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Posts by Richard Williams

Aug 26

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The timekeeper of Damascus

Intrigued by the title of Pat Thomas’s new album of solo piano music, The Solar Model of Ibn al-Shatir, I did a bit of online research into its source of inspiration. Born in Damascus in 1304, Ibn al-Shatir studied astronomy in Cairo and Alexandra before returning home to become the official timekeeper of the city’s main Umayyad Mosque. His extensive research into the relative movements of the sun, moon and planets enabled him to publish findings that represented an advance on the discoveries made in Ancient Greece and Egypt by Aristotle and Ptolemy, furthering a science whose subsequent luminaries included Copernicus and Newton. He died in 1375.

It’s hard to grasp now the eminence of such a figure in a world before clocks, a world of astrolabes and equants and epicycles. Al-Shatir designed a sundial for one of the minarets of his mosque — an engraved slab of marble 2m tall and 1m wide — and was responsible for determining the hours of the five daily prayers and the dates of the beginning and end of Ramadan. If you look online, you’ll find diagrams and calligraphy of great beauty.

He would probably have had interesting conversations on heliocentric matters with Sun Ra, another source of inspiration for Thomas, who was born in the UK in 1960 to music-loving parents from Antigua and is based in Oxford, from where he has worked with countless distinguished improvisers, notably the vibes-player Orphy Robinson in their shape-shifting group Black Top. Although Thomas decided he wanted to play piano as a small child after seeing Liberace on TV, and then adopted Oscar Peterson as an early model, today he belongs in a loose tradition of jazz pianists that includes Ellington, Monk, Herbie Nichols, Elmo Hope, Hasaan Ibn Ali, Dick Twardzik, Cecil Taylor, Andrew Hill, Muhal Richard Abrams and two Alexanders, von Schlippenbach and Hawkins.

The titles of the individual pieces also throw up some interesting information. “The Oud of Ziryab” refers to the 9th century Arab musician, born in Baghdad, who added a fifth pair of strings to the oud and spent most of his life in Al-Andalus, running an influential music school in Cordoba. “For George Saliba” salutes a contemporary academic, a professor at Columbia University and an expert on Arabic astronomy. “For Ibn al-Nafis” refers to a 13th century native of Damascus, an expert in law, literature theology and human anatomy who was the first to identify the way the blood circulates from the heart. “For Mansa Musa” is a dedication to a 14th century ruler of the Malian Empire, a man of enormous riches who famously went on an improbably lavish hajj in 1324-25, during which Musa allegedly built a mosque every Friday, wherever he stopped along his 2,700-mile route to Mecca.

That’ll do for the history lesson, although it might be enough to suggest how little those of us educated in the West actually know about the history and achievements of the Islamic world. What about the music? There’s nothing programmatic about the compositions and improvisations, in the sense that you could listen to them and remain unaware of any of the above associations. But I find it extremely stimulating, not least for the way that Thomas makes the piano sound very different: it sounds like wood and steel, and like something being struck. Not exactly “eighty-eight tuned drums” — a phrase generally attributed to Val Wilmer, although she’s not sure she coined it — but still very distinctive.

Thomas’s playing is marked by its clarity and control, even in the most intense moments. It’s rhythmically charged without being oppressive, and the counter-movement of his hands is often very compelling — sometimes reminding me, unlikely as it may seem, of Lennie Tristano in the mode of his “Descent into the Maelstrom”, a startling 1953 solo improvisation prefiguring Cecil Taylor’s flight from convention.

Thomas’s album is a follow-up to The Elephant Clock of Al Jazari, recorded at Café Oto in 2015 and released last year, inspired by a water clock devised in what is now Northern Iraq in the early 13th century by another visionary of the Islamic world. I don’t know whether Thomas intended these new pieces, recorded at the Fish Factory studio in North London on a single day in March of this year, to suggest the work of measuring movement of time in the world before the 17th century invention of the pendulum clock, but they certainly suggest something, though, even though it’s hard to pin down.

But however much or however little the listener cares to delve into the background of Thomas’s pieces, his high-tension creativity, his balance of contrast and continuity, and on this occasion his ability to coax an unusual timbre from the instrument make the album a very absorbing experience.

* Pat Thomas’s The Solar Model of Ibn al-Shatir is out now on the Otoroku label: https://patthomaspiano.bandcamp.com The photograph, taken during the session at the Fish Factory, is from the album cover and was taken by Abby Thomas.

