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Posts from the ‘Jazz-rock’ Category

Oct 10

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The spirit of 1971

On an earlier re-release of the first and only album by Centipede, the 50-strong (and therefore 100-footed) band assembled by Keith Tippett, RCA’s marketing department used a quote from the Melody Maker‘s original review: “No one who wants a permanent record of where our music was at in 1971 will want to be without Septober Energy.” It was true at the time and today, listening to a remastered and reissued version of the double album made by an ensemble containing actual and former members of Soft Machine, King Crimson, the Blue Notes, the Spontaneous Music Ensemble, the Blossom Toes, Nucleus, Patto, the Steam Packet and Dantalian’s Chariot, it still feels right.

In his notes to the new Septober Energy reissue, Sid Smith quotes my description of it at the time as “a miracle”, but as miracles go it was an eminently achievable one, given the spirit of creativity, goodwill and mutual encouragement in which it was conceived and implemented under Tippett’s inspired guidance. This was the first of his large-ensemble projects; if it lacked some of the finesse of later endeavours, it wanted for nothing in terms of spirit.

The clue was in the title. “Energy” was a word much applied back then to the kind of improvising habitually done by the freer players here — the tenorists Gary Windo and Alan Skidmore and the trombonist Paul Rutherford, for example, the singers Julie Tippetts and Maggie Nichols, and the three marvellous South Africans: the trumpeter Mongezi Feza, the altoist Dudu Pukwana and the bassist Harry Miller. But others from related fields were cheerfully infected by the same vibe: the trumpeter Ian Carr, the guitarist Brian Godding, the oboeist Karl Jenkins and the 19 string players led by the violinist Wilf Gibson. And then there were the horns from Tippett’s own sextet, already borrowed by Soft Machine and King Crimson: the cornetist Mark Charig, the trombonist Nick Evans and the altoist Elton Dean. There were five bass players in all, including Jeff Clyne and Roy Babbington, and three drummers, two of them being Robert Wyatt and John Marshall. Robert Fripp played guitar on stage and produced the album.

I seem to remember that the announcement of their debut concert, at the Lyceum in November 1970, made the front page of the MM. After that first gig, boisterously exhilarating but inevitably chaotic, they went on the road in Europe and had a great time. The following June they went into Wessex Studios in north London, located in an old church hall, with just four days for recording the 80-minute piece under Fripp’s supervision and a couple more days for him to mix and edit the results into four movements, each one fitting a side of the double album. Their last appearance was at the Albert Hall in December 1971.

All the enthusiasm of the time, as yet unspoiled by time and the depredations of the music industry, is there on the album. And so, thanks to the skills of the composer and the producer, is a clear view of the individual strengths of the featured soloists (meaning practically everybody), as well as their readiness to attempt a coalescence into something greater than the sum of the parts.

Part 1 begins with the sound of small percussion, like something from a Shinto temple, before long tones — strings, voices — emerge and hover, soon disrupted by the first hints of the storms to come. Gradually the brilliant disposition of the orchestral resources comes into focus as Tippett balances the roistering horns and thunderous drums with subtler deployments and great control of crescendo and diminuendo. The wrapover to Part 2 is a lovely bass conversation — one bowed, one plucked, one playing harmonics con legno — leading to a very period-correct jazz-rock sequence with Tony Fennell’s drums and Babbington’s bass guitar accompanying quarrelsome saxes over a brass choir, suddenly interrupted by giant overlapping unison riffs in which, metaphorically, the entire band seems to have been fed through a fuzz-box. A space is cleared for Carr’s serene trumpet and Skidmore’s urgent tenor to take solos against the rhythm section, both exploiting the lift of lyrical chord sequence, before Godding’s distortions announce the return of the heavy artillery. An improvised trombone quartet adds another contrasting texture.

