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Posts from the ‘Jazz’ Category

Sep 24

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Mike Westbrook’s Band of Bands

From left: Mike Westbrook, Kate Westbrook, Karen Street, Pete Whyman, Chris Biscoe, Marcus Vergette (out of shot: Coach York)

You might have noticed, Mike Westbrook said as the second of today’s two lunchtime sets at the Pizza Express drew to a close, that a lot of this music we’ve been playing has something to do with the blues. And then he quoted Duke Ellington: “When times get tough, I write another blues.” That, Westbrook said, is what he found himself doing rather a lot these days. And then he and the new septet he calls his Band of Bands played “Gas, Dust, Stone”, which he described as “a blues for the planet”.

Its slowly wandering theme, first sung by Kate Westbrook and then voiced for the alto saxophones of Chris Biscoe and Pete Whyman and the accordion of Karen Street, reminded me at times of Ellington’s world-weary “4:30 Blues” before the mood switched, charging into the 12/8 of Charles Mingus’s “Wednesday Night Prayer Meeting”, powered by Marcus Vergette’s bass and Coach York’s drums, with a beautiful Street solo.

Westbrook, who is 87, formed his first band in Plymouth in 1958, and the Band of Bands celebrates longevity. Mike and Kate have been working, writing and performing together for 50 years. Biscoe first joined them 40 years ago, to create the Westbrook Trio. Street and Whyman have been with them on various projects for 30 years. Vergette and York, the newcomers, were called to the colours a mere 20 years ago, and are now the heartbeat of the Uncommon Orchestra.

The septet is both an expansion of the trio and a reduction of the big band, capable of handling everything from the fast bebop of the opening “Glad Day”, one of Westbrook’s pieces inspired by William Blake, through a brilliantly recast version of Billy Strayhorn’s “Johnny Come Lately” to the slow-rolling gospel cadences of “Blues for Terenzi” and the open spaces of “Unsigned Panorama”, with marvellous unaccompanied solos by Whyman (on clarinet) and Street.

Several songs from Fine ‘n’ Yellow, their 2010 song cycle, made an impression. Throughout “Yellow Dog”, York maintained a pulse (on his beautifully clear Murat Diril ride cymbal) three times that of the rest of the band, allowing Biscoe to float in his typically expressive solo between the drummer’s tempo, the much slower one being paced by Vergette, and the unstated one in between. “My Lover’s Coat”, finely sung, seemed to have “Blue Monk” in its bones.

If there were frequent reminders of how thoroughly Westbrook has metabolised his love of Ellington, Mingus and Monk, there was also evidence of a new enthusiasm for the songs of Frederick Hollander, a German composer of film music. Born Friedrich Hollaender in London in 1896 and brought up in Berlin, he wrote for Max Reinhardt’s theatre productions, accompanied artists in the Weimar-era cabarets, and wrote the music for Josef von Sternberg’s The Blue Angel, including “Falling in Love Again”, delivered by the film’s star, Marlene Dietrich. Leaving Germany when the Nazis took power, he arrived in Hollywood in 1934, anglicised his name, and had written for more than 100 films before his return to Germany in 1956, where he died in 1976.

One of those Hollywood films was A Foreign Affair, a 1948 comedy-drama set in post-war Berlin, directed by Billy Wilder and again starring Dietrich. Kate Westbrook delivered two of Hollander’s songs from that film, both concerned with the perils of emotional and sexual transactions: the sardonic “Black Market”, a Weill-esque piece on which she departed from the text to display her command of vocal effects, and “Illusions”, a gorgeous ballad on which she was exquisitely supported by Street and Biscoe.

Pointing out to the audience that this was the first public appearance of the Band of Bands, Westbrook expressed the hope that there would many more. An album devoted to the music of Frederick Hollander might not be such a bad next step*.

* See a comment below.

Sep 23

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Fire of London

The flight of Mike Osborne’s alto saxophone was like that of the swift: its entire existence was spent on the wing, soaring high or swooping in shallow dives, twisting back on itself before arcing again towards the heavens, as if desperate to avoid contact with the ground.