Aug 16

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Before the lights go up

I try to make a habit of staying to the very end of a film’s credits, because you never know what you’re going to hear. I learnt that while sitting through Wim Wenders’ Until the End of the World. The film had seemed determined to live up to its title, but the reward was to discover Robbie Robertson’s magnificent “Breakin’ the Rules”, from his Storyville album, with its exquisitely understated Paul Buchanan second vocal and Wardell Quezergue’s barely-there horn arrangement.

Sitting through three and a half hours of Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s About Dry Grasses last week was no ordeal. Ceylan is possibly my favourite living director, and his new one lives up to Climates, Once Upon a Time in Anatolia, Winter Sleep and the rest. And while the credits were rolling, there was a bonus.

It was this. Philip Timofeyev’s “Adagio for Bassoon” is a piece of fake baroque music, written specially for the film. It’s an obvious homage to the popular “Adagio for Strings and Organ in G minor” supposedly written by Tomaso Albinoni in the 18th century but actually based on fragments of a manuscript left by the Venetian composer, turned into a piece in 1958 by his biographer, Remo Giazotto.

So a fake of a fake, then, in a way. But Timofeyev’s stately composition does its job perfectly. At the end of a dialogue-driven film in which the audience has been encouraged to reflect on all sorts of important issues, not least truth and lies, there is no rupture when the lights come on. We emerge into the street still thinking the thoughts that Ceylan implanted there.

* The still from About Dry Grasses shows the young Turkish actress Ece Bagci, whose performance is among the film’s highlights.

Aug 13

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‘Whoops! La-di-dah…’

If I had to nominate a favourite tiny moment, lasting no more than a couple of seconds, from any piece of music I know, it might be the one that occurs 1 minute and 30 seconds into “Stay”, by Maurice Williams and the Zodiacs.

The record — the shortest ever to hit No 1 in the US pop charts — is already fading out when Maurice suddenly cries: “Whoops! La-di-dah…” Goodness knows why, but somehow it fits perfectly and it sticks in the mind. Or at least it’s stuck in mine for six and a half decades, and I like the record enough to own it on a 45, an EP and an LP (for which I see I paid 50 cents — in an oldies store in Greenwich Village in the early ’70s, I think).

Maurice’s death has just been announced. He was 86, and he died at his home in Charlotte, North Carolina. I’ve been writing a full obituary for the Guardian this morning; it includes the charming story behind the song, as well as mentioning its various and very successful reincarnations. No doubt the piece will appear online before long.

Meanwhile, I thought those who already know the moment of which I’m so fond might like to be reminded of it, and those who don’t might enjoyed being introduced.

Aug 12

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‘The Black Chord’

David Corio is a fine British photographer whose book The Black Chord, with text by the writer Vivien Goldman, first appeared in the UK 25 years ago. A new edition, published by Hat & Beard, a Los Angeles-based imprint, presents his images of black musicians via a much more elegant design.

Corio was born in London in 1960 and had his first work published when he was 18. Where he differs from Roy DeCarava and Val Wilmer, two other great photographers of black music, is that most of his subjects are caught in performance, on or off stage. DeCarava and Wilmer both sought particular kinds of intimacy, spiritual or domestic. Corio’s images tend to look outward, making a direct address to the viewer, which means they work well in magazine features and on album covers, and the 200-odd photographs here, beautifully reproduced, combine to make an exhilarating book.

The subjects range from the drummers of Burundi and a Santeria ceremony in Cuba through John Lee Hooker, Fats Domino, Bobby Bland, Aretha Franklin, Art Blakey, Celia Cruz, Fela Kuti, Abbey Lincoln, Ray Charles, Barry White, Millie Jackson, Lee Perry, Ornette Coleman, Al Green, Toots Hibbert, Salif Keita, De La Soul, August Darnell, Sade, the Last Poets, Alton Ellis, PM Dawn, Miles Davis, Foday Musa Susa, Nile Rodgers, Don Cherry, Missy Elliott, and of course Bunny, Tosh and Bob. And many, many others. Goldman’s love of this music, from blues to jazz via R&B, soul, reggae, salsa, afrobeat and hip-hop, originally on view in her work in the 1970s for Sounds, the Melody Maker and the NME, infuses the lively essays that intersperse the groupings of photographs.

One of the pictures I like best contains no performers: over a double-page spread, half a dozen boys perch together around a sound system in London in 1978, shot from below, exuding life and possibilities despite the implicit challenge of the world around them. It has poetry in it. As, more obviously, does the portrait of Nina Simone seen above and also on the book’s cover, taken during a performance at Ronnie Scott’s in 1984, a photograph to make you think a lot about troubled genius. That, too, is Corio at his best.