Part 3 opens with the four singers — Tippetts, Nichols, Zoot Money, Mike Patto — delivering Julie’s lyric without accompaniment: “Unite for every nation / Unite for all the land / Unite for liberation / Unite for the freedom of man.” Then the trio of drummers take over for a powerful conversation, each individual carefully separated in the stereo picture, leading into a long ensemble passage that builds to a shuddering climax before a slow electronic fade leads to the two female singers improvising over the strings, like a giant version of the SME, the same forces combining in a disquieting written section that ends the side. Tippett’s solo piano announces Part 4, sliding into a broad, swelling theme for brass, mutating through a long Elton Dean soprano solo into a trenchant restatement of the “Unite for…” song, and ending with a pensive coda for piano and cornet.

Of course it sprawls, and not every note played over the course of almost an hour and a half could be described as deathless or essential. But it was and remains a triumph of conception and execution, a vision of musical scale with, as it were, the Little Theatre Club at one end and Woodstock at the other. It also set me thinking about the form an equivalent project might take today, with similarly open-minded and collaboratively inclined musicians drawn from newer generations. Jonny Greenwood and Thom Yorke from Radiohead would have to be there. Shirley Tetteh, Shabaka Hutchings, Olie Brice, Sheila Maurice Grey, Moses Boyd, Nubaya Garcia, Rachel Musson, Tom Skinner, Rosie Turton, Cassie Kinoshi and Theon Cross from the new London jazz scene. Beth Gibbons and Adrian Utley from Portishead. Keiran Hebden (Four Tet) and Sam Shepherd (Floating Points). Well, you can make your own list.

* The CD reissue of Centipede’s Septober Energy is on the Esoteric label. I don’t know who took the photograph at the Lyceum show.

Jul 19

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Soft Machine today

Soft Machine Baked Potato 1

It’s many years since, to all intents and purposes, I lost interest in the Soft Machine. One by one, the early members  — Daevid Allen, Kevin Ayers, Robert Wyatt, Mike Ratledge, Hugh Hopper — dropped away, taking their various eccentricities and my enthusiasm with them. Left behind was a constantly shifting corpus of musicians who, for all their individual qualities, didn’t seem to amount to much more than just another jazz-rock band, taking advantage of the mileage left in the name.

And it’s the old conundrum, going back to Theseus’s ship or the woodsman’s axe. Or whichever football club you happen to support. If, over the years, all the components are replaced, is it the same ship, axe or football club?

So when the latest album by the group currently calling itself Soft Machine arrived in the post, I played it out of nothing more mild curiosity, prepared to hit the eject button as soon as the twiddling-and-noodling quotient was exceeded. To my surprise, I found myself listening all the way through with increasing interest and enjoyment. And then playing it again. For the past couple of weeks it’s been a fairly constant companion.

It’s a live set, recorded in February 2019 by the present line-up — John Marshall on drums, Roy Babbington on bass guitar, John Etheridge on guitar and Theo Travis on soprano and tenor saxophones, flute and Fender Rhodes piano — at a Los Angeles jazz club called the Baked Potato, located on Cahuenga Boulevard, just the other side of the Hollywood Freeway from Universal Studios, and owned by the pianist Don Randi, once of the Wrecking Crew. The Softs’ changes of personnel over the decades would challenge even Pete Frame, compiler of all those celebrated Rock Family Trees. For those who haven’t been keeping up, it’s enough to mention that Marshall joined in 1972, replacing Phil Howard, who had replaced Wyatt in 1970; Babbington arrived as Hopper’s replacement the following year; Etheridge joined in 2004 (see note **), and Travis two years later. In the past, I believe, there have been problems over the use of the name; until quite recently they were unappetisingly billed as Soft Machine Legacy.

