field recordings in West Wales with her saxophones, flute, piccolo, wind chimes, singing bowl and tro (a Cambodian spike fiddle).

Birdsong, wind, church bells — these form the material into which Musson weaves her own contributions, shaping a 40-minute tapestry beyond definition. Birds are the first thing you hear, chirping and cawing, and soon a song is being mimicked by her flute, which reminded me of something Eric Dolphy, another flautist, said long ago: “At home I used to play, and the birds always used to whistle with me. I’d stop what I was working on and play with the birds.” A piccolo joins in, while a singing bowl and the patter of saxophone pads add to the mix before a brief passage of restrained free-style tenor ends the piece.

The music creates and sustains its own space, with frequent individual highlights. The second and fifth of the six tracks, “Bethink and Lay to Heart” and “Windblown”, contain lovely saxophone chorales emerging out of the ambiance and speaking to it, while the finale, the 10-minute title track, opens with a pair of piccolos conversing like blackbirds, introducing the altered sound of bells and other distorted samples which loom and linger until they recede into the silence, having made their quiet but lasting impression.

* Rachel Musson’s album is on Soundskein Records: https://rachelmusson.bandcamp.com/album/ashes-and-dust-earth-and-sky-lludw-a-llwch-daear-a-nef