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Mar 21

Mike Westbrook at 90

Mike Westbrook turns 90 today. To celebrate that milestone, the master of long-form compositions for large ensemble has released the latest in a series of solo piano albums in which he explores music that means a great deal to him, in the process exposing the roots of his own creative journey.

Some of those albums — Paris, Starcross Bridge, the several volumes of The Piano and Me — juxtapose jazz standards, gospel tunes, melodies from the opera, Broadway hits and more recent pop tunes — in combinations that sometimes seem surprising but always work. The latest of them is devoted to a single theme made explicit in its title: The Piano in the Room and the Blues.

Assembled from recordings made in 2006 at Falmouth Arts Centre in Devon, where the paintings of Mike’s wife Kate were on show, this is a homage to the blues at its most plain-spoken, taking Bessie Smith and Jimmy Yancey as its reference points: the former’s “Young Woman’s Blues” and “Good Old Wagon” and the latter’s “Death Letter Blues” are used as texts, on each of which Westbrook builds several variations.

Given a Steinway grand and unlimited time to set his thoughts down on a Sony DAT Walkman, with no live audience to think about, the oianist settles into a mood of calm reflection, using the tonality and cadences of the blues to explore an emotional register ranging from stoicism to quiet joy. There are no sharp edges here, no attempt to bend the material into unfamiliar forms, and most of all no hurry. A gentle pace enables Westbrook to distill a lifetime’s attention to the blues and what its deep song has meant to him into a very precious document.

* Mike Westbrook’s The Piano in the Room and the Blues is released on the Thingamajig label and is available via Bandcamp: https://mikewestbrook.bandcamp.com/album/the-piano-in-the-room-and-the-blues The photograph of Westbrook at Falmouth Arts Centre is by Kate Westbrook.

Mar 19

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A night at Wigmore Hall

The roots of the trumpet-and-piano duo in jazz go back to the day in December 1928 when Louis Armstrong and Earl Hines recorded a piece titled “Weather Bird”. It became a classic, one of the keystones of jazz history. I was thinking about it when Ambrose Akinmusire and Sullivan Fortner took the stage at the Wigmore Hall last night, so I was thrilled when it turned up in the first section of their 90-minute concert.

They began with variations on two Akinmusire compositions, “Grace” and “Weighted Corners”, before “Weather Bird” made its appearance on the way to “Stablemates”, Benny Golson’s hard-bop favourite. By that time, around 20 minutes in, it was obvious that we were being exposed to something special. The liquid clarity and endless enventiveness of Akinmusire’s trumpet had clearly found a perfect match in Fortner, who was born in New Orleans and displays all the elegance associated with the city’s great pianists as well as his own ability to create strong and deep currents which guide the music’s flow.

A rarely glimpsed peak was reached with the next section, which opened with a Fortner tune called “Aerobatics”, written specially for Akinmusire, leading into an investigation of something that revealed itself to be “All the Things You Are”. That’s a tune I’ve heard played hundreds of times by players of all kinds, including some of the greats, but never like this. It emerged in fragments, twisted and disordered (Fortner’s allusion to the familiar dark-hued intro from the various Charlie Parker versions came several minutes in), but recombined by the two musicians into a constantly shifting mosaic, completely new while somehow seeming to carry the weight of all previous versions. It was like hearing the tune in a hall of mirrors, each set at a different angle, throwing its shapes from different perspectives and trajectories.

The third section of the set was devoted to Akinmusire’s “Owl Song 1”, a ballad whose astonishing tenderness — beautifully enunciated in Fortner’s solo — provided a platform for the trumpeter’s occasional fondness for finding a quickfire motif and repeating it with elaborations and variations of tone until it exhausts itself and is absorbed by the prevailing tide. It’s an example of the sense of dramatic architecture that characterises his work, even at its least superficially emphatic.

For the encore, there was a return to Armstrong with a vigorous reinvention of “West End Blues”, recorded by the Hot Five six months before Louis and Hines got together. Akinmusire and Fortner were showing that musicians who belong to the 21st century can understand how to draw from the past to help create the future. What they did last night — blending joy, humour, lyricism, compassion — represented the highest refinement of the improviser’s art, creating something in the moment that will stay with you forever.

