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Posts by Richard Williams

Mar 14

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Keith Emerson 1944-2016

The NiceKeith Emerson died the other day, aged 71, apparently by his own hand. According to Mari Kawaguchi, his partner of more than 20 years, he had been thrown into a depression by the effect of nerve damage on his ability to play his keyboard instruments, with a series of concerts in prospect. Whatever one’s opinion of Emerson’s work, it is extraordinarily sad that his career should seemingly have ended in that particular form of defeat. Of one thing there was no doubt: his love of music.

I saw him first with the Nice at the Nottingham Boat Club in 1967, when they were a four-piece, with David O’List on guitar, Lee Jackson on bass and Brian Davison on drums. This was before they had made their first record. In a small room, in front of perhaps 100 people, they were exciting and stimulating; there was already a degree of showmanship emanating from Emerson, but not so much as to get in the way of the notes.

Two years later, in October 1969, I went on the road with them, on assignment for the Melody Maker: a three-day trip taking in Newcastle City Hall, the Essen Blues Festival in Germany and the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam. O’List had gone by then, and the remaining three were good company. In Newcastle, greeted by an ecstatic audience, they premiered sections of Emerson’s Five Bridges Suite, written in honour of Jackson’s home town. In Essen they followed Deep Purple and Amon Duul on stage, and were met by a muted reception. In Amsterdam’s beautiful 19th century concert hall the audience was respectfully enthusiastic; I recorded in my notebook that the applause for their version of Tim Hardin’s “Hang on to a Dream” seemed to go on for about five minutes.

This was a time when young British rock musicians, some of them with a grounding in classical music, were starting to stretch themselves in bands such as King Crimson, Soft Machine, Egg, Yes, Caravan and East of Eden. Emerson’s decision to leave the band and form a new trio with Greg Lake and Carl Palmer in 1970 represented a defining moment at which all that bright-eyed enthusiasm and musical adventurousness tipped over into excess. I saw ELP at close quarters during that year’s Isle of Wight Festival, their first large-scale gig, and I thought the whole experience was dreadful. Lake’s insistence on having a Persian rug to stand on while playing was just one of the factors that put them on their way to becoming a primary template for Spinal Tap.

But wind back a little, to a couple of months after I spent that long weekend in the company of the Nice. In December 1969 they played Fillmore West in San Francisco: here’s an audio recording of how they sounded back then. Surprisingly good, I think. When Emerson takes a long Hammond solo on “For Example”, they really hit a groove. The elements of the music are kept in reasonable proportions, with ambition and execution still in balance.

But you can sense where Emerson wanted his music to go, and why he felt he needed a different set of accomplices. To be brutal, Jackson and Davison weren’t cool enough. He needed a couple of guys who could play even faster and on whom long hair and twenty-guinea Anello & Davide stack-heeled snakeskin boots looked as natural as they did on him. For better or worse, he found them.

* The photograph of the Nice shows (clockwise from top): David O’List, Lee Jackson, Binky Davison, Keith Emerson.

Mar 9

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George Martin’s Day in the Life

George MartinForty five summers ago, George Martin granted me a long interview for the Melody Maker. It was a very enjoyable experience: he was most courteous of men, and his answers were full of fascinating detail, with the occasional gentle indiscretion. He spoke in some depth about his experience of working with the Beatles, all the way from “Love Me Do” to Abbey Road, and the result was published in three parts, on August 21 and 28 and September 4, 1971. Lennon and McCartney were at war with each other that year, and some of what he said got up John’s sensitive nose, provoking a couple of letters from New York, the first of which you can see above. But when I asked Martin about the making of “A Day in the Life”, he responded with a very thorough and interesting description, giving a vivid snapshot of the creative relationship between the producer and the four young men he always referred to as “the boys”, a partnership based on his willingness to entertain their interest in taking risks and their respect for his experience and integrity. Had he, I asked, been responsible — as rumour then had it — for sweeping up several seemingly disconnected musical episodes from the studio floor and sticking them together to create a masterpiece?

No, let’s explain that. John had this song, which started off with his observation, and his part was the beginning and the end, and Paul’s was the middle bit. We started recording it with Paul on piano and John on guitar, and we decided we needed another riff in it, and Paul said, “Well, I’ve got this other song — ‘Got up, got out of bed…'” — and he was going to make that a separate song. He said, “You can use it if you like, put it in your one. Will it fit?” They thought about it for a bit and decided it would work, and they wanted something different in it but they didn’t know what.

