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Posts from the ‘Jazz’ Category

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.

May 26

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Miles at 100

There’s so much Miles Davis around just now, in celebration of today’s centenary of his birth on May 26, 1926. There are stage plays (I went to one in Southwark, starring the trumpeter Jay Phelps), orchestral concerts at the Cheltenham Jazz Festival and the BBC Proms starring Guy Barker and Ambrose Akimusire respectively, tribute albums like A Supreme Blue by Nicholas Payton and Butcher Brown, and audiophile editions of landmarks such as Birth of the Cool and the soundtrack to Lous Malle’s Ascenseur pur l’echafaud. And there’s Radio Three’s composer of the week slot, presented by Kate Molleson, which began very promisingly on Monday. Good. He deserves it all.

I’ve written a lot about him in the past (including a couple of books), and although I want to mark this occasion, I don’t really have anything new to add to the debate. So here’s an unpublished photo I took of him at Montreux on July 7, 1991, during rehearsals for the following day’s concert, when he played Gil Evans’s historic charts in front of a specially assembled large ensemble conducted by Quincy Jones.

He didn’t look strong and his playing was fragile, but the spirit was still there in his eyes and his manner. He wanted to make it good, of course, particularly after overcoming his lifelong aversion to looking in the rear-view mirror. Just under three months later, in a hospital in Santa Monica, he died from a combination of factors, including bronchial pneumonia and a cerebral haemorrhage. He was 65.

I fell in love with his music when I heard “Milestones” — the one with Cannonball Adderley, John Coltrane, Red Garland, Paul Chambers and Philly Joe Jones — at my school’s jazz society in, I think, 1960. An older boy had brought it on a UK Fontana EP for us to absorb while clustered around the gramophone. Pretty soon I came to think of what it contains in five minutes and 42 seconds as a rare example of perfection in art, and I’ve never seen a reason to resile from that opinion. The one little trumpet fluff on the bridge of the final theme statement is the dropped stitch in the Persian rug, included by the weaver in acknowledgment that true perfection belongs only to Allah.

Well, I don’t really know about that. But if I could take only one piece of music with me, whether on the next road trip or the final voyage to eternity, that would still be it.

May 12

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A farewell to Mike Westbrook

Summarising the long life and very eventful career of Mike Westbrook in a maximum of five minutes was not the easiest assignment I’ve ever been given. But that was the necessary limit placed on the tribute I was invited to deliver during the great composer and bandleader’s funeral in Exeter last week. The crematorium chapel was packed, and the music included the singing by the congregation of “Jerusalem” to the accompaniment of Karen Street’s accordion and of another William Blake lyric, “I See Thy Form”, by Phil Minton with Matthew Bourne at the piano. Here’s what I had to say.

For many years – in fact from the 1920s through the 1950s – the principal job of the British jazz musician was to learn the language of the great American originals and absorb it thoroughly enough to be able to produce a creditable facsimile.

But in the 1960s, something different happened. A group of young British-based musicians suddenly appeared with a new set of aims. They admired the American masters just as deeply as their predecessors had, but they were looking for something more. They were after a language of their own, an approach that would enable them to create a kind of jazz that wasn’t simply in thrall to someone else’s tradition.

From the moment Mike Westbrook arrived in London in 1963 and formed a new band, it became obvious that there was an unusual freshness and originality about his music. Mike’s personal heroes included Duke Ellington and Charles Mingus, but he managed to do what all great jazz musicians do, which is to move beyond his idols in order to find his own voice.

Like his heroes, he had the priceless gift of creating settings that brought the best out of his carefully chosen soloists, from John Surman and Mike Osborne in those early bands through countless other distinguished players.

The scale of Mike’s ambition as a composer became clear after he signed his first recording contract in 1967 and began writing extended works. They included the epic anti-war piece Marching Song and then Metropolis, written with the aid of an Arts Council bursary that enabled him to stop working as an art teacher and become a full-time musician.

Those longer pieces led to others – like Earthrise, a theatre piece produced in 1970 in collaboration with John Fox and the Welfare State. He wrote Citadel/Room 315 in 1974, at the time he met Kate, who became his wife and collaborator on pieces that made use of her voice, her lyric writing and their shared interest in cabaret, musical theatre, and poetry. That led in the 1980s to the vast multi-hued canvases of The Cortège and London Bridge Is Broken Down, with texts from Rimbaud, Lorca, Goethe, Sassoon and others, and to the suite called On Duke’s Birthday, a marvellous homage to Ellington.

