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Posts from the ‘Jazz’ Category

Apr 26

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Matana Roberts at the Roundhouse

Matana Roberts did a lot of talking at the Roundhouse last night. A lot more talking than playing, in fact. Alone on the stage, opening the show for Lonnie Holley with an hour-long set, she restricted her soprano saxophone to the occasional short phrase, often prefaced with the words “This is an improvisation.” She has a handsome tone on the straight horn, and an ardent delivery, but nothing was allowed to build or cohere into a greater scheme.

Instead she talked to us, riffing on a variety of topics, from the general reaction to her wild new hair to what a border control officer said about her tattoos. She spoke of a photo she’d seen of a recent protest in which students had barricaded their doors and windows in the way they’d been taught in “active shooter” drills. “I’m from the Mid-West,” she said. “We only had tornado drills.”

That got her talking about protest songs. Soon she was encouraging us to hum a single tonic note in accompaniment as she sang “Wade in the Water” in her pleasant, unemphatic voice. Eventually she persuaded us to join her in “I Shall Not Be Moved”.

She told a story about being invited to play at the Whitney Museum on the day in 2015 when Michelle Obama, her fellow Chicagoan, was opening a new wing designed by Renzo Piano. While the First Lady was doing the ribbon-cutting thing, Matana was invited to perform on the roof, so that her music would cascade down over the ceremony. What she found up there was a detachment of snipers.

“They were surrounding me,” she remembered. “Three of them. And they were kind of happy-go-lucky. They wanted to show me their guns. ‘I don’t want to see your guns!'” When it finished, she watched Michelle Obama being taken away in an armoured vehicle.

“That was really a symbol of America today,” she said. And back she went to her singing and playing and musing, trying to summon the better spirits of our troubled world.

Apr 15

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Sounds for summer

Tall enough to be unmissable in any environment, and with a truly remarkable fashion sense, Shabaka Hutchings had presence from day one of his career. To me, as an observer, that was the concert at the Royal Festival Hall in June 2009 at which he was one of several UK guests with Charlie Haden’s Liberation Music Orchestra (others included Robert Wyatt, Jason Yarde, John Parricelli and Andy Grappy). He had just one solo but when he stepped forward, the sounds coming from his tenor saxophone commanded everyone’s attention.

Since then, we’ve heard him with Sons of Kemet, The Comet Is Coming, the Ancestors and Louis Moholo-Moholo’s Five Blokes, and in a reinterpretation of Coltrane’s A Love Supreme at the Church of Sound a few weeks ago which I was very sorry to miss. And now he has enough presence to allow him to drop his surname and become just Shabaka.

He’s also dropped the saxophone, which is more of a surprise, in order to study the flute — specifically the Japanese shakuhachi and other iterations, including the Andean quena and the Slavic svirel. His new album — titled Perceive Its Beauty, Acknowledge Its Grace — is evidence of this turn of interest.

It’s a radical departure from anything he’s given us before. A series of sketches deploys varying personnel, including the pianists Nduduzo Makhathini and Jason Moran, the guitarist Dave Okumu, the singer Lianne La Havas, Moses Sumney, Laraaji and ESKA, the harpists Brandee Younger and Charles Overton, the drummers Marcus Gilmore and Nasheet Waits, the speakers Saul Williams, Miguel Atwood-Ferguson and Anum Iyupo, the rapper Elucid, the percussionist Carlos Niño and the bassists Esperanza Spalding and Tom Herbert.

That’s an impressive line-up, but as you listen to the album you’re never really thinking of individuals or their virtuosity. In that sense it’s a quite different experience from that of listening to a “jazz album”. But neither is it a kind of New Age tapestry of sound, slipping by without disturbance, merely a bit of aural decoration.

It has an overall charm and moments of great and singular beauty, too, such as the shakuhachi improvisation against Overton’s harp and the celestial layered voices of Sumney on “Insecurities”, La Havas’s vocal reverie on “Kiss Me Before I Forget”, or Spalding’s springy bass behind Elucid’s rap on “Body to Inhabit”, but it also has depth, and not just in the occasional verbal passages, which are carefully integrated into the quilt of sound. The overall impression is what counts, and somehow that goes beyond words.

The album contains one snatch of tenor saxophone, on a track called “Breathing”, in which Rajni Swaminathan’s mridangam — a Carnatic double-ended hand drum — backs first Shabaka’s treated and looped flutes, then his clarinet, and finally his saxophone, which briefly erupts in a gentle squall with an intonation recalling the great Ethiopian tenorist Getatchew Mekuria.

