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Oct 27

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‘Play slower…’

In his sleeve note to Masabumi Kikuchi’s album Black Orpheus, a recording of the Japanese pianist’s last solo concert, Ethan Iverson noted a piece of paper placed on the piano with the instruction: “Play slower. I sound better when I play slower.” Kikuchi took his own advice to heart. In the solo performances recorded in the 20 years before his death in 2015, aged 75, his playing decelerated to the point where the music’s metabolism seemed to enter another level of existence.

The final evidence was gathered in a session on a vintage Steinway D at New York’s Klavierhaus in 2013, its first fruit released four years ago by the Red Hook label under the title Hanamichi. Now there’s a second helping from the same source: Hanamichi, The Final Studio Recording Vol II. Like its predecessor, it mixes untitled improvised pieces with the standard tunes he loved to explore, in this case “Manha de Carnaval”, “Alone Together”, “I Loves You, Porgy” and “My Ship”.

I’ve previously written about Black Opheus here and the first volume of Hanamichi here, so I’m not going to repeat myself. I’ll only say that this version of “Manha de Carnaval” is the most fully realised of the three I have by him on record (the first two from 1994 and 2012), and his interpretation of “Alone Together” so beautifully illuminates the emotional contours of the 1932 Broadway ballad by Arthur Schwartz and Howard Dietz that it becomes a definitive instrumental exploration, to match Jo Stafford’s 1945 vocal reading.

It’s no accident that two of the standards here, “I Loves You, Porgy” and “My Ship”, were recorded by Miles Davis and Gil Evans in the late ’50s. The two pieces are irradiated by the memory of Kikuchi’s friendship with Evans, who helped him move to the United States in the early ’70s, and in whose bands he played during that decade. But if they inhabit the spirit of those earlier orchestral pieces, they also distil Kikuchi’s own remarkable essence.

There’s a short trailer here, with a snatch of “Manha de Carnaval”. You’ll get the idea.

* Masabumi Kikuchi’s Hanamichi: The Final Studio Recording, Vol II is out now on Red Hook Records: https://www.redhookrecords.com/ The photograph of Kikuchi is by Abby Kikuchi and is borrowed from the booklet accompanying Black Orpheus (ECM).

Oct 22

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Around John Prine

One night in January 1985 Bonnie Raitt was joined on the stage at the Arie Crown Theatre in Chicago by John Prine. They sang Prine’s “Angel from Montgomery”, which had first been heard on his debut album in 1971 and which Raitt had covered on her 1975 album Streetlights.

Raitt takes the first verse — “I am an old woman, named after my mother / My old man is another child that’s grown old / If dreams were thunder and lightnin’ was desire / This old house would’ve burnt down a long time ago.” Prine joins in as they sing the chorus in unison, an octave apart: “Send me an angel that flies from Montgomery / Make me a poster of an old rodeo / Just give me one thing that I can hold on to / To believe in this livin’ is just a hard way to go.”

So far, so lovely, so resonant. But then the magic happens. Raitt steps back and merges into her band as Prine starts the second verse alone, his parched, papery, barely-there voice only just holding on to the melody: “When I was a young girl, I had me a cowboy / He weren’t much to look at, just a free-ramblin’ man / But that was a long time, and no matter how I tried / Those years just flow by like a broken-down dam.”

It’s a song full of mystery and allusion cloaked in the mundane, and the gender-switch somehow gives it an extra layer of — what? — rubbed-raw pathos? humdrum tragedy? Don’t ask me to explain. It’s there. The audience in the Arie Crown Theatre recognises it as soon as Prine starts singing, and so will you. For me, his singing of those first words creates one of the most electrifying musical moments I know.

Raitt finishes it off with the third verse: “Well there’s flies in the kitchen, I can hear ’em, they’re buzzin’ / And I ain’t done nothin’ since I woke up today / How the hell can a person go to work in the morning / Come home in the evening and have nothing to say.” What a masterpiece of the songwriter’s craft.

Anyway, I’ve just been listening to Prine’s last album. Called The Tree of Forgiveness, it was released in 2018, two years before his death in the first month of the Covid-19 pandemic. Although it joins Leonard Cohen’s You Want It Darker and David Bowie’s blackstar as a work conceived in the shadow of an impending exit, its mood is cheerful and thoughtful and intimate and infinitely congenial and sometimes mordantly humorous. Every one of the 10 tracks, produced by Dave Cobb at RCA in Nashville, has something to commend it.