At the other end of the scale came the Trio, with Kate and Chris Biscoe, and the Brass Band, a combo-sized unit that appeared at street festivals around continental Europe – where it has to be said he was often more profoundly appreciated than in his home country.

He was astonishingly prolific. There was a jazz cabaret piece called Mama Chicago, and several operas, including one based on Michael Ondaatje’s Comin’ Through Slaughter, and his big-band settings of Rossini, performed first in Italy and then at a BBC Prom concert in 1992. And much, much more.

In later years, he formed the Uncommon Orchestra and the smaller Band of Bands, featuring musicians from Devon, including one or two he’d played with in his earliest days. Towards the end of his life also gave spellbinding solo piano concerts in which he could wander gently through pieces from all the idioms he loved, exploring their affinities.

Mike’s legacy is one of great richness and diversity. But perhaps the most enduring of all his pieces will be his settings of William Blake’s poems. The Westbrook Blake began life in 1971 when the poet Adrian Mitchell invited him to provide the music for a Blake-themed show called Tyger.

The pieces then took on a life of their own, becoming a classic of contemporary English music, delivered in all sorts of places right up until last Christmas, when there was a very moving final performance with Mike at Blackheath Halls. Something in Blake spoke to Mike, and then spoke through him.

I wouldn’t want to slight any other musician, from any era, when I say that Mike’s place as the pre-eminent composer and bandleader of British jazz is hard to dispute. As is his role in enabling jazz made outside America to establish its right to an independent existence.

Most important of all, everything he did was based on a recognition that when a jazz group is working properly, it becomes a model for a decent society: a vehicle for individual expression in full and unselfish collaboration with others. 

How lucky we were to have him.

May 8

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Alex Hawkins at Cafe Oto

Alexander Hawkins played two nights at Cafe Oto this week with his new 11-piece band before spending two days recording the pieces they played, to which he gives the title Willow Music. If the set I heard on Tuesday is any guide, the resulting album will be worth considerable study.

The opening bars of the first piece the group played made me smile. For a minute I thought that I’d stepped back in time to the Royal Roost in 1948, and here was the Miles Davis Nonet — which became known as the Birth of the Cool band — playing a Gil Evans arrangement of a bebop standard. The feeling didn’t last because the music soon changed into something more identifiably itself, but it was oddly exhilarating while it lasted.

Davis’s nonet was constructed to reflect the range of the human voice, from the top end of the trumpet and the alto saxophone to the bottom of a tuba and a string bass. The Willow Music band achieves a similar spread, but even wider. Here were Alicia Gardener-Trejo on flute, bass flute and bass clarinet; Tom Challenger on flute and alto saxophone; Xhosa Cole on flute and tenor saxophone; George Crowley on flute, tenor saxophone and bass clarinet; Alex Ward on clarinet; Charlotte Keeffe on trumpet; Alex Paxton on trombone; Olivia Hughes on tuba; Neil Charles on bass and Stephen Davis on drums. With Hawkins himself on piano, of course.

With earlier projects, Hawkins has shown himself adept at handling larger ensembles; this one constantly engages the attention through the sheer variety of textures and timbres he draws from it. I was particularly beguiled by a piece that concentrated on the five woodwind players on flutes and clarinets, at first acappella; it reminded me of some of the West Coast recordings of the ’50s by people like Bob Cooper, Bud Shank and Jimmy Giuffre (themselves all inspired by the Birth of the Cool band), but again brought right up into contemporary practice.

It proved to be a perfect platform for soloists who integrate the vocabulary of free jazz into their improvisations. There were outstanding individual contributions, particularly from a rampaging Cole on tenor, the blustery Keeffe and the astonishingly agile Ward, but Challenger, Crowley, Paxton and Gardener-Trejo also made their mark, and there was outstanding work from Hughes, often in unison with Charles, and the infinitely subtle Davis. The composer mostly sat in front of the band, ready to cue and conduct these brand-new pieces when necessary, but he also made the space for some fine piano solos, particularly one on which he used various devices to alter the instrument’s sound, something in which he now specialises.

By the end of a set that lasted well over an hour, I was convinced that Hawkins has come up with something remarkable: a format that encourages him to make new discoveries.

He also has a new album on release, with a different line up. No Nation But Imagination features him on piano, synthesiser and sampler with Nicole Mitchell on flute, Rhodri Davis on harp, Hamid Drake on drums and Matthew Wright on turntables and live sampling. This is a very different sound: an intricately worked open-weave web of softer sounds, with a different balance of composition and arrangement, full of surprises and with a powerful undertow to remove any hint of passivity, and a wonderful gospel-inspired finale. It’s another stage in a remarkable career that is already taking its next step.

* No Nation But Imagination is out now on the Intakt label.

May 2

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The return of Kenny Wheeler

‘What Was’ (from left): Ray Warleigh, Stan Sulzmann, Tony Levin, Kenny Wheeler, John Parricelli, Chris Laurence (photo by Caroline Forbes)

The Toronto-born trumpeter and composer Kenny Wheeler left a big hole when he died in London in 2014, aged 84, after more than 60 years in the UK. A quiet and almost pathologically self-effacing man, he was hugely admired by his peers, who recognised not just the originality of his conception as a player and writer but the quality of his vision, which embraced both purity and open-mindedness. He made the music he wanted to make.

And he hasn’t really gone away. Last year some of his big-band charts were recorded for an album called Some Days Are Better by the Royal Academy of Music’s jazz orchestra and guest soloists, conducted by Nick Smart, Wheeler’s co-biographer; rather wonderfully, it received a Grammy nomination. And there’s also a new album called Vital Spark in which the bassist Dave Holland and the singer Norma Winstone collaborate with the London Vocal Project under Pete Churchill’s direction on performances of Wheeler’s unrecorded settings of poems by Langston Hughes, Stevie Smith, William Blake and Lewis Carroll, with new lyrics by Winstone completing some of Kenny’s late compositions.

Of course many of Wheeler’s own albums, particularly the ECM classics Gnu High (1975), Music for Large and Small Ensembles (1990) and Angel Song (1997), remain available. And now there’s an important new addition to his discography with the appearance of What Was, a sextet album originally recorded by Evan Parker for his Psi label in 1995 at Gateway Studio in Kingston upon Thames and now finely packaged for release.

The line-up is Wheeler on flugelhorn with Ray Warleigh on alto saxophone and flute, Stan Sulzmann on tenor, John Parricelli on guitar, Chris Laurence on double bass and Tony Levin on drums — an A-team of the Canadian’s regular partners. There are seven tracks, amounting to 64 minutes of music, all recorded within a single day in a room that had originally been built by Kingston University as a rehearsal space for the London Sinfonietta before being repurposed as a studio. The sextet sounds both lustrous and sinewy; thanks to the resident engineer, Steve Lowe, the tonal quality and balance are unimpeachable.

As is the music. In the sleeve notes, Sulzmann says this: “It was an old-school recording date where we all turned up on the day, no rehearsals, and we all brought a tune or two to try.” The brilliance of the players ensures that there are few dropped stitches, but the spontaneous nature of the session surely accounts for the freshness that the music radiates.

There are two compositions by Warleigh, two by Sulzmann and one by the pianist Mike Pyne before we reach Wheeler’s own two contributions. It’s fascinating to hear what a difference Parricelli’s imaginative background textures can make to a relatively standard post-bop piece, particularly to Warleigh’s Latin-inflected “Blue Nile”, which draws a fantastically inventive alto solo from the composer — one the finest on record, I’d say, from another figure sadly missed since his death in 2015.

It’s all first-class, until we get to the two Wheeler tunes, where things go up another level again. “What Was” glides teasingly through unpredictable changes, distantly related to the standard “What Is This Thing Called Love”, that provoke these master improvisers into compelling solos, with superlative support from Laurence and Levin, and a marvellous series of exchanges between the flugelhorn and the drummer, wittily leading into a closing statement of “Subconscious-Lee”, Lee Konitz’s take on the same source material. “Kind Folk” is a tune Wheeler returned to in various forms, and is the only previously released track in this set (it appeared in 2003 on Dream Sequence, a Psi album compiled from various Gateway sessions); here it slides in and out of tempo, like water flowing from one pool to another, with Sulzmann in particular benefitting from the reflective mood.

I said there were few dropped stitches. The ones you spot — a tiny hesitation here, a truncated thought there — merely confirm that this music was being made in the moment, with full collective commitment. A precious document indeed.

* What Was is out now on the False Walls label: http://www.falsewalls.co.uk. Some Days Are Better and Vital Spark are on the Greenleaf and Edition labels respectively.

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

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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 most 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.

* 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

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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.

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