* The Black Chord by David Corio with text by Vivien Goldman is published by Hat & Beard (hatandbeard.com), price $60.

Aug 5

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On Kit Downes

One night a few weeks ago I was at the Vortex, listening to a hour of free improvisation performed in the downstairs bar by the pianist Kit Downes with the saxophonist Tom Challenger, his familiar colleague, the drummer Andrew Lisle, and two names new to me; the guitarist Tara Cunningham and the bassist Caius Williams. It was a lovely set, full of lyricism and surprises. Downes, Challenger and Lisle are entirely at home in such an environment; it was a pleasure to hear the contributions of Cunningham, making an intriguing adaptation of the innovations associated with Derek Bailey, and Williams, who produced not just supple and responsive lines but the loveliest tone I’ve heard from an upright bass for ages.

Then I went home to resume listening to a new CD sent to me from Amsterdam, where the celebrated Bimhuis club had recorded Downes’s multinational 10-piece band playing an extended piece titled Dr Snap — one of a series of four “composition assignments reflecting the current zeitgeist” commissioned, under the overall heading of Reflex, from four different composers — and to Outpost of Dreams, Kit’s new album of duets with Norma Winstone on the ECM label.

Recorded live at the Bimhuis in November 2022, Dr Snap consists of seven pieces by Downes, one by Challenger and two by the bassist Petter Eldh. It begins in a deceptively mild manner — twitchy rhythms, knotty woodwind themes — before broadening and deepening as it goes on, opening out to expose exceptional work from the trumpeter Percy Pursglove, the saxophonists Ben van Gelder and Robin Fincker, the flautist Ketije Ringe Karahona, the guitarist Reinier Baas, the bassist Petter Eldh, and the drummers and percussionists Sun-Mi Hong, James Maddren and Veslemøy Narvesen, Plus, of course, the composer’s piano.

Like a lot of today’s jazz writing, it requires 11 fingers on one hand and seven on the other if you want to try and decipher the time signatures. But no such technical analysis is required for a simpler enjoyment of the music as it passes by, hastening without rushing, guided through its endless twists and turns by the highly inventive rhythm section.

There’s a lot of variety here, from passages of hustling density to a lovely stretch of serenity in “Pantheon 4”, a feature for Karahona, via the use of free-jazz techniques behind Pursglove on “Snapdraks”. The solos arise naturally, part of the overall design — as they did, for instance, in the recordings of Steve Lehman’s octet. Three-quarters of a century after what became known as the Birth of the Cool sessions, this kind of jazz for medium-sized ensembles continues to evolve in a very stimulating way.

Downes’s duo with Winstone is a meeting of minds as well as generations (he is 38, she is 82). His tunes join those of John Taylor, Ralph Towner and Adam O’Rourke as vehicles for her lyrics, which are full of elegant, often wistful references to nature and the seasons, to sky and light and wind and their effect on the senses. There are also fine versions of “Black Is the Colour of My True Love’s Hair” and of a traditional tune arranged by the late Bob Cornford, titled “Rowing Home”. From the latter, was there ever a more ECM-evoking opening to a lyric than “Upon the lake in winter sun / A sun that bleaches the sky…”?

As further evidence of Downes’s scope, there’s a forthcoming trio LP called Breaking the Shell on which he plays pipe organ with the guitarist Bill Frisell and the drummer Andrew Cyrille. A track called “Este a Székelyeknél”, released on Bandcamp by the Red Hook label this week, suggests that this, too, will be a notable addition to the body of work being assembled by one of the most consistently stimulating musicians of our time.

* Dr Snap is on the Bimhuis label and Outpost of Dreams is on ECM, both albums out now. Breaking the Shell is released by Red Hook on September 27. The photograph of Kit Downes with the Dr Snap band was taken at the Bimhuis by Maarten Nauw.

Jul 30

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And on drums, Jimi Hendrix…

Stevie Wonder can play the drums (listen to “Creepin'”). So can Paul McCartney, after a fashion (“Maybe I’m Amazed”). But I didn’t know that Jimi Hendrix knew how to use a pair of sticks, too.

The proof is in American Drummers 1959-88, Val Wilmer’s new book of 36 photographs of drummers she has observed on and off the stage — and in the case of Hendrix (the only one of her subjects better known for something else), during a sound-check before his show with the Experience at the Royal Albert Hall in London on November 14, 1967.