That little hint of Ethiopian music sent me to a new release in the name of Emahoy Tsege Mariam Gebru, who died this time last year at the age of 99. Born in Addis Ababa, she studied violin in Switzerland as a child, worked as a civil servant and sang for Haile Selassie, was imprisoned by the Italian occupiers during the Second World War, and spent a post-war decade as a nun in a hilltop monastery. The arrival of a new regime forced her to flee to Jerusalem, where she spent the rest of her life in an Ethiopian Orthodox convent and composed music for piano, organ, and various ensembles while running a foundation to encourage music education among children in her native land and elsewhere.

Like Mekuria, she had a volume of the producer Francis Falceto’s Ethiopiques series devoted to her music in 2006, and in the last couple of years there have been more albums on the Mississippi label. The latest is called Souvenirs, a collection of her songs apparently recorded between 1977 and 1985. It’s a primitive recording: the piano sounds like a poorly maintained upright and her voice was probably recorded on the same microphone, in a room that was almost certainly not a recording studio. But that does nothing to diminish the appeal of these songs, with titles such as “Where Is the Highway of Thought?” and “Like the Sun Shines on Meadows”, whose vocal melodies are doubled by the pianist’s right hand against left-hand figurations assembled from scraps of blues and rhumba and gospel tunes.

What’s so appealing, almost mesmerising, about this music? I think it’s the combination of transparent simplicity (and sincerity) with the unexpected guile of the rhythmic undertow, which is always playing appealing tricks on the western ear. There’s something about the distinctive melodic shapes and phrase lengths that is special to this kind of Ethiopian music, springing from some deeper root.

Something else to add pleasure to this summer is After a Pause, the new album of acoustic duo music by two brilliant Welsh musicians, the guitarist Toby Hay and the bassist and cellist Aidan Thorne. I got interested in Hay when he was filming himself outdoors playing ragas during the first Covid-19 lockdown in 2020 and putting the results on YouTube, and wrote a bit more about him when he released some duets recorded in an old chapel with his fellow guitarist David Ian Roberts later that same spring.

I try to avoid talking about what musicians are doing in terms of the work of other musicians, but I suppose a simple — and, I hope, enticing — way of describing the scope of these duets is to imagine what Davy Graham and Danny Thompson might have got up to if they were both in their prime in the 2020s and were able to spend three days together in a studio with no distractions, enhancing their compositions and improvisations with a sparing but highly effective use of overdubbing and electronics.

After living with this album for a few weeks, I’ve come to appreciate not just its surface beauty but the way it reveals more of itself and its spiritual essence the closer you listen. The 12-string arpeggios and bowed bass of the opener are a call to the attention that is never wasted as the music blooms and glows through 10 shortish but unhurried pieces, trajectories shifting and densities varying considerably from bare-bones to near-orchestral (on “Burden” or “Eclipse”) but mood sustained. The brief solo piano coda is a lovely way to finish.

A light shines through these three albums. I’ve a feeling they’re going to be among the summer’s best companions.

* Shabaka’s Perceive Its Beauty, Acknowledge Its Grace is on the Impulse! label. Emahoy Tsege Mariam Gebru’s Souvenirs is on Mississippi Records. Toby Hay and Aidan Thorne’s After a Pause is on Cambrian Records. Links here:

https://spibaig.bandcamp.com/album/perceive-its-beauty-acknowledge-its-grace

https://emahoytsegemariamgebru.bandcamp.com/album/souvenirs

https://cambrianrecords.bandcamp.com/

Apr 5

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The Necks at Cafe Oto

“We’ve never really been an emotional band,” Lloyd Swanton observed drily after the first set on the last of the Necks’ four nights at Cafe Oto in London this week, “but it seems to be creeping in.”

I’d been trying to tell him, somewhat incoherently, how moved I’d been by what they’d just played, and in particular how it seemed to express something about the current state of the world. His reflexive response indicated that what he and his colleagues in the Australian trio do is principally about the notes, about the process of three musicians improvising together with no preset material and certainly with no programmatic content in mind. Which is not to say that listening to them isn’t an emotional experience. It is, almost invariably, but the emotions they generate are usually non-specific.

To me, at least, it seemed that there was something different about Thursday’s first set. It started out normally enough, after they and the audience had settled, with one member — Swanton, on this occasion — breaking the silence. As he plucked an isolated note on his double bass, repeating it and echoing it an octave down, sometimes switching to his bow, and initially with long pauses, Tony Buck joined in with mallets gently rolling around his tom-toms and cymbals, followed by Chris Abrahams picking out pensive Moorish figures in the middle-upper octaves of the piano.

