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Posts from the ‘Jazz’ Category

Apr 1

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Mark Sanders at Cafe Oto

A three-night season at a place where he has made so many distinguished contributions was no more than Mark Sanders’ due. I was only able to make it to one of the nights, each of which featured a different line-up, and then only to hear the opening set. But what I heard was more than enough to remind me of Mark’s qualities both as a drummer/percussionist and as a dynamic component in any free-improvising group.

The set I heard teamed him with two German musicians, the distinguished and vastly experienced pianist, composer and educator Georg Graewe and a newer name, the viola-player Laura Strobl. It began as collective free improvisation sometimes does, with the feeling of waiting for something to happen. The three of them were playing at the same time, all busy enough, but with little apparent sense of connection.

Then, however, that thing happened that can only happen with free improvisation. An entire music emerged. A real collective creation began to take shape, as if from nowhere (although not from nowhere, of course). Gradually the sounds they made together acquired proportion and a pulse, momentum and direction, an abstract narrative.

A long crescendo was more than just a question of getting louder. A sudden halt was more than just a red light. Graewe’s scurries, Strobl’s scrapes and Sanders’ extraordinarily deft manipulation of a panoply of sound-making devices — gongs, bells and small cymbals as well as the regular trap set — fused into something living and breathing.

* Tonight, Wednesday April 1, is the last of Mark Sanders’ three nights at Cafe Oto. He’ll be joined by Adrian Utley, Larry Stabbins and Neil Charles.

Mar 31

4 Comments

Alto voices: Art Pepper & Karsten Vogel

1.

Alto is just such a hard instrument; there are so few people that play it really well. I feel it’s the best one, too, now. At first I didn’t feel that way — I wanted to be a tenor player. It took a long time for me to feel that alto was the mnst expressive of the saxophones.

That’s Art Pepper, talking to Les Tomkins in an interview for Crescendo magazine in 1979. And it’s certainly true that when he got his first alto at the age of 12, Pepper found his voice, one that continues to beguile listeners today, four decades after his death in 1982, aged 56. Something about the horn’s register and the weight of its sound helped him to expose his emotions.

Pepper was 34 years old and had already lived several lifetimes when he travelled from Los Angeles to Vancouver in September 1959 to fulfil a 10-night engagement at a club called the Cellar, where American jazz musicians were regularly featured. The format was a familiar one in those days: a visiting soloist with a local rhythm section, using a repertoire built from Broadway tunes, jazz standards and perhaps one or two originals from the guest. Pepper had first appeared there in 1957, when he was in a bad way; he was in better condition for this return engagement, as we can hear in a new four-CD box set called Everything Happens to Me, comprising previously unheard recordings made on a mono tape machine

He was a player of special qualities. In the liner notes to a Pepper album (Gettin’ Together, 1960), the critic Martin Williams wrote that he would use the example of Pepper’s improvisations to persuade a square friend that jazz musicians can create melodies better than the ones they started with. Listen to “What’s New” here, or the two versions of “Over the Rainbow”, or particularly the title track of the set, see what Williams meant, as Pepper switches between broad spontaneous melodies and triple-time flurries that deserve to be slowed down, transcribed and studied.

The people who went to hear him at the Cellar in the summer of 1959 were very fortunate. They caught him at his best, with sympathetic accompanists. The pianist Chris Gage, the bassist Tony Clitheroe and the drummer George Ursan may never have established wider reputations, but they knew enough to provide thoughtful and sensitive support, whether on the ballads or the jazz pieces like “Allen’s Alley”, “Yardbird Suite” and Pepper’s own “Brown Gold”.

The sound is not studio-quality, but it’s exactly as you would have expectecd it to be in a club in 1959. The vibe is preserved through introductions and false starts, as when Pepper calls a halt after a few bars of “I Surrender Dear” and apologises to the audience: “As you know we’ve never rehearsed or anything, so if we should goof at any time, please bear with us. It’s just one of those things. We’ll get it, we’ll get it.” One or two tunes are incomplete and have to be faded. But none of that matters. This is how it was.

* Art Pepper’s Everything Happen to Me: 1959 — Live at the Cellar is released on the Omnivore label: http://www.omnivorerecordings.com The photo of Pepper is by Ray Avery.

2.