Something remarkable was happening in London in the early ’70s, at places like the 100 Club, the Phoenix in Cavendish Square, the Plough in Stockwell, and Peanuts, a regular session run by Osborne at a place near Liverpool Street station. A few dozen young musicians, most of whom had emerged late in the previous decade as sidemen in the bands of Mike Westbrook, Chris McGregor, Graham Collier and John Stevens, were now playing together in shifting combinations. The economics of jazz dictated a preference for small groups, and one of the most remarkable was Osborne’s trio, completed by two South African emigrés, Harry Miller on bass and Louis Moholo on drums.

What I remember from that scene is the absolute lack of pretension. There was no interest in surfaces or self-presentation. The musicians appeared before the audience wearing the clothes they’d arrived in. There wasn’t much in the way of introducing or explaining — but neither was there the kind of self-conscious detachment that even someone as natural as the bassist Dave Holland, once a member of that London scene, felt compelled to adopt on stage when he crossed the Atlantic and joined Miles Davis.

On the bandstand, the Mike Osborne Trio was typical of its time and milieu in that there was only one priority: to burn. Strategies learnt from Coltrane, Coleman and Ayler were bent to their own ends, creating a platform for their own individual voices. Osborne loved Ornette and Jackie McLean, his fellow altoists (I remember a copy of the latter’s great Blue Note LP Destination…Out! propped beside the record player in his flat when I interviewed him in 1970), but he became one of the era’s great originals on his instrument.

Sadly, his own era didn’t last long. In 1959 he arrived from Hereford as an 18-year-old to study at the Guildhall in London. Fifteen years later he suffered a breakdown at the end of a six-week gig at the Paris Opéra, where he had played onstage for a ballet alongside the other two members of the group SOS, his fellow saxophonists Alan Skidmore and John Surman. Prolonged treatment meant that there would be only sporadic gigs until 1982, when he returned to Hereford, his playing days at an end. He died of cancer in 2007, aged 65.

His discography is not huge, but it is of extraordinary quality, whether in sessions with Westbrook, SOS, the one-off quartet of the trumpeter Ric Colbeck, Surman’s octet, the big bands of Kenny Wheeler and John Warren, Miller’s Isipingo, McGregor’s Brotherhood of Breath, or a duo with Stan Tracey. And now there’s a wonderful addition in the shape of a session said to have been recorded (surprisingly well) at the 100 Club in December 1970, where Ossie, Harry and Louis were joined by Skidmore to make a fire-breathing quartet of ferocious intensity but immaculate balance.

As I remember him, Ossie always played with his eyes closed, everything else shut out. His tone is at its most beautiful on this session, whether making an assembly of staccato phrases or, more frequently, sliding through faster-than-light near-glissandi that never lose coherence or a sense of proportion. At this stage of his life, his emotions had located the perfect musical register. No wonder, after he had dropped out of SOS, Surman and Skidmore found him impossible to replace, and the group’s own short life was over.

On a winter’s night in an Oxford Street basement in 1970, Skidmore, Miller and Moholo matched him every step of the way, and Starting Fires is a very appropriate title for an album containing 40 minutes of music that never lacks light and shade but is driven by its unwavering sense of purpose. Short, epigrammatic themes appear and then dissolve, giving shape to the performance. Near the beginning and again towards the end, the two horns improvise together quite brilliantly, twining and tangling with complete commitment. It’s life-and-death stuff, which is how so much of this music felt at the time, and never more so than when Mike Osborne was on the stand.

* Mike Osborne’s Starting Fires: Live at the 100 Club 1970 is out now on the British Progressive Jazz label. I don’t know who took the photograph. My Guardian obituary of Osborne is here.

Sep 16

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Re-Focus

No single organisation has exerted a more profound or beneficial influence on jazz in Britain than Tomorrow’s Warriors, founded as an outgrowth of the Jazz Warriors big band 30 years ago by Janine Irons and her husband, the bassist Gary Crosby, with the ambition of giving young people from diverse and usually unprivileged backgrounds a chance to play and learn about this music. A few days after the historic Mercury Prize win by Ezra Collective, whose five members first came together in their free workshops, another celebrated Tomorrow’s Warriors graduate, the tenor saxophonist Nubya Garcia, took the stage at the Royal Festival Hall last night in front of a 32-piece all-string version of the Nu Civilisation Orchestra, TW’s shape-shifting large ensemble. Their mission was to perform the music written by Eddie Sauter for Stan Getz in 1961, recorded by Creed Taylor for the Verve label and released as the album titled Focus, instantly setting a new standard for the creative use of a string orchestra in jazz.

Crosby told me that the idea came to him soon after his first encounter with Garcia, 14 or 15 years ago, when she was in her teens. Something about her sound, he said, made him think the combination would work on a reinterpretation of work he’d long admired. Garcia knew about Getz but had never heard Focus. Last night she filled what Sauter called “the holes I left for Stan” with her own sound and style, while fully respecting the tone and approach of the original, a task probably eased by her own early training as a classical violinist.

The suite in seven movements begins with the hectic flurry of “I’m Late, I’m Late”, one of the most arresting album openings imaginable. Last night the part of Roy Haynes, whose urgent brushwork so memorably sparred with Getz, was deftly taken by Romana Campbell. Garcia grew into the performance, adding weight and character to her improvisations as the sequence flowed through “Her”, “Pan”, “I Remember When”, “Night Rider”, “Once Upon a Time” and “A Summer Afternoon”. Her sound reminded me less of Getz’s feathery ethereality than of the firmer tone of his fellow Lester Young disciple Jimmy Giuffre; there was even a passage — during “Pan”, I think — when the combination of the tenor with a folkish motif unexpectedly reminded me of a greatly expanded version of Giuffre’s celebrated “Train and the River” trio. Led by the violinist Rebekah Reid, the strings were immaculate, remarkably so considering that a family illness had prevented the scheduled conductor, Peter Edwards, from taking part. Scott Stroman, the Guildhall School’s professor of jazz, stepped into the breach.

Maybe Focus doesn’t sound as bracingly different today as it did 60 years ago, when it so boldly broke away from the conservative tradition that had dominated the string arrangements for Charlie Parker (by Jimmy Carroll and Joe Lipman) and Clifford Brown (by Neal Hefti). Like George Handy, George Russell, the film composer Bernard Herrmann and one or two others, Sauter’s study of Bartók and Stravinsky had inspired the desire to bring some of their techniques to his own writing. But the result still sounds spectacular, and the London crew more than did it justice in a performance that mixed care and joy in admirable proportion.

* A few days before the concert, Nubya Garcia and the Nu Civilisation Orchestra recorded two of the pieces for Jamie Callum’s Jazz Show on BBC Radio 2. They can be heard here (interview from 17:00, music from 37:00): https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m001q5gy — and if you want to give money to help Tomorrow’s Warriors with their valuable work, go here: tomorrowswarriors.org/iamwarrior

Sep 14

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Defying gravity

It’s easy to imagine the director Dorsay Alavi going all the way through an alphabetical list of Wayne Shorter’s compositions while looking for a suitable title for her three-part documentary on the life and work of the great saxophonist and composer, and knowing when she reached “Zero Gravity” that she’d got it. As such bio-docs on jazz musicians go, Wayne Shorter: Zero Gravity is something of a masterpiece. The title expresses the subject’s unique characteristic, present in his music and in his conversation, as I found while interviewing him in his London hotel room for the Melody Maker in 1972, during Weather Report’s three-week season at Ronnie Scott’s. Here’s how the piece started:

“I hate to talk about music,” Wayne Shorter said. So we didn’t — at least, not really. For instance, we talked about the navigation of ships. Wayne showed me several large books on the subject, told me he was hoping to study it seriously, and then unrolled a sheet of score-paper on which he’d written a new composition called “Celestial Navigator”, based on the feelings gathered from his discoveries.

We talked about the sacred figures of Brazil — like the Lady of the Sea. If you see her, Wayne said, she she sees you, then you don’t live to tell the tale. But she serves people from the sea, too, and every Brazilian home contains her picture. And he showed me another piece, named after her.

And so it went on, through an hour or so of conversation which I can only compare to the experience of talking to Ornette Coleman, Don Van Vliet (Captain Beefheart) or Van Dyke Parks. The interviewee is operating on a different plane of thought and expression, and your best plan is to keep out of the way and let their logic take its own trajectory. Of course that doesn’t always work. Sometimes you can’t help trying to drag them back to earth. Yet at such moments Shorter remained gracious. Here’s more:

Although he didn’t really want to discuss it, I asked him why he left Miles Davis. “After six years with Miles it was becoming… that living cycle, that seven-year itch thing, came around. I knew had to take a year off, at least. My wife and I moved around, spending the summer in a town house in New York, where I could think about how to get rid of that sound I had with Miles, to get the sound of the musicians, and the compositions I wrote during that time, out of my head.

“I wanted to rid myself of any one association — so that people can look at anything new that I do with a bit of objectivity, without connecting me with Miles or Art Blakey, as everyone always has.” It wasn’t always easy for him to take his sabbatical. “Miles would call me up and ask if I wanted to make a record date, or write something for his band, and I had to refuse because it was necessary for me to break that connection completely.”

He talked about his most recent Blue Note album, Super Nova, and its projected successor, Odyssey of Iska, dedicated to his younger daughter, and about his enthusiasm for the Brazilian singer Milton Nascimento (who would be featured on Native Dancer, his first album for Columbia, in 1975). And he spoke warmly, of course, about Weather Report:

“I’d always had the feeling that it would be nice to have a band in which everybody would hold their own and have a leader’s responsibility. We’re all responsible to many different obligations, which is much better than when one man is responsible for everyone’s obligations. We can do more, musically. It was hard to find a bunch of musicians who were prepared to stop playing like they used to.”

That last remark is the kind of thing that pops up throughout Zero Gravity: little maxims, like Zen koans, that open the mind to new ways of thinking about old subjects, some of them adapted from Davis, his former boss. “Play like you don’t know how to play” is one. Search for “music that doesn’t sound like music” and “Jazz means, ‘I dare you'” are others. Danilo Perez, the pianist with his quartet, remembers being given a large pile of new compositions, and on asking Shorter when they were going to find the time to rehearse them, getting the reply: “You can’t rehearse the unknown.”

The first of Zero Gravity‘s three hour-long episodes deals with his early years, from a New Jersey childhood to the great Davis Quintet, the director taking the chance of using two young actors in wordless imaginative reconstructions of his boyhood with his brother Al. The second part examines with the period of Weather Report’s great success, the reasons behind the group’s dissolution, his work with Joni Mitchell, and the personal tragedies he encountered during those years, including the deaths of Iska and her mother, Ana Maria Patricio, his second wife, and of Al, his brother.

The final part deals with the music of his last 20 years: the wonderful quartet with Perez, the bassist John Patitucci and the drummer Brian Blade, the orchestral pieces, and the opera, Iphigenia, written and performed with Esperanza Spalding. Her presence in the film, along with that of Mitchell and the drummer Terri Lyne Carrington, reminds us that few jazz musicians of his generation were as comfortable as Shorter with the idea that female musicians could have equal standing within the music.

Shorter’s love of fairy tales and science fiction, in part ignited by early exposure to Charles Kingsley’s The Water Babies, is also featured as part of an exploration of the character of a man who retained a child’s sense of wonder throughout the life that ended last March, in his 90th year on the planet. The animations and flights of visual imagination that appear throughout the film, alongside many fine clips of the Jazz Messengers, the Davis band and the Shorter quartet, make complete sense. Filmed and edited while he was still alive, and thus preserving him in the present tