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Posts from the ‘Jazz’ Category

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.

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.

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