My life in music is based on the saxophone. In the busy years with Burnin Red Ivanhoe and Secret Oyster most of my time was taken by composing, arranging, holding the bands together, logistics and trying to get the economical side to function for the bands (which in fact never did). My alto saxophone – the reason for the whole thing – came third. And I regret that a lot. With a few exceptions I don’t like to hear the recordings with my soloing from these days. In the past like 35 years I have tried to compensate for that and somehow I have succeeded. I’m still working on that project.

And that’s Karsten Vogel, the Danish alto saxophonist and composer, talking in 2024 to the Slovenian writer Klemens Breznikar in an interview for the online magazine It’s Psychedelic Baby!. Vogel was in the process of recording a quartet album that has just been released under the title Late Night Ballads. It seems very fair to suggest, on this evidence, that he’s made up all of that lost time, and then some.

I’ve always had a special fondness for Karsten’s playing, whether with his regular bands or alongside John Tchicai in Cadentia Nova Danica, solo in an art gallery in London, in a duo in cave by the sea on the Faroe Islands, or with the Indian violinist L. Subramaniam. But I think I like him best in the basic “alto with rhythm accompaniment” format, heard on the album called My Old Flame in 2009 and now on Late Night Ballads.

The two altoists to whom he’s perhaps closest in terms of the emotional climate of his playing are Tchicai, with whom he played in Copenhagen in the late ’60s, and Lee Konitz in his latter years. He has a light sound, favouring the instrument’s upper register, with phrasing that — like Art Pepper’s — is agile without drawing attention to itself. Like both of those, he can summon a kind of pathos without descending into sentimentality.

Karsten is 83 now, so there’s a temptation for a critic to interpret this new album as “late work” (like the live albums of Konitz with Brad Mehldau and Charlie Haden released by Blue Note). But the seeming fragility of his sound is not a consequence of the ageing process: it’s something he’s always had, and it’s certainly nothing to do with weakness. He is also a master of phrasing, manipulating notes into weightless clusters, with the gift of making the unpredictable sound inevitable.

As the album’s title suggests, the mood is relaxed and contemplative, the tempos ranging from slow-medium to medium-slow but never feeling passive. It’s a little bit noirish, although that impression may be just caused by the fact that the opening track is David Raksin’s title song from Otto Preminger’s Laura. The other chosen standards include “I Remember You”, “You Go to My Head” and “Don’t Explain”, and Dave Brubeck’s “In Your Own Sweet Way”, with one original, “Open 24 Hrs”, cut from the same cloth. Throughout, the leader receives fine support from Mads Søndergaard on piano, Peter Hansen on double bass and Klaus Menzer on drums.

I sometimes think of the alto saxophone as the poet’s instrument. Here, as Vogel loops and soars above the contours of “Laura” or “You Go to My Head”, transcending but not quite detaching himself from the source material, is persuasive evidence.

* Karsten Vogel’s Late Night Ballads is on the Storyville label: http://www.storyvillerecords.com

Mar 21

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Mike Westbrook at 90

Mike Westbrook turns 90 today. To celebrate that milestone, the master of long-form compositions for large ensemble has released the latest in a series of solo piano albums in which he explores music that means a great deal to him, in the process exposing the roots of his own creative journey.

Some of those albums — Paris, Starcross Bridge, the several volumes of The Piano and Me — juxtapose jazz standards, gospel tunes, melodies from the opera, Broadway hits and more recent pop tunes — in combinations that sometimes seem surprising but always work. The latest of them is devoted to a single theme made explicit in its title: The Piano in the Room and the Blues.

Assembled from recordings made in 2006 at Falmouth Arts Centre in Devon, where the paintings of Mike’s wife Kate were on show, this is a homage to the blues at its most plain-spoken, taking Bessie Smith and Jimmy Yancey as its reference points: the former’s “Young Woman’s Blues” and “Good Old Wagon” and the latter’s “Death Letter Blues” are used as texts, on each of which Westbrook builds several variations.

Given a Steinway grand and unlimited time to set his thoughts down on a Sony DAT Walkman, with no live audience to think about, the pianist settles into a mood of calm reflection, using the tonality and cadences of the blues to explore an emotional register ranging from stoicism to quiet joy. There are no sharp edges here, no attempt to bend the material into unfamiliar forms, and most of all no hurry. A gentle pace enables Westbrook to distill a lifetime’s attention to the blues and what its deep song has meant to him into a very precious document.

