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Feb 24

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Roberta Flack in London

Roberta Flack, who has died aged 88, made her London debut on July 27, 1972, at an early-evening showcase presented by Atlantic Records before an invited audience of industry and media types at Ronnie Scott’s Club. She’d already released three albums but it was when Clint Eastwood chose to feature a track from the first of them, “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face”, in his 1971 movie Play Misty For Me that she became a hot property.

I sat with my friend Charlie Gillett and we were both overjoyed to discover that her band included Richard Tee on keyboards, the guitarist Eric Gale and the drummer Bernard “Pretty” Purdie. A real New York studio ‘A’ team, the kind you couldn’t quite believe you were seeing in a London club. They provided the perfect platform for the poise and exquisitely chosen material of a singer who was already, at 35, a mature woman.

Of a beautiful little show, in which she also presented two talented young male singers who were her protégés (and whose names I’m afraid I don’t recall), the highlight for me was “Reverend Lee”, a slice of lubricious lowdown funk written by Eugene McDaniels, to whom she had been introduced by her original patron and mentor, Les McCann. She’d already recorded McDaniels’ “Compared to What” on her debut album, First Take, released the day before before McCann and Eddie Harris cut their hit live version at the Montreux Festival.

I prefer her reading, in which the incendiary lyric of a great protest song is rendered all the more powerful for her restrained delivery. Produced with exemplary sensitivity by Joel Dorn, it features the great Ron Carter on double bass, shortly after he had ended his six-year stint with Miles Davis’s quintet.

“I have chills remembering his virtuosity that first day in the studio in New York,” she told me when I asked her about working with Carter during an interview for Uncut magazine in 2020. “He understood that less is more and the importance of the silence between the notes. He was also humble and open to my musical thoughts and suggestions. Our synergy is what you hear on ‘Compared to What’ and ‘First Time’.”

Like Nina Simone, Flack had begun her musical career in the hope of becoming a classical pianist, but fate took them both in a different direction. Simone carried the sense of having been unjustly thwarted with her throughout her life. I asked Flack if she’d ever felt that way, too.

“Life can be so unpredictable,” she said. “One thing I know is that everything changes. I’ve tried to embrace the twists and turns that life’s changes have brought. I took my classical training and used it as the foundation on which I based my arrangements, my dynamics and ultimately my musical expression. I think if you’re rigid about how you see yourself and if you aren’t open to the changes that life brings you, the resentment will show in your music and can interfere with honest expression.”

I’m listening to First Take while writing this. Whether it’s in the quietly spine-tingling gospel of “I Told Jesus”, the laconic protest soul of “Tryin’ Times” or the sublime sophistication of “Ballad of the Sad Young Men”, honest expression from a great artist is what you get.

* The photograph of Roberta Flack at Ronnie Scott’s in 1972, with Eric Gale (right), was taken by Brian O’Connor. If you want to read more about Ms Flack, you won’t find anything better than this piece by Ann Powers: https://www.npr.org/2020/02/10/804370981/roberta-flack-the-virtuoso

Feb 17

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Dave Tomlin 1934-2024

I never met Dave Tomlin, or heard him play live, but the news of his death at the age of 90 rang a bell that echoed back to London in the late 1960s. A Tibetan prayer bell, probably: among other distinctions, Tomlin was the founder of the wonderfully named Giant Sun Trolley, a group who were one of the early attractions, along with Pink Floyd and the Soft Machine, at UFO, the legendary psychedelic club which opened in December 1966 in a Tottenham Court Road basement, where it ran weekly until July 1967.

Originally an army bugler, then a clarinetist with Bob Wallis’s Storyville Jazzmen during the Trad boom, Tomlin switched in the mid-’60s to soprano saxophone, the instrument on which he was featured in the Mike Taylor Quartet, a Coltrane-influenced group led by a strikingly adventurous but troubled British pianist. A recording of a January 1965 gig, with Tony Reeves on bass and Jon Hiseman on drums, emerged under the title Mandala four years ago, supplementing their official release, Pendulum, recorded in October of that year by Denis Preston in his Notting Hill studio.