I’ve also been reading Tom Piazza’s just-published Living in the Present with John Prine. A musician and author of many well received books on such subjects as Alan Lomax, New Orleans and the bluegrass musician Jimmy Martin, Piazza met Prine only two years before his death, while writing a piece on the singer-songwriter for the Oxford American magazine.

They got on so well that Prine invited Piazza to help him write his autobiography. They spent time in each other’s company at Prine’s homes in Nashville, Tennessee and Gulfport, Florida, going to restaurants, driving around in Prine’s prized 1977 Cadillac Coupe de Ville, playing songs to each other and together. They had time for only two sessions with a recording machine before Prine died; not enough for the kind of book they had planned but enough for Piazza to write this warm, affectionate sketch of the singer-songwriter in his last years, reminiscing and enjoying the love and respect of those close to him.

Late in the book there are some vivid memories of encounters with Cowboy Jack Clement, Johnny Cash, Chet Atkins and, most surprisingly, Phil Spector, with whom Prine wrote a song called “God Only Knows”, which appears on the final album. There’s quite a lot of talk about guitars, too. Piazza writes with a sensitivity to mood, an observant eye and an easy grace that make this not just a singularly enjoyable book but the best possible way of remembering its subject.

* Tom Piazza’s Living in the Present with John Prine is published by Omnibus Press. Prine’s The Tree of Forgiveness is on Oh Boy Records. The version of “Angel from Montgomery” described here was included in The Bonnie Raitt Collection, released in 1990 on Warner Brothers.

Oct 16

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At the London Palladium

Two poets took the stage at the London Palladium this week. The first, Patti Smith, was celebrating the 50th anniversary of the release of the epochal album Horses by playing it all the way through with a band including two of her original confrères. The second, Al Stewart, had made it part of his farewell tour, and thus his final appearance in the city where he once shared a flat with the young Paul Simon and had a residency at Bunjie’s, a folk club a shortish walk across Soho from where he was saying his goodbyes.

Smith is 78. Stewart is 80. Horses came out in 1975, the year before Stewart enjoyed his biggest hit with the title track from Year of the Cat. Both drew full houses — Smith on two nights running — and performed with a vigour that reanimated the work of their youth.

We know Smith as a poet who rammed literary and musical forms together to great and lasting effect. Stewart’s success in turning big subjects — the Basque separatist movement, the French Revolution, Operation Barbarossa — into long narrative folk-rock songs reflected a creative use of the early impact of Bob Dylan on his songwriting. But where the enduring glamour of the New York era of CBGB and Max’s Kansas City ensures Smith’s continuing credibility, Stewart’s soft-rock associations have probably restricted his following to his original audience. There was no measurable difference in the enthusiasm that greeted both artists on a celebrated stage.

If the guitarist Lenny Kaye and the drummer Jay Dee Daugherty provided valued historical support for Horses, assisted by Jackson Smith and Tony Shanahan on keyboard and bass guitar, Stewart (and his four-piece band from Chicago, the Empty Pockets, plus the saxophonist/flautist Chase Huna) benefited from the guest presence of his old collaborator Peter White, who added beautiful guitar decoration to “Time Passages”, which he co-wrote, and “On the Border”, and remodelled the rhapsodic piano introduction — including “As Time Goes By” — to “Year of the Cat”.

To be honest, I hadn’t listened to Stewart for decades before last night. I bought the tickets as a treat for my wife, who knew him a little in Bristol folk scene of the late ’60s and remembers once giving him a lift to London. But as thrilled as I was to hear Smith declaiming “Redondo Beach” and “Birdland”, I was just as beguiled by Stewart’s “The Road to Moscow” and “The Dark and the Rolling Sea”.

Today Smith, of course, looks even more like a poet than she did in 1975. Stewart, who lives in Arizona, now resembles someone who might be the secretary of the local bridge club. Good on both of them.

Oct 12

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Silence and slow time

“Silence and slow time…” John Keats’s beautiful phrase finds an echo in some of the music I love, the kind that emerges from a stillness to which it eventually returns, taking its time and not raising its voice to attract attention. Here are five brand-new examples of music with healing qualities, all highly recommended.

