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Posts by Richard Williams

Nov 17

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‘Soundtrack to a Coup d’état’

Sixty years ago Archie Shepp wrote a provocative column for Down Beat magazine in which, if memory serves, he compared his tenor saxophone to a machine gun in the hands of a Vietcong guerrilla. In the early ’60s it seemed that jazz’s New Thing, or whatever you wanted to call it, possessed a powerful political dimension, exemplified by Max Roach and Abbey Lincoln’s Freedom Now Suite, John Coltrane’s “Alabama”, and Shepp’s own “Malcolm, Malcolm — Semper Malcolm”. Even the music that had no explicit political content, such as Ornette Coleman’s “Free Jazz”, somehow seemed to express revolutionary feelings.

It’s with great brilliance that the Belgian film director Johan Grimonprez makes that music (and indeed those very pieces, plus others) into an integral component of his award-winning documentary Soundtrack to a Coup d’état. The two-and-a-half-hour film’s subject is the murder in 1961 of the activist and politician Patrice Lumumba, whose tenure as the first prime minister of the newly independent Republic of Congo — formerly the Belgian Congo — was ended after only three months by a military coup fomented by those with interests in the country’s rich deposits of rare minerals, notably Belgium, the withdrawing colonial power, the United States government of President Eisenhower, and the British government of Harold Macmillan.

Lumumba was a symbol not just of the independence of former colonies but of pan-Africanism. Given the activities of the CIA and the British and Belgian intelligence services, it was no surprise that he welcomed support from Castro’s Cuba and Khrushchev’s Soviet Union, or that he should pay the ultimate price for it, his body hacked to pieces and dissolved in acid by the mercenaries who killed him. Names familiar to those of my generation — Moïse Tshombe, Joseph-Désiré Mobutu, Joseph Kasa-Vubu, Dag Hammarskjöld — stud the narrative, while Grimonprez deploys archive interviews of varying degrees of blatant or sly self-incrimination with participants including Larry Devlin, the CIA station chief, and the MI6 officer Daphne Park.

What makes this film different is the use of music. Grimonprez has spotted the US government’s soft-power deployment of jazz during the Cold War through State Department-sponsored international tours. In 1956 Dizzy Gillespie and an 18-piece band spent 10 weeks touring Europe, Asia and South America. A year earlier Louis Armstrong had pulled out of what would have been the inaugural tour in protest against racial segregation in schools in the Southern states, but in 1960 he travelled to Congo, where he played to an audience of 100,000 people in Léopoldville (as Kinshasa was then known) in the middle of the political disturbances, before returning to Africa in 1961 to perform in Senegal, Mali, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Sudan and the United Arab Republic.

We see Armstrong in Africa in the film, but more novel and powerful is the juxtaposition of the avant-garde jazz of the time with footage of the political events: not so much a soundtrack as an active commentary. So we hear Abbey Lincoln’s anguished screaming, Max Roach firing off snare-drum fusillades, the contorted sounds of Eric Dolphy’s bass clarinet (with Charles Mingus’s group, shortly before his death), Nina Simone simmering through Bob Dylan’s “Ballad of Hollis Brown”, and Coltrane, on fire in “My Favourite Things” and intoning the sorrow of “Alabama”. Fast cutting is usually the enemy of understanding, but Rik Chaubet’s shrewdly paced editing creates a non-stop tapestry of emotions, making the rhythms and the cry of the music mirror the events being depicted.

Direct action also played a part, and if you see this extraordinarily compelling film, you won’t forget the spectacle of Lincoln, Roach and dozens of others courageously disrupting a session of the UN Security Council in New York to protest against the assassination of the figure Malcolm X called “the greatest black man who ever walked the African continent.”

Lumumba’s death was a crime and a tragedy of enormous significance. Grimonprez alludes to its enduring importance through reminding us that the Democratic Republic of Congo, whose mines produced the uranium for the atom bombs that fell on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, remains the world’s major source of coltan, the rare and precious commodity that powers our iPhones. In other words, a country of 100 million people, whose mineral deposits are said to be worth $24 trillion, but where two million children are at risk of starvation, and which currently ranks 179th out of 191 countries in the UN’s Human Development Index, is safe for civilisation.

* Soundtrack to a Coup d’etat is being screened at various independent cinemas.

Nov 15

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Rougher and rowdier (take 2)

So many people told me how much they’d loved the first of Bob Dylan’s three nights in London this week that, having written a rather grumpy response to his performance in Nottingham last Friday, I went on the secondary market to buy tickets for the third and final night, also the last show of the 2023-24 edition of the Rough and Rowdy Ways Tour.

The most telling words came in an email from the historian David Kynaston, who expressed “a powerful sense of gratitude that here I was seeing him at the Albert Hall in 2024, some 55 years after he’d been a speck in the distance at the Isle of Wight, and with all sorts of thoughts about the intervening years – the ups and downs of his different phases, how they rhymed or didn’t rhyme with my own life, his constant presence in one’s interior landscape – coursing through my mind.”

His constant presence in one’s interior landscape. That did it for me. And because I thought it might help give me a different perspective, this time I left my notebook and pen at home, setting aside the working habit of a lifetime.

Buying those tickets turned out to be the year’s best decision. In the warm and dignified surroundings of the Albert Hall, almost everything I found frustrating about the Nottingham show, rooted in a sonic harshness, was smoothed away. The sound was perfect, the vocals were clear and perfectly balanced against the instruments, Dylan’s piano-playing was always relevant to the song, he made each note of every harmonica solo count, and in the moody lighting of those old tungsten lamps the musicians clustered around him as if they were playing together in someone’s front room.