For a while, not much seemed to be happening. No surprise there, necessarily. Later Buck said that he’d worried it had started out “a bit washy”. But in 20 years of attending their performances I’ve learnt to wait, to show the kind of patience as a listener that they show as players, in the knowledge that the surprise will come. In fact, they are the proof that the sound of surprise can take emerge slowly, by gradual accretion.

This time the process of accretion led to something extraordinary. As the playing of all three grew busier, the textures thickened, the spaces closed and the volume increased, all of it occurring almost imperceptibly, you began to feel that you were hearing things: bells, cries, gunfire. It was an illusion. They weren’t there, and neither was anyone trying to produce them. But somehow they were present — for me, anyway — in the harmonics reflecting off the piano lid, the scrabbling and keening of the bass, and the hard crack of the bass drum against the overlapping splashes of the cymbals.

Eventually it reached a pitch of intensity that was sustained for maybe 15 minutes before being gradually wound down through a collective diminuendo into silence once again. And in those 15 minutes I couldn’t help replaying the images we’ve been seeing on the TV news every night for months — images of buildings, streets, whole cities lying in ruins, of the dead being counted and the living in flight, the sort of total war we may stupidly have believed was safely consigned to a distant past.

That’s not, I’m sure, what the members of the Necks were thinking of while they were summoning the music into being. It’s more the sort of thing the pianist Vijay Iyer had in mind when, with the bassist Linda May Han Oh and the drummer Tyshawn Sorey, he recorded a new trio album whose title, Compassion, explicitly indicates its theme. “Music is always about, animated by, and giving expression to the world around us: people, relations, circumstances, revelations,” Iyer writes in the sleeve note, describing the responsibility, as he sees it, of making art in a time of suffering.

I’ve heard the Necks play music unafraid of ugliness before (a hair-raising triple-forte set at Café Oto in 2013 stands out in the memory), but never anything in which the kind of responses they normally evoke — including but not restricted to euphoria and elevation — were so strikingly replaced by this very different kind of transcendence, a sustained howl expressing something beyond words yet somehow very specific.

So that was the fifth of the six sets I heard them play this week, and the sixth was, as usual, quite different. Abrahams opened it with a reversion to the sort of thing that provokes the use of adjectives like “luminous” and “lambent”. But again there was a surprise when the piece evolved into an essay in the use of asynchronous rhythms, a field they’ve opened up in recent years, in which each one establishes his own pulse or metre and, without forfeiting closeness of listening to the others, maintains it as the piece develops. At its best, it leads to a kind of higher interplay — and this was the practice at its very best, creating a rhythmic maelstrom that activated a very different response in the audience.

All a long way from the sort of passive music for Zen meditation with which they are sometimes erroneously associated, and irrefutable evidence of their commitment, now extending well into its fourth decade, to a constant self-regeneration of which we are the fortunate beneficiaries.

* The Necks continue their European tour at Peggy’s Skylight in Nottingham on Monday (already sold out) and the Tung Auditorium in Liverpool on Tuesday, April 8 and 9 respectively. Their most recent album, Travel, was released in 2022 on the Northern Spy label. Compassion, by Vijay Iyer, Linda May Han Oh and Tyshawn Sorey, was released earlier this year by ECM.

Mar 31

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Ishiguro, long ago

A typical day in the A&R department at Island Records’ London headquarters in November 1975. Four or five people coming in to play their demo tapes to me or my assistant, Howard Thompson, in the semi-basement office in a beautiful stucco house in St Peter’s Square, W6. A lunchtime meeting with Phil Collins, a familiar face from the early days of Brand X, before they went off to sign with Charisma. The early evening rehearsal of a band called the Rockits, evidently a Muff Winwood project. And a note to go and see the still-unsigned Roogalator, with their great American guitarist Danny Adler, at the Kensington pub near the Olympia exhibition halls.

At four o’clock that day there was an appointment with “Ishiguro, K”, bringing a tape for us to hear, evidently from Guildford. Sadly, I have no clear memory of the man or his songs. What I do know is that he would go on publish the first of his eight novels, A Pale View of Hills, in 1982, win the Whitbread Prize for An Artist of the Floating World in 1986, the Booker Prize for The Remains of the Day in 1989, and the Nobel Prize in literature in 2017, all of this topped by a knighthood in 2018. So I think one could say that, just a couple of weeks past his 21st birthday and a couple of months into the first year of his undergraduate studies at the University of Kent, Kazuo Ishiguro negotiated what is nowadays known as a sliding-doors moment with some success.