Mar 18

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Ready for his close-up

Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis, a biopic released in 2022, was something I felt I could do without. What turned up during the research process, however, was something else: a cache of film shot in Las Vegas and elsewhere soon after Presley’s comeback in 1969. Hitherto unseen, it consisted of unedited footage devoted not just to recording his performances but to rehearsal and backstage scenes. Here was Luhrmann’s goldmine, and he spent a couple of years turning it into EPiC: Elvis Presley in Concert, a 97-minute documentary which I saw at the BFI’s IMAX cinema in London this week.

There are things about the film that I’m not so fond of, such as the flash-cut montages that race through various aspects of Elvis’s life amd career: the looks, the screen kisses, and so on. It’s a way of bringing younger audiences up to speed, I suppose, and the 60-images-in-60-seconds approach probably seems perfectly normal to them. I found it a bit trashy — but of course there was something a bit trashy about Elvis, as there is about Luhrmann’s work. Neither of them, one imagines, would be averse to a ride in a gold Cadillac.

More seriously, the film is stuffed with passages that succeed in telling us more about Elvis than we already knew. Where Luhrman’s approach works, against all odds, is in eliding several performances of a single song, from rehearsal to Vegas showroom, creating a single unit of music containing several perspectives. Sounds a bit meretricious? Works beautifully on songs like “Burnin’ Love” (where we appear to be shown the first band rehearsal of Dennis Linde’s composition), Tony Joe White’s “Polk Salad Annie” and the majestic “How Great Thou Art” (although it does suggest that Elvis’s gospel chops have deteriorated since he made his first gospel album, His Hand in Mine, in 1960).

But to see him working with his rhythm section and singers is to understand how much he loved music. You can’t sing Joe South’s “Walk a Mile in My Shoes” the way he does without real commitment to the material. Or the quite fantastic medley of “Little Sister” and “Get Back”. You hate medleys? Try this one, which brings the best out of the guitarist James Burton and the drummer Ronnie Tutt — making me all the more angry that the closing credits don’t list any of the members of the rhythm section or the backing singers, all of whom are clearly having a ball working with the King. I’d heard that medley before, but to see it performed, with such skill and enthusiasm, is something special.

A couple of moments caught me cold. One is when the director isolates Elvis murmuring “All my trials… soon be over,” from the traditional song Mickey Newbury incorporated into his “American Trilogy”. Another is a snatch of Presley singing as if to himself: “I feel my light come shining / From the west down to the east / Any day now, any day now, I shall be released.” He repeats it, and then, as an aside, says the name “Dylan”. I felt I’d heard it before, and I had: it’s taken from a week of all- night sessions with his band in 1971, released in 2021 on a four-CD set called Back in Nashville.

It makes you wish he’d recorded it properly, and then it makes you think about all the great songs he should have recorded, in the best possible circumstances. Instead, as he admits in contemporaneous interview footage, he wasted the ’60s making terrible Hollywood movies at the insistence of his manager, Colonel Parker, who lurks around the fringes of this documentary in a way that tells you very clearly what Luhrmann thinks of him. Elvis also expresses regret and puzzlement at not having appeared in places like Europe and Japan — anywhere outside the USA, in fact — and we know who was to blame for that.

One or two other things: the shots of the various audiences are fascinating, particularly one wide-angle view from the back of the stage at the Las Vegas International showroom. And there’s a glimpse of Elvis in a car with the Memphis Mafia, giving you a hint of their special kind of camaraderie.

In all of this footage, which I guess is from 1970-71, Elvis is in good shape — a little fuller in the face, but not in the figure. He’s lithe and agile. In good spirits, too: always ready for a goofy laugh, or to change a lyric during rehearsals to include something mildly filthy. I know that such a documentary is the director’s construct, telling the story he wants you to know. But I really did come out of it feeling warmer about Elvis the human being, and even more regretful about the opportunities he missed.

Mar 2

Alice’s adventures on the astral plane

As one of those who didn’t pay enough attention to Alice Coltrane during the days when she was making what is now acclaimed as a series of classic albums, I welcome Andy Beta’s Cosmic Music. The first full-length biography of the pianist, harpist and composer, subtitled “The Life, Art and Transcendence of Alice Coltrane”, will no doubt help to ensure that she is remembered and properly valued in all her dimensions.