* Mike Westbrook’s The Piano in the Room and the Blues is released on the Thingamajig label and is available via Bandcamp: https://mikewestbrook.bandcamp.com/album/the-piano-in-the-room-and-the-blues The photograph of Westbrook at Falmouth Arts Centre is by Kate Westbrook.

Mar 19

5 Comments

A night at Wigmore Hall

The roots of the trumpet-and-piano duo in jazz go back to the day in December 1928 when Louis Armstrong and Earl Hines recorded a piece titled “Weather Bird”. It became a classic, one of the keystones of jazz history. I was thinking about it when Ambrose Akinmusire and Sullivan Fortner took the stage at the Wigmore Hall last night, so I was thrilled when it turned up in the first section of their 90-minute concert.

They began with variations on two Akinmusire compositions, “Grace” and “Weighted Corners”, before “Weather Bird” made its appearance on the way to “Stablemates”, Benny Golson’s hard-bop favourite. By that time, around 20 minutes in, it was obvious that we were being exposed to something special. The liquid clarity and endless enventiveness of Akinmusire’s trumpet had clearly found a perfect match in Fortner, who was born in New Orleans and displays all the elegance associated with the city’s great pianists as well as his own ability to create strong and deep currents which guide the music’s flow.

A rarely glimpsed peak was reached with the next section, which opened with a Fortner tune called “Aerobatics”, written specially for Akinmusire, leading into an investigation of something that revealed itself to be “All the Things You Are”. That’s a tune I’ve heard played hundreds of times by players of all kinds, including some of the greats, but never like this. It emerged in fragments, twisted and disordered (Fortner’s allusion to the familiar dark-hued intro from the various Charlie Parker versions came several minutes in), but recombined by the two musicians into a constantly shifting mosaic, completely new while somehow seeming to carry the weight of all previous versions. It was like hearing the tune in a hall of mirrors, each set at a different angle, throwing its shapes from different perspectives and trajectories.

The third section of the set was devoted to Akinmusire’s “Owl Song 1”, a ballad whose astonishing tenderness — beautifully enunciated in Fortner’s solo — provided a platform for the trumpeter’s occasional fondness for finding a quickfire motif and repeating it with elaborations and variations of tone until it exhausts itself and is absorbed by the prevailing tide. It’s an example of the sense of dramatic architecture that characterises his work, even at its least superficially emphatic.

For the encore, there was a return to Armstrong with a vigorous reinvention of “West End Blues”, recorded by the Hot Five six months before Louis and Hines got together. Akinmusire and Fortner were showing that musicians who belong to the 21st century can understand how to draw from the past to help create the future. What they did last night — blending joy, humour, lyricism, compassion — represented the highest refinement of the improviser’s art, creating something in the moment that will stay with you forever.

Mar 2

Alice’s adventures on the astral plane

As one of those who didn’t pay enough attention to Alice Coltrane during the days when she was making what is now acclaimed as a series of classic albums, I welcome Andy Beta’s Cosmic Music. The first full-length biography of the pianist, harpist and composer, subtitled “The Life, Art and Transcendence of Alice Coltrane”, will no doubt help to ensure that she is remembered and properly valued in all her dimensions.

Born Alice McLeod in Detroit in 1937, she studied classical piano and orchestral percussion before becoming a member of the vibraphonist Terry Gibbs’s combo. In Paris in 1960, where she arrived with her first husband, the singer Kenny Hagood, she heard John Coltrane playing with Miles Davis, befriended Bud Powell, and was filmed for French TV at the Blue Note club in a group with the tenorist Lucky Thompson and the drummer Kenny Clarke. Watching the clips from that show, in which she plays a gorgeous “Lover Man” and a hectic “Strike Up the Band”, you can hear her using gospel figures alongside bebop runs but also injecting the blend with an unusual kind of fluidity, a quality that she took into her second husband’s band in 1965 and thence into her own recordings, particularly in her work on organ and concert harp.