One thing he does is allow the audience to see the music’s working processes. Nowadays he has a set-list that seldom varies, but last night there was an unusually strong sensation of being invited in to watch and hear decisions being made on the fly, in the moment.

At times it had the delicacy of chamber music. “Key West” — a song whose setting he’s played around with throughout the tour — was particularly exquisite in that respect. So was “Mother of Muses”. The new arrangements of “All Along the Watchtower” and “Desolation Row” came into much clearer focus. The music ebbed and flowed with freshness and grace. “Goodbye Jimmy Reed” and “False Prophet” located the Chicago blues sound so fundamental to Dylan’s feelings about how a band should be organised. The spare treatment of “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue” was heartstopping. The closing “Every Grain of Sand” was a serene benediction.

Without his refusal to be consistent or predictable, he wouldn’t be what he is. But last night he drew us in, and I think most people there would have felt unusually close to him. If I really was seeing him for the last time, it ended with seeing him at his best.

Nov 9

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Rougher and rowdier (take 1)

Almost as soon as Bob Dylan and his musicians emerged on to the half-darkened stage of the Motorpoint Arena last night, a jangle of discordant electric guitars made me uneasy. It turned out that the discordance was chiefly coming from the guitar of Dylan himself, who was already sitting at his piano bench, with his back turned to the audience. Within a few seconds that jangle had somehow formed itself into the opening of “All Along the Watchtower”, the first of the 17 songs — nine of them from Rough and Rowdy Ways — he’d give us.

For me, it was a strange concert from several perspectives. It was certainly far from the poised, concentrated, finely detailed performance he’d presented at the same venue in Nottingham two years earlier, which had been a measurable level up even from the two fine shows I’d seen him give at the London Palladium a week before that. Quite often I found myself thinking we were back in the ’90s, when the thing I seemed to say most frequently after one of his concerts, while defending him to sceptics, was, “Well, they’re his songs, he can do what he likes with them.”

Another early warning sign: he repeated the first verse of “Watchtower”, meaning that the song no longer ended with “Two riders were approaching / The wind began to howl” — among the most effective closing lines in popular music — but with “None of us along the line / Know what any of it is worth.” I have no better idea of why he’d choose to do that than of why he’d rearrange a full-band version of “Desolation Row” to the galloping tom-tom beat of “Johnny, Remember Me” or decide to extend the same song with a meaningless piano solo.

The sound was much worse than two years earlier in the same hall. It was louder and harsher, and yet somehow less powerful, and with a much more distracting echo on the voice. Sometimes I flinched involuntarily when he put exaggerated emphasis on a particular syllable, as he so often does. The harmonica, which appeared on several songs, had mislaid its customary poignancy and what he played on it was, unusually, not particularly interesting, even on the closing “Every Grain of Sand”.

His current modus operandi is to start many songs — “I’ve Made Up My Mind to Give Myself to You”, for instance — standing near the back of the stage, singing into a handheld microphone. After a verse or two he advances to the baby grand piano, leans over it, and sings another verse or two, reading from the book of lyrics resting on top of the instrument. So far, so good. But then he sits down and clogs up the music by adding his wilful and often wayward piano-playing to the guitar interplay of Bob Britt and Doug Lancio. There’s no finesse in his keyboard contribution this time round, which is another contrast with 2022. It’s a form of interference, which of course may be what he’s after.

“My Own Version of You” closed with a chaotic ending that suggested that this was the first time they’d played it, rather than the two-hundred-and-twenty-somethingth. “To Be Alone With You” was such a mess that I couldn’t help thinking, “What on earth does he imagine he’s doing?” The drumming of “the great Jim Keltner” — as Dylan quite justifiably introduced him — never seemed as well integrated into the band as that of his precedessor in 2022, Charley Drayton, or George Receli from further back.

During the boogie of “Watching the River Flow” it was tempting to conclude rather irritably that the Shadow Blasters, Dylan’s first band, probably sounded better doing something similar at the Hibbing High School talent contest in 1957. For the first time in 59 years of going to see him on a fairly regular basis, I felt that I could have left my seat, gone to buy a beer, and returned without having missed anything important.

Of course that’s not true. There were moments of grace, mostly when the instrumentation was reduced to voice and piano, as in “Key West”, or voice and guitars, as in “Mother of Muses”. The first two verses of “Made Up My Mind” were lovely, as were the out of tempo bits of “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue”, delivered against Tony Garnier’s bowed bass. By the time Dylan got to “Goodbye Jimmy Reed”, the penultimate item on the set list, he was singing beautifully, with clarity and marvellous timing.

Every time you see him now, you think it might be the last. So this one wasn’t great. But that doesn’t really matter, even if there aren’t any more. Time past, time present: lucky to have it at all, all of it.

Nov 5

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Back to Berlin

“A lot of people have died recently,” Otomo Yoshihide remarked to his Berlin audience on Sunday night, halfway through a set by his 16-piece Special Big Band. “This is for them.” The band’s marimba player, Aikawa Hitomi, began to trace out some quiet, limpid phrases, with a sound like pebbles dropping in a pond. One by one, her colleagues joined in. I don’t really know how to explain what was happening, whether or not it was a written composition or completely improvised, but each player added a layer of sadness to the piece until it gradually, and completely without ostentation, reached a critical mass of emotion.

It was amazing. The non-specific nature of Yoshihide’s introduction allowed the listeners — and the musicians, I guess — to direct their mourning wherever they wished. And having created something so sombre and profound, Yoshihide didn’t take the bandleader’s easy option by then lifting the mood with one of the absurdly entertaining rave-ups in which his band specialises, and with which they would eventually send the audience home smiling fit to burst. Instead his accordionist, Okuchi Shunsuke, squeezed out the gentle melody of “Années de Solitude”, a graceful composition by the great Astor Piazzolla. Soon the lonely accordion was joined the baritone saxophone of Yoshida Nonoko, before the other horns entered in a rich arrangement ending with hymn-like cadences.