Born Alice McLeod in Detroit in 1937, she studied classical piano and orchestral percussion before becoming a member of the vibraphonist Terry Gibbs’s combo. In Paris in 1960, where she arrived with her first husband, the singer Kenny Hagood, she heard John Coltrane playing with Miles Davis, befriended Bud Powell, and was filmed for French TV at the Blue Note club in a group with the tenorist Lucky Thompson and the drummer Kenny Clarke. Watching the clips from that show, in which she plays a gorgeous “Lover Man” and a hectic “Strike Up the Band”, you can hear her using gospel figures alongside bebop runs but also injecting the blend with an unusual kind of fluidity, a quality that she took into her second husband’s band in 1965 and thence into her own recordings, particularly in her work on organ and concert harp.

Andy Beta relies heavily on Shankari Adams’s Portrait of Devotion and Franya Berkman’s Monument Eternal,.both written after Alice Coltrane’s death in 2007, in which the authors which analyse the spiritual life of the woman who became known as Swamini Turiyasangitananda. But he also has material of his own gleaned from conversations with such musical associates and friends as Terry Gibbs, the saxophonist Bennie Maupin, the pianist Kirk Lightsey, the trombonist George Bohanon, the bassist Vishnu Wood and Alice’s nephew, the record producer, DJ and rapper Steven Ellison. better known as Flying Lotus, as well as with acolytes from her later years as a spiritual leader.

To get the most from the book, readers may need to come to terms with their feelings about its subject’s religious beliefs. The author clearly buys into the world of swamis and ashrams. He has no problem with reporting the vision of Jesus Christ that appeared to her in the Nile Valley, the occasional bit of astral travelling, a visit from the long-dead Igor Stravinsky, or instructions regularly received from above: “At some point in her meditations for that year, Turiya Coltrane as told directly by the Supreme Lord that she would move to California and establish a Vedantic Center.” Without raising an eyebrow, Beta tells us how, towards the end of her life, her touch could heal those suffering from “an array of maladies: back pain, leg injuries, torn knee cartilage, infertility, multiple sclerosis, coccidoidal meningitis, abnormal growths, injured wrists, scoliosis, and class III ovarian cancer.”

You can pour scorn on this, or you can accept it on its own terms. I choose to accept it as part of the story of an exceptional woman who used the years of her widowhood to give shelter and comfort to others (including Nina Simone), and whose music resonates more widely and profoundly as the years pass. Whatever their spiritual source, the volcanic duet with Rashied Ali’s drums on “The Battle of Armageddon” (from Universal Consciousness, Impulse, 1971) or the rapturous sweep of her setting for strings of “Galaxy in Satchidananda” (World Galaxy, Impulse, 1972) are unlikely ever to lose their power. And the posthumously released vocal music heard on The Ecstatic Music of Alice Coltrane (Luaka Bop, 2017) and Kirtan: Turiya Sings (Impulse, 2021) possesses a beauty of its own.

Cosmic Music is a life story, not a musicological analysis. As such, and despite Beta’s fondness for such verbs as “ideate” and “concertize”, it does its job well. Talking about Infinity, the John Coltrane album released five years after the saxophonist’s death, he also tackles the thorny issue of Alice’s decision to overdub a string section, harp and other instruments on to her late husband’s original tracks. “It is the lone album,” he writes, “to offer a tantalising glimpse of what a truly equal John and Alice Coltrane album might have sounded like.”

Again, there will be those who dismiss such a claim. But, all these years later, listening again to the music Alice recorded under her own name, and particularly the pieces featuring strings, can help us to understand why her husband welcomed her into his band: her music contains elements of non-western ritual, just as his came to do in his last couple of years. This displeased many of those who admired the technical rigour of the music made in the period between Giant Steps and A Love Supreme but who could not stomach the apparent leap into the unknown that began with Ascension and was truncated by his death. Inviting other musicians to share the stage on a permanent, temporary or ad hoc basis, as he did in those last years, was a symbol of his desire to expand his universe. For him, the music had become something greater than itself. For Alice, too. Her story is certainly worth reading.

* Andy Beta’s Cosmic Music is published by White Rabbit Books on March 19. The photograph of Alice Coltrane in India is from The Ecstatic Music of Alice Coltrane and was taken by Radha Botofasina.