Taylor’s mental problems, seemingly exacerbated by the prolonged use of LSD, would soon destroy his musical career. According to Ron Rubin, who took over from Reeves as the group’s bassist and played on Pendulum, he was so disturbed that at one point he threatened to kill Tomlin. In January 1969, after a period during which he had been seen busking on the streets with an Arabian clay drum, Taylor’s drowned body was found washed up on an Essex shore, the cause of his death, whether accident or suicide, unexplained.

Tomlin, by contrast, survived the mind-expanding journeys of the time. Glen Sweeney, a jazz drummer when he joined Giant Sun Trolley, met him at the London Free School in 1966 and said in an interview with the archivist Luca Ferrari that he “was known as an ace guy — he’d taken a lot of drugs and dropped out.” Sweeney became Tomlin’s first recruit to Giant Sun Trolley; they were sometimes joined by bassist Roger Bunn (later to become the original Roxy Music guitarist) and a trombonist named Dick Dadem. They split up when Tomlin decided to spend some time in Morocco in 1967, leaving behind no aural evidence of the band’s time together.

Sweeney switched to tablas and formed the Third Ear Band, who became a fixture at underground events. One track of their 1969 debut album for EMI’s Harvest label featured a guest appearance by Tomlin, playing violin on his own composition “Lark Rise”.

Thereafter music seemed to play a smaller role in Tomlin’s life. He was a poet, novelist and memoirist, and between 1976 and 1991 devoted much of his time to the Guild of Transcultural Studies, a community of artists from many disciplines who took informal occupation of London’s unoccupied Cambodian Embassy.

He died three months ago, but I didn’t know about it until one of his sons wrote a short obituary for the Guardian. His death removes another link with the particular Notting Hill microclimate of artistic and social optimism embodied by UFO, the Free School, Blackhill Enterprises, Joe Boyd’s Witchseason and IT. He never became a big name, and probably never wanted to be, but the sound of his soprano saxophone survives on those challenging, sometimes exhilarating Taylor quartet recordings as evidence of a man in his element.

* The Mike Taylor Quartet’s Mandala is a CD on the Jazz in Britain label. Pendulum, originally issued on Columbia, was reissued in 2007 on Sunbeam Records. The Third Ear Band’s three albums were reissued in 2021 in a box set of CDs titled Mosaics by Esoteric/Cherry Red. The photo of Tomlin is taken from Luca Ferrari’s archive: http://www.ghettoraga.blogspot.com

Feb 14

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Keyboard studies

Perhaps it was last month’s 50th anniversary of Keith Jarrett’s Köln Concert that got me thinking about solo jazz piano. As it happens, I’d been listening recently to the incomparable Art Tatum, particularly to the unaccompanied pieces from Jewels in the Treasure Box, recorded in 1953 at the Blue Note in Chicago and released last year, and to Paul Bley’s 1972 very different solo classic Open, to Love, now being given a vinyl reissue.

Then Mike Westbrook got in touch to tell me that his four volumes of solo recordings, made in various locations between 2022 and 2024 for private circulation under the title The Piano and Me, were now — thanks to entreaties from several quarters, including this one — available to everyone via download. And, kicking off a three-night season at Cafe Oto, I heard Alexander Hawkins play a half-hour solo set that achieved marvels of modernistic sonic architecture on material that will form part of a forthcoming solo release.

All this solo piano made me wish there was a place in London today similar to Bradley’s, the piano bar that existed in Greenwich Village between 1969 and 1996. A few months after it opened, I saw two significant pianists playing solo there. The first was the bebop veteran Al Haig, whose touch and lucidity made an understated but indelible impression. The second was Dave McKenna, in whose large frame were gathered all the virtues of mainstream jazz pianism. Like Jimmy Rowles and Alan Clare, McKenna seemed to know every standard ever written, and then some. He died in 2008, aged 78. A priceless film of him was made at a private party in 1991.