It’s tempting to assume that Hendrix was just messing around when he sat behind Mitch Mitchell’s kit and picked up a pair of his sticks. But the photo is the evidence that he knew what he was doing. He was left-handed, of course. And he’s holding his right-hand stick in the way that a right-handed drummer would hold his left stick, were he using what is known as the orthodox grip, in which the stick rests in the cradle formed by the clefts between the thumb and forefinger and the second and third fingers.

You can see it on the opposite page in the photo of Andrew Cyrille, a great jazz drummer who has played with Cecil Taylor and many others. Cyrille is a high accomplished technician and most of the time he uses the orthodox grip. The alternative is the matched grip, in which both hands hold the sticks in the same way, as if (to make a crude analogy) they were saucepan handles. Charlie Watts used the orthodox style, Ringo Starr the matched grip.

Drummers sometimes switch from orthodox to matched when they want a particular kind of power — playing the Bo Diddley beat, for instance. And it’s the way most people who aren’t drummers hold the sticks if they’re given the chance to hit something.

But Hendrix is unmistakably using the orthodox grip, which set me thinking. Did he learn it from someone who played drums in one of the bands he’d been in, backing the Isley Brothers and others? Or from Mitch Mitchell, whose early leaning was towards jazz? That seems a bit unlikely to me. You don’t generally learn the orthodox grip unless there’s a very good reason.

So it sent me back to his days in the US Army, drafted into the 101st Airborne Division (the “Screaming Eagles”) in 1961 as an alternative to a jail sentence for joyriding in stolen cars when he was still in his teens. He hated it and lasted barely a year, given a discharge after breaking his ankle in a parachute jump. The only reference I can find to musical involvement during that year was when he asked his father in a letter from Fort Campbell on the Kentucky-Tennessee border to send him the guitar he’d left at a girlfriend’s house in Seattle.

But what if he’d been given the chance to join a marching band, and received basic tuition in playing a shoulder-slung snare drum? That would require a mastery of the orthodox grip, because that’s what it was invented for. And although it might seem at first to be awkward and unnatural, once you learn it, it never goes away.

Val’s photos are full of all the qualities that make her work so special (and which I wrote about when she had an exhibition last year). Yes, there are pictures here of musicians playing on stage — Philly Joe Jones, Max Roach, Kenny Clarke, Tony Williams, Billy Higgins, Elvin Jones, Milford Graves — but also in other, different moments: Sunny Murray reading the paper, Marquis Foster getting his drums out of the trunk of his car, Denis Charles loosening up with a practice pad.

And there are other stories, hidden and half-hidden. A well known New Orleans drummer called Freddie Kohlman is pictured playing a snare drum with the Onward Brass Band at a funeral in 1972. Val told me this week that Kohlman — who died in 1990, aged 75 — had told her how the fledgling Motown label had paid for him, and one or two others, to travel to Detroit to teach the company’s studio musicians how to play the New Orleans rhythms that were the basis of R&B and rock and roll.

Musicians trusted Val, so she could capture them in less formal settings. Below you can see a scene in the Professional Percussion Center on New York’s Eighth Avenue one day in 1971, with the proprietor, Frank Ippolito (who played with Glenn Miller’s Army Air Force Band during WW2), behind the counter, chatting to a trio of customers.

On the left is “Papa” Jo Jones, whose work with Count Basie in the 1930s survives somewhere within the work of every jazz drummer today. In the middle is Jeff Williams, a 21-year-old Berklee graduate from Ohio about to embark on a professional career with the bands of Lee Konitz and Stan Getz (and who has been based for many years in the UK, teaching at the Royal Academy of Music and the Birmingham Conservatoire). On the right is Oliver Jackson, one of Papa Jo’s acolytes, an underrated player with a sense of swing to match that of Roach, Higgins or Frank Butler, as you can hear if you listen to King Curtis’s “Da Duh Dah”.

Just a bunch of guys shooting the breeze in a drum shop one day half a century ago. And, like a lot of Val’s photos, it invites us to share the privileged access that produced this lovely little book.

* Val Wilmer’s American Drummers 1959-1988 is published by Café Royal Books (caferoyalbooks.com), price £6.70.

Jul 26

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Another night on E Street

The epiphany came early at Wembley last night, only a couple of songs into an unbroken three-hour set. That monster freight train called “Seeds” howled into the stadium, carrying with it all the dread and desolation that can be packed into the repetition of a single word: “Gone… gone… gone…”

I wrote about “Seeds” the last time Bruce Springsteen played Wembley Stadium, so I won’t repeat myself. But something about it moves me in a way I haven’t been moved by rock and roll since Elvis recorded Chuck Berry’s “Promised Land”, finding all of America in a song you could get on one side of a 45.