After that, it was time to change the mood in a set that contained an unusually large proportion of the gamut of human emotions, from cheesy film and TV themes and a perky “I Say a Little Prayer” through a pretty version of Eric Dolphy’s “Something Sweet, Something Tender” and a suitably stirring reading of Charlie Haden’s “Song for Che”. The encore was a completely bonkers piece of Japanese pop music featuring the all-action singing and dancing of three of the group’s women — Hitomi, the electronics player Sachiko M and the saxophonist Inoue Nashie — with a kind of rap from Yoshihide.

For the closing performance of the 2024 JazzFest Berlin, Yoshihide’s ensemble was the perfect choice. Twenty four hours after the Sun Ra Arkestra had occupied the same stage in their tinsel and cooking-foil Afrofuturist costumes, recessing from the stage one by one with a chanted recommendation for Outer Spaceways Incorporated, the men and women of the Japanese band came dressed like refugees from a Comme des Garçons sample sale. Were they from the West, Felliniesque would be one obvious way of describing their presentation. With two drummers, a tuba and a very emphatic bass guitarist, and with the leader’s guitar sometimes throwing in some of the noise elements for which he is well known, they made me think of what might happen if you merged the Willem Breuker Kollektiev with the Glitter Band, with Carla Bley providing the arrangements.

One amusing thing they did in the up-tempo pieces was to have each member leap up to give cues and perhaps conduct a few bars before resuming their places: a kind of daisy-chain of instructions and cheer-leading. It made me think of something I’d seen that morning on stage at the Jazz Institut, where the festival’s Community Sunday, centred on the multicultural Moabit district of Berlin, began with a concert featuring children. While a young piano trio played, a group of kids, perhaps six to 10 years old, stood in front of them, giving the sort of signals — faster! slower! stop! start! — familiar from the techniques of conduction.

It was a good game, everyone enjoyed it, and it made me wonder whether, a few decades ago, someone had tried something similar in Japan, laying the foundations for Otomo Yoshihide’s Special Big Band. Almost certainly not, but there was the same sense of play at work, as it were. And if you give that opportunity to a bunch of kids, there must be a chance that it will open up a world for some of them.

The Moabit adventure continued with a mass walk through the streets, audience and musicians stopping off at various points for pop-up musical events. It ended in a church, where Alexander Hawkins played the organ and members of the Yoshihide band and the Swedish bassist Vilhelm Bromander’s Unfolding Orchestra took part, along with a young people’s choir and local musicians with various cultural backgrounds. The special project of Nadin Deventer, now seven years into her tenure as the festival’s artistic director, it proved to be a brilliant way to involve a community and its children, and deserves to become a permanent feature of an institution celebrating its 60th birthday.

For me, other highlights of the four days included Joe McPhee reading his poetry with Decoy; the French pianist Sylvie Courvoisier’s new quartet, Poppy Seeds, featuring the vibraphonist Patricia Brennan, the bassist Thomas Morgan and the drummer Dan Weiss, playing compositions of great intricacy with superb deftness; and the trio of two British musicians, the pianist Kit Downes and the drummer Andrew Lisle, and the Berlin-based Argentinian tenor saxophonist Camila Nebbia, entrancing a packed A-Trane with warm gusts of collective improvisation. In the main hall on Saturday night there was also a moving ovation for the pianist Joachim Kühn, who made a speech announcing that, at 80, this appearance with his current trio would be his last at the festival, having made his first in 1966, aged 22.

A festival with an ending, then, in more than one sense, but also full of beginnings and new possibilities, just as the visionary jazz critic and impresario Joachim-Ernst Berendt envisaged 60 years ago when he persuaded the West German government that its slice of Berlin, marooned in the GDR, needed something with which to demonstrate a sense of vibrant modernity to the world, and that thing was jazz. In very different circumstances, it still is.

Oct 30

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Other sounds 5: Feat. Arve Henriksen

A fugitive sound, soft, glancing, indirect: the Norwegian trumpeter Arve Henriksen has a signature I love, in pretty much whatever context it appears. It could be in his group Supersilent, or with Jan Bang, Christian Wallumrød, Dhafer Youssef, Terje Rypdal, Iain Ballamy or Trygve Seim, or on his own albums, particularly Places of Worship (Rune Grammofon, 2013), which I think of as this century’s Sketches of Spain.

He’s developed the European equivalent of Jon Hassell’s trumpet sound, using electronics and a natural tendency towards understatement to take the instrument out of its normal brassy universe and into somewhere more mysterious. And he finds two soulmates in the Danish drummer Daniel Sommer and the Swedish bassist Johannes Lundberg on Sounds & Sequences, a trio recording made in a Gothenburg studio.

A series of 11 pieces evolving from free improvisations subjected to post-production processes of editing and shaping, this is a very beautiful thing indeed. Sommer’s playing draws the ear throughout, pulling gentle grooves out of the air and adding the finest of detail. Lundberg and Henriksen both contribute electronic beds and textures (Henriksen also uses his counter-tenor voice from time to time), nudging the music towards something that touches the celestial sublime.

The trumpeter pops up in Triage, the new album from Erik Honoré, one of the founders of Kristiansand’s remix-based Punkt festival, which celebrated its 20th edition last month. Deploying colleagues including Sidsel Endresen, Eivind Aarset, Ingar Zach, Nils Petter Molvaer and Jan Bang, Honoré creates little tone poems, some of them used as settings for found texts.