Andy Beta relies heavily on Shankari Adams’s Portrait of Devotion and Franya Berkman’s Monument Eternal,.both written after Alice Coltrane’s death in 2007, in which the authors which analyse the spiritual life of the woman who became known as Swamini Turiyasangitananda. But he also has material of his own gleaned from conversations with such musical associates and friends as Terry Gibbs, the saxophonist Bennie Maupin, the pianist Kirk Lightsey, the trombonist George Bohanon, the bassist Vishnu Wood and Alice’s nephew, the record producer, DJ and rapper Steven Ellison. better known as Flying Lotus, as well as with acolytes from her later years as a spiritual leader.

To get the most from the book, readers may need to come to terms with their feelings about its subject’s religious beliefs. The author clearly buys into the world of swamis and ashrams. He has no problem with reporting the vision of Jesus Christ that appeared to her in the Nile Valley, the occasional bit of astral travelling, a visit from the long-dead Igor Stravinsky, or instructions regularly received from above: “At some point in her meditations for that year, Turiya Coltrane as told directly by the Supreme Lord that she would move to California and establish a Vedantic Center.” Without raising an eyebrow, Beta tells us how, towards the end of her life, her touch could heal those suffering from “an array of maladies: back pain, leg injuries, torn knee cartilage, infertility, multiple sclerosis, coccidoidal meningitis, abnormal growths, injured wrists, scoliosis, and class III ovarian cancer.”

You can pour scorn on this, or you can accept it on its own terms. I choose to accept it as part of the story of an exceptional woman who used the years of her widowhood to give shelter and comfort to others (including Nina Simone), and whose music resonates more widely and profoundly as the years pass. Whatever their spiritual source, the volcanic duet with Rashied Ali’s drums on “The Battle of Armageddon” (from Universal Consciousness, Impulse, 1971) or the rapturous sweep of her setting for strings of “Galaxy in Satchidananda” (World Galaxy, Impulse, 1972) are unlikely ever to lose their power. And the posthumously released vocal music heard on The Ecstatic Music of Alice Coltrane (Luaka Bop, 2017) and Kirtan: Turiya Sings (Impulse, 2021) possesses a beauty of its own.

Cosmic Music is a life story, not a musicological analysis. As such, and despite Beta’s fondness for such verbs as “ideate” and “concertize”, it does its job well. Talking about Infinity, the John Coltrane album released five years after the saxophonist’s death, he also tackles the thorny issue of Alice’s decision to overdub a string section, harp and other instruments on to her late husband’s original tracks. “It is the lone album,” he writes, “to offer a tantalising glimpse of what a truly equal John and Alice Coltrane album might have sounded like.”

Again, there will be those who dismiss such a claim. But, all these years later, listening again to the music Alice recorded under her own name, and particularly the pieces featuring strings, can help us to understand why her husband welcomed her into his band: her music contains elements of non-western ritual, just as his came to do in his last couple of years. This displeased many of those who admired the technical rigour of the music made in the period between Giant Steps and A Love Supreme but who could not stomach the apparent leap into the unknown that began with Ascension and was truncated by his death. Inviting other musicians to share the stage on a permanent, temporary or ad hoc basis, as he did in those last years, was a symbol of his desire to expand his universe. For him, the music had become something greater than itself. For Alice, too. Her story is certainly worth reading.

* Andy Beta’s Cosmic Music is published by White Rabbit Books on March 19. The photograph of Alice Coltrane in India is from The Ecstatic Music of Alice Coltrane and was taken by Radha Botofasina.

Feb 27

3 Comments

Music for our time

The sun came out for a couple of days this week, and the birds started singing: a reminder towards the end of a long winter that nature survives, however threatened. And so must hope, whatever we hear in the news. It’s a good time to listen to Maria Schneider’s new piece, which is called “American Crow” and comes with a message from its composer:

We’re living through a crisis of listening, shaped by increasingly curated perspectives that widen the space between us. Jazz teaches us something different — that listening, responding, and collaborating are at the center of its beauty. I believe those same qualities lie at the heart of a healthy democracy. In that spirit, as we mark the 250th year of America’s democracy, these are the values I wanted to share through music.

You can hear the piece above, or as one of two compositions that make up the Schneider orchestra’s new EP. “American Crow” functions as a kind of concerto for the marvellously expressive trumpet of Mike Rodriguez. The other piece, “A World Lost”, is a fine feature for Jeff Miles’s equally impressive guitar. Both performances are full of Schneider’s beautifully personal manipulation of the standard big-band format, with the addition of an accordionist, Julien Labro, and the use of Scott Robinson’s contrabass clarinet and George Flynn’s contrabass trombone to deepen the emotional range.

Mike Rodriguez’s presence here reminds me that he was also a member of the late Charlie Haden’s Liberation Music Orchestra. With “American Crow”, as with her previous album, Data Lords (2020), Maria Schneider seems to have quietly picked up Haden’s baton. Some protest music needs to scream in order to make its point. This is at the other end of the spectrum: a protest music that, by making its point through a demonstration of humanity, is no less eloquent.

* The Maria Schneider Orchestra’s American Crow EP is available here: https://www.artistshare.com/Projects/Experience/1/539/1/Maria-Schneider-American-Crow-A-Narrative-in-Notes-and-Frames

Feb 17

9 Comments

Hootin’ ‘n Tootin’

One of the things I loved about the Blue Note label in the early ’60s was its founders’ appreciation of the sort of basic, blues-rooted jazz to be found in the black clubs of the era, almost always featuring a Hammond organ, a guitar and a tenor saxophone. Jimmy Smith, Grant Green and Stanley Turrentine would be the most obvious examples of successful Blue Note artists in that genre, but I was also beguiled by the ones that didn’t reach their level of sales and celebrity. – or indeed, as in the case of a tenor player named Fred Jackson, any celebrity at all.

Jackson was brought to the label by his fellow tenorist Ike Quebec, who, as well as recording albums of his own, was then also functioning as Blue Note’s A&R man. Jackson made his Blue Note debut on the organist Baby Face Willette’s Face to Face in January 1961; twelve months later he recorded his own album, released later in 1962 under the title Hootin’ ‘n Tootin’. In 1963 and ’64 he appeared on two albums by another organist, ‘Big’ John Patton: the wonderful Along Came John in 1963 and The Way I Feel in 1964.

And that was it. After the session for the second Patton album, on June 19, 1964, Jackson disappeared completely and permanently from the radar screen. Nothing is known about his subsequent life (or, perhaps, death — were he still alive, he would be in his mid-nineties now).

All that we know about him is that he was probably born in 1931, probably in Atlanta, Georgia, and that at the time he recorded for Blue Note he was a member of Lloyd Price’s orchestra, through whose ranks — as with Ray Charles’s band — many fine jazz musicians passed (including John Patton). Jackson was one of those players who could switch with ease between R&B and modern jazz.

The available evidence suggests that he wasn’t what you’d call a great player, merely a very good one. But I’ve always been fond of Hootin’ ‘n Tootin’. It’s the sort of thing I remember one American critic describing as “meat-and-potatoes” jazz: no frills, no trimmings, no culinary experiments. Jackson’s accompanists are the guitarist Willie Jones, the drummer Wilbert Hogan, and, most interestingly, the Detroit organist Earl Van Dyke, best known in his role as a key Motown session man in the 1960s. How he came to be with Jackson at Rudy Van Gelder’s studio in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey on February 5, 1962 has never been explained, but it’s nice to hear the hero of soul music favourites like “All For You” and “6 by 6” in the sort of setting he would have known extremely well from countless gigs in his hometown bars.

The programme consists of seven Jackson compositions, for which the term “originals” would be misleading: they’re mostly variations on the contours of better known jazz tunes, things like Milt Jackson’s “Bags’ Groove” and Nat Adderley’s “Work Song”. This is what was then known as “soul jazz”, full of gospel phrases strained through the bebop format, emphasised by the sound of the Hammond, which started its life as a church instrument. Jackson has a strong tone, a little hoarse at times, not as immediately identifiable as other Blue Note tenorists (Turrentine, Don Wilkerson, Hank Mobley, Wayne Shorter). His solos are always to the point and, as in the slow blues “Southern Exposure”, fit the mood beautifully.

Very much the sort of music that belongs in places with names like the Flame Show Bar and the Thunderbird Lounge, accompanied by the sound of background chatter and clinking glasses, cutting through a fog of cigarette smoke, it’s all well executed and perfectly enjoyable. But when the producer Michael Cuscuna came to reissue the album on CD in 1997, in Blue Note’s Connoisseur series, he was able to raid the archives for seven tracks recorded two months later, for which the same line-up was augmented by the addition of the great bassist Sam Jones, whose previous work for Blue Note had included an appearance on Cannonball Adderley’s classic Somethin’ Else in 1958. And those seven tracks, intended to form a second album, tell a slightly different story.

Perhaps it’s the presence of Jones, or maybe Quebec and the Blue Note co-founder and producer Alfred Lion asked Jackson for more variety. Whatever the stimulus, these seven compositions move into adjacent territories, including straight bebop on “Stretchin’ Out”, where Jackson proves his mastery of that most demanding idiom, delivering a fluent and well argued solo full of imagination and surprise. A lovely blues ballad called “Teena” is actually a barely disguised rewrite of “St James’ Infirmary”, a neatly arranged version of “Joshua For the Battle of Jericho” is retitled “Egypt Land”, and a medium-up 12-bar called “On the Spot” together make this session a more varied and sophisticated affair. An unidentified percussionist on two Latin-inflected tracks might be Garvin Masseaux, who played the shekere on Quebec’s album Soul Samba a few months later.

According to Cuscuna, Alfred Lion seems to have concluded that 35 minutes of music was not enough to make an album (although Hootin’ ‘n Tootin’ was only a minute or two longer). More likely is that the first album didn’t achieve enough sales to justify a follow-up. Blue Note often did well with 45s aimed at jukebox and radio play (such as Patton’s “The Silver Meter” and Lee Morgan’s “The Sidewinder”), but I can find no reference to a 45 extracted from Jackson’s first album (** I’m wrong — see Comments).

Hootin’ ‘n Tootin’ is getting another reissue this spring, in Blue Note’s Tone Poet series, which features the original album in remastered 180g vinyl form, encased in a gatefold sleeve with extra session photos by label’s other co-founder, Francis Wolff, who had a way of lighting musicians that turned them — and their button-down shirts and heavyweight shawl-necked cardigans — into after-hours icons. The latest reissue won’t have is those extra seven tracks, which give a broader view of Fred Jackson’s gifts. But whatever his unknown fate, it’s nice to see him back in the catalogue.

* The photo of Fred Jackson was taken during the Hootin’ ‘n Tootin’ session and is included in The Blue Note Years: The Jazz Photography of Framcis Wolff, published by Rizzoli in 1995. The Tone Poet reissue of the album is released on April 3.

Jan 16

22 Comments

‘Sue me if I play it wrong…’**

Within a very short time last night, it was apparent that my pal Martin Colyer and I were probably the only people in a packed Ronnie Scott’s who were seeing the night’s featured attraction for the first time. The enthusiasm aroused by the Royal Scammers’ versions of the Steely Dan repertoire, from the opening “Night by Night” to the closing “Aja”, was so warm and immediate that it could only have come from committed fans.

Fans of the compositions of Donald Fagen and Walter Becker, of course, but also of the 14-piece band formed by the twin Stacey brothers, Paul on lead guitar and Jeremy on drums, with two clear intentions: to pay homage to the source and to have a lot of fun in the process. It was the way every member of the band seemed to buy into those ideas that made the whole thing fly, for the musicians and the audience alike.

Let’s name them all now, these people charged with summoning the spirits not only of Fagen and Becker but of their cadre of great session musicians: Andy Caine (vocals, rhythm guitar), Sumudu Jayatilaka (backing vocals, keyboard, tambourine), Louise Marshall, Bryan Chambers (backing vocals), Dominic Glover (trumpet), Trevor Mires (trombone), Andy Ross (tenor saxophone), Jim Hunt (tenor and baritone saxophones), Dave Arch, Gary Sanctuary (keyboards), Robin Mullarkey (bass guitar) and Pete Eckford (percussion). I was amused to see that they lined up across the stage at Ronnie’s in exactly the way the actual Steely Dan did/do, as seen on the cover of Northeast Corridor, their 2021 live album.

I’ve mentioned before that I’m allergic to tributes and recreations, but there are exceptions. And sometimes a literal recreation is the only way to go. I mean, are you going to come up with anything better than Wayne Shorter’s astonishing tenor improvisation on “Aja”? Jim Hunt played it note for note, and it was beautiful. Ditto Pete Christlieb’s tenor solo on “Deacon Blues”, replicated by Andy Ross. As much as the precision, it depends on the intention and the emotion with which it’s done.

Interestingly, when the “real” Steely Dan play “Aja” now, Walt Weiskopf, their excellent tenorist, is allowed free rein to make up his own solo in the space once occupied by Shorter. But I don’t think that’s what required from the Royal Scammers. The first improvised solo I ever learnt off by heart was by the cornetist Bobby Hackett on Glenn Miller’s 1941 Bluebird recording of “String of Pearls”; if I went to see a modern Miller tribute band today and the cornetist didn’t reproduce Hackett’s improvisation note for note, I’d feel cheated. On the other hand, when the American band known as Mostly Other People Do the Killing saw fit to record an exact replica of Kind of Blue a few years ago, as a post-modern gesture, it felt like an insult — to the original and its creators, to the listener, and to the spirit of the music itself.

The spirit of Steely Dan was certainly alive and flourishing at Ronnie Scott’s last night, in a setting of wonderful musicianship. Andy Caine, facing the challenge of assuming Fagen’s voice, took two or three songs to warm up but then sang brilliantly, giving full value to two of my favourite couplets: “I cried when I wrote this song / Sue me if I play it wrong”** (“Deacon Blues”) and “Chinese music always sets me free / Angular banjos sound good to me” (“Aja”).

There spirited renderings of early songs like “Reelin’ in the Years” and “Rikki Don’t Lose that Number”, less obvious ones like “Night by Night” and “Pretzel Logic”, and ones with sudden fiendish modulations like “Green Earrings”. Wherever the original ended in a studio fadeout, the Staceys devised an interesting and wholly fitting coda.

There were also four great songs from Gaucho: “Babylon Sisters”, the always strangely spinetingling “Hey Nineteen”, “Time Out of Mind” and the title track, which actually improved on the original by subtly dialling up the mariachi inflection in the horns. The three backing singers delivered the chorus bit of “Gaucho” with such thrilling intensity that I noticed Martin spontaneously applauding not just on the first iteration but the reprise: “Who is the gaucho, amigo? / Why is he standing in your spangled leather poncho / And your elevator shoes? / Bodacious cowboys such as your friend will never be welcome here / High in the Custerdome.”

It occurred to me that tributes and recreations work where the original template is mostly established, i.e. composed. Ellington’s music can continue to be performed successfully because, although he wrote for his soloists, the settings were fixed. It’s the same with Fagen and Becker. You can play around quite happily with their wonderfully inventive, literate, cryptic and infernally catchy songs (as Chris Ingham does with his quintet) but you can also decide that playing them as written is the best homage. Which is what the Royal Scammers do, quite brilliantly.

* The Royal Scammers play two shows tonight and tomorrow and one on Sunday at Ronnie Scott’s. All are sold out. The photograph was taken last night by Tatiana Gorilovsky.

** This is not the correct lyric (see Comments). But it’s how I heard it 48 years ago and it’s how I hear it still. Yes, I’m wrong, but — sorry, Walt & Don — I prefer my version.

Jan 14

11 Comments

Miles at the Plugged Nickel

Sixty years ago, in the week before Christmas 1965, Teo Macero recorded the Miles Davis Quintet over two nights at a club called the Plugged Nickel on North Wells Street in Chicago’s Old Town district, nowadays known as the Near North Side. That December it was 15 months since Wayne Shorter had become the group’s tenor saxophonist, joining the pianist Herbie Hancock, the bassist Ron Carter and the drummer Tony Williams to complete what would be known as Davis’s Second Great Quintet.

Extracts from those evenings were released on a couple of LPs in Japan in 1976, and then worldwide in 1982, but it wasn’t until the 30th anniversary, in 1995, that everything from the two nights — three sets from the first night, four from the second, seven and a half hours of music in all — was packaged into a slipcased seven-CD box. Which was when it became clear how important a place it occupied not just in Davis’s discography but in the history of jazz. Now, after many years in which used copies of the set fetched extraordinary prices, it has been restored to general availability.

No jazz group has ever taken the use of pre-existing formats (head arrangements, soloist and rhythm) and materials (composed melodies, chord or modes, rhythms) to such heights of sophistication and simultaneous invention. Ambition was one factor. Davis wanted, as usual, to stay ahead of the competition, and these four young musicians (Williams had left his teens only 10 days earlier) provided not just the fuel but the fire. In return, he set them free. They could go anywhere they wanted. What mattered was that everything they played was the result of listening and responding, not just of moving with the currents but setting up crosscurrents and rip tides and making radical choices between them.

It worked because they were all virtuosi, all innovators, all repositories of the jazz history of their instruments but intent on taking the next step. Where that step took them was to the ultimate iteration of the evolution of small-combo jazz as it had been known for half a century. In their four years together, they achieved something that, in its field, would never be bettered.

Which is not to say, of course, that jazz finished when their work was done. It took on new forms and new challenges, and it remains a living and vital force, existing in dimensions undreamt of 50 years ago. But on these discs you hear the ideal of five musicians moving independently and yet as one, colliding and diverging, slowing down or speeding up, switching the mood in an instant, from the playful to the bone-deep serious, conveying such a remarkable sense of space even when they seem to be jostling and provoking. There is no coasting here: every note counts, wherever it sits in the plan.

The tunes are familiar: “If I Were a Bell”, “Stella by Starlight”, “Walkin'”, “I Fall in Love Too Easily”, “My Funny Valentine”, “Four”, “When I Fall in Love”, “Agitation”, “Round Midnight”, “Milestones”, “The Theme”, “On Green Dolphin Street”, “So What”, “Autumn Leaves”, “All Blues”, “Yesterdays”. For fans of pre-electric Miles, that would surely be pretty close to a perfect programme. You hardly notice the breaks between the tunes: it’s like one unbroken journey.

This is a club date, so you get little snatches of incidental conversation and the occasional bit of vocal encouragement. There actually seems to be an argument going on, perhaps at the bar, during the first night’s beautifully pensive version of “When I Fall in Love”; a burst of random applause during the piano solo may be signalling the departure of one of the disputants. That’s OK by me. It’s a reminder that this isn’t a studio session in which the musicians knew they were laying down something destined to become an artefact. Or a formal concert, with a audience seated in rows and a measure of self-consciouness on either side of the footlights.

They were, in the very best sense, making it up as they went along: creating music on the fly, discovering themselves, testing the limits, exploring the music’s inherent elasticity, living on the leading edge, leaning way over it with no safety net, and exhibiting the ultimate in the improviser’s ideal of relaxed concentration. Pure exhilaration, then and now, from start to finish, and utterly essential.

* The Complete Miles Davis Live at the Plugged Nickel is reissued by Columbia Records, the same music now reformatted on eight CDs, with new packaging — individual cardboard sleeves rather than jewel cases — at around £69. The uncredited photo is from the original brochure.

Dec 21

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At Blackheath Halls

Yesterday, the eve of the winter solstice, turned out to be a good one for music. Looking for a Christmas present, I found myself in a clothes shop where the sound system was playing Al Green’s version of Kris Kristofferson’s “For the Good Times”, making me wonder for a moment if there had ever been a finer performance by a soul singer of a country ballad. Then, while I was having a cup of coffee, the café’s playlist surprised me by including Bob B. Soxx and the Blue Jeans’ soaring “The Bells of St Mary”, from Phil Spector’s Christmas Album, a piece of art which seems — unlike Gesualdo’s madrigals and Caravaggio’s paintings — to have been widely cancelled in the present era.

In the evening I took myself to Blackheath Halls, a really splendid venue for music, to hear The Westbrook Blake, a suite of pieces which has been in constant evolution since in 1971, when Adrian Mitchell invited Mike Westbrook to provide musical settings for some of William Blake’s poems, as part of a piece for the National Theatre called Tyger.

I’ve written about it before, here and here, so I won’t repeat myself, except to say that it’s one of the glories of contemporary English music, and the chance to see any performance of it is to be grabbed with some urgency. Last night the two wonderfully expressive solo singers (as always, Kate Westbrook and Phil Minton) and the five-piece band were joined by the 30 or so singers of the Blackheath Halls Community Singers, directed by Paul Ayers.

While Mike Westbrook’s place at the piano was taken by the brilliant Matthew Bourne, the composer himself took the stage in a wheelchair, from which he recited a couple of Blake’s more trenchant poems with clarity and feeling. The spectacular solos from the accordion of Karen Street, the violin of Billy Thompson and the alto saxophone of Chris Biscoe were more than worthy of the spontaneous applause they drew. It was an evening of proper music-making, full of communal warmth, often thought-provoking, and generally good for the soul.

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