They decided that they were going to put a lot of just rhythm in it, and add something later. So I said, “Let’s make it a definite number of bars, let’s have 24 bars of just rhythm in two places, and we’ll decide what to do with them later.” They said, “How are we going to know it’s 24 bars, because it’s a long time?” So we had Mal (Evans) standing by the piano, counting “One… two… three…” and in fact he had an alarm clock, because he was timing the thing as well, and it actually went off. On the record you can hear Mal saying, “Twenty one… twenty two…” if you listen.

When they’d done it, I asked them what they were going to do with those bloody great gaps. Paul said he wanted a symphony orchestra, and I said, “Don’t be silly, Paul — it’s all right having 98 men, but you can do it just as well with a smaller amount.” He said, “I want a symphony orchestra to freak out.” So I said, “If you really want one, let me write something for it.” He said, “No, I don’t want you to. If you write it, it’ll be all you. Let’s have just something freaking out.” I said, “Let’s be practical. You can’t get an orchestra in there and say, ‘Freak out, fellers,’ because nothing would happen. They’d just look embarrassed and make a few funny noises.”

So I booked a 41-piece orchestra, half the normal symphony orchestra, and I spent some time with Paul and John. I wrote out the obvious underlying harmonies, and during the main 24-bar sections John and Paul suggested that we should have a tremendous shriek, starting out quietly and finishing up with a tremendous noise. So I took each instrument in the orchestra and at the beginning of the 24 bars I wrote down their lowest note, whatever it was, so that the cello, for instance, had a bottom C, and at the end of the 24 bars I gave them their highest note related to the chord of E. And throughout the 24 bars I just wrote “poco a poco gliss(ando)”, and when it came to the session I told the musicians that they had to slide very gradually up and those people in the woodwind who needed breaths should take them at random. It was just a general slither.

But when we came to do it, the boys said they wanted to make a real event of it. So they got all their friends to come along and dress up and at that time Mick (Jagger) and Marianne Faithfull came along and all their Apple shop friends — the Dutch people — and there must have been about 40 of them, all freaking out with joss sticks. Paul said, “We’re going to be in our flowers but we don’t expect you to do that because you’re not that kind of person.” I said, “Thank you very much.” He said, “But I want you to wear evening dress, and the orchestra, too.” So I booked the orchestra in evening dress, and when it came to the point Paul had brought a lot of carnival gear — funny hats and false noses — and I distributed them among the orchestra. I wore a Cyrano de Bergerac nose myself. Eddie Gruneberg, who is a great fiddle player, selected a gorilla’s paw for his bow-hand, which was lovely. It was great fun.

Mar 7

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When Nashville took on Mad Men

Ray Stevens 3It’s pretty strange that the man best known for “Ahab the Arab”, “Bridget the Midget” and “Everything is Beautiful” should have written and recorded one of the most striking protest songs of the 1960s. That, at least, is how I’ve always thought of Ray Stevens’ “Mr Businessman”.

Released in 1968, it deploys a great pop structure — a melody and a chord sequence that descend at different rates, and a brilliant kitchen-sink arrangement — to mount a blazing attack on the amorality of corporate America. Listen to the lyric today, and Stevens could be writing about the world of Donald Trump: “Spending counterfeit incentive / Wasting precious time and health / Placing value on the worthless / Disregarding priceless wealth / You can wheel and deal the best of them / And steal it from the rest of them / You know the score / Their ethics are a bore…”

Not exactly your standard Nashville confection. If we go back and look at the song from the perspective of its own time, it’s clear that he’s attacking the Mad Men culture: “Eighty-six proof anaesthetic crutches prop you to the top / Where the smiles are all synthetic and the ulcers never stop…” He finishes with a lacerating payoff worthy of Dylan at his most vituperative: “No one more lonely than / This rich important man / Let’s have your autograph / Endorse your epitaph…”

The weird thing is that in 1968 Stevens looked exactly like the people he skewered in this song: ready for an afternoon on the country-club golf course. Did he mean the words, or was he just coming up with something that suited the market? A year later he released “The Minority”, a strange little song which comes down on the side of the policeman earning $130 a week for risking his life and the man who takes his children to Sunday School, pays his bills and is faithful to his wife. The silent minority, in  fact: “But the majority rules / While a stampede of fools / Marches over them / Singing a pious hymn.”