The set list is a good mixture of ancient and modern, beginning with Ratledge’s “Out-Bloody-Rageous” (first heard on Third in 1970), given a keyboard intro by Travis which recalls the Softs’ early interest in Terry Riley’s keyboard improvisations. Ratledge’s more fusion-y “The Man Who Waved at Trains” is also present, as is Hopper’s moody “Kings and Queens”, a feature for Travis’s attractively Charles Lloyd-ish flute. The Karl Jenkins era is represented by “Hazard Profile Pt 1” and “The Tale of Taliesin”, both reminders of how effective a musical organiser the Welshman could be in this kind of context.

Marshall contributes “Sideburn”, a two-minute drum solo showing the fine touch he always possessed, and there are two pieces from Etheridge and three from Travis, mostly operating in stylistic terms within a triangle formed by the Mahavishnu Orchestra, mid-’70s King Crimson and the Pat Metheny Group. Which is where I would normally take my leave, except that here there’s no sense of the sort of self-indulgence to which so many excellent musicians — particularly guitarists — were prone during the bad old days of the jazz-rock fusion.

All the pieces here are concise and well formed, and all the solos have substance. Etheridge’s “Heart Off Guard” is another vignette: a gentle study for guitar and soprano that slides into his lovely “Broken Hill”. His solo on the circling and rising chord pattern of “Hazard Profile” is genuinely lyrical and emotionally involving. Travis’s flute is again outstanding on his own “Fourteen Hour Dream” (its title surely a nod to the group’s origins in London’s psychedelic scene), where the supportive excellence of Babbington also takes the ear.

So there it is. There may be no pataphysical ramblings or “Moon in June”-style fantasias emanating from this group trading under the hallowed name, nor a sense of a continuing need to stretch boundaries, but it’s a pleasure to discover that I was wrong to write them off. Maybe I’ll have to trawl through their extensive back catalogue from the decades when I was looking the other way. But even if there isn’t time for that, this is a nice surprise.

* The photograph is by Mauricio Alvarado. Live at the Baked Potato is released on Moonjune Records: http://www.moonjune.com or http://www.softmachine.org

** As several people have kindly pointed out, John Etheridge first joined the Softs in 1975, replacing Allan Holdsworth. See? I told you I hadn’t been paying attention.

Sep 29

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Steve Howe’s ‘New Frontier’

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I hadn’t heard any of the Steve Howe Trio’s previous albums, so New Frontier, their third release, came as a pleasant surprise. I knew of Steve as the guitarist who took over from Peter Banks in Yes — a band in which my interest diminished as their songs got longer — in 1970, and I knew the trio’s drummer, Dylan Howe, who is Steve’s son and whose album of instrumental versions of David Bowie’s Berlin compositions, Subterranean, I liked a lot on its release five years ago.

The trio is completed by Ross Stanley, a fine keyboards player who is heard here on organ. Guitar-organ-drums trios were a thing in the ’60s: Jimmy Smith, Baby Face Willette, John Patton, Richard “Groove” Holmes and Larry Young were among the organists who made that line-up a favourite format. The guitarist on such albums was often Grant Green, and it’s interesting to discover that a prog-rock guitarist can absorb Green’s spare, bluesy style into his own approach, as he does here on several tracks. There are hints of Wes Montgomery, too, in the occasional burst of octave picking (and Montgomery led a fine organ trio of his own on a couple of Riverside albums).

The result isn’t as heavy and bluesy as some of that music. Stanley doesn’t go for the full Leslie-speaker throb and stays away from the bass pedals, so there’s an airness about the sound, while Dylan Howe has a light, deft touch. Steve Howe varies his tone and effects pleasantly without overdoing it, and uses an acoustic guitar on a couple of tracks. All three contribute compositions, as does Bill Bruford, another former Yes man and Dylan Howe’s one-time drum tutor. Sometimes it’s a little bit like early-’70s Santana without the percussion, or Danny Gatton without the absolute authority. But it’s an extremely nice album, and occasionally — as on the lyrical “Western Sun”, co-written by both Howes — rather more than that.

* The Steve Howe Trio’s New Frontier is out now on the Esoteric Antenna label.