I found that diary entry a couple of years ago, while looking for something else. It came back into my mind while reading the introduction to The Summer We Crossed Europe in the Rain, a book of Ishiguro’s lyrics, written over the last couple of decades for the London-based American jazz singer Stacey Kent.

“I’ve built a reputation as a writer of stories, but I started out writing songs,” he writes, before going on to describe an apprenticeship influenced by Leonard Cohen, Joni Mitchell, Bob Dylan, Robert Johnson, Jimmy Webb, Tom Jobim, Hank Williams, Hoagy Carmichael, Cole Porter and many others. He failed in his original ambition to become a successful singer-songwriter, but what’s interesting is the degree to which he believes his eventual mastery of writing fiction was shaped by his early efforts with music, which led him to think that the trick was not to prioritise getting a grip on his readers but rather to find a way of engaging their interest at a different and perhaps more lasting level.

“A song lasts only a few minutes,” he writes. “Its impact can’t afford to reside just in what happens during the moment of direct contact. A song lives or dies by its ability to infiltrate the listener’s emotions and memory, and, like a parasite, take up long-term residence, ready to come to the fore in moments of joy, grief, exhilaration, heartbrteak, whatever. No one aspires to write a song that catches the attention only while it’s being heard, then gets forgotten. That’s not how songs work.”

What he identifies is “something in the unresolved, incomplete quality of so many well-loved songs that’s significant here. In the world of prose fiction, there’s a strong impulse to achieve completeness; to tie every knot, answer every question, to leave no loose ends hanging. By contrast, in the world of songs, there’s a much lower bar when it comes to literal sense-making. The tiny amount of words available, the internal logic of the melody, the emotional content imposed by chords and chord sequences mean that the ability of a song to connect had little to do with, say, convincing psychological back stories or even the clear readability of the songs unfolding before us. It occurs to me that good songs may haunt the mind not despite their incompleteness, but because of it…”

The whole thing is worth reading, as are the 16 lyrics reproduced in the book, beautifully illustrated by the Italian artist Bianca Bagnarelli in a bande dessinée style. If the occasional specificity of places and film references recalls Clive James’s efforts in a similar direction (mentions of Casablanca and Indochine, Les Invalides, “some tango in Macao”, “Gabin / Hooded eyes / A slow Gitanes / Weary deserter on the run”), the subtlety of the emotional engagement is closer to that of Fran Landesman, the writer of “The Ballad of the Sad Young Men” and “Spring Can Really Hang You Up the Most”. Ishiguro’s lyrics are sophisticated without being smart, precise but leaving intriguing gaps; they bear reading on the page, and their effect — like that of his mature prose — can linger in the mind.

As I said, I have no real memory of what happened on that Wednesday in 1975 when “Ishiguro, K” came by. It can’t have had any effect on his destiny. But I hope we were nice to him.

* Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Summer We Crossed Europe in the Rain is published by Faber & Faber. Stacey Kent’s albums Breakfast on the Morning Tram and The Changing Lights, which contained some of the early fruits of their collaboration, set to music by Kent’s husband, the saxophonist and flautist Jim Tomlinson, were released in 2007 and 2013 respectively on the Blue Note label.

Mar 26

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New sounds in the Round

Mejedi Owusu (left) with his quintet at Jazz in the Round

There’s been a bit of a kerfuffle at London’s music conservatoires in recent days over an email from a teacher claiming that white students in the jazz departments are disadvantaged by the preferences given to fellow students who are black. The teacher in question — and I won’t name him — is an eminent white musician in his sixties. He claims, in passing, that his own career has been hindered by discrimination in favour of black musicians, and it would not be hard to imagine that this sense of grievance may lie at the heart of his more general complaints.

These include the suggestions that because so few black students study classical music, a disproportionate number are allowed into the jazz courses in order to meet overall equality and diversity quotas within the institutions, and that white bandleaders employ black musicians at the expense of superior white candidates simply because their presence helps them get gigs and grants.

Anyway, his classes at Trinity Laban, the Guildhall and the Royal Academy of Music have been boycotted and he is currently at home on sick leave. While his supporters have been disparaging the students as woke snowflakes and getting up a petition to demand his reinstatement, his critics have set up a counter-petition calling for his permanent removal.

My view is that what he had to say in the email is nonsense, and dangerous nonsense at that. Towards him personally, I’m old enough to feel a kind of sorrow tinging the hot anger with which his students have understandably responded. No doubt he thinks that he was smply being honest. But there had to be a better, wiser alternative to creating divisions where none should exist.