These include Emily Dickinson’s poems “Hope Is a Thing With Feathers” and “Pain Has an Element of Blank”, portions of Ezra Pound’s Cantos — read by Bang — and a section from the US Surgeon General’s undated instructions on early care of combat wounds: “A not uncommon occurrence in the present war are those distressing wounds of the face and jawbones which have attracted particular attention not only on account of the disfigurement which they cause but even more so from the difficulty that was first encountered on dealing with them…”

The use of different readers adds variety and surprise, as if there were not already enough in the music itself, which also makes use of radio samples and field recordings. An instrumental piece called “Prague”, featuring Molvaer’s trumpet over Bjørn Charles Dreyer’s guitar and Mats Eilertsen’s treated double bass, is particularly striking, as is “In the Station of the Metro”, in which Henriksen’s breathy trumpet emerges between Pound’s lines and Honoré’s manipulated samples with typical probing grace.

Finally, Henriksen’s recent album of duets with the Dutch pianist Harmen Fraanje, Touch of Time, is more conventional in terms of exploitation of the available sonic materials, allowing a clearer view of the trumpeter’s playing, with only the occasional effective touch of electronics. Compositions by both men create music that is delicate, pensive, carefully weighted, devoid of affectation or allusion to outside worlds. The closer you listen, the stronger it gets.

* Sounds & Sequences is on the April Records label (www.aprilrecords.com). Triage is on Punkt Editions/Jazzland. Touch of Time is on ECM. All are out now.

Oct 28

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Phil Lesh 1940-2024

Phil Lesh wasn’t anything like the person I’d been expecting to meet when I turned up to interview him one Wednesday afternoon in the spring of 1970 at an apartment in Bayswater. Lesh, who died last week aged 84, was acting as the advance guard for the Grateful Dead, whose other members were due to fly into London the next day. The following Sunday they would make their British debut at a rock festival on a piece of Staffordshire farmland. They were bringing their Haight-Ashbury psychedelic legend to Newcastle-under-Lyme on the heels of the UK release of Live/Dead, including its epic 23-minute “Dark Star”, recorded a year earlier at the Fillmore in their native San Francisco.

Far from conforming to the acid-head stereotype, Lesh was alert, bright-eyed and responsive to everything . He was even happy to agree with my somewhat presumptuous suggestion that their first three studio albums had been disappointments, particularly to those who had only been able to read about their live appearances and for whom “Dark Star” was the first piece of conclusive evidence in support of all the claims of collective transcendental genius made on their behalf.

“We simply haven’t known how to make records,” he told me, “and we figured the only way to make them was to learn ourselves, because we tried recording with a producer at the beginning and it was really hopeless. It all sounded completely flat. Anthem Of The Sun is the most satisfying of the first three to me, because we had the almost impossible task of making an album from very little material.

“The way it went very tight from the compositional standpoint was pleasing, and it’s very coherent – I can still follow it all the way through. But still we all knew that it was a hundred per cent non-commercial, and I certainly don’t like the way it was mixed. I know we could have done it better, but we didn’t know how. It was strange because we took stuff from three studio sessions and eight or nine gigs and put it all together without thinking of levels or equalising. We just did it from a musical standpoint, which is not enough. Anyway, it took us four albums and untold thousands of dollars to learn how to record ourselves. The music, though, was really good, and deserved a better fate.

“Even the live album, which I like, was put out six months after it was recorded, and even longer in Britain, and we do all the numbers completely differently now. The music is constantly evolving, progressing and regressing on many different levels.

“We have a new one out in the States, called Workingman’s Dead, which I’m very pleased with. It’s certainly the best of any of our studio work, and I hope it’s a success because we want to stop touring. We’ve been on the road every weekend since October, and we really need a rest… if only to think up some new music.”

I liked Lesh a lot, and I wish I’d gone into the interview knowing more about him — about his background in classical music, his studies with Luciano Berio, his college friendship with Steve Reich. Then I might have asked him some more interesting questions. But there you go. Life is full of unknown answers to unasked questions.

The Dead’s performance in a field that Sunday afternoon was a mix of the countryish songs from Workingman’s Dead (I think they kicked off with “Casey Jones”), R&B standards (Pigpen’s “Turn on Your Lovelight”) and spacey improvisations, including “Dark Star”. Oddly, for a band by then obsessed with developing the best amplification, the sound was a bit weak, which in my memory reduced the impact of the unique contrapuntal interplay between the guitars of Jerry Garcia and Bob Weir and Lesh’s bass. Committed Deadheads (readers of IT and Frendz) loved them; others who’d come out of curiosity, or were there primarily to hear other artists, seemed a bit nonplussed. But I’m glad I saw them at that stage of their long, strange trip.

* Here’s the Guardian‘s obituary of Phil Lesh, by Adam Sweeting: https://www.theguardian.com/music/2024/oct/27/phil-lesh-obituary If you want to know more about the Grateful Dead’s British debut, there’s a website: https://www.ukrockfestivals.com/Holly-dead.70.html

Oct 25

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The lost genius of Albert Stinson

This is a piece about the bassist Albert Stinson (1944-1969). It’s something I’ve been meaning to write for a long time. The great drummer Jim Keltner was kind enough to talk to me about his boyhood friend, as was another drummer from Los Angeles, Doug Sides, who toured and recorded with him in John Handy’s band. I first heard Stinson in 1963 on Passin’ Thru, Chico Hamilton’s very striking Impulse album, recorded when the bassist was all of 18 years old. To my 16-year-old ears, he was exceptional even then; goodness knows what he might have become.

It’s the evening of Friday, April 7, 1967 in the Harmon Gymnasium at the University of California, Berkeley. Your name is Albert Stinson, you play the double bass, and you’re about to deputise for Ron Carter in what might be the greatest small jazz group of all time: the Miles Davis Quintet as constituted between the autumn of 1964, when Wayne Shorter arrived to join Davis, Carter, Herbie Hancock and Tony Williams, and the middle of 1968, when Carter became the first to leave. The greatest? Certainly the one applying new levels of freedom and near-telepathic interplay to the business of improvising on tunes.

So this group has been together and constantly evolving for the best part of three years and you’re being dropped into the middle of it. You’re only 22 years old but you’re ready, in the sense that you have the chops and the experience. You were a prodigy, and you’ve played alongside Charles Lloyd and Gábor Szabó in a brilliant Chico Hamilton Quintet, and with other heavyweights.

But to play in this band, at this stage, you had to be ready for anything. Accelerando or ritardando, not always synchronised. Stopping on a dime without warning, restarting at the merest twitch of a nerve-end, intuiting the leader’s moves but following without following, waiting out a silence, hitting the short, sharp ramp from triple-p to triple-f without a moment’s doubt. Playing against or through what someone else was doing.

You’re not the first bassist to deputise for Carter, a busy guy on call for many sessions. Gary Peacock was the first. Then Reggie Workman, then Richard Davis. After you, there’ll be Miroslav Vitous before Carter goes for good and Dave Holland becomes a permanent member. All great, great bassists. And now it’s your turn.

There’s a buzz in the Harmon Gymnasium. For starters, Miles calls “Gingerbread Boy”, the brusque, flaring Jimmy Heath tune featured on Miles Smiles, the quintet’s second studio album, the one that made everyone realise something different was happening here. At a rocket-propelled 80 bars a minute, the theme hurtles past, with Williams’s drums at their most volcanic. You play time, straight. You survive, although you miss the cue at the end and the piece finishes with your phrase trailing off, as if surprised by the sudden silence around you.

Miles leads into “Stella by Starlight”, his tone at its purest, the trumpet holding a long note into what feels like infinity as you join Hancock in a free background that seems to be inventing itself outside the tune. Eventually you move into a walking medium 4/4, deploying your big, strong tone but keeping the elasticity that enables you to move with the others when the tempo doubles and Williams starts to force the issue. You’re okay, and a little more than that when you respond to the wind-down of Shorter’s solo with something that shows you’re getting the hang of this particular freedom of narrative. Hancock’s solo begins out of tempo and you invent figures to support him before you slide back into the 4/4, seamlessly.

And then, on Shorter’s “Dolores”, a post-bop epigram also from Miles Smiles, the tempo goes back up, and now you’re no longer feeling your way but fully contributing, the equal of these four giants as they charge through a warp-speed exercise in musical plasticity, in aural geometry, in listening, hearing and responding at some Zen level of intuitiveness. In fact you’re almost too ready when Miles creates the silence from which he goes into “Round Midnight”, and you let your lower-register notes bloom in a way that Carter would probably consider excessive. But you’re part of the excitement as Williams’s snare-drum fusillades overwhelm the two-horn fanfares and soon you’re shifting the time around behind the flickering, nudging phrases of Shorter’s solo.

And now you’re home, riding the waves as the set continues with something based on the bones of “So What” and concludes with “Walkin'”. After just under an hour, it ends with an ovation.

—ooOoo—

“Albert brought something different to that band,” the drummer Jim Keltner told me when I asked him to talk about his longtime friend. “Ron Carter is one of the greatest musicians ever, but Albert brought a different kind of fire. They were so highly evolved, and Albert was one of them. I don’t really want to talk about genius-this and genius-that, but I do believe that he was a genius. He came back and told us that Miles had asked him to join the band, but he said he couldn’t because he had too many gigs lined up with Chico. That’s mind-boggling. But it’s the kind of player and person he was.”

Keltner, who would go on to play with Bob Dylan, John Lennon, George Harrison, Ry Cooder, Neil Young and countless others, was in his last year at the mostly white Pasadena High School when he met Stinson, who was two years younger and attending the mostly black John Muir HS. They were neighbours in the Altadena. “I was always aware that I was older than Albert,” Keltner said, “but I knew that I would never be as smart as him. A very, very smart cat. A very high IQ.” Another neighbour, the vibraphonist Bobby Hutcherson, had just graduated from John Muir, and the three played together constantly.

“Albert lived in a kind of cul-de-sac about five minutes from my house. It was a very diverse community, very well integrated. White people had black or Asian neighbours, and there were a lot of Mexicans around. And I’m half-Mexican.”

He remembered that Stinson lived with his mother, a former dancer, and her steady flow of boyfriends. His father had left the family early. When Keltner got married young, to a girl he’d known in high school, Stinson envied him. “He always loved the fact that Cynthia, my wife, and me, we made the long haul, which is very unusual for musicians. I think he wanted that and thought he could have it, but it wasn’t to be. I can’t really bring myself to talk about his personal life, but he was hurt badly by his relationship. His very first girlfriend was really young, a young beautiful black girl, and he was young, too… he was in love with her. I can’t speak for her but he was really in love with her. They were a little team. At some point he married and had a baby. He’s called Ian Stinson. He looks just like Albert, but with dreads… a beautiful kid. He’s a drummer and lives up north.”

Keltner remembered an early visit to the Stinson house on Shelly Street. “One afternoon I went over and he was sitting on the floor with his cigarette and ashtray and his weed and a little half-smoked doobie and a glass of cheap Ripple white wine, with a newspaper and glue and a huge massive book. He was making his own bass from a library book. I’m not sure how he did it, but the bass that he built himself was the one that I used to put in my car, because I would drive him everywhere. An upright bass and my drums in a Volkswagen.”

But before long they’d all hooked up with another young star of the future, the saxophonist and flautist Charles Lloyd. “I told Charles Lloyd about Albert when we were driving down from a little gig in a country club up in the mountains,” Keltner said. He was subbing for Mike Romero, Lloyd’s regular drummer. Hutcherson was already in the band, along with the pianist Terry Trotter and the bassist George Morrow. Soon Stinson would be replacing Morrow and also persuading Keltner, who thought he would never be as good as Romero, out of giving up music altogether.

“Mike Romero would come into the music store where I worked and I just thought he was the coolest guy in the world. One day he said to me, ‘You want to sub for me for half a set?’ I acted very confident and yet I was scared shitless. So I played, then I stayed and watched Mike, and I was so demoralised. Albert lit into me and told me how dumb I was. He said, ‘I would rather play with you any day than with Mike Romero.’ I said, you’re just saying that because you’re my friend. But I never forgot it. It carried me through.”

Of Stinson’s six albums with Chico Hamilton, recorded between 1962 and 1965, Passin’ Thru is the one that made a deep impression on me at the time. On pieces like “Lady Gabor” and the title track, he seemed to have metabolised the deep-groove drone effects created by the multiple bassists on such John Coltrane recordings as Olé and Africa/Brass. Barely 18, his strength and maturity were extraordinary.

He’d also recorded for Pacific Jazz with the pianist Clare Fischer (Surging Ahead, 1962), the guitarist Joe Pass (Catch Me!, 1963) and Charles Lloyd (Nirvana, 1965). He’d played (although not recorded) with Gerald Wilson’s mighty big band in Los Angeles. In 1964 he’d visited London with Hamilton, Szabó and the altoist/flautist Jimmy Woods to record the soundtrack for Roman Polanski’s Repulsion. He’d been in Rudy Van Gelder’s famous studio in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, one day in 1967 to record a quartet session for Blue Note under Hutcherson’s leadership, with Hancock on piano and Joe Chambers on drums, featuring a fantastic Stinson solo on a piece called “My Joy”, although the album wouldn’t be released until 1980, under the title Oblique.

“Albert loved playing music and he loved jazz,” Keltner said. “He was a thorough jazz musician. All of our friends, jazz players, were completely inspired by him. He was a leader, a ringleader. I was always round at his house, listening to music. We listened to Bartók, we listened to Coltrane. Everything I heard, I heard it first with Albert. Bobby Hutcherson lived even closer to him than I did. Those 3 a.m. calls to rescue Albert, it was always Bobby and me who went to save him.”

Those 3 a.m. calls came when he’d overdosed on heroin, something that had existed in his life alongside music well before, in 1967, he, Hutcherson and Keltner joined the band of the altoist John Handy, whose reputation had been made by an incendiary performance at the 1965 Monterey Jazz Festival. “Albert got me that gig,” Keltner said. “It was a fantastic time for me. It was at a club in San Francisco called the Both/And. I don’t remember playing very good, just hanging on and trying to get it right. I didn’t have the confidence. Jazz playing is a huge amount about confidence. Not like rock and roll, where you do your thing. Not that I’m belittling it. But jazz is a different thing. And even though I wasn’t cutting it, and I knew it, Albert would make it right.”

By the time the new line-up made a well received album, New View, recorded live at the Village Gate in New York for Columbia, featuring a wonderful version of Coltrane’s “Naima”, Keltner had been replaced by Doug Sides, another young musician from Los Angeles.

“Albert was one of these kids who just had a glorious talent, and he was a person that almost anybody would love,” Handy told David Brett Johnson, a deejay on Indiana University’s radio station, in 2008. “A very easy, sweet young guy, and his playing was just incredible. He seemed to have a bunch of natural ability, which I understood because I came that way myself, without that much experience, but just kind of knew how to do it. However, I was afraid — even with those guys in my band, there were drugs. They kept it away from me. They were younger, they kind of… you know, when you‘re the bandleader the little cliques kind of take place, and they weren‘t vicious, they just… I could see the half-generation difference in age and all.”

Doug Sides, who moved to the UK in 2010 and died at his home in Kent this month (October 2024), aged 81, remembered meeting Stinson at jam sessions in an LA place known as the Snake House — actually the home of a musician who kept pet snakes.

“Albert a very special human being,” he told me. “He was one of the nicest guys I ever met. He didn’t have animosity toward anybody. He just liked to have fun. But he had one problem. He liked to get high and he liked to shoot up with the junkies. And he tried to keep up with them, which caused him to overdose a few times before he died in New York doing the same thing.

“He was a really great player. He had a big sound, too, and he could play any tempo. For a small cat – he was short – but he was very strong, strong like somebody who was 6’5 or something, he had that kind of strength. In those days they had beer cans that you couldn’t crush very easily, not like the modern ones where you just squeeze and they fold up. He used to crush them like they were the modern ones.”

His seven months with Handy included a stint in San Francisco performing an opera, The Visitation, written by Gunther Schuller for 19 voices, woodwind and string sections and a jazz quartet, applying ideas from Kafka’s The Trial to the world of civil rights in America, and blending 12-tone composition with jazz.

“Albert had never played with a conductor,” Handy told David Brent Johnson. “Well, man, he learned those parts by just — with one or two rehearsals, and they were very difficult, as you can imagine if you know anything about Gunther Schuller‘s music. And at one point Gunther Schuller stopped the rehearsal and said to the bass players, ‘Do you hear this bass player? He sounds as big as almost all of those guys put together back there!’ And poor Albert was so sick, I didn‘t realise it, from doing crazy things, you know, and vomiting during the breaks because he was taking drugs… I didn‘t know that. He kept it away from me. All I know is he played his butt off.”

Jim Keltner said he thought one of the reasons Stinson turned down Miles Davis’s offer was that he didn’t want to leave Altadena, where his mother had left him their house on Shelly Street. “My own life had really changed by that time,” the drummer recalled. “I’d done rock and roll with Gary Lewis and the Playboys in 1965. Albert thought that was cool. He wasn’t judgmental. Some of the others were jazz snobs. By 1968-69 I was playing in a couple of bands and Albert was travelling more so I was seeing him less, but I’d hear things.”

Stinson joined the band of the guitarist Larry Coryell, whose popularity had taken off during his time with Gary Burton’s quartet. “When I heard he’d joined Coryell,” Keltner continued, “someone said he was playing electric bass, or thinking about it. I thought, oh wow, that’s incredible. He’ll burn that thing up. He’ll make it his own and he’ll be one of the baddest cats and maybe at some point we’ll play together again. But then, bam.”

On the road in June 1969, a few weeks short of his 25th birthday, Stinson overdosed again in a New York hotel room. This time he would not be saved. “It wasn’t a shock,” Keltner said, “but it was incredibly sad. Then I started hearing stories about the guys he was getting high with. Instead of trying to save him, they got scared and ran away. That’s one of the things I learned in the earlier days, one of the sad, dumb things, about how you don’t do that. You’ve got to save them. Which then, in turn, I got saved two times later. Bobby and I weren’t there to save him.

“Because of that rumour, I remember just hating Larry Coryell and everything about him. It was a misplaced anger. I didn’t know the details or anything. Eventually I had to let go of blaming him for Albert’s death.”

Whatever his habits, and the problems they may have caused for himself and others, Albert Stinson was someone who inspired powerful feelings of love and loss in fellow musicians. In Keltner and Sides, obviously, and also in Charles Lloyd, who cherishes his memory. Four months after Stinson’s death, Bobby Hutcherson wrote and recorded a lament called “Now”, dedicated to his late friend, with a lyric by Gene McDaniels delivered by the soprano Christine Spencer: “At the end, no more need…”

“Later in life,” Keltner told me, “I came to appreciate that although people will compliment you on your talent, generally speaking your talent is based on who you’re playing with. Every time I played with Albert, under any situation, whether it was some little silly gig like a bar mitzvah or whatever, it was incredible. It was always great. I always felt like I was somebody.

“It shows how amazing Albert was. He was so soulful. And he was too sensitive a cat for the world. A sensitive, beautiful old soul.”

* The fine photograph of Albert Stinson is by Ave Pildas, whose work in jazz and many other fields can be seen at http://www.avepildas.com. A bootleg of the radio broadcast of the Miles Davis Quintet’s Harmon Gymnasium concert was released on a CD some years ago by the recordJet label.

Oct 21

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Other sounds 4: ‘Za Górami’

Ladino is a language spoken by Sephardic Jews, with its origins in medieval Spanish, Hebrew and Aramaic. In her wonderful book Ornament of the World, subtitled “How Muslims, Jews and Christians Created a Culture of Tolerance in Medieval Spain”, María Rosa Menocal describes it and its equally Romance language-based Muslim equivalent, Aljamiado, as not just “languages of exile and persecution” but as “quixotically defiant memory palaces”.

Five traditional Ladino songs are included in Za Górami, a new album by Alice Zawadzki, Fred Thomas and Misha Mullov-Abbado, providing a kind of structure for the 11-track sequence featuring Zawadski’s voice, violin and viola, Mullov-Abbado’s double bass and Thomas’s piano, drums and vielle (a fiddle favoured by French troubadours between the 11th and 13th centuries). The remainder of the programme consists of songs taken from a variety of sources.

Here’s what the three London-based musicians say, in a jointly authored sleeve note: “Collected on our travels and taughgt to us by our friends, these are songs we have learnt and loved together. Though our musical and cultural backgrounds encompass Europe, Russia and South America, we were all three born in England. This happenstance was the product of love, war, exile, the arbitrariness of borders and the yearning for a new life.” All those themes, they say, are woven through the songs.

Za Górami is Polish for “behind the mountains”. Other songs come from Argentina (Gustavo Santaolalla’s “Suéltate Las Cintas”), Venezuela (Simón Diaz’s “Tonada De Luna Llena”) and medieval France (“Je Suis Trop Jeunette”). “Gentle Lady” is Fred Thomas’s setting of a text by James Joyce: “Gentle lady, do not sing / Sad songs about the end of love / Lay aside sadness and sing / How love that passes is enough.”

Recorded in Lugano and produced by Manfred Eicher, the music could be said to be a perfect manifesto for the ECM philosophy: the creation of a frontierless chamber music based on the instincts and practices of jazz but entirely porous in its acceptance of other cultures and idioms.

The Ladino lyrics are interesting for their closeness to more familiar languages: “Arvoles lloran por lluvias / Y montañas por aire / Ansi lloran los mis ojos / Por tí querido amante” translates as “The trees weep for rain / And the mountains for air / So weep my eyes / For you, my love.” That’s the closing track, a restrained lament consisting of three haiku-like verses that concludes: “I turn and ask — what will become of me? / I will die in foreign lands.” These are lieder for a modern world in which echoes of the past are inescapable.

If, as it happens, nothing here sounds much like jazz, it couldn’t exist without jazz, either. The clarity and subtle shadings of Zawadzki’s soprano, the handsomely shaped bass sound and calm phrasing of Mullov-Abbado, and Thomas’s reflective piano and subtle percussion work together to create a pan-national music in which elegance, economy and ardour are held in perfect balance. In its quiet way, this is one of the year’s outstanding albums.

* Za Górami is out now on the ECM label: the trio will perform at Kings Place on November 23 as part of the EFG London Jazz Festival. The photo of Mullov-Abbado, Zawadzki and Thomas is by Monika Jakubowska.