Jul 25

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Soft Machine in Croydon, 1970

Softs in CroydonCroydon’s Fairfield Halls art complex closed this week for a complete renovation that is expected to take two years. The news reminded me of the night back in January 1970 when I got so badly lost in my Fiat 500 in the one-way system around the town’s high-rise office blocks that I missed most of the first half of an important Soft Machine concert.

It’s always interesting when a gig you attended turns up on a CD decades later, even though part of one track, “Facelift”, was taken and used, after editing and overdubbing, on the Soft’s first album for CBS, the classic Third, later that year. Some years ago the Cuneiform label released the complete 75-minute show under the title Noisette; it’s still available, and well worth investigating.

Back in 1970, this is how I started the review in the following week’s Melody Maker: “It seems to me that this might just be Soft Machine’s year. Having done things the unconventional way by finding first fame on the Continent, the group should find the musical climate of Britain coming round to embrace them in the near future.”

The hall was “all but sold out”, the audience “young and attentive”. I got there in time to hear “Hibou, Anemone and Bear”, the final number of the first half. Thanks to the Cuneiform disc, I now know that Robert Wyatt — for whom, having been brought up in Dulwich, this was practically a home fixture — introduced the concert with these words: “The programme for this evening is that we do a bit and then we stop for a bit and then we do a bit more.”

It turns out that I missed 25 minutes of excellent music. Had I heard it live, I might not – after praising the playing of Wyatt, Mike Ratledge, Hugh Hopper and Elton Dean — have written the following about the fifth member, the saxophonist and flautist Lyn Dobson: “I have grave reservations about Dobson, who seemed to be trying to do too much. Only on tenor did he say the piece of which he is capable”.

Dobson had joined the Softs the previous year, as part of a four-strong horn section. The other three members — Dean, Marc Charig and Nick Evans — had been nicked from the Keith Tippett band. Charig and Evans had left at the end of 1969, after a French tour. (Here and here are rare glimpses of that shortlived seven-piece line-up on a French TV show, L’invité du dimanche, with the added attraction of the great Delphine Seyrig.) The five-piece didn’t last long, either. Here they are in Paris that spring, shortly before Dobson left, thereby missing the band’s historic appearance at the Albert Hall in August, when they became the first ensemble from the field of popular music to appear at the BBC Proms.

At the time of his stint with the Softs, Lyn was a well-known face on the London scene. He had played the flute solo on Manfred Mann’s “Pretty Flamingo” and recorded with the Small Faces. He was a member, along with John McLaughlin, of Georgie Fame’s first post-Blue Flames bands in 1967, and could be heard with the People Band, which also included Terry Day and Mike Figgis. He played with the Keef Hartley Band, he would appear on the title track of Nick Drake’s Bryter Layter and on John and Beverley Martyn’s The Road to Ruin, and in the 1990s he made a couple of albums with the Third Ear Band before going to live, I believe, on Crete.

Anyway, I can now admit that in the section of the evening I missed was one of the concert’s highlights: Lyn’s flute solo on Ratledge’s ballad, “Backwards”. Introduced by the composer’s wah-wah’d electric piano, he produces a beautifully constructed improvisation that achieves an excellent blend of Eric Dolphy’s pure-toned inventiveness and Roland Kirk’s funky distortion, the latter feature coming to the fore as the piece goes into a wild Mingus-like 9/8 vamp. (Mingus, along with the Coltrane quartet of “My Favourite Things” and Uncle Meat-era Zappa, seemed to be the Softs’ most powerful influences at the time.) His tenor solos, like the one on Hopper’s “12/8 Theme”, manage to retain their clarity and logic in the heat of a furnace stoked by the non-stop focused clatter of Wyatt’s impassioned drumming.

As it happens, Wyatt was already beginning to become detached from the band. “Hugh, myself and Elton were pursuing a vaguely jazz-related direction,” Ratledge told Rob Chapman in a Mojo interview in 1997. “Robert was violently opposed to this, which is strange looking back on it because he was passionate about jazz. But he had defined ideas of what pop music was and what jazz was.” Wyatt’s verdict, quoted by his biographer Marcus O’Dair in Different Every Time: “To me, fusion jazz was the worst of both worlds. It was rock rhythms, played in a rather effete way, with noodling, very complicated solos on top.”

Robert may have been right in general terms, but that’s not true of the music preserved from the Croydon gig, which has power and inventiveness and its own kind of authenticity. To me, the five-piece was the last great Soft Machine line-up, before the noodling began to take over.

By the time Dobson joined the Softs, he had already developed a serious interest in eastern music and mysticism. Not long after he departure he generously lent me Hazrat Inayat Khan’s book about Sufism and music. It stayed with me through many house moves but eventually went missing. Maybe, like the recording of the enthralling Croydon concert, it will one day magically reappear, ready to provide a reminder of a time of open-minded, open-hearted creativity.

* The photograph of Lyn Dobson, Hugh Hopper and Elton Dean was taken by Mark Ellidge, and is from the booklet accompanying Noisette.

May 16

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Elephant9 in the room

Elephant9For an hour or so at Ronnie Scott’s last night, I had the illusion of being in a different place and time: the Middle Earth club in Covent Garden, perhaps, or Implosion at the Roundhouse, or the Temple (formerly the Flamingo), back at the end of the 1960s or the very dawn of the ’70s. Once or twice I had the feeling that if I looked around, John Peel would sitting nearby. The creators of this sensation were a Norwegian trio called Elephant9, who find their inspiration in that era’s jazz-influenced progressive rock, as exemplified at its best by the three-piece version of Soft Machine or Tony Williams’s Lifetime.

Their keyboardist is Ståle Storløkken, a graduate of the celebrated Trondheim conservatory, and better known to me as a member of the improvising group Supersilent. The last time I saw him, a few years ago, was in the church of St Martin-in-the-Fields, where he was playing the pipe organ in a duo concert with his Supersilent colleague, the trumpeter Arve Henriksen (about whom I wrote, quite coincidentally, here last week). The drummer is Torstein Lofthus, a graduate of the Norwegian academy of music in Oslo, and the bass guitarist is Nikolai Hængsle Eilertsen, who is also a member of BigBang and the National Bank.

Maybe the best way of describing Elephant9 is to say that if you took Emerson, Lake & Palmer or Atomic Rooster and replaced their personnel with more interesting musicians playing more interesting compositions, you’d have something close to what we heard in Soho last night. I knew them only from their first album, but that record — Dodovoodoo, released on the Rune Grammofon label in 2008 — made me want to go and see what they were like in person.

Shaggy-haired and dressed-down in the style of the typical early-’70s jazz-rocker, they certainly looked the part. They were ferociously loud from time to time, and the structures of the music were sometimes relatively unsophisticated (even when they were playing in 10/4), but the volume and the simplicity were for a purpose, and there was always a feeling of substance and variety. The serpentine melodies seemed designed to lead somewhere, the thundering rhythm patterns were never merely bludgeoning, and the riffs provided an effective launching pad for Storløkken (playing Hammond B-3 organ and Fender-Rhodes electric piano, with the occasional use of heavy distortion on both) to build lengthy solos of genuine excitement. Impressionistic solo keyboard interludes added contrast to a set built around extended medleys of original material.

All in all, they provided an enjoyable and surprising reminder of why, in such bands as Egg and East of Eden, the jazzier end of British progressive rock once seemed to hold out hope for the future. Sincere congratulations, then, to Elephant9. Finding a way out of what once seemed like a dead end is quite an achievement.

* In the photograph above, from left to right: Nikolai Hængsle Eilertsen, Ståle Storløkken and Thorstein Lofthus.

Aug 12

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The return of Burnin Red Ivanhoe

Burnin Red IvanhoeWhen I saw them playing with their Danish compatriot John Tchicai at the Berlin Jazz Festival in November 1969, Burnin Red Ivanhoe impressed me as the first significant contribution made to rock by a band from continental Europe. This was before Focus, Shocking Blue and Golden Earring from Holland, before the flood of German bands that included Amon Düül II, Can, Kraftwerk, Neu! and Tangerine Dream, before Wigwam from Finland, before PFM from Italy.

Basically, Burnin Red Ivanhoe had a rock rhythm section (guitarist Ole Fick, bassist Jess Stæhr and drummer Bo Thrige Andersen) and jazz horns: Kim Menzer on trombone, flute and harmonica and Karsten Vogel on alto and soprano saxophones. There was a bit of Uncle Meat-era Zappa in there, a bit of Soft Machine, maybe a bit of Who and Floyd. I was particularly taken by the eloquent, heartfelt playing of Vogel, who had also been a member of Tchicai’s Cadentia Nova Danica. Rather fashionably, they had just released a double album, titled M 144, which showcased their various dimensions: riffy rock, free blowing, the occasional burst of Scandi-whimsy.

I wrote about them a couple of times in the Melody Maker (in the days when the sub-editors were not above inventing headlines that made play with phrases such as Great Danes and Viking Invasion). John Peel played them on his programme and gave them a deal for a new album on his Dandelion label, which he co-produced (under his favourite pseudonym, Eddie Lee Beppeaux) with Tony Reeves, Colosseum’s bass guitarist, at CBS Studios in London. They toured a few times, and recorded another album in Copenhagen, called W.W.W., but eventually they disappeared from general sight.

Over the years I kept in occasional touch with Karsten. He’d give me recordings that showed his remarkable range: with his own fusion band, Secret Oyster (Straight to the Krankenhaus, CBS, 1976); on a nice solo album called Birds of Beauty (CBS, 1976), in a duo with the great Carnatic violinist Dr L Subramaniam (Meetings, Calibrated Records, 2007); playing tunes associated with Charlie Parker on a lovely quartet album called My Old Flame (Calibrated, 2010). There’s also an extraordinary album recorded with two singers, Hanne Siboni and Skye Løfvander, in Copenhagen’s vast disused underground water cisterns: Stained Glass Music (Oyster Songs, 2004) is a fascinating study in the sensitive exploration of a cathedral-like natural echo.

But the point of this post is the arrival of a new Burnin Red Ivanhoe album. Released by Sony in Denmark in artwork echoing the cover of M 144, with stencilled lettering on a plain background, the new one is called BRI and features two original members, Vogel and Menzer, with the latter’s son, Klaus, on drums, Assi Roar on bass, Aske Jacoby on guitar and Lone Selmer on voice and keyboards.

Quite often these late-life revivals don’t work. But this band — and Vogel, the chief composer, in particular — seems to have as much to say as it did 45 years ago, perhaps more. And the musicians certainly have better resources with which to say it. The mix of idioms sounds richer and much more assured as they switch from the whispered recitative and soprano/harmonica conversation over the irresistible descending sequence of “Natlig Rejse” to the folkish bluegrass strum of “Det Er Det”, the brittle power chords of “Tiden Om Tiden”, the gorgeous jangly pop of “Alting Var Bedre”, the gliding, glistening beauty of “Cafe Blåhat”, and the insistent “Mind the Gap”, whose lyric juxtaposes lines from Baudelaire and Poe with an announcement familiar to users of the London Underground (“Stand clear of the closing doors…”).

For old times’ sake, there’s also an absolute killer remake of “M 144”, with great alto from Vogel over a driving groove. But this album isn’t about the recreation of past glories. It’s about creation in real time, by real musicians who’ve made excellent use of the intervening years. What a shame Peel isn’t around to hear how good they’ve become.

* Photograph of Lone Selmer and Karsten Vogel by Mette Kramer Kristensen.