1 The Necks: Disquiet (Northern Spy)

Three hours of glorious studio-recorded collective interplay on three CDs. “Rapid Eye Movement” is a 57-minute exploration of densities, starting with Chris Abrahams’ Rhodes piano, punctuated by Lloyd Swanton’s abrupt double bass figures. It changes slowly, like the weather, eventually reaching a passage of single-note cascades from the acoustic piano over Tony Buck’s rumbling tom-toms, leading to an exquisitely tapered ending. “Ghost Net” is 74 minutes of lurching, clattering, gradually darkening polyrhythmic layering, with each musician apparently playing in 12/8, but in three different 12/8s. Using what sounds like a Farfisa organ, it’s as though they’ve suddenly found the sweet spot between Thelonious Monk and ? and the Mysterians. The other two tracks divide an hour between them. “Causeway” opens with echoing guitar and celestial organ and contains a completely intoxicating E minor/B minor/A minor vamp — the Necks’ own three-chord trick — with piano above guitar and organ before a sudden gearchange, involving the addition of thrashing drums, turns a reverie into something soaringly urgent. “Warm Running Sunlight” is an essay in textures and the contemplative space between them: string bass going from plucked to bowed and back, splashing cymbals, Rhodes heavy on the reverb. A lot to take in, but among their very best, I’d say.

2 Tom Skinner: Kaleidoscopic Visions (Brownswood)

The drummer and composer whose Voices of Bishara project I liked so much, in both its studio and live incarnations, takes a slightly different tack here. The music is built around his regular bandmates — the saxophonists Chelsea Carmichael and Robert Stillman, the bassist Tom Herbert and the cellist Kareen Dayes — but with a handful of guests: Meshell Ndegeocello layering her voices on one track, Portishead’s Adrian Utley adding his guitar to a couple more, the singer Contour (Khari Lucas) from South Carolina gently intoning the poetic lyric of “Logue”, and Yaffra (London-born, Berlin-residing Jonathan Geyevu) reciting the poem “See How They Run” over his own piano and Skinner’s overdubbed keyboards, vibes, bass, guitar and percussion. Music without boundaries, full of human feelings, ancient to the future.

3 Jan Bang / Arve Henriksen: After the Wildfire (Punkt Editions)

The two Norwegians devise eight pieces featuring Henriksen’s distinctive trumpet with Bang’s samples, Eivind Aarset’s guitar, Ingar Zach’s percussion, three singers, the Fames Institute Orchestra, a cellist, two Balkan instruments — the tapan (a double-headed drum) and the kaval (an end-blown flute) — and the zurla, a Turkish double-reed instrument. Ravishing from beginning to end, starting with “Seeing (Eyes Closed)”, which made me think that Miles Davis and Gil Evans had been reincarnated as graduates of the contemporary Norwegian jazz scene, to “Abandoned Cathedral II”, a continuation of Henriksen’s classic 2013 album, Places of Worship.

4 Rolf Lislevand: Libro Primo (ECM New Series)

Another Norwegian, this time an exponent of the archlute and the chitarrone, examining the works written for the lute and its variants by the 16th and 17th century composers Johann Hieronymus Kapsberger, Giovanni Paolo Foscarini, Bernardo Gianoncelli and Diego Ortiz. Lislevand’s sleeve essay explains the revolution in which these composers were involved, and he brings them into the present day with free, fluid interpretations that make this music ageless. His own riveting “Passacaglia al Modo Mio” is both a salute and a declaration of possibilities. Anyone with a fondness for Davy Graham or Sandy Bull will enjoy this enormously.

5 Charles Lloyd: Figures in Blue (Blue Note)

For the latest in his series of drummerless chamber trios, the great saxophonist is joined by an old colleague, the pianist Jason Moran, and a newer one, the guitarist Marvin Sewell. This two-CD set begins with what is surely the first version of “Abide with Me” to appear on a jazz album Monk’s Music in 1957 and ends with a exquisite rumination on the standard “My One and Only Love”. In between Lloyd invokes the spirits of Duke Ellington, Billie Holiday, Langston Hughes and Zakir Hussain. On two tracks he also makes fine use of Sewell’s command of bottleneck techniques, leading one to wish that more modern jazz musicians would explore the blues in the way Gil Evans did with “Spoonful” and Julius Hemphill with “The Hard Blues”.