It’s included in a new Ace Records anthology, called Face the Music, of the singles Stevens released on the Monument label between 1965 and 1970, also including “Mr Businessman” (and “Freddie Feelgood and his Funky Little Five Piece Band”, “Mary My Secretary” and the first recorded version of Kris Kristofferson’s classic “Sunday Mornin’ Comin’ Down”). The compiler, Tony Rounce, mentions in his sleeve notes that the singer, still active in the recording and television studios at 77 years of age, now supports the Tea Party, the far-right faction of the bunch that seems ready to nominate Trump for leader of the free world.

Mar 4

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Tales of Woodstock

Richard ManuelIt’s 30 years today since Richard Manuel took his own life in his room at the Quality Inn motel, Winter Park, Florida, a few hours after a gig. Born 42 years earlier in Stratford, Ontario, Manuel was both the owner of one of the most emotionally direct and affecting voices in the history of rock and roll and a member of what had been, by common agreement of most of the people I know, its finest band.

Last night a crowd of people gathered at Rough Trade East in Brick Lane to celebrate the publication of Small Town Talk, Barney Hoskyns’ new book about Woodstock’s musical history. Graham Parker, long a resident of upstate New York, and Sid Griffin talked and played. The atmosphere was warm and the anecdotes amusing, but there was no disguising the fact that the lives of a lot of the people we were hearing about had ended prematurely.

In one of his earlier books, Across the Great Divide, Barney told the story of the incarnation of five men — Manuel, Levon Helm, Rick Danko, Garth Hudson and Robbie Robertson — first as the Hawks and then as the Band; it remains, in my opinion, the finest single account of what compelled young white boys in the 1950s and ’60s to adopt the musical language of black people as their own, with world-altering consequences. It is also the story of a slow-motion tragedy.

There was a lot about Manuel in that first book, of course, and the new one — which is fascinating, and ranges far and wide — contains plenty of reminders of how brightly the fire burned before it began to consume him. His last gig was with Danko, Helm and Hudson in the reformed version of the Band at Winter Park’s Cheek-to-Cheek Lounge, quite a fall from places such as the Royal Albert Hall and the Academy of Music, where the full five of them had played to such unforgettable effect in their heyday.

Back in 1967/68 Richard co-wrote “Tears of Rage” and “I Shall be Released” with Bob Dylan and sang them on Music from Big Pink. He also wrote that album’s “In a Station”, “We Can Talk” and “Lonesome Suzie”.  On its successor, The Band, he co-wrote “When You Awake”, “Whispering Pines” and “Jawbone” with Robertson. There were two co-writes on Stage Fright (“Sleeping” and “Just Another Whistle Stop”), and no compositional contribution at all to Cahoots, the fourth album. And that, in miniature, is the story of the Band: the slow disintegration of a sense of communal purpose, eroded by distractions and asymmetrical ambitions.

Eric Clapton once wrote this about Richard: “I wanted so much to be like him, to be able to express with such power and frailty.” Beneath the party-animal exterior, Clapton had spotted “an incredible vulnerability”.

I’m listening to an album called Whispering Pines: Live at the Getaway, Saugerties, NY, recorded on October 12, 1985, five months before Richard’s death. By that time he had ended an unhappy stay in Malibu and relocated to the more familiar and congenial surroundings of Woodstock. “I love it here,” he said in this interview conducted by Ruth Albert Spencer in March 1985. “I love the season changes. I love to see all that. California is just like one season with the weather changing.”

It’s an informal club session and he sings Band songs and a handful of standards: “Grow Too Old”, “You Don’t Know Me”, “Georgia on My Mind” (which the Band had recorded and released as a single to support Jimmy Carter’s presidential campaign) and “Miss Otis Regrets”, plus J.J. Cale’s “Crazy Mama” and Ray Charles’s “Hard Times”. The album was not released until 2002, three years after the passing of Danko, who joins his old friend on four of the 17 songs. Those two voices, seriously ravaged now by comparison with their youth (and “struggling”, as Hoskyns puts it, with heroin habits), nevertheless combine on “Tears of Rage” to summon an echo of that old heart-piercing impact, the sound of two gifted, wayward boys who never quite grew up.