The success and visibility of young musicians of colour coming through the conservatoires and Tomorrow’s Warriors and similar schemes around the country in the last few years, working alongside their white contemporaries while bringing a new audience to the music, has been the healthiest collective phenomenon I can remember in six decades of listening to British jazz. Black musicians over-represented in jazz? About time, is all I can say.

As if to prove the point, last night’s edition of Jazz in the Round at the Cockpit Theatre in North London was opened, as is the custom at the monthly series, by a group of young musicians. This was a quintet let by the trumpeter Mejedi Owusu, who is 18 years old and a student at Trinity Laban. The line-up was completed by others from his cohort: Will Coode on alto and tenor saxophones, Chris Outhwaite on piano, Kielan Sheard on bass and Sacha Harlan on drums. They played three Owusu originals, and as they tore into the first of them, a jet-propelled piece titled “Paranoia”, every ear in the place was pinned back. For a minute the scalding trumpet-and-alto unisons allowed us to feel what it must have been like to be ringside at Birdland in the early 50s.

The second piece was a likeable composition called “Dark Eyes”, in the style of those Blue Note boogaloo pieces that Alfred Lion used to get Lee Morgan or Hank Mobley to write and record in the hope of getting jukebox exposure. The final piece was a ballad called “Affliction of the Innocent”, written a couple of years ago in the double shadow of the Covid-19 death toll and the murder of George Floyd, following the tradition of such elegant hard-bop threnodies as Benny Golson’s “I Remember Clifford” and Freddie Hubbard’s “Lament for Booker”.

One thing the set confirmed is that it is usually harder, at least for relatively inexperienced musicians, to play a slow tune than a fast one. That comes with maturity. Owusu and his colleagues are at the beginning of their careers, with plenty of time for growth. You just hope that, when they emerge into the professional world, there’ll be work for them all — as well as for sixty-something teachers who may yet prove capable of learning from the voices of their students.

Mar 8

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The artwork of British jazz

Who could have imagined, as the music and those who made it were fighting for their existence, the three-figure sums that British jazz albums from the ’60s and ’70s would be fetching in a new century? To some, Richard Morton Jack’s Labyrinth: British Jazz on Record 1960-75, a large-format book containing threequarter-size reproductions of the front and back sleeves of 161 albums, plus another 140 at a smaller scale, will be a catalogue of longing and desire.

Look! Original copies (cond: VG) of Joe Harriott’s Abstract and David Mack’s 12-tone New Directions on Columbia, of Poetry and Jazz in Concert on Argo, of Mike Westbrook’s Celebration on Deram, of The People Band on Transatlantic, Bob Downes’s Open Music on Philips and Ric Colbeck’s The Sun Is Coming Up on Fontana! The first LPs by Howard Riley on the Opportunity label and Back Door on the Blakey imprint! The SME’s debut on Eyemark! Mike Taylor’s Pendulum! The only recording of the Chitinous Ensemble, directed by Paul Buckmaster! Guy Warren of Ghana! Lots of Michael Garrick, Graham Collier, Gordon Beck, Tony Oxley, Tubby Hayes, Stan Tracey, Keith Tippett, Alan Skidmore, Rendell & Carr, Ray Russell… all the way to the Nottingham Jazz Orchestra’s Festival Suite, released on Doug Dobell’s Swift label.

Richard Morton Jack gives a brief commentary on each album, with quotes from reviews, and there’s an introduction by Tony Reeves, probably most famous as the bass player with Jon Hiseman’s Colosseum, who describes how he, a Lewisham schoolboy, found his way into the scene as a player and a producer, with Neil Ardley’s New Jazz Orchestra, whose Western Reunion and Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe are featured, and others.

What a time it was — although, as I said, it was always a struggle for those trying to make a living in jazz clubs up and down the country, despite the efforts of intrepid A&R men/producers like Denis Preston, Terry Brown, Peter Eden and Giorgio Gomelsky to persuade Decca, EMI, Philips, Pye, Polydor and CBS to record this adventurous music.

Labyrinth finds a different and very enjoyable way of telling the story, exploiting the artwork and the information contained within 12 x 12 album jackets, back in the days of helpful sleeve notes. And if I had the choice of all these albums, but could keep only one? It would probably be the Blue Notes’ Very Urgent, their first recording after landing in the UK from South Africa. Produced by Joe Boyd at Sound Techniques and issued on Polydor under Chris McGregor’s name, it’s as exhilarating today as it was back in 1968, and its long-term influence is still to be felt, even in the work of young musicians then unborn.

* Richard Morton Jack’s Labyrinth: British Jazz on Record 1960-75 is published by Lansdowne Books (£60)

Feb 15

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Songs for a mother

When the painter Penny Marrows was given a diagnosis of terminal cancer in March 2023, her son, the London-based composer and guitarist Billy Marrows, began writing pieces for her. Some of them were recorded and played to her before her death five months later, aged 72. In the aftermath Billy carried on writing and recording, and compiled the pieces in an album, Penelope, for which one of his mother’s paintings provides the cover (you can see it above).

One good reason for buying the album is that the proceeds will go to World Child Cancer, a charity providing help in countries that don’t have the benefit of the sort of organisations that cared for Billy’s mother, such as the NHS and Macmillan Cancer Support. But the music is reason enough.

The aggregation of musicians heard on the album is known as Grande Família. Five of the pieces, interspersed throughout the running order, are for solo guitar or baritone guitar. One is a duo for guitar and viola (Teresa Macedo Ferreira). Another is a trio for guitar, piano (Angus Bayley) and clarinet (Gustavo Clayton Marucci). The remaining three are by a 12-piece chamber-jazz ensemble including trumpet, trombone, French horn, flute, clarinets, saxophones and viola.

I’ve been playing the album a lot over the last few days, and it’s made a friend of me. The solo guitar pieces are pitched somewhere between Bill Frisell (a refined backporch sensibility) and Mary Halvorson (the sparing and subtle use of effects, and a sense that a surprise isn’t far away). The solo version of “Shenandoah” (the only non-original) which provides the album’s coda is lovely; when I do my “Shenandoah” mixtape, it’ll go nicely between Frisell’s interpretation (with Ry Cooder on Good Dog, Happy Man) and Bob Dylan’s (one of the saving graces of Down in the Groove).

The most striking of the ensemble pieces is “L’Heroïsme”, which features the tenor saxophone of Tom Ridout and the trumpet of Mike Soper. You can see them playing it here. But what I really like about the album is how its 10 separate pieces, for all their variety of means and approach, behave as though they belong together, like a family.

* Penelope by Billy Marrows + Grande Família is available as a CD and download. Details here: http://www.billymarrows.com. They’ll be playing at the Pizza Express in Soho on 13 May. Penny Marrows’ painting is used by kind permission.

Feb 13

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‘Rhapsody in Blue’ at 100

The first public performance of George Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue” was given 100 years ago this week, on 12 February 1924, at the Aeolian Hall on West 43rd Street in New York City, by Paul Whiteman and his Concert Orchestra, with Gershwin himself at the piano. Whiteman had commissioned the piece from its composer specially for the evening, which was billed as ‘An Experiment in Modern Music’.

I first heard “Rhapsody in Blue” in childhood, played by the same Whiteman/Gershwin combination, on the 12-inch 78rpm record you see above, which my mother would have bought from a record shop in Barnsley, South Yorkshire, in the 1930s. Nine minutes long, it’s split over both sides of the disc. The gramophone — a Columbia Viva-Tonal Grafonola — is the one on which she played it, along with her other 78s.

To mark the centenary, the pianist Ethan Iverson started a lively debate the other day with a piece for the New York Times in which he examined the artistic impact, then and now, of what he called “a naive and corny” attempt to blend the superficial characteristics of jazz with European classical music. If “Rhapsody in Blue” is a masterpiece, he wrote, it’s surely “the worst masterpiece”: an uncomfortable compromise that blocked off the progress of what would later be called the Third Stream, and with which we are both “blessed and stuck”.

Thanks to my mother’s influence, I view it from a slightly different angle. For me, in childhood, it became a gateway drug. I loved the spectacular clarinet introduction, and the shifting melodies and the hints of syncopation, but more than anything I responded to the tonality that reflected its title, expressed in the exotic flattened thirds and sevenths of the blues scale.

It didn’t take very long before I was following a path that led to Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Charlie Parker, Thelonious Monk, Miles Davis, Charles Mingus, John Coltrane, Ornette Coleman and Cecil Taylor, right up to the Vijay Iyers, Matana Robertses and Tyshawn Soreys of today’s jazz. Pretty soon I’d worked out that an ounce of Ellington was worth a ton of Gershwin’s instrumental music*, but I retain a respectful gratitude to “Rhapsody in Blue” and its role as a gateway, just as I do to The Glenn Miller Story and “Take Five”.

A few weeks after the world première Gershwin’s piece, F. Scott Fitzgerald and his young family would set off for France, where he spent the summer knocking the early draft of his third novel into shape. When The Great Gatsby was published the following April, it contained a vivid scene in which the society guests at one of Jay Gatsby’s Long Island parties were entertained by a band described by the author as “no thin five-piece affair, but a whole pitful of oboes and trombones and saxophones and viols and cornets and piccolos, and high and low drums.”

The bandleader — who is unnamed, but it’s easy to imagine him as Paul Whiteman, with his tuxedo, bow-tie and little moustache — makes an announcement. “At the request of Mr Gatsby,” he says, “we are going to play for you Mr Vladimir Tostoff’s latest work, which attracted so much attention at Carnegie Hall last May.” The piece is known, he adds, as “Vladimir Tostoff’s Jazz History of the World”. I’ve always idly wondered what it would sound like, but I imagine Mr George Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue”, with its bustling bass saxophone eruptions and flamboyantly choked cymbal splashes, is as close as we’ll get.

* A few people have picked me up on this statement, and I tend to agree with them. I was trying to make a specific point, rather clumsily. George Gershwin was a genius songwriter, as any fule kno.

Feb 11

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At Peggy’s Skylight

Some jazz clubs are intimidating to the first-time visitor, and maybe that’s how they’re supposed to be. Not all of them, though. I’d been meaning to visit Peggy’s Skylight in Nottingham for ages, and on Saturday afternoon I walked in there for the first time and felt right at home.

A Saturday afternoon might seem an odd time to visit a jazz club. But I’d just got off the train from London, with a couple of hours to spare in my old home town before the start of the football match I’d come up to see, so I walked from the station to George Street, just off Hockley, a narrow but always busy street on the edge of the historic Lace Market.

Peggy’s Skylight occupies the double-frontage of a nice old building. The club was opened in 2018 by Rachel Foster and Paul Deats, and it’s named after Charles Mingus’s “Peggy’s Blue Skylight”; you can see a visual reference above the bandstand in the photo. The Mingus track was recorded in 1961 and featured Roland Kirk, who in 1964 played a concert one street away from where Peggy’s now stands, at the Co-operative Arts Centre on Broad Street (I wrote about it here and here).

On Saturday afternoons Peggy’s has an Unplugged session, with free admission. Deats was playing piano when I walked in. He was sharing the stage with a seriously good local tenor saxophonist, Ben Martin, and they were playing “My One and Only Love”, one of my favourite ballads. The room was full, and I was lucky that they could find me a seat. People of several generations were eating, drinking, chatting and occasionally checking their phones while Martin and Deats produced accomplished, unflashy, nicely proportioned duets that were soon putting me in mind of how Hank Mobley and Tommy Flanagan might have sounded together.

At this session, the music had a different vibe. It was part of a social setting, absorbed in a way that didn’t devalue it at all. If you wanted to listen to as good version of “Alone Together” as you’re likely to find this side of Jo Stafford, or a lively “On the Sunny Side of the Street”, you could do happily do so, joining the warm applause at the end of each tune. But the voices from the tables around you were part of the environment. It wasn’t like that oaf guffawing for posterity over Scott LaFaro’s final notes on the Bill Evans Trio’s sublime version of “Milestones” at the Village Vanguard in 1961. Here, the ambient sounds were perfectly natural and unobtrusive.

Normally I don’t like eating while I listen to music, and I’m not much interested in food anyway. But I was hungry and it seemed fine to enjoy an excellent pan of eggs with harissa while keeping my ears open. (Deats is also a chef, and Peggy’s menu has a North African and Middle Eastern tilt.)

Last year the club’s partners were required to resist plans to sell the building by the local council, which owns the freehold and has recently become one of several around England to announce its own bankruptcy. The day before I walked in had brought news the reduction of the city’s entire culture budget to zero. Nottingham Playhouse, opened with great pride 60 years ago almost to the month and whose artistic directors included John Neville and Richard Eyre, will see its council subsidy, which stood at an annual £430,000 a decade ago, reduced from last year’s £60,000 to £0.

This is mostly due, of course, to the severe reduction, during 14 years of Tory misrule, in the government funding on which local authorities depend. The present generation of Conservative Party politicians seems to regard the arts as something that might open minds and encourage independent thought, and therefore to be stamped on.

On the train from London I’d been reading a depressing piece in the FT about the boom in giant high-tech music arenas — the sort of place where you might go to see Taylor Swift or U2 — being built around the country, paralleled by a crisis affecting small-scale venues, almost one in six of which closed or stopped scheduling music during 2023. That made a first visit to Peggy’s Skylight seem even more precious.