Oct 4

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Finding Lulu

Lulu was on a breakfast TV show the other day, talking about overcoming a drink problem that had its roots in her family background. She was engaging enough to make me want to read her newly published autobiography, If Only You Knew. Compiled with the help of a ghostwriter, Megan Lloyd Davies, it’s quite a surprise. Its 76 short chapters, plus prologue and epilogue, are not just extremely readable but full of interesting observations from a long career.

I was never a fan of her singing, but I’m a considerable fan of two of her songwriting efforts. They come from the opposite ends of the emotional spectrum. The first is “I Don’t Wanna Fight”, a hit for Tina Turner in 1993, a great pre-breakup song full of complex grown-up feelings — resignation, defiance — to which Tina could bring a sense of her own history. The second is “My Angel Is Here”, a track from Wynonna Judd’s 1996 album Revelations, a luminous love song of perfect simplicity.

Lulu didn’t write those songs alone. Her brother Billy Lawrie worked with her on both, with contributions from Steve DuBerry in the first case and Mark Stephen Cawley in the second. My guess is that, since she doesn’t play an instrument, her main contribution was to the lyrics. Anyway, they’re two of the best tracks of the ’90s, if you ask me.

What’s good about her book? Its candid descriptions of her Glasgow childhood, for a start, as Marie Lawrie, the oldest of four children of an alcoholic father; of her audition at Decca in 1963, when the power of her voice blew a microphone; of the resulting decision to move down to London, aged 14, with her band; of her experiences in the ’60s scene, when there the absence of a real division between “rock” and “pop” meant that Jimi Hendrix was a very memorable guest on her Saturday-night BBC TV show; of her short-lived involvement, musical and personal, with David Bowie in 1973. And of her inability to say no to the schemes dreamed up by her devoted manager, Marian Massey, who steered her resolutely towards light entertainment and mostly away from the stuff she wanted to sing, resulting in pantomime seasons and the Eurovision-winning “Boom Bang-a-Bang”, which she clearly detested.

For me, the most interesting section deals with her experiences with Atlantic Records, to whom she was signed by Jerry Wexler in 1970 and with whom she recorded two albums, New Routes and Melody Fair, at Muscle Shoals and Miami’s Criteria Studios respectively. She leaves no doubt about how much this meant to her, in terms of moving closer to the music she loved. Wexler choosing the songs, Arif Mardin doing the arrangements, Tom Dowd at the mixing desk, the Swampers and the Dixie Flyers laying down the tracks: it seemed like the answer to her prayers, a guaranteed escape from the middle of the road.

But it didn’t work out, and I was curious enough to listen to tracks from both albums to try and understand why. The song choices aren’t great, which is weird when you consider that Wexler would have had access to material from the finest country-soul writers of the time, people like Dan Penn and Spooner Oldham. But it’s a mish-mash. The real problem, however, is that although Lulu had her first hit with a raucous cover of the Isley Brothers’ “Shout”, she isn’t a soul singer. She’s a pop singer. For all her ability to add a rasp to her voice, she skates across the surface of the songs. It’s not hard to imagine Wexler concluded quite early on that he’d made a mistake. She wasn’t an Evie Sands or a Merrilee Rush, and this wasn’t going to be a repeat of Dusty in Memphis.

The book’s later episodes include a success with Richard Eyre’s Guys and Dolls, touring with Take That, guest-starring in Absolutely Fabulous, and a grim experience on Strictly Come Dancing. And gradually, coming in like layers of cloud, the drinking that took a grip as she went through middle age, finally taking her into six weeks of rehab in an American clinic at the age of 65.

Yes, it’s a bit showbizzy in places, because that’s partly who she is, but she’s honest about things like her two marriages, for instance, which both ended in divorce, and her looks (“some Botox and filler around my jaw, plus some kind of eye lift”). She also at pains not to bore us: she never dwells too long on anything, which keeps the narrative rolling along.

It’s not normally the sort of book I’d choose to spend time with, but I’m quite glad I did. I suppose I was most genuinely moved by the description of how, while still in her teens, she horrified her family and their neighbours by her appearance in a TV soap ad, speaking in a voice from which, after four years in London, all traces of Glasgow had been smoothed away. “I sounded as if I’d grown up somewhere between Cheltenham and Chelsea,” she writes. “The erasure of Marie Lawrie, on the outside at least, was complete.” But, as we discover, that was very much not the whole story.

* Lulu’s If Only You Knew is published by Hodder & Stoughton.