Finally, here’s a sweet, sad thing you might not know: a modest and tender version of “Country Boy” that Richard also recorded in October 1985 and which turned up, elaborately arranged in post-production, on the Band’s 1993 album, Jericho. His final time in a studio, I’d guess.

* The illustration of Richard Manuel is by Jack Dutieux and is taken from the cover of Whispering Pines, as is the quote from Eric Clapton’s sleeve note. Small Town Talk is published by Faber & Faber.

Mar 1

Jazz in the Round

Jazz in the Round 1Jez Nelson’s monthly Jazz in the Round nights at the Cockpit Theatre in Marylebone are as good a way to hear improvised music in London as anyone has yet devised. A couple of hundred listeners settle themselves down in mini-bleachers on all four sides of the floor, where the musicians set up to face each other, creating an unusual degree of intimacy radiating through 360 degrees. As a member of Empirical — I think it was Nathaniel Facey, the alto saxophonist — told last night’s audience, it makes you play differently. In a good way.

Facey and his colleagues kicked off what turned out to be a special night even by the standards of this excellent series. The evening was being recorded for transmission (on March 28) as the last-ever Jazz on 3, which Nelson presents, and after 18 years he was understandably emotional as he introduced a bill handpicked to represent the programme’s philosophy over the years. After Empirical came Django Bates, who gave the solo performance that traditionally separates the evening’s two bands, followed by a set of free improvisation from a multi-generational quartet assembled specially for this event: Laura Jurd (trumpet), Alexander Hawkins (piano), Orphy Robinson (marimba) and Evan Parker (tenor saxophone).

Empirical were coming off a week of thrice-daily gigs in a pop-up revue at Old Street tube station: a wheeze that apparently worked as well as it deserved to, attracting crowds of passers-by intrigued by what they heard. They’re an exceptional band and they played a fine set of striking new compositions by each of the four members, ending with “Lethe”, a quietly beautiful slow tune by the vibraphonist Lewis Wright. I’ve heard them play it before, and it stuck in my head. I was delighted to hear it again, and to discover that it’s on their new album, Connection.

Bates had just arrived from Switzerland, where he is a professor of jazz at Bern’s University of the Arts. He began by singing, to his own deft kalimba accompaniment, a little song about the anxiety of a man introducing himself to a piano (which turns out to be female). Then he sat down at the keyboard to play a piece in which he doubled his improvised single-note lines in the treble register with whistling of virtuoso standard. A tenor horn solo preceded a final stint at the keyboard, which included some gorgeous gospel figurations and a song about a London pub transformed by a developer into empty luxury apartments. “Empty luxury,” he repeated, sotto voce but with emphasis.

The members of the final improvising group were chosen to show how Jazz on 3 has always reflected the way this music spans the generations, with the accent on new developments. They had never played together as a unit, but the shared qualities of musicianship and sensitivity ensured that they created a genuine conversation that not only gripped their listeners but enfolded them in the act of creation. It was, as Nelson pointed out, the best possible way to demonstrate that, in the hands of such people, the music’s future is safe.

* The photograph of Empirical at the Cockpit Theatre was taken by Steven Cropper, and is used by kind permission. His blog, with more of his fine images, is at http://www.transientlife.uk. Jazz on 3 will be replaced on BBC Radio 3 by Jazz Now, presented by Soweto Kinch. Jez Nelson’s Somethin’ Else will be on Jazz FM on Saturday nights from April 2. Jazz in the Round takes place on the last Monday of each month: http://www.thecockpit.org.uk/show/jazz_in_the_round_0.

Feb 26

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Feat. Bill Frisell

Bill Frisell at home 2There was a time, seven or eight years ago, when I came to the conclusion that Bill Frisell was simply making too many records. I fell out of the habit of automatically buying his new releases because he seemed to be spreading himself too thin. Good Dog Happy Man (1999) and Blues Dream (2001) are still two of my all-time favourite albums, but I tend to prefer him nowadays as a contributor to other people’s records — something to which his particular expertise is well suited. Used sparingly, the characteristics of his playing add texture and flavour, just like King Curtis or Steve Cropper once did.

The job of being an accompanist is much underrated these days, so it’s good to welcome the arrival of two outstanding new albums on which Frisell fulfils that role: first with the saxophonist and flautist Charles Lloyd on I Long to See You and second with singer-songwriter Lucinda Williams on The Ghosts of Highway 20. They’re very different, of course, but they benefit equally from the guitarist’s modest, graceful touch.

When I interviewed him for the Guardian in 2002, Frisell explained a personal evolution that had begun with his first 45, the Beach Boys’s “Little Deuce Coupe”. Then came the Beatles and Manfred Mann — “that’s where I heard the blues for the first time” –followed by the Rolling Stones, John Mayall and the Paul Butterfield band. “I was coming to the blues backwards,” he said, “by figuring out where the English bands were getting a lot of their stuff from.” He may be in his sixties now, but he’s kept a sense of discovery in his music, whatever company he happens to be keeping.

I Long to See You finds Lloyd and Frisell tackling some familiar material, such as the saxophonist’s “Of Course Of Course” and “Sombrero Sam”, and a version of “Shenandoah” that doesn’t quite match the sublime reading Frisell and Ry Cooder contrived on Good Dog Happy Man. The biggest surprise is a resolute instrumental version of Dylan’s “Masters of War”, while the soulful Spanish traditional song “La Llorona”– previously recorded by Lloyd — invites Frisell to display his innate lyricism. Guest appearances by Willie Nelson on “Last Night I Had the Strangest Dream” and Norah Jones on “You Are So Beautiful” are pleasant but not exactly essential.

The track that justifies the album’s existence, however, is its closer, the 16-minute “Barche Lamsel”. Named after a Buddhist prayer, it allows Lloyd (its composer), Frisell and their three bandmates — the steel guitarist Greg Leisz, the bass guitarist Reuben Rogers and the drummer Eric Harland — to improvise a dreamy five-minute intro on a single chord before drifting into a pulse defined by the drums  for a delicately funky jam that would once have been described as “spaced out”.

The concerns of The Ghosts of Highway 20 are more earthly in tone but no less spiritual in nature, if much less comforting. Lucinda Williams’ ravaged voice and bar-room country-blues songs do not trade in reassurance. Her America is a place of wayfaring strangers fleeing the past and seeking refuge from the future. As the poet of this world of lost highways and dangerous glances, Williams is rivalled only by James McMurtry.

Like its predecessor, 2014’s Down Where the Spirit Meets the Bone (which also featured Leisz and Frisell), this one is a two-disc set. The extra length offered by the format would exhaust the capacity of most singer-songwriters, but it seems ideally suited Williams’ temperament. Although her songs are often skeletal, they need to stretch out and breathe inside arrangements that create their own sense of time. On “Louisiana Story” the two guitarists sit either side of the parched voice, carefully picking out a double commentary against a tempo that flows like a thin stream of black treacle.

* The photograph of Bill Frisell is by Monica Frisell.

Feb 22

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Grooving at Falcon Lair

Falcon Lair

Few jazz musicians get to enjoy living quarters like Falcon Lair, a house in the Spanish colonial revival style built in 1924 by Rudolph Valentino high up in Benedict Canyon, in Beverly Hills. The architect was Wallace Neff, a favourite of the movie stars of silent era; four years earlier he had built Pickfair for Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks Jr, turning an old hunting lodge into Hollywood’s most celebrated mock-Tudor mansion.

Doris Duke, the 40-year-old heiress to a vast tobacco fortune, bought Falcon Lair in 1953 and moved in with her new boyfriend, the pianist Joe Castro. They had met a year earlier in Hawaii, where Castro was performing with a jazz-tinged cabaret group called 3 Bees and a Queen. Duke, who liked jazz, asked him to give her piano lessons, and the relationship began.

Having become, on the death of her father when she was 12 years old, “the richest girl in the world”, she was a generous woman. She had previously been married to the Dominican playboy Porfirio Rubirosa; after their wedding in 1947 (her second, his third) she gave him a B-25 bomber to be refitted for his personal use, a string of polo ponies, and a Ferrari for him to drive at Le Mans; later, as part of their divorce settlement, he received a 200-year-old house in Paris. After she hooked up with Castro, they were soon making plans for a new home to share. Falcon Lair was their choice, and a studio was soon installed over the garage, with a Steinway D for Castro and recording equipment to enable him to tape the jam sessions that took place there over the next few years.

Castro, born in Arizona in 1927, was an accomplished bebop pianist who had a good feeling for the blues and a powerful sense of swing, and liked to mix chordal work with conventional single-note right-hand lines. And he soon showed himself to be at ease in fast company, with the great tenor saxophonist Teddy Edwards among his most regular musical companions. When Edwards recorded a pair of quartet albums, Sunset Eyes and Teddy’s Ready!, for the Pacific Jazz and Contemporary labels in 1959 and 1960, Castro was his preferred pianist in a line-up completed by the bassist Leroy Vinnegar and the drummer Billy Higgins. At around the same time, the group recorded an album called (rather misleadingly) Groove Funk Soul for Atlantic under Castro’s name.

Joe Castro 2.jpg

The relationship between Duke and Castro lasted, with the occasional hiatus, until early 1966. During that time they hosted innumerable jam sessions, not just at Falcon Lair but at at her New Jersey estate, Duke Farms, and her Honolulu property. They also booked sessions at various Hollywood studios for groups including Castro’s big band and Edwards’ 10-piece group, and in 1964 they set up a label, Clover Records, to issue the material. Only one album, a Castro quartet session, appears to have seen the light of day before the break-up put an end to the project.

Now comes an extremely handsome six-CD box titled Lush Life: A Musical Journey, devoted to all that lost work. There’s a whole disc devoted to Castro’s very respectable Basie-style big band, which includes such first-call LA session men as the trumpeters Al Porcino, Stu Williamson and Conte Candoli, the trombonist Frank Rosolino, the saxophonists Tony Ortega and Bob Cooper, the guitarist Howard Roberts and the drummer Larry Bunker. Another disc rounds up the work of Edwards’s tentet, with Freddie Hill on trumpet and Lou Blackburn on trombone. A third features an hour of the Castro-Edwards-Vinnegar-Higgins quartet at its best. The other three contain extracts from the informal jam sessions, and include the tenor saxophonists Lucky Thompson, Stan Getz and Zoot Sims (also featured — on alto, strangely — with Castro on a quartet album called Live at Falcon Lair, released by Pablo in 2o04). Among others present are the drummers Chico Hamilton and Ron Jefferson, the bassist Oscar Pettiford and the pianist Teddy Wilson, who takes Castro’s place to join Sims and Getz on tracks recorded at Duke Farms.

The box is released on the Sunnyside label and the compilation, annotation and packaging of the set — in which Castro’s son James played a leading role — are first-class. If none of the musical content is exactly revelatory, it’s all good stuff and highly representative of its period, and the jam session material benefits from the combination of an informal atmosphere and (except for the earliest disc) much better sound quality than was usually the case when such occasions were committed to tape in the post-war years.

Those who don’t know Castro’s work but have a strong feeling for mid-’50s jazz will enjoy making the acquaintance of a really engaging player who went on to work with the singers Anita O’Day and June Christy. He married another singer, Loretta Haddad, in October 1966, before they settled a few years later in Las Vegas, where they brought up their two sons and he became music director at the Tropicana Hotel. His jazz years seem to have ended when he moved his belongings out of the house at 1436 Bella Drive.

Duke died at Falcon Lair in 1993, aged 80. Platoons of lawyers took many years to settle the arguments between those who believed they had a claim to her very substantial remaining fortune, much of which she bequeathed to her charitable foundations. Her estate sold the property in 1998. A restoration project having failed, the house was demolished in 2006.

Her ex-boyfriend died in Las Vegas in 2009. Castro’s entire and rather fascinating story is well told in great depth here. And here, from the 1959 Atlantic album, with Edwards, Vinnegar and Higgins, is a good way to remember him, with a fine example of his ballad and mid-tempo playing, on a lovely version of “Yesterdays”.

Feb 12

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Down Applewood Road

Applewood Road 2Applewood Road, a trio of female singer-songwriters, recorded their first album around a single microphone. Last night they went one better, clustering around an upright piano at the side of the stage in the Exmouth Market Centre to perform their encore with no amplification whatever.

Recorded direct to two-track quarter-inch tape, with no edits or overdubs, Applewood Road has the kind of intimacy you might expect. Released by Gearbox Records, specialists in vinyl, it’s a record of great warmth and charm.

Those qualities were certainly on view at the launch gig, part of a short UK tour. Emily Barker, Amber Rubarth and Amy Speace met in a Nashville coffee shop in late 2014, with the intention of seeing if they could write songs together. “Applewood Road”, written the next day, was their first effort; the album otherwise consists of songs they wrote separately, or with other partners.