* The very nice new album by the guitarist John Etheridge and his organ trio was recorded live at Peggy’s Skylight. It’s called Blue Spirits, it’s on the DYAD label and appropriately enough it concludes with Etheridge’s solo treatment of a favourite Mingus tune, “Goodbye Pork Pie Hat”. Forthcoming attractions at the club include the saxophonist Tony Kofi and the trombonist Dennis Rollins. Full programme: peggysskylight.co.uk

Jan 26

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Son of a drum

Vinnie Sperrazza grew up in Utica, New York as the son and great-grandson of drummers. He’s played the drums all his life, while thinking about drums and drumming and drummers. We’ll get to his own playing in a minute, but what first alerted me to his existence were his Substack posts, which appear under the heading of “Chronicles”. They’re not always about drumming, but they’re always interesting. And the ones that are about drumming contain the most perceptive and eloquent writing about drummers that I’ve ever read.

Sperrazza doesn’t describe the art of a drummer with the kind of literary eloquence with which the New Yorker‘s Whitney Balliett could bring, say, a solo piece by Papa Jo Jones to life on the page. (But then Balliett once claimed that Max Roach didn’t swing.) Sperrazza finds different but equally compelling ways to tell you what a Roach, a Gerald Cleaver, a Billy Hart or an Ed Blackwell is doing, and perhaps why, and certainly how it affects the surrounding music.

When I had a cup of coffee with Sperrazza during in London before Christmas, he was keen to hear my memories of seeing Tony Williams, who is his special subject, and about whom he writes with great insight. I was able to tell him about things he’s too young to have seen for himself, like Lifetime’s gigs at Ungano’s and the Marquee, a later edition of the band in Berlin, VSOP at the Grosvenor House and the Albert Hall, the quartet with Herbie Hancock, Ron Carter and Wynton Marsalis in Nice, and Tony’s own great quintet — the one with Wallace Roney, Bill Pierce and Mulgrew Miller — in Camden.

Most of all, I think he liked me describing the unforgettable experience of listening to Tony tuning his drums during the soundcheck for the gig in the Grosvenor House ballroom, for a gig that, believe it or not, was part of the 1977 Columbia Records international sales convention. That music is still in my ears.

Before we parted, he gave me a copy of Sunday, the third album in 10 years by his quartet, which is called Vinnie Sperrazza Apocryphal and also includes Loren Stillman on soprano and tenor saxophones, Brandon Seabrook on guitar, mandolin and banjo, and Eivind Opsvik on double bass — all great players from the contemporary New York scene. Frankly, I didn’t much mind whether I was going to like it or not, because I admire his writing so much and enjoyed his company. But when I put it on, it had me entranced.

The eight pieces making up the album are intended, he says, to depict “the moods and actions of one man in NYC on a random Sunday.” It’s probably typical of Sperrazza that the opening track doesn’t feature him at all: just Stillman’s affectingly human tenor tone, Seabrook’s pinched harmonics and distortions and Opsvik’s rich arco playing in an enticing prologue full of hints of what’s to come. But then the drums have the second track more or less to themselves, creating a subtly shaded, carefully developed, bombast-free soliloquy that Max or Papa Jo would surely applaud.

All four musicians then come together on a low-down, behind-the-beat groove with a blues feeling given its spice by Seabrook’s spacey and increasingly asymmetrical guitar chords, which fade away to the ticking of Sperrazza’s rimshots. Banjo colours the next piece, a solemn chink above shivering bass and sombre drums, shadowing Stillman’s lyrical ruminations, before Seabrook cuts loose with a jittering, jabbing solo.

And those four pieces are just the half of it. Like them, each of the remaining four creates its own microclimate, exploiting the available resources with a sense of variety and wit. When Stillman switches to soprano, something about the open rhythm reminds me of John Coltrane with Steve Davis and Elvin Jones on Coltrane Plays the Blues. There’s a joyful guitar feature with an 8/8 backbeat, not entirely unlike the early Lifetime. The banjo reappears for a quiet piece that could reasonably be described as giving Americana a good name.

It made me think of The President, Wayne Horvitz’s old band, as does a lot of this album, in its ability to to make sure that every track has its own little story to tell, while presenting music that, without compromising its spirit of inquiry, is extremely easy to like.

* Sunday by Vinnie Sperrazza Apocryphal is on the Loyal Label: https://vinniesperrazzaapocryphal.bandcamp.com/album/sunday His Substack archive is here: https://substack.com/@vinniesperrazza

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