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Posts from the ‘Jazz’ Category

Sep 14

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‘A Ritual for John Coltrane’

The centenary of John Coltrane’s birth in Hamlet, North Carolina falls later this month; many commemorative events will take place. Yesterday afternoon at Cafe Oto, in the first of four monthly Sunday matinee concerts, Evan Parker led something he titled ‘A Ritual for John Coltrane’, which turned out to be the sort of tribute that summons the spirit of the dedicatee without trying to mimic the substance.

I may have mentioned before that the first time I interviewed Evan, at his home in the early ’70s, I was impressed by a shelf of LPs with orange and black spines: Coltrane’s albums on Impulse, of course, in their original US editions. Over the years I learned more about his love of the great man’s work, and the inspirational effect it had on the development of his own playing.

Yesterday Evan sat at the centre of an expanded performance space, with his soprano saxophone and a suspended gong. He was flanked by Matt Wright, his partner in Trance Map, at a table with a laptop and a turntable, and by Filipe Gomes of Ramsgate’s Arco Barco studio, also with a laptop and other electronic devices. At the four corners of the space were a quartet of percussionists assembled by Mark Sanders, himself standing at an array of larger gongs, cymbals and small upturned bass drums, with Miles Levin, Jim Bashford and Tymek Jozwiak each seated at minimal kits of varying configurations.

After the room had fallen silent, Evan began proceedings by striking the gong. His strokes precipitated a very gradual accretion of sounds from the other players, creating an abstract tapestry of rustles, taps, pings and other noises, with the subtle infiltration of electronic sounds at its base. After many minutes of this, and a fade to a silence in which we heard Coltrane’s voice speaking about his desire for growth as a person, Evan picked up his soprano and began the first of several improvisations against the constantly shifting sound-quilt.

He is 82 now, more than twice as old as Coltrane was when he died in 1967. Yet his playing is still mesmerising in its unquenchable flow of invention, based on all the techniques of blowing and fingering developed over the decades and powered by circular breathing as well as a constantly active imagination. I suppose you could trace it back to Coltrane’s three-minute unaccompanied tenor cadenza on the version of “I Want to Talk About You” released on Live at Birdland in 1964 — staggering at the time, and still inspiring awe.

The use of the soprano saxophone recalled how Coltrane, once he had taken up the instrument, must have heard in it echoes of the double-reed rhiatas of the Sufi musicians of Jajouka and the shenai of South Asia. The tapestry of percussion effects, rising and falling in waves as the intensity surged, abated and then surged again, was a reminder of how, in his later years, Coltrane loved adding drummers to his ensemble — Rashied Ali, J. C. Moses, Algie DeWitt, Jumma Santos, Ray Appleton, Juno Lewis, Umar Ali, Joe Brazil, Babatunde Olatunji — in the attempt to realise the vision of a music that, as he once said, would start in the middle and move outwards in both directions.

As Evan and his colleagues made their way through a magnificent performance that lasted well over an hour before returning to silence, it was impossible not to hear in the saxophone’s flutters and skeins and multiphonics a direct evolution — entirely personal to Parker — of what Coltrane began more than 60 years ago. As I said, the best kind of tribute.

* ‘A Ritual for John Coltrane’ will be performed again this Friday evening, September 18, at Foyle’s Studio in the Midlands Arts Centre, Birmingham.

Sep 13

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‘Everybody Digs Bill Evans’

On its own terms, Grant Gee’s Everybody Digs Bill Evans is an extraordinary film, fully deserving the accolades and awards coming its way. Adapted from Intermission, the 2013 novella by the Welsh writer Owen Martell, it concentrates on the months in 1961 following the car crash that took the life of the bassist Scott LaFaro, depriving Evans of his closest musical partner and throwing him into a a severe depression. The Norwegian actor Anders Danielsen Lie delivers a finely drawn portrait of Evans’s sometimes mute anguish, compounded by his addiction to heroin and complex relationships with a lover and with his family.

Bringing the famous cover photo of Sunday at the Village Vanguard (the artist as ascetic, bespectacled intellectual) to life, his performance is fully supported by Valene Kane as Ellaine Schulz, Evans’s girlfriend, Barry Ward as his older brother, Katie McGrath as his sister-in-law, Bill Pullman as his father, and Laurie Metcalf,as his mother. All are superb, but Pullman and Ward are particularly adept at suggesting the mixture of concern, incomprehension and envy that makes this a compelling family drama.

Mark O’Halloran’s spare screenplay, Piers McGrail’s high-contrast black and white cinematography (erupting into saturated colour for sequences set in 1973 and 1979), the razor-sharp editing of Adam Biskupski and the wonderfully subtle score by Roger Goula are all of the highest quality, helping Gee to create as fine a cinematic depiction of a real-life jazz musician as I can remember. We get just enough of Evans’s music, in an opening sequence recreating the great trio — Evans, LaFaro and the drummer Paul Motian — playing a snatch of “Gloria’s Step” at the Village Vanguard in June 1961, to give those who don’t know the music a clear idea of what it was all about. The subtle use of archive footage artfully enhances the sense of period and place.

Although I’d recommend everyone to see it, and hope it achieves lasting recognition for the outstanding piece of work it is, I do have a lingering sense of disquiet. Is this actually the film that Bill Evans deserves? By concentrating on one harrowing episode of his life, certainly a legitimate subject for a novella, will it unfairly distort an appreciation of his place in the world? It’s a bit like reading Martell’s book without first having first read How My Heart Sings, Peter Pettinger’s definitive biography of Evans, published in 1998. Looking at the full arc of Evans’s career, there are questions that remain open. But Gee’s five-star film, so carefully focused and sensitively pitched, can really only be greeted with the warmest applause.

* The still from Everybody Digs Bill Evans shows Anders Danielsen Lie as Evans and Will Sach as Scott LaFaro. The film is in cinemas now.

Aug 21

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The Miles Davis Prom

After a somewhat lacklustre first half and a similarly underwhelming resumption, last night’s Prom concert commemorating the centenary of the birth of Miles Davis finally took wing in a sold-out Royal Albert Hall with a sultry version of “Once Upon a Summertime”, Michel Legrand’s melody delivered with understated elegance by the great trumpeter Ambrose Akinmusire in front of the BBC Concert Orchestra, conducted by Miho Hazama.

Miles recorded the tune with Gil Evans in 1962 for Quiet Nights, which turned out to be his most disappointing album. He’d come across it through the singer and pianist Blossom Dearie, who in turn had found it during a stay in Paris in 1954. She was introduced to it through the sponsor of her trip, the record executive Eddie Barclay, who had co-written the original words with the lyricist Eddy Marnay. It was known as “La Valse des Lilas”. Back in the US, Johnny Mercer wrote an English lyric for her to sing. Whenever her friend Miles showed up to hear her in a night club, he’d tell her, “Play me my song.” Now, in a different century, it had a new role to play.

The idea of the Prom was that Hazama, a skilful and experienced conductor, composer and arranger, would take the work Davis and Evans accomplished together between the late ’40s and early ’60s and refashion it into something befitting the larger resources of the Concert Orchestra and Akinmusire’s quartet: a sort of concerto grosso setting.

Was that ever a good idea? It did, after all, answer a need. Only once — at Carnegie Hall in 1961 — did Davis and Evans get to perform a few of the charts, meaning that whenever the original arrangements are performed, they tend to be received with gratitude and reverence by those with a special love for Miles Ahead, Porgy & Bess and Sketches of Spain. I have a fond memory of a performance of the entire Porgy suite by the Royal Academy of Music alumni under Nick Smart at St John’s, Smith Square in 2019, and of a socially distanced recreation of the Concierto de Aranjuez by Ryan Truesdell’s Gil Evans Project in New York in 2020. On the evening before last night’s Prom, in a similar homage 6,000 miles away, Evans’s original scores were performed at the Hollywood Bowl by a band including Herbie Hancock and Ron Carter, two of Davis’s greatest alumni.

But to try and expand Evans’s carefully conceived and refined work, which made such revolutionary use of instrumental combinations and contrasts, might seem at best foolhardy. The addition of a full string section, in particular, carried significant risk, as it always does in jazz. Hazama had her work cut out.

The first half began with pieces from the Gershwin opera: “Bess, You Is My Woman Now”, “Summertime” and “I Loves You, Porgy”, plus Evans’s own “Gone”, While the new orchestrations were sometimes ingenious, the additions were often superfluous, occasionally verging on a bombast that would have been anathema to Evans. Moving on to other material, they meant that Hazema’s variations on “Boplicity” sacrificed much of the 1948 original’s cool agility and gained nothing from a quote from the James Bond theme. Her arrangement of “Blue in Green”, from Kind of Blue, was mostly notable for the space it created for a fine solo by the pianist Taylor Eigsti.

The late critic Max Harrison famously described Evans’s unique approach to existing material not as arrangement but as “recomposition”. As the first half ended with a medley of pieces from Manuel de Falla’s El Amor Brujo, from which Evans extracted “Will o’ the Wisp” for Sketches of Spain, it began to feel that recomposing a recomposition might not be such a great idea, even though Hazema slipped a few measures of the “Milestones” theme into the closing up-tempo section. There were moments when, as my companion said, it felt “a bit lounge”, and I could only agree.

That uneasy feeling re-ermerged after the interval, when the re-recomposition of Kurt Weil’s “My Ship” included one passage that sounded like a Disney soundtrack, albeit followed by a full-strength collective workout for Akinmusire’s stellar quartet, with the oustanding Eigsti (a late replacement for Sam Harris) on piano, Harish Raghavan on bass and Kendrick Scott on drums, temporarily freed from orchestral encumbrance — which, on an arrangement of the next tune, “Miles Ahead”, included a weird passage for Hollywood strings.

At that point I was wishing that the arranger’s job had been handed to Michael Gibbs or Maria Schneider. But then came a thoroughly decent “Once Upon a Summertime”, which settled things down. That seemed to encourage the quartet to take off on their own with an Akinmusire composition called “Henya”, recast from its original recording on the album Owl Song as a spellbinding ballad in slow 3/2 time, its constantly cycling harmonic contour and sense of infinite space drawing the best solos of the night, as well as magnificent distant rolling thunder from Scott.

On, then, to the great set-piece, Evans’s historic 17-minute recasting of the Adagio from Joaquin Rodrigo’s guitar concerto. And here, in the Concierto de Aranjuez. Hazema made better sense of the possibilities of the expanded instrumentation, creating a section in which Akinmusire improvised beautifully through and around sombre and carefully placed stop-time figures, and using the strings to give extra drive to the fantastic crescendo with which piece reaches its climax. No complaints there, and none for the vociferously demanded encore, Ahmad Jamal’s “New Rhumba”, in which Hazema faithfully reproduced the trombone section’s stabs — Evans’s subtle imitation of Red Garland’s comping in Miles’s first great quintet –behind Eigsti’s spirited solo.

In an interview in the concert programme, Akinmusire spoke of the challenge of playing Davis’s role. “I love this music so much that I’ll be thinking, what if Miles was sitting in a seat in the Royal Albert Hall? What would he expect, and what would make him walk away with a smile? I don’t think he’d want me to play like him.” The easy response is that Miles, the enemy of sentimental recreation, wouldn’t have been there at all. But Akinmusire, the most gifted jazz trumpeter of his generation, met the demand with skill and humility. His virtuosity allowed him to make allusions to the rounder tone of the flugelhorn Davis used on some of the recordings with Evans, and to find the sobbing tone that Kenneth Tynan, in his 1961 profile of Miles, quoted his young daughter describing as “like a little boy who’s locked out and wants to get in.”

It was hard to tell whether he was entirely comfortable in the role. There were a few fluffs, and not always did his own sense of space seem to match that of the arrangements. A long sequence of squeezed high notes in the de Falla piece, for instance, didn’t mean much. But as the evening went on, he was able to infiltrate more of himself into the necessary task of interpretation, occasionally doing what he often does in more natural circumstances, unloosing figurations that emerge from somewhere below the horn’s known lowest notes and spiral up via fantastical shapes to end in the uppermost register. And sometimes he found the pathos to match the careful diminuendos with which Hazema closed a few of the pieces.

Those were moments of genuine grace. In the end, despite doubts about how Davis himself would have viewed the project, and although it’s hard to accept that a satisfactory homage to Gil Evans would ever involve rewriting him, there were enough of those to carry away and remember with pleasure.

* The concert is on BBC4 tonight at 8pm. The audio will be available for the next 52 days on BBC Sounds: https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m003029j The photograph of Miles Davis and Gil Evans was taken by Don Hunstein.

Aug 16

Tunes of peace

Earlier today I closed the last page of Regime Change, Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan’s epic dissection of the first 15 months of Donald Trump’s second term at president of the United States. It’s a close-quarters observation of megalomania operating in real time, reaching its climax as the US/Israeli attack on Iran founders in the Strait of Hormuz, a hubristic miscalculation which one profoundly hopes will eventually define Trump’s reputation in the eyes of history. One can only wonder at the identity of the source who gave the two New York Times reporters such extraordinary material.

Now I need something to listen to, and here at hand is Peace Anthems, a new album of 10 short pieces by artists associated with Red Hook Records, the label founded five years ago by the producer Sun Chung, whose first release was Hanamichi, by the late pianist Masabumi Kikuchi. The new release, timed to coincide with the anniversary, is specially commissioned by Chung from the artists, who were invited to contribute pieces inspired by the theme of peace.

The trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith and the pianist Amina Claudine Myers, whose album Central Park made many best-of-the-year lists in 2024, provide two sketches, “Sonic Requiem X” and “Reflections on Palestine”. Smith also appears on “Three Years Later” with the drummer Andrew Cyrille and the modular synthesiser player Qasim Naqvi, whose solo piece, “Al Badawi”, opens the album. Moor Mother’s invocations and BlankFor.ms’ electronics combine on “Imaginary Lines”. The singer Martha Deribe and the pianist Simone Maggio are heard on “War Is Over”. The guitarist Taylor Deupree, the trombonist Kalia Vandever and the bassist Thomas Morgan contribute Deupree’s composition “Wither Light and Airy”. Kit Downes gets two chances to demonstrate his skill with a pipe organ on “Into the Woods — Three Weary Calls” and “Closing Meditation for OM”, the second of which concludes the sequence.

The mood is restrained and reflective, as if the performers agreed that the message would be allowed to find its way gently into the listeners’ ears. These are little tone poems whose delicacy is their strength. And nowhere is that more apparent than on a piece called “The River of Imjin” by the Korean saxophonist and composer Sungjae Son (photographed above), whose previous release, Near East Quartet, appeared in 2016, at a time when Sun Chung was an in-house producer for the ECM label.

“The River of Imjin”, bearing a name made famous by a battle between Chinese and UN (predominantly British) forces during the Korean War in 1951, finds Son overdubbing his tenor, bass clarinet and pump organ on two choruses of something that sounds like an old Methodist hymn tune. If you have fond memories of Thelonious Monk’s “Abide With Me”, John Surman’s “Doxology” or Don Cherry’s “Desireless”, then this fits right alongside them. After 414 pages describing Trump’s attempt to drag the world into his own darkness, sometimes two minutes and 15 seconds of music is all it takes to switch the light back on.

* Peace Anthems is out now on Red Hook Records. All proceeds will go to the International Red Cross: https://redhookrecords.bandcamp.com/album/peace-anthems

Jul 30

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The art of the duo

Elias Stemeseder (left) and Thomas Morgan

The new album by the pianist Elias Stemeseder and the bassist Thomas Morgan begins with variations on the piece from which it takes its name: Io Pur Respiro, a madrigal by the 17th century Italian composer Carlo Gesualdo. I love Gesualdo’s music so much that once, during a visit to Naples, I went looking for his tomb: it’s an inscribed stone laid into the floor of one of the chapels in the Church of Gesù Nuovo on the Via Benedetto Croce, should you find yourself in that extraordinary city.

Whether intentionally or not, Stemeseder and Morgan spend the first 10 minutes evoking the harmonic restlessness underlying the beauty of all Gesualdo’s choral music, the sudden shifts that make you feel as though the ground is sliding under you. Titled “Madrigal, Variation, Courante”, it opens with a lyrical two-part invention, before accelerating into an almost pointilliste dialogue, staccato phrases flying back and forth until the pair reach a conclusion so perfectly formed that it might make you gasp with pleasure.

Already it’s obvious that the combination of the Austrian pianist and the Californian bassist, both now based in New York, is an exceptionally empathetic one. I love the firmness and clarity of Stemeseder’s touch and the way, very often, equally interesting things are happening in both hands, bringing Lennie Tristano and Brad Mehldau to mind, although he never sounds like either of them. Morgan never ceases to demonstrate his ability to operate as an equal creative partner without neglecting the essential function of his instrument; in that respect, he’s the heir to Gary Peacock.

The recording was made in the Sala Vanni at the Basilica of Santa Maria del Carmine in Florence, during a short European tour in 2024**. The two musicians reassembled there the following morning, with the idea of making what would be in effect studio versions of the material they’d been exploring during the series of concerts, but eventually they and their producer, Martin Brugger, decided to use the live recording, despite the occasional cough from the audience.

Two of the five tracks are standard ballads. The first is Billy Strayhorn’s yearning “Love Came”, the second Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein’s “I Have the Room Above Her”, from the musical Showboat, already familiar to the contemporary jazz audience as the title track of a Paul Motian album from 2005. Both tunes are investigated with great care and beautifully restrained warmth: listen closely to the opening section of the Kern song and appreciate how those microscopic differences in timing are evidence not of imprecision but of spontaneity, of the closeness with which they’re listening to each other.

Like the opener, the other tracks are original compositions by Stemeseder. He begins “On the Euclidian Plane” on what sounds like a spinet before moving back to the piano for a piece whose rhythmic energy is imparted equally by both players, the keyboard prodding and the bass strings snapping as they urge each other forward in a double helix of invention. “Subject Carved From Words Uttered” begins with a ruminative passage, Morgan pushing phrases against Stemeseder’s carefully spaced chords before the pianist starts to unfurl single-note lines that begin to clot into chords as the piece nears its closure. The texture thins out again as the two pace each other towards an ending in which the notes seem to evaporate, forming an elegant conclusion to a highly original and truly outstanding album.

* Io Pur Respiro by Elias Stemeseder and Thomas Morgan is released on the Squama label: https://eliasstemesederthomasmorgan.bandcamp.com/album/io-pur-respiro. The photograph is by Johannes Brugger.

** For some reason I typed “2004” and didn’t spot it before I posted the piece. Now corrected. Thanks to Paul Kelly for pointing it out.

Jul 24

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The coolest of cats

Georgie Fame’s career has been an affair of ups and downs, from the huge and unexpected success of “Yeh Yeh”, which knocked the Beatles off the No 1 spot in January 1965, to the medical problems — a fall from a ladder in 2019, breaking his hip and severing tendons in his right hand, followed in 2025 by a diagnosis of hydrocephalus, impairing his mobility — that have restricted his musical activities in recent years. He’s 83 now, and there probably won’t be any more gigs or records, so it seems all the more worthwhile to investigate a new biography, Cool Cat Blues, written by his friend and fellow singer-keyboardist Ben Sidran.

It’s a slender book, only 140-odd pages, but the story is well told, particularly that of his early childhood in the 1940s amid the mills and pits of Lancashire, and the warmth of a family in which music played a significant role. Then the Butlin’s and Larry Parnes years, during which Clive Powell became Georgie Fame and evolved from the pianist with Billy Fury and the Blue Flames to the singer and organist with his own Blue Flames, settling in London and taking up residence at the Flamingo Club, where the all-nighters with an audience of American servicemen and Caribbean immigrants provided the environment in which he could hone his distinctive musical character.

During that period, 1964-67, I took every opportunity to see the Blue Flames whenever they visited my home town, which was often. I loved their blend of R&B and jazz, influenced by Ray Charles’s small bands, the vocalese of Eddie Jefferson and King Pleasure, and Mose Allison’s vocal delivery and wry wit. And I loved Fame’s choice of sidemen with jazz instincts — has any British jazz saxophonist produced a better ballad solo than the effort by baritonist Johnny Marshall on “Moody’s Mood for Love”, from their second album, Fame at Last?

The book runs through the partnership with Alan Price, CBS’s attempts to turn him into a hipper Andy Williams, the surprisingly unsuccessful hook-up with Chris Blackwell and Island Records in the mid-’70s, his popularity in Sweden and his work with various big bands around the world, the creation of an Australian Blue Flames, the recordings produced by Sidran in New York for the Go Jazz label, Fame’s years as a star sideman with Van Morrison and Bill Wyman’s all-star Rhythm Kings, the integration into his band of his two sons, Tristan and James Powell, on guitar and drums respectively, and his decision, following the tragic death of his wife, Nico, in 1993 and the failure of a subsequent relationship, to move to Sweden, where he had many happy and fruitful years until moving back to England in 2018. He made his last London appearances at Ronnie Scott’s with Guy Barker’s big band in the autumn of 2022.

It’s a lot to get into a short book, and some might feel that much goes unmentioned. But this is, after all, Fame’s biography, not that, for instance, of the sidemen who always fascinated me — Mick Eve, Bill Eyden, Glenn Hughes, Cliff Barton, Tan Tan Thornton, Speedy Acquaye and so on. For that, and a detailed chart of their comings and goings, as well as a discography, you’d need to consult the German writer Uli Twelker’s much more compendious work, Georgie Fame: There’s Nothing Else to Do, published in 2014. Twelker also goes through his albums track by track, including the great Fame at Last and Sweet Things, which pass unmentioned in Cool Cat Blues. Sidran doesn’t mention the Blue Flames’ first recordings, two 45s issued on Rita and Benny Eisen’s tiny North London-based R&B label in 1963.

I’d have liked more on the evolution of Fame’s songwriting, which produced three fabulous ballads: the fondly lubricious “Eros Hotel”, his setting of Fran Landsman’s words, which made its debut on the album Right Now in 1979 and subsequently became a live favourite, and the entirely self-penned “Lost in a Lover’s Dream” and “A Declaration of Love”. In those songs, the cool cat revealed himself as a dyed-in-the-wool romantic. It would have been nice, too, if Sidran’s publisher had employed an editor who knew that it’s Tadd (not Tad) Dameron, Karl (not Carl) Jenkins, and “Buona (not Bona) Sera”, that James Brown led a revue (not a review), and that Bill Wyman’s real name is Bill Perks (not Perkins).

But the compensations for any deficiencies are many, not least in an entire chapter devoted to his decade with Van Morrison, gnomically titled “Ulster Logic” and as charmingly enlightening an insider portrait of the “difficult” Belfast genius as you’re likely to read, and in the judicious intimacy of the book’s overall tone — this is not a hagiography but a biography written by a friend, with the complicity of the subject, to whom it does proper honour.

* Cool Cat Blues: The Life and Times of Georgie Fame is published by Equinox: https://www.equinoxpub.com/projects/cool-cat-blues.

Jul 21

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René Urtreger 1932-2026

The photo above was taken at the Institut Français in Berlin in 2017, during a Q&A session with the pianist René Urtreger following a screening to celebrate the 60th anniversary of Louis Malle’s Ascenseur pour l’échafaud (released in the UK as Lift to the Scaffold and in the US as Elevator to the Gallows). The last surviving member of the quintet with which Miles Davis recorded the soundtrack for that classic film, René had accepted my invitation to come to JazzFest Berlin for the event, and to play and then talk in front of an audience. What he’s just said has clearly cracked me up. It may have been his observation about Thelonious Monk — a great composer, he said, but an absolutely terrible pianist.

He said it with a twinkle, but he meant it. René was a bebop purist. Bud Powell was his idol and his model. He knew Powell, of course, from Paris in the 1960s; one of his early trio albums was called René Urtreger Plays Bud Powell, including his versions of “Dance of the Infidels”, “Parisian Thoroughfare”, “Celia” and so on. He never lost that allegiance.

René died last week, aged 92. Back in 2014, after I’d brought him to London to play at a private event, I wrote here about his career. I won’t repeat myself, but I will say that if you don’t know his playing, the discovery will be worthwhile, whether it’s on that great soundtrack album (just given a de luxe vinyl reissue on Blue Note/Fontana), on the live album from his 1957 Salle Pleyel concert with Miles (Fresh Sound, 2023), on his beautiful album of solo ballads titled Tentatives, released in 2006 on the Minium label, or on his 2017 album with the singer Agnès Desarthe.

Desarthe, incidentally, was also the author of his biography, published in 2016 (in French only) under the title Le Roi René. It told his fascinating story, including the long and ultimately successful battle against his heroin addiction, the yé-yé years with Claude François and Serge Gainsbourg, the soundtracks he composed for the films of his childhood friend Claude Berri, and his eventual return to the idiom he loved. He was a delightful man, and one of the greatest European jazz pianists.

* The photograph was taken by Camille Blake. Le Roi René is published by Odile Jacob.

Jul 17

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Brian Case 1937-2026

When Brian Case joined the Melody Maker in 1978, at my invitation, he dubbed himself “Junior Beret” in tribute to Max Jones, the paper’s senior jazz writer, who habitually covered his bald pate with just such a piece of jaunty headgear. Brian died oin Monday, aged 88. I hope to write more about him elsewhere, but for now I’ll just say how much I loved his work, which was as full of surprises as the music he described.

It was my privilege to supply the foreword to a collection of pieces about his favourite subjects (On the Snap, published in 2015 by Caught by the River), including Dexter Gordon, Sam Fuller, Rahsaan Roland Kirk, Norman Mailer, Jimmy Smith, Al Pacino, Ian Dury, and Gerry Mulligan. And, of course, Art Pepper. Here’s Brian opening a feature on the great saxophonist with a description of his long-awaited UK debut at a London church in 1979:

Few among the congregation who rose to their feet and applauded before a note was played at St. Paul’s Church, Hammersmith, could have had much idea of what that ovation meant to the performer. They wouldn’t have learned much from his face, but they were to hear it in his music. It was one of those spontaneous exchanges of gifts that achieve a rare, fulfilling parity, a love for a love, and not the love-all of those exchange & mart comebacks with the bombardiering boxed orchids. The tribute to Art Pepper was compounded of respect for his endurance, his artistry, and — for those who understood the shifting symmetry of anguish and elegance in his playing — an acknowledgement of the toll of that equation. Real music costs.

Afterwards Brian told Ronnie Scott he should get Pepper in for a season. Knowing Pepper’s reputation as a major junkie who had spent years in and out of Chino, Folsom, Lexington and San Quentin, Scott was dubious. But a year later it happened. The photograph above was given to me by Jak Kilby, who took it backstage at Ronnie’s one night in 1980. Pepper is in the middle, Brian is on the right, I’m on the left. Happy times. Be seeing you, Junior Beret.

Jul 7

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Raising John Brown

The only time I can remember seeing the 19th century abolitionist John Brown mentioned in a jazz context was in a piece called “The Day John Brown Was Hanged”, written by George Russell for the altoist Hal McKusick’s 1956 album Jazz Workshop. In that intricate seven-minute composition for quartet, Russell interpolated lines from the melody of “John Brown’s Body Lies a-Mouldering in His Grave”, the marching song sung by Union soldiers during the American Civil War, a conflict whose prefatory skirmishes included a Brown-led assault on a federal armoury at Harper’s Ferry, Virginia, in 1859.

A white man, and an evangelical Christian, Brown believed in the Declaration of Independence’s words about all men being created equal, and came to the conclusion that violence offered the only way to overthrow slavery and everything it represented. He had hidden escaped slaves and helped them along the Underground Railroad to freedom, and already led anti-slavery forces in several conflicts. The attack on the armoury, intended to capture weapons with which slaves could be armed for an insurrection, involved an elaborate plan devised with the support of Harriet Tubman (although not that of Frederick Douglass, who disapproved of the tactics). A bloody failure, it led to Brown’s capture and trial, after which he became the first man to be executed in the United States on a charge of treason.

He was hanged on the morning of December 2, 1859, in a small field in Charles Town, Virginia. Onlookers included the future Confederate generals Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson, John Wilkes Booth, the future assassin of Abraham Lincoln, and Walt Whitman, who mentioned it in his poem Year of the Meteors. In a speech in 1881, Frederick Douglass — an escaped slave become statesman and orator — said that whereas his own abolitionist zeal was “bounded by time, (Brown’s) stretched away to the boundless shores of eternity. I could live for the slave, but he could die for him.”

Now comes the distinguished American tenor saxophonist and composer Chris Potter with an album titled Alive With Ghosts Today, a suite of pieces for septet inspired by the continuing resonance of Brown’s story. There’s nothing programmatic about it — no quotes from the Battle Hymn of the Republic (except in the use of “Mine Eyes” as the title of one piece) — but it’s a work that seems somehow marinated in American history, from then to now, in the way jazz somehow always is, being perhaps that turblent story’s most remarkable single outgrowth.

I have a special fondness for medium-sized groups, from seven to 10 pieces, led by people such as Charles Mingus, Slide Hampton, John Surman, Jef Gilson, George Coleman, Keith Tippett, Steve Lehmann and Vijay Iyer. In the right hands, they combine power with flexibility and a range of tone colour. Potter says he was looking for the sound of a “slightly unruly village band”, and besides himself the group is completed by Rane Moore on clarinet, Zekkereya El-Magharbel on trombone, Bill Frisell on guitar, Sara Caswell on violin, Burniss Travis on bass and Nate Smith on drums. It’s an unusual line-up, and a perfect one for his purposes, which was to have “Copland, blues and gospel and African rhythm all living in the same space.”

The eight tracks are carefully wrought, making fine use of the individual timbres, and inevitably of Frisell’s ability to use his guitar and pedals as an orchestral resource, colouring the backgrounds with purpose and restraint. In fact the album that Alive With Ghosts Today most reminds me of is Frisell’s Blues Dream, his classic septet album from 2001, and praise doesn’t come much higher than that. A sense of conciseness in endemic to Potter’s writing, but also a sense of space; density is counterbalanced by ease of delivery. The mood ranges from sombre to playful. sometimes within the same piece. On “Mine Eyes”, Potter produces his finest solo over lively backgrounds before an interlude for trombone, guitar and drums leads to a hymn-like ensemble passage prefacing a return to the nimble theme.

There’s nothing hectoring about Potter’s album, despite its origins. The musical atmosphere is warm and companionable, with just enough surprise to keep you on your toes. But thinking about the source of his inspiration, the parallels with our own world are unavoidable. Acknowledging the complexity of the story, Potter concludes: “I have no easy answers, I only feel that ours is a beautiful, heartbreaking country, where we are still living with these ghosts.” This music, rather than firework displays, military flypasts or cage-fighting contests on the White House lawn, might represent a better way to commemorate America’s 250th birthday.

* Chris Potter’s Alive With Ghosts Today is out now on the Edition label. The photograph of Potter is by Dave Stapleton. Bandscamp link: https://chrispotterjazz.bandcamp.com/album/alive-with-ghosts-today

Jun 3

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Sarah Tandy at Ronnie Scott’s

From left: Binker Golding, Jihad Darwish, Tee Peters, Sarah Tandy, Jamie Murray, Poppy Daniels (photo: Paul Pace/Ronnie Scott’s Club)

All Sarah Tandy has to do to make me happy is sit down at a good piano and play a standard ballad. But she’s an ambitious bandleader and composer, and it was those aspects of her musical journey that were explored at Ronnie Scott’s last night. As she did when her debut album, Infection in the Sentence, came out seven years ago, she brought her quintet to the Frith Street temple to showcase some of the material from its successor, to be released later this year.

Now with Poppy Daniels on trumpet, Binker Golding on tenor saxophone, Jihad Darwish on bass and Jamie Murray on drums, the band launched the first set with “Unleash the Beast”, whose introduction quickly gave way to a raging up-tempo blast over what sounded like a modern variation on the structure of Miles Davis’s “Milestones”. Tandy’s opening solo set the tone, chorus after dizzying chorus, like a dancer leaping and pirouetting across a tightrope with no safety net, laying down the challenge for Golding and Daniels to meet.

The next new piece, “Aftermath”, began with Darwish switching to bass guitar and using loops and other effects on an unaccompanied introduction before the band settled into a late-night funk groove, like something you might find on one of the better CTI albums. The piece ended with the dying fall of Daniels’ nicely poised solo — no recapitulation of the theme or arranged coda, which is typical of Tandy’s interesting approach to the architecture of her compositions.

By contrast, the set ended with the thunder of Murray’s drum improvisation at the conclusion of “Bradbury Street”, from the first album, a witty exercise in staccato syncopation which seem to have tilted over the years in favour of the Second Line rhythms of New Orleans and gave Murray the chance to demonstrate how to employ formidable chops with discretion.

After the break, Tandy turned to her electric piano and synthesiser for two new funk-based instrumental pieces, “Princess Peachy” and “Keep Dreaming”. The former featured a Daniels solo in which the trumpeter set aside her liking for extended multi-noted flurries in favour of well-shaped phrases with a tone that reminded me of the young Donald Byrd, while the latter showed Golding at his most trenchant. Then Tandy introduced an MC, the good-natured Tee Peters, who rapped with impressive flow over compositions called “You Need to Heal” and “Rematch”, the latter apparently inspired — to the delight of at least a portion of the audience — by Arsenal FC’s recent exploits.

Tandy likes to have fun making and sharing music. To close the evening, she announced that they were going to play some jazz. Not, she added, that everything they’d already played hadn’t been jazz. But you could see what she meant as soon as she launched into a gloriously unfettered stride-piano introduction to “On the Sunny Side of the Street”, kicking the band into one last burst of high-energy two-beat action, with Golding front and centre.

On the night of a Tube strike, it was good to see the main room at Ronnie’s packed full for this young London-based band. Full, that is, not just of patrons but of attention and enthusiasm, of response to the nuances as well as to the roof-raising bits, with enough of both elements to satisfy just about everyone.

* Sarah Tandy’s new album, titled Delicious Capricious, will be released in the autumn, distributed via Kartel.

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