I love it when a pianist, whether on a concert platform or a railway station concourse, has the time to follow a train of thought wherever it may lead. That’s what I cherish about the Westbrook recitals, which follow on from his previous solo albums: Paris (2017) and Starcross Bridge (2018). He takes the opportunity to wander, but never without purpose. In the fourth volume of the new set, recorded at Ashburton Arts Centre in Devon, he moves seamlessly from his own “View from the Drawbridge” to Monk’s “Jackie-ing” and then John Ireland’s hymn tune “Love Unknown”. In the second volume, recorded at the Pizza Express, “My Way” runs into “Falling in Love Again”, then into “Lover Man”, and then into Billy Strayhorn’s “Blood Count”.

It’s a look inside the mind of a musician who, now in his eighties, finds nourishment in Mingus, Bacharach, Rossini and the Beatles. The pace is steady, the mood reflective. There’s time to explore the melodic byways, the harmonic implications. No Tatum-style technical fireworks, yet the result is mesmerising. And, as with all the music and musicians I’ve mentioned in this piece, it’s a reminder that the piano really is one of humanity’s noblest inventions.

* You’ll find Mike Westbrook’s The Piano and Me here: https://mikewestbrook.bandcamp.com/. Art Tatum’s Jewels in the Treasure Box is on the Resonance label. Paul Bley’s Open, to Love is reissued in ECM’s Luminessence vinyl series. Alexander Hawkins’s new solo album, Song Unconditional, will be out in the spring on Intakt. The photo is a screen-grab from a fine TV documentary on Art Tatum: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VXJb14qufe4

Feb 11

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Tour de force

As we queued in the Dalston drizzle outside Cafe Oto for last night’s sold-out show by the Tyshawn Sorey Trio, I don’t suppose many of us realised quite the extent to which we were about to enter a better world.

Outside: the return of territorial conquest as a mode of historical change, the revived persecution of minorities, the increasing contrast between private affluence and public squalor, the plight of bankrupt councils trying not to close libraries and other basic services, the destruction of humanities courses in universities, the malign manipulation of such digital-era innovations as AI and cryptocurrency, the exaltation of spite, revenge and mistrust in public life, and the general deprecation of the public good. Inside: playing non-stop, without a break, for two and a quarter hours, Sorey and his colleagues, the bassist Harish Raghavan and the pianist Aaron Diehl, reminding us of what human beings can do, at their very best.

There was too much to describe. This is a group that thinks in long durations, in slow development, in whispers as well as roars. Its three albums (the first two of which had Matt Brewer on bass) fully demonstrated those priorities. In person, however, the effect is more than redoubled, thanks to the brilliance with which they manage the flow and its sometimes radical transitions through nothing more than eye-contact cues, twice managing gradual and beautifully calibrated accelerations that transported the crowd as well as the musicians.

Each player is a virtuoso, a product of intense learning and dedication as well as innate talent. But the machine they build, as with any great group, is superior to the sum of its constituent parts. There were elements of blues and gospel in some of the vast, surging climaxes that drew shouts from the audience, and of ballads and different shades of blues in the passages that flirted with silence. Sorey’s rattling Latin rhythms bounced off the walls; his gossamer shuffle barely disturbed the air. Diehl’s dizzyingly fast upper-register filigree phrases spun with a centripetal force. Raghavan’s assertive agility was balanced by deep thoughtfulness.

Their repertoire avoids original material in favour of extended explorations and dissections of generally lesser known pieces by significant jazz composers: Ahmad Jamal, Duke Ellington, Muhal Richard Abrams, Wayne Shorter, Horace Silver, Brad Mehldau, McCoy Tyner, Harold Mabern. Since the chosen themes are not the obvious ones, and are not identified in performance, the audience listens with fresh ears, unaffected by the comfort of familiarity, open to everything they do.