Oct 19

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Springsteen’s road movie

About halfway through Road Diary, Thom Zimny’s new film of Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band returning to action in 2023, Patti Scialfa steps forward to talk about the diagnosis of early-stage multiple myeloma she received in 2018. Treatment for the rare form of blood cancer has compromised her immune system and kept her from appearing on stage on all but rare occasions.

And that’s where we’re at. Deep into an eighth decade, with more future behind than ahead. The girl you took to both shows at Hammersmith Odeon in 1975 is dead. Your parents have gone, which — depending on your relationships — may be a loss that doesn’t fade. (Adele Springsteen, who was in her eighties when she sashayed across a stage in her son’s arms to “Dancing in the Dark”, died this year at 94.) Your husband or wife — or you — have health issues. Your kids are suddenly what you once were. And priorities change. But some stuff doesn’t.

That stuff includes the feeling of joy that Springsteen can still bring you, and there’s a big helping of it in Zimny’s 90-minute documentary, which blends together contemporary and archive footage of rehearsals and performances with interviews: Springsteen himself, Steve Van Zandt and the other members of the band, from those now gone — the eternally missed Danny Federici and Clarence Clemons — to recent arrivals, such as the very engaging percussionist Anthony Almonte. And we hear the voices of others, from dedicated fans in Italy, Norway and the UK to his manager of almost 50 years, the erstwhile rock critic Jon Landau, who broadened his cultural horizons while guarding his interests.

Bruce turned 75 this year and he looked a little stiffer as he mounted the short flight of steps to the stage for a Q&A after an advance screening of the film in London last night. He spoke very touchingly about keeping a band together for so long. It’s hard enough with just two guys, he said: Simon hates Garfunkel, Sam hates Dave, Hall hates Oates, Don hates Phil. Can you imagine having four friends at school and then spending every day for the rest of your life with those same guys? That takes some good decisions at critical moments.

The keystones of the 2023 shows were two newer songs: “Last Man Standing”, about the realisation that he is the now last survivor of his teenage band, the Castiles, and “I’ll See You in My Dreams”, the final solo encore, about George Theiss, that band’s other guitarist and singer, who died in 2018. Mortality is more than just the subtext of the film.

Later last night, on Graham Norton’s BBC1 chat show, he was an amiable presence alongside the actress Amy Adams, the singer Vanessa Williams and the comedian Bill Bailey: a very congenial lineup. When he and Bailey got into a discussion about Fender guitars, Norton might have said, “Come on, girls, let’s leave the boys to talk about their hobby.” But then Bruce called Adams “my second-favourite redhead”, which was very sweet and turned this viewer’s thoughts back to Patti. And although we know the outline of that part of the story, the reality of it is theirs alone.

At the screening I was sitting next to Damien Morris, who writes for the Observer. Before the film started we were chatting about Springsteen gigs. He asked me which song that Bruce doesn’t normally play in concert would be the one I’d ask him for, if I had a request. That was easy. “Thundercrack”, which he actually played on his return to Asbury Park in September. But later, when I thought about it some more, there were other answers. “Santa Ana” or “The Promise”. “Rendezvous”, of course. “Wreck on the Highway”. “Brilliant Disguise”. “One Step Up”. “Let’s Be Friends (Skin to Skin)”. There’s so much, isn’t there? All of it resting on the unshakeable twin pillars of “Born to Run” and “Thunder Road”. Such depth and richness.

Or there’s “Fire”. During the film Zimny suddenly cuts to Bruce and Patti on stage together somewhere or other last year, leaning into each other as they croon that song into a single microphone. “Romeo and Juliet, Samson and Delilah / Baby, you can bet, a love they couldn’t deny…” His favourite redhead.

During the Q&A, he was asked how long he saw himself continuing to make music. “Until the wheels fall off,” he said.

* Road Diary is on Disney+ from October 25.

Oct 14

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Lady Blackbird’s ‘The City’

It begins with a piano tinkling against background chatter. Uptown jazz in a cocktail bar at the top of a skyscraper, its windows overlooking over the rainy nighttime streets. There’s a sighs of strings, and then a pause before a bass riff comes in against a rattle of congas. And then the voice of Lady Blackbird.

Born Marley Munroe in New Mexico 39 years ago, she now makes records with the guitarist/producer Chris Seefried. They wrote this song together. It’s on her new album and it’s called “The City”.

This is a story-song: “Lucille was a mother workin’ for the man / Hard-workin’ women always got a plan / She’ll get there (We’ll get there) / Gettin’ money for the kids and collect the pay / Save their money, gonna move away / To get there (We’ll get there)…” Her voice is strong — toughened by pain, although not unyielding, with a discreet use of fast vibrato, distinctive but subtle.

But then the chorus kicks in — “Show me the joy in the city / No time for pity…” — and the mood is instantly lifted by a groove that defines the way a driving four-four snare drum (here played by Tamir Barzilay) and a freer-floating bass guitar (Jon Flaugher) can together created an irresistible momentum based on the intuitive microsecond differences in their timing, the way Benny Benjamin and James Jamerson used to do at Motown. It sweeps you along, sweeps you away.

“The City” is on Lady Blackbird’s Slang Spirituals, the follow-up to 2021’s highly acclaimed Black Acid Soul. It’s 4:27 of the kind of soul music that blends a shout of triumph and defiance with an undertow of melancholy — so much more compelling than mere euphoria. Gladys Knight’s “Taste of Bitter Love” and Odyssey’s “Native New Yorker”: it’s one of those. And I suspect that it, too, will be with me for a long time.

* Lady Blackbird’s Slang Spirituals is on the BMG label.

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