Last night I wanted it to go on for ever. But there were other good things. “The E Street Shuffle” turning into a soul symphony that made perfect use of the horn section. The way “Land of Hope and Dreams” did the same for the backing singers, with a gospel coda of “People Get Ready”. Steve Van Zandt strapping on a Stratocaster painted to resemble the flag of Ukraine for “No Surrender”. A beautiful “Racing in the Street”, the patina on its bodywork deepening as the decades pass. The Latino trumpets and cowbell turning “Twist and Shout” back into something of which Bert Berns would be proud. The softly spoken introduction to “Long Walk Home”: “This is a prayer for my country.”

It’s a show now, of course, carefully routined and built with the help of high technology to reach a crowd of 50,000 in a sports stadium. But there are still moments when the place goes dark, the spotlight picks up the lone figure at the front of the stage, a harmonica wails, and those opening words — The screen door slams / Mary’s dress sways / Like a vision she dances across the porch / As the radio plays — bring all the magic back to life once again.

Jul 25

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The last of the Tops

There’s still something distinctly majestic, even monumental, about the run of more than a dozen hits that Eddie and Brian Holland and Lamont Dozier wrote and/or produced between 1964 and 1968 for the Four Tops, whose last surviving original member, Abdul “Duke” Fakir, died this week, aged 88.

It’s a Himalayan range of which the peak, of course, was “Reach Out, I’ll Be There”. I can still remember hearing it for the first time, played by Mike Raven on Radio 390 one evening in 1966, and being transfixed not just by its unprecedented arrangement — the galloping percussion, the piping woodwind, four to the bar on a tambourine, the celestial choir — but by the realisation that someone at Motown had been listening to Bob Dylan. For a fan of both kinds of music, that much was immediately obvious in the urgent repetitive incantation of the melody, so far away from the normal structures of Motown tunes.

The run of hits began in 1964 with “Baby I Need Your Loving”, its swinging rhythm carried by fingerpops on the backbeat — unusual for Motown, although also tried a couple of years later on Martha and the Vandellas’ “No More Tearstained Make Up” — and by James Jamerson’s inventive bass line. It reached the fringes of the Top 10, and remains much loved, but the follow-up, “Without the One You Love”, was too close to it to repeat that success. Listening to it now, I also realise that the bass player on this one must have been someone else; whoever it is, all he does is follow the root note, with none of the octave leaps, passing notes and general fluidity that made Jamerson’s work so distinctive.

Their third Motown single was a gorgeous anomaly: a heartbroken ballad written and produced not by H-D-H but by William Stevenson, the label’s A&R director at the time, and Ivy Jo Hunter. Jamerson returns here, working in conjunction with open strummed rhythm guitars. And as with its two predecessors, what’s particularly noticeable is the use of the Andantes, a female vocal trio, to add to the Tops’ own background harmonies. Jackie Hicks, Marlene Barrow and the soprano Louvain Demps never had a Motown hit in their own right, but they created a kind of penumbra of emotion that gave this record, and almost all the early Tops hits, a special quality that eludes analysis but goes straight to the inconsolable heart.

For their fourth single, and first No 1, they went back to Holland-Dozier-Holland in the spring of 1965 for “I Can’t Help Myself (Sugar Pie Honey Bunch)”, a record that established a template for bass-driven dance records, Jamerson bouncing off the 4/4 on the snare drum and Jack Ashford’s vibes. It was never a favourite of mine, unlike its slightly less successful successor, “It’s the Same Old Song”, which follows the formula but relies less on the bass line and has a lyric you could dance to.

“Something About You” emphasised the pounding beat, forfeiting some of the poetry rediscovered in “Shake Me, Wake Me (When It’s Over)”, and the move towards a funkier sound culminated in the return of Ivy Jo Hunter, co-writing “Loving You Is Sweeter Than Ever” with Stevie Wonder and producing a magnificent track based on chords whose voicings descend with a dark and thrilling inevitability, paced in a deliberate rhythm by the patented combination of tambourine, snare drum and chopped guitar on 2 and 4.

Then came the great run of “Reach Out, I’ll Be There”, “Standing in the Shadows of Love” and “Bernadette”, a trilogy united by the anguish of Levi Stubbs’ lead vocals and the exuberant imagination at work in the arrangements. Jamerson is at his towering best on “Standing in the Shadows”, where Eddie “Bongo” Brown’s congas grab the spotlight in four-bar breaks that foreshadow the tactics of disco remixers a decade later. The third part of the trilogy is remembered for a sudden silence broken by Stubbs’ cry of utter desperation — “BERNADETTE!” — but the female voices have already painted the backdrop, reaching up to touch the heavens.

After that came “7 Rooms of Gloom”, a track that almost turned the trilogy into a tetrad, its opening a masterpiece of suspense before drums and bass enter in a flurry, with a hint of harpsichord in the background. Then “You Keep Running Away”, notable for Jamerson’s hyperactivity and the two sets of syncopated convulsions that form a bridge between sections, and its B-side, the tearstained gospel-doowop fusion of “If You Don’t Want My Love”, with the harpsichord marking out the chord cycle.

We’re in 1968 now, and the two lush covers of the Left Banke’s “Walk Away Renée” and Tim Hardin’s “If I Were a Carpenter” were unexpected and beautifully soulful. But by the end of the year H-D-H were on their way out of Motown, leaving the Tops with one last masterpiece: “I’m in a Different World”, a gear-change in synch with (and perhaps a response to) Norman Whitfield’s increasingly adventurous productions for the Temptations. Dramatic changes of density with layers of guitars, a swoosh of strings, a bed of percussion: bass drum, congas, and that hi-hat, a single stroke hissing midway through every bar: “one-and-two-AND-three…”

Now Duke Fakir, whose tenor led the group’s background harmonies, has gone to joined his Detroit friends Lawrence Payton, who arranged those harmonies, Renaldo “Obie” Benson and Stubbs. What a run they had, and what a range of peaks they left, each one still catching the sun from a different angle.

Jul 19

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‘In the Brewing Luminous’

Champagne, sorbet and cocaine. Who would have guessed, while falling under the spell of Cecil Taylor’s music at the beginning of the 1960s, that these formed the basis of the great pianist’s diet? From listening to Jazz Advance, “Excursion on a Wobbly Rail”, the “Pots”/”Bulbs”/”Mixed” session and the sublimely sombre trio reading of “This Nearly Was Mine”, I had him pegged as an artist of the ascetic variety. How utterly wrong.

Actually, I was given a clue at the end of a post-gig interview in London in 1969, when he asked if I could recommend a good discothèque. As Philip Freeman demonstrates in the course of In the Brewing Luminous, Taylor lived on his own terms, resistant to cliché in his life as much as in his music.

A full-scale biography of Taylor has long been needed, and Freeman’s densely packed 250-page volume is as good a one as we are likely to get. I say “densely packed” because the author has made the decision to include as much detail as possible of all the gigs Taylor played and all the recordings he made throughout his long career, along with impressionistic descriptions, where evidence survives, of how they sounded.

To begin with, I worried that this was going to produce the kind of play-by-play narrative familiar from sporting biographies, where one match or competition follows another in a way that can try the reader’s patience. Eventually my reservations faded to nothing. Apart earning our gratitude for the intrinsic value of having all this information assembled in one place, Freeman inserts enough first-hand testimony from participants and bystanders to bring Taylor, who died in 2018, aged 89, back to life.

In 2016, when the reopened Whitney Museum hosted a season to celebrate Taylor, Freeman interviewed him for The Wire. Although highly articulate and sometimes loquacious to a fault, the pianist was not always the most forthcoming or enlightening of witnesses on the subject of his own career. But enough exists for the author to have pieced together the remarkable story of his early life, his rise to notoriety as the first member of the avant-garde to send ripples through the jazz establishment, and his progress, as Freeman eloquently puts it, “from insurgent to institution”, from enduring the scorn of Miles Davis and others to becoming the recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship in 1973 and a MacArthur “genius grant” in 1991.

Writing about Taylor’s music in descriptive terms is straightforward enough. Almost any would-be Whitney Balliett can raid the adjective cupboard to produce a satisfactory review of a single concert or recording. As many of us have, Freeman makes considerable use of similes and metaphors drawn from the natural world, so there are lots of thunderstorms and tidal waves in his accounts of the sound and effect of Taylor’s music, particularly the solo work. Again, at first I thought this might become wearying. It doesn’t, because there’s a lot of other important stuff going on.

Freeman examines Taylor’s relationships with the music’s facilitators and gatekeepers, such as George Wein, a perhaps unlikely early champion, and the record producer John Snyder, and with the educational institutions where he taught and assembled groups as test-beds for his compositional techniques. This isn’t a book of musicology, so there isn’t much real analysis, but we hear enough from former sideman and students to get a glimpse of a man so supremely musically literate would write his pieces down in alphabetical form — a string of notes, such as D-B-E flat-A-F sharp-G — and give them to players without much else in the way of detail (no note values or registers) or instruction.

Over the course of the book, and without labouring the point, Freeman persuades us that Taylor, far from being a man with a mission to connect modern jazz with the Second Viennese School, as many assumed in the early days, was actually concerned with creating a language based on non-Western rituals and practices.

He could seem perverse. There are several accounts of how he would sometimes rehearse a band relentlessly, searching for something, only to abandon all the preparation once they had taken the stage. But that wasn’t always the case. I have a vivid memory from one night in 1969 of how intently Jimmy Lyons and Sam Rivers, his saxophonists, followed the scores on their music stands while performing his music at Hammersmith Odeon.

Many interesting people slip in and out of this narrative, from Amiri Baraka to Mikhail Baryshnikov to Pauline Oliveros. Some were collaborators, some were friends, some were adversaries. Death, alas, robbed Freeman of the chance to talk to many who would have had something interesting to say, such as Lyons, the Johnny Hodges to Taylor’s Duke Ellington, or Buell Neidlinger, the bassist in his early groups, a man with perfect recall of every session he ever played on, and with pungent views. I wish he’d talked to Evan Parker, who saw the classic Taylor-Lyons-Sunny Murray trio in New York and played with Taylor during the pianist’s stay in Berlin in 1988. But there are enough survivors, albeit inevitably weighted towards the later decades (including the pianist Vijay Iyer, the drummer Pheeroan akLaff and the trumpeter Amir ElSaffar), to provide a pretty rich portrait.

In his later years, Taylor’s performances increasingly involved the dramatic recitation of his poetry, a gloriously forbidding jumble of polysyllabic arcana. I was present one night in the year 2000 at St Mark’s Church on East 10th Street in New York when he shared a Poetry Project evening with Baraka. I had no idea what to make of his poetry. Nor, perhaps, was I meant to. Freeman can’t do much more than briefly describe it, which is not surprising. Impossibly gnomic, fearlessly impenetrable, it probably contained the key to the mystery of Cecil Taylor.

Freeman’s diligence enables him to preserve for us the details of events such as the ceremony surrounding Taylor’s acceptance of the 2013 Kyoto Prize in Tokyo, including a moving description of his duet with the dancer Min Tanaka at the ceremony and the pianist’s words in a subsequent interview: “The question is simply this: is the secret in the symbol of the note, or is it the feeling that exists before you translate the note into music? Music proceeds from within. The note is merely a rather uninteresting symbol that equates to the sound. But sound is always with us.”

Alas, a man posing as a friend and helper managed to separate Taylor from the prize money that went with the Kyoto award: a small matter of $492,725. For a man in his mid-eighties, in increasingly frail physical health, the ensuing legal battle for restitution was traumatic. Eventually he was granted a court-appointed legal guardian, who looked after him until his death.

Not surprisingly, the book becomes more emotionally compelling as it moves towards and through this final chapter. As I finished it, I realised that In the Brewing Luminous (which, of course, takes its title from one of Taylor’s compositions), is a work not just of heft but of sensitivity towards an awkward, sometimes forbidding subject.

Freeman notes that Taylor’s ashes were interred in the Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx, also the resting place of the remains of King Oliver, Coleman Hawkins, Miles Davis, Max Roach, Ornette Coleman, and Taylor’s own idol, Ellington, key figures in the tradition to which he made his own tumultuous, enigmatic, sometimes exasperating, but utterly original contribution.

* Philip Freeman’s In the Brewing Luminous was published on July 5 by Wolke Verlag. The photograph of Cecil Taylor was taken by Andrew Putler and is from Jazz: A Photographic Documentary, published by Studio in 1994. A previously unheard 1980 recording of Cecil Taylor with a sextet including Jimmy Lyons and Sunny Murray at Fat Tuesday’s in New York has just been issued by Hat Hut Records in the Ezz-thetics First Visit series.

Jul 8

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Down the Dungeon

You can still find men and women in their late 70s prepared to argue over the best act they ever saw at the Dungeon Club. Was it Little Stevie Wonder, then 15 years old, or Little Walter? The Who or the Small Faces? Patti LaBelle and the Bluebelles or Inez and Charlie Foxx? The Yardbirds or the Moody Blues? T-Bone Walker or Sonny Boy Williamson? Sugar Pie DeSanto or the Soul Sisters? The Action or the Move? Lee Dorsey or Wilson Pickett? The Alan Bown Set or the Jimmy Brown Sound?

Stanford Street is an unremarkable stretch of road, about a hundred yards long, leading up from the empty shopfronts of Lister Gate in the centre of Nottingham towards the hill on which the Castle stands. It’s amid something of a wasteland now, close to the demolished remains of the Broadmarsh shopping centre, which awaits the money for redevelopment as an urban park. The estate agents’ website currently offering office space at No 6 — “to be refurbished to a high standard throughout” — mentions the building’s period features but nothing about its history, which I’m guessing began in the late 19th century with an involvement in the city’s then-thriving textile industry.

On July 10, 1964 — 60 years ago this week – the ground floor and basement of 6 Stanford Street were opened by a man called Mick Parker as a club for live music with room for two or three hundred teenagers and no drinks licence. It lasted three and half years. During its short but hectic life, the Dungeon’s basement stage hosted the artists mentioned above, and many others, including Georgie Fame and the Blue Flames, the Exciters, Long John Baldry’s Hoochie Coochie Men, the Moody Blues and the Dixie Cups (with Alvin “Shine” Robinson on guitar).

In those years Manchester had its Twisted Wheel, Sheffield had its Mojo and Newcastle had its Club A Go Go. London, of course, had its Flamingo and Marquee. But we in Nottingham felt lucky. We had the Dancing Slipper, where the acts booked by Bill “Foo” Kinnell (say it quickly) evolved from trad jazz to R&B (and where I first saw the 19-year-old Rod Stewart with Baldry’s band). We had the three rowing clubs, cheek by jowl along the towpath by Trent Bridge: the Union, the Britannia and the Boat Club, all of them with upstairs rooms presenting live music three or four nights a week: Graham Bond, Herbie Goins, John Mayall, Freddie Hubbard, eventually even the Pink Floyd. In the Lace Market there was the Beachcomber, where we were fortunate enough to see Jimi Hendrix, Martha and the Vandellas and the complete Ike & Tina Turner Revue at very close quarters.

But the Dungeon was a special place, which is why this week there will be an event commemorating its 60th anniversary. It was the centre of mod culture in the region, where the music you danced to and the clothes you wore seemed like the only things that mattered in life.

I was lucky enough to play there a number of times in a local semi-pro R&B band called the Junco Partners — not to be confused with the slightly better known Newcastle band who’d also borrowed their name from a record made in 1952 by the Texas-born singer James Wayne. I joined them in the autumn of 1964, playing drums alongside Mick Dale (lead guitar), Dave Turner (rhythm guitar, harmonica and vocals), an art student from down south called Ian Taylor on electric piano, and our leader, Rae Drewery, on bass guitar and vocals. (Rae was a builder by trade and after work he’d clear out his Transit van to take us and our gear to gigs; he was already the father of a small daughter who would become the wonderful Corinne Drewery of Swing Out Sister.)

We were all blues fans, missionaries for this music, and our repertoire included Sonny Boy’s “Don’t Start Me to Talkin'”, Howlin’ Wolf’s “Smokestack Lightnin'”, Jimmy Reed’s “Baby What You Want Me to Do”, Muddy Waters’s “Hoochie Coochie Man”, Bo Diddley’s “Before You Accuse Me” and “Mama Keep Your Big Mouth Shut”and John Lee Hooker’s “Boom Boom” and “Dimples”. Cultural appropriation on a grand scale, in other words. But, you know, at that stage everybody — us, the audience, the originators — benefited from this enthusiasm.

We were getting about £25 a night, as I recall, and it took us a few months to move up from art college hops, blues clubs and pub gigs to the comparative big time of the Dungeon. When an act couldn’t make it one Sunday just before Christmas, Parker called us in at a couple of hours’ notice to play what amounted to an audition. We must have passed because he booked us in to play on a Saturday night in January 1965, supporting the Original Checkmates.

Eight days later we were back in support of the Applejacks. A month later we were supporting Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, then the Lancastrians. In March we supported Robb Storme and the Whispers, Screamin’ Lord Sutch and the Savages, and the Moody Blues, a couple of months after “Go Now” had topped the chart. In April we supported Baldry, Mark Fayne and the Fontaines, and Eden Kane and his Downbeats. And on Friday 4 June we were the sole attraction: topping the bill.

A couple of weeks later I played my last gig with Rae, Mick, Dave and Ian, and went off to get a haircut and start a job. You can see us in those two photos (alas, only the top of Ian’s head), taken on one of those nights at the Dungeon. There’s also my membership card, with which I was able to dance with my friends to the likes of James Brown’s “Out of Sight” and Jr Walker’s “Shotgun”. I can’t be there to celebrate the anniversary this week, but a feeling for the place has never left me.

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