“See you on the other side,” Sorey had said before the start of the journey. After an hour or so, during a quiet passage, he asked: “Y’all still with us?” Not only were we still with them, both then and at the reluctant end of the performance, but many of us were probably still with them on the journey home and on the morning after, and will be with them for some time to come. An unforgettable night.

* The Tyshawn Sorey Trio’s three albums — Mesmerism, Continuing and The Susceptible Now — are on Pi Recordings, available at tyshawn-sorey@bandcamp.com

** In the original version of this I had a moment of brain fade and wrote “public affluence and private squalor”. Now corrected.

Feb 7

Looping time at the Science Museum

To reach the performance space, it was necessary to walk under a 1929 Handley Page biplane suspended from the roof, around a steam engine by the 19th century inventor Henry Maudslay, and past a row of human skulls apparently once used for phrenological analysis. Not your regular gig, then, but Time Loops, a performance by Icebreaker at the Science Museum.

Formed in the UK in 1989, Icebreaker play new music (from Louis Andriessen to Kraftwerk via Philip Glass and Brian Eno), always involving amplification. For this concert, in which their musicians were dispersed around the exhibits in one of the galleries, they utilised electronic devices old enough to be in the museum’s collection: the Watkins Copicat tape-echo unit from the late 1950s, the VCS3 and VCS4 portable synthesisers from the ’70s, and the ShoZyg instruments made between 1967 and 1975 by the late composer Hugh Davies, once a member of the Music Improvisation Company and Gentle Fire.

The audience was free to wander around the perimeter of the performers’ space, able to observe at close quarters as the musicians — a cellist, a violinist, two flautists, two saxophonists, a percussionist, a guitarist, a bass guitarist, an accordionist, a number of keyboard and synth operators — went to work on three commissioned compositions.

The first, “Time Loops” itself, a 42-minute piece by Shiva Feshareki, began with high harmonics from the bowed cello, joined by similar high frequencies — from pan pipes, bowed guitar and bowed vibraphone, among other things — as the layers built up, with a synth adding loud floor-trembling bass rumbles to counterpoint the scratches and whistles that sounded like outtakes from the NASA space noise Terry Riley used in Sun Rings. Then the textures gradually thinned out again and the piece ended with discreet guitar feedback. I found it a very enjoyable sonic space to inhabit.

The first affordable echo unit was celebrated in the second piece, Sarah Angliss’s “Copicat”. I was looking forward to this, since the first band I was in, at the age of 13 or so, managed to acquire one Charlie Watkins’s inventions to help us on our journey through post-skiffle, pre-Beatles rock and roll. Angliss subtly evoked its original use in the minimalist twang of the guitar and the bass, but began with solo violin before incorporating accordion stabs and swells, a pair of bass clarinets, toy piano, and alto flutes. Watkins’ voice was also sampled in a 20-minute piece I’d gladly hear again, live or on record, not only in order to decipher more of what he was saying.

Electronics were a more salient feature of “Concerto Grosso for ShoZygs”, Gavin Bryars’ salute to his old friend. The ensemble realigned itself into three parts: a “rhythm section” of guitarist, bassist and percussionist (the latter standing between a gran cassa and large gong with a mallet in each hand, sustaining a steady, surging pulse), a chamber group of violin and cello, alto and baritone saxophones and accordion, and a very active quartet of electronicists, manipulating devices from the pre-turntablist era, including the home-made ShoZygs.

Also 20 minutes long, this was the piece that was hardest for the listener to get a handle on, given the topography of the space, but Bryars, who sat listening throughout by the mixing desk, deserved the applause with which he and this adventurous ensemble were greeted as he took a bow at the end of an intriguing and worthwhile evening.

Feb 4

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Riding with John Hiatt

In his heyday, John Hiatt wrote songs about cars and girls with a fine wit and a firm grasp of rock and roll essentials. On the eve of the Grammy awards last Saturday night, the Americana Music Association organised a celebration of his career at the Troubadour in West Hollywood. I read about it in Bob Lefsetz’s newsletter, and wished very much that I’d been there.

The evening began with various luminaries performing a selection of Hiatt’s songs: Lyle Lovett (“Train to Birmingham”), Michael McDonald (“Have a Little Faith in Me”), Joe Bonamassa (“Perfectly Good Guitar”), Tom Morello (“The River Knows Your Name”), Cedric Burnside (“Icy Blue Heart”), Joe Henry (“The Way We Make a Broken Heart”), Hiatt’s daughter Lilly singing “You Must Go”, and various members of Little Feat — Bill Payne, Fred Tackett and Kenny Gradney — doing “Slow Turning”. Los Lobos presented one of their own songs, “Down by the Riverbed”, to the recording of which Hiatt had contributed vocals. Maggie Rose sang “Riding with the King”, one of the best of the many songs inspired by Elvis Presley.

Then Hiatt himself took the stage, singing “Memphis in the Meantime”, “Across the Borderline”, and — with Brandy Clark — “Thing Called Love”, the song that gave Bonnie Raitt a top 10 hit in 1989. I’m guessing that its inclusion on her five-million-selling Nick of Time probably earned its composer more than the rest of his copyrights put together.

When I first saw Hiatt, it was at the Apollo Victoria in 1980. He was a member of Ry Cooder’s Radio Silents, stepping into the spotlight to give a memorable rendering of O. V. Wright’s R&B drama “Eight Men and Four Women”. The next time was in 1992 with Little Village — a short-lived supergroup comprising Hiatt, Cooder, Nick Lowe and Jim Keltner — at Hammersmith Odeon, where their repertoire included “Don’t Think About Her When You’re Trying to Drive”, Hiatt and Cooder’s great heartbreak ballad.

In between times, he’d made a bunch of solo albums, of which the best received was 1987’s Bring the Family, which established the template for Little Village and included memorable songs: “Memphis in the Meantime”, “Have a Little Faith in Me” and “Lipstick Sunset”. It was the first of his four albums for A&M, and the second of them, Slow Turning, released in 1988, remains for me one of the very finest albums of that decade. Maybe it’s even one of the last great albums of classic guitar-led rock and roll with roots firmly planted in Chuck Berry and Hank Williams.

The album’s solid backing band includes the slide guitarist Sonny Landreth, and there isn’t a weak song among the dozen tracks. In the fast-moving “Tennessee Plates”, Hiatt joyfully channels Berry’s gift for storytelling and wry humour, while “Drive South” is the sort of song that makes you want to put the top down and step on the gas. “Trudy and Dave” is a great little story about a couple, their baby, a pistol and a laundromat. In “Georgia Rae”, he even gets away with serenading his infant daughter.

Best of all, “Icy Blue Heart” is a beautiful ballad with one of the great barroom lyrics: “She came on to him like a slow-movin’ cold front / His beer was warmer than the look in her eyes / She sat on a stool / He said, ‘What do you want?’ / She said, ‘Give me a love that don’t freeze up inside.'” But the singer knows all too well what will happen next, when he turns a heart “that’s been frozen for years / into a river of tears.” The metaphor is sustained through every line.

Hiatt has released 15 solo albums since Slow Turning. Some of them include fine songs, like “Perfectly Good Guitar” “Terms of My Surrender”, and “The Most Unoriginal Sin” (which opens thus: “What there was left of us / Was covered in dust and thick skin / A half-eaten apple / The whole Sistine Chapel / Painted on the head of a pin”), and fine musicians, including Doug Lancio, currently playing guitar in Bob Dylan’s touring band, and the brothers Luther and Cody Dickinson of the North Mississippi Allstars. On the most recent, Leftover Feelings, released in 2021, he shares the spotlight with the dobro genius Jerry Douglas.

His albums are always worth hearing, because he’s a fine craftsman steeped in the blues, country music and bluegrass. But Slow Turning is a pinnacle, one that never gets old.

* The photo of John Hiatt, taken by Jack Spencer, is from the cover of his album The Open Road, released on the New West label in 2010. There’s a nice piece on Hiatt by my old colleague Neil Morton here: https://www.herecomesthesong.com/post/2017/08/22/john-hiatt-the-goners-the-most-unoriginal-sin

Feb 2

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Laura Nyro: a woman in full

If you don’t own much of Laura Nyro’s music and have a couple of hundred quid to spare, a newly released 19-CD set of her complete studio and almost complete live recordings titled Hear My Song would be a good investment. All the 10 studio albums are there, from 1967’s More Than a New Discovery to the posthumously released Angel in the Dark, plus the official live albums — Spread Your Wings and Fly (1971), Season of Lights (1977) and The Loom’s Desire (1993-94) — and two live performances from a San Francisco hotel in 1994.

For me, though, there’s one thing missing: a double album called Laura, subtitled Laura Nyro Live at the Bottom Line. Recorded during a tour in 1988, her first in 10 years, it was released the following year on the independent Cypress label after the A&R department at Columbia Records, her home since 1968, indicated that they didn’t want her next album to be a live recording and gave her permission to make a one-off deal with another company.

For the tour she put together a small band with Jimmy Vivino on guitar, David Wofford on bass guitar, Frank Pagano on drums, Nydia Mata on percussion and Diane Wilson on harmony vocals. It’s not the kind of virtuoso-level team with which she toured in 1976 and whose work with her was preserved on Season of Lights — guitarist John Tropea, double-bassist Richard Davis, Mike Mainieri on vibes, Andy Newmark on drums — but it’s a much better fit with her music and recorded with much greater warmth, richer textures and sense of space. Laura’s own performance is much more mature and confident.

The whole lengthy set is very fine, but the one thing I wouldn’t be without is a song called “Companion”, of which this seems to be the only recording. It begins with the drummer ticking off the time and a heart-melting guitar-and-bass lick that leads into a slow 12/8 blues ballad. It’s the fourth song in, and Laura addresses the crowd in the Greenwich Village club: “Well, now that you’re finally my captive audience, I’m going to force these new songs on you…”

Then she sings. “I don’t want to marry / I don’t want your money / But love’s come our way / Just a warm companion is what I want, honey…” The melody as simple and gorgeous as the lyric: “Life is complicated / Funny, love can be that way / When just a warm companion is what I want, honey / A very special trust / A very special lust…” There’s a short bridge passage (“Walk inside the rain / Laughter in the dark…”) that goes out of tempo, then the guitar-and-bass lick returns and the band riffs quietly as she introduces them, one by one, before three part harmony (Nyro/Wilson/Pagano) gently takes it out.

There nothing here of the wild originality she brought to Eli and the Thirteenth Confession and New York Tendaberry when she was in her very early twenties. She’s a different person, no longer sitting on a fire escape above a New York street. Her life has changed. She’s been through a marriage. She’s living in Amherst, Massachusetts with a female partner, the painter Maria Desiderio. She’s a radical feminist campaigning for women’s rights, Native American rights, animal rights. She’s a mother, bringing up a son, Gil. But as different as the songs may be, the voice is still hers, with all the poetry it contains.

Some people criticised her later studio albums — Smile, Nested, Mother’s Spiritual, Walk the Dog & Light the Light — for lacking the fire of her early music. That’s like accusing her of growing up. We’re lucky to have all of it. And for me, alongside “Wedding Bell Blues” and “Emmie” and “Been on a Train” and “When I was a Freeport and You Were the Main Drag”, there’s “Companion”, the expression of a woman no less powerfully connected with her deepest feelings but now finding peace.

Maria Desiderio was with Laura when she died in April 1997 of ovarian cancer, the disease that had killed her mother, her maternal grandmother, and her maternal great-aunt. She was 49 years old. It’s a great thing to know that, around the world, people are still listening to her voice and her songs with admiration and love.

* The Hear My Song box is released on the Madfish label. Live at the Bottom Line is out of print in both vinyl and single-CD formats. The photograph is by David Bianchini, to whom Laura Nyro was married in the early ’70s, and is taken from the booklet accompanying The Loom’s Desire.