“Applewood Road” is a harmony song, and when I first heard them sing it together, at Gearbox’s offices a few months ago, the sound gave me chills. Barker (who I’ve written about before, here) is from Australia, Rubarth grew up in California and Speace is from Baltimore, but at times they can sound as if they spent their childhoods singing together around a family hearth in the Appalachians. The best work they do together — like their spellbinding cover of “Losing My Religion”, or “To the Stars”, which Rubarth wrote with Adam Levy, or “I’m Not Afraid Any More”, by Barker with Robby Hecht — mostly involves the three of them as equal contributors to the vocal blend.

There are other musicians on the album, just a handful, but last night the singers provided their own accompaniment, switching between banjos, an acoustic resonator bass guitar, harmonica, and Emily’s vintage Gibson acoustic guitar. Each of them also performed a song at the stageside piano during the three short solo sets that made up the first half of the evening.

Speace, who has made six solo albums since 2002 and had a song, “Way of the World” recorded by Judy Collins in 2010, exudes a calm authority that the other two have yet to attain. She was once an actress, describes herself as a folk singer, and has a voice somewhere between Joan Baez and Mary Chapin Carpenter, with the poise of the former, the emotional richness of the latter, and a soul of her own. Her individual set started with a fine song called “The Sea and the Shore”. As a member of the trio, there’s a presence about her that gives depth and focus to the whole group.

* The photograph (from left: Speace, Rubarth, Barker) was taken at Exmouth Market Centre by Andy Barnes.

Feb 8

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Mike Westbrook’s Bigger Show

The Uncommon Orchestra image 1The great English jazz composer and bandleader Mike Westbrook turns 80 next month — on March 21, to be exact. His long career is studded with extended works of great ambition and achievement: Marching Song, Metropolis, Citadel/Room 315, The Westbrook Blake, The Cortège (his masterpiece, for my money), On Duke’s Birthday, London Bridge Is Broken Down, Mama Chicago, and others. What began in the late 1960s as a distinctively Westbrookian conception of jazz — with undertones of the approach Ellington and Mingus took to blending composition and improvisation — was broadened by an engagement with street theatre and brass bands, and by a collaboration with his wife, the singer and librettist Kate Westbrook, on pieces that reflected the influence of Berlin theatre song and British music hall.

And now there’s another magnum opus to celebrate. A Bigger Show is a piece in eight sections, lasting almost two hours, performed by Westbrook’s latest large ensemble, the Uncommon Orchestra, a 21-piece unit based around his home in Devon. Due to its size, it doesn’t often show its face. But last summer a recording of the piece was made at Exeter’s Barnfield Theatre, and the results — produced by Jon Hiseman — are out now on a 2CD set.

The suite was inspired by the old St Bartholomew’s Day fair, which took place in Smithfield, in the City of London, continuously between the 12th and 19th centuries until it was closed down in 1855 on the grounds of excessive rowdiness and debauchery. Back in 1975 Westbrook’s Brass Band took part in a production of Ben Jonson’s play Bartholomew Fair, and the idea grew into its present incarnation.

Once again the Westbrooks’ vision of modern life finds powerful expression in a work featuring rousing and often turbulent ensemble work with instrumental solos of real substance from such familiar figures as Alan Wakeman on soprano and tenor saxophones and Dave Holdsworth on pocket trumpet and Sousaphone, and newer names like the altoist Roz Harding, the trumpeter Sam Massey and the tenorist Gary Bayley. As has been the case with Mike Westbrook since the beginning of his career, the improvisations emerge from the arrangements in an organic and dramatically satisfying way — the work of composer who has paid close (but never imitative) attention to the lessons handed out by Ellington, Mingus and Gil Evans.

The tone is variously raucous and tender, celebratory and scathing. Kate Westbrook’s lyrics, sung by herself, Martine Waltier and Billy Bottle, are etched in acid (particularly in a song satirising the social media). Human nature and human behaviour, they suggest, are little altered since the days of Blake and Hogarth: in an era when the gap between affluence and poverty is widening rapidly, only the superficial symptoms of excess and deprivation differ.

All this is achieved with a courage, a vigour and a generosity of spirit always characteristic of Mike Westbrook’s work. A Bigger Show is ambitious, thought-provoking, and exhilarating; when it ends, you feel as though you’ve been on a journey. Perhaps one day his extended pieces will be acclaimed as belonging among the most acutely relevant cultural artefacts of our time. Until then, here’s a new one to treasure.

* A Bigger Show is released on ASC Records. Westbrook and the Uncommon Orchestra will perform the piece at the Brewhouse Theatre in Taunton on April 1, Kings Place in London on May 20, and the Plough Arts Centre in Torrington on June 10.

Feb 5

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Maurice White 1941-2016

Maurice WhiteWhen Maurice White told me that he’d deputised for the absent Elvin Jones with the John Coltrane Quartet at a Chicago jazz club called McKie’s in the early 1960s, I was as impressed as I’d been by anything Earth, Wind & Fire had played at the OMNI arena in Atlanta the previous night.

It had been quite a gig, however, full of smoke and mirrors — the musicians materialising in transparent perspex tubes which had descended from above, and dematerialising as they made their departure, and the bass-guitarist (Verdine White, Maurice’s brother) levitating during his solo spot — with costumes from ancient Egypt, as well as red-hot playing. This was February 1978, and EW&F were the happening thing, to the extent that a bunch of journalists had been flown from Europe to witness their show.

Maurice hadn’t touched a drum throughout the set, but during the interview at their hotel the next morning that’s what I got him talking about. I knew that he’d succeeded Al Duncan, who kept the backbeat snapping on Jimmy Reed’s “Shame Shame Shame” and devised those lovely fills on the Impressions’ “It’s All Right”, as the leading studio drummer for R&B and soul sessions by Chicago labels such as Chess and Vee-Jay.

“When I came out of school, he was THE drummer locally,” Maurice said of Duncan. “But he had a drinking problem, so I started getting dates. And I was ‘young blood’. Of course, I learnt a lot from being around him.”

Having taken Duncan’s place, he played on Fontella Bass’s “Rescue Me”, Ramsey Lewis’s “Wade in the Water”, Billy Stewart’s wild recasting of “Summertime”, and almost certainly the Dells’ widescreen classics of 1968-69, the remakes of “Oh What a Night” and “Stay in My Corner” and the fabulous “The Love We Had (Stays on My Mind)”, co-written by Terry Callier.

He had grown up in the 1950s, he said, in the Chicago jazz scene with a generation of musicians who would turn out to be significant, including the pianist-composer Muhal Richard Abrams, the saxophonist Kalaparusha Maurice McIntyre and the drummer Steve McCall, who was a particularly close friend. “At the time I simply wanted to be the world’s greatest drummer,” Maurice said.

It was meeting Charles Stepney that broadened his horizons. A pianist and arranger who began by idolising Bud Powell (“I think Eddie Harris turned him on to that”) and Burt Bacharach, Stepney worked as a staff arranger and producer at Chess, on the Dells’ records and those of his own creation, the Rotary Connection. Their bond lasted until Stepney’s death in 1976. White admired Stepney’s musical ambition: “He also listened to classical composers, and he evolved through jazz.”

White joined the Ramsey Lewis Trio in 1966, but left in 1970 to move to LA, where he formed the first version of EW&F. It was with the second incarnation of the band, signed by Clive Davis to Columbia Records in 1975, that the hits started coming.

In Atlanta, even in the midst of all the space-age vaudeville presentation, which drove an  almost entirely African American audience of 15,000 crazy with delight, I was impressed by the precision and inventiveness of the band, particularly the Phenix Horns, among whom the saxophonist Andrew Woolfolk stood out. The music may have been glittered up for the disco generation, but the role of the musicians was no different from that of their predecessors in Percy Mayfield’s, Ray Charles’s or James Brown’s bands: they were jazz musicians adapting their skills to the popular blues-based dance music of the day.

When I asked Maurice afterwards about the lavish presentation, with its Nubian gong-bashers and its Tutankhamun masks, he told me he’d been studying Egyptology for three or four years. But I was suddenly struck by a thought. Who had done this sort of thing before — and not only that, but in the Chicago jazz scene in the 1950s, when the young drummer was coming up? So I asked him about it.

“Sun Ra?” Maurice replied. “Yes, I saw him in Chicago. He had a light on top of his head. I thought he was crazy.”

* Maurice White died this week, aged 74. Here is the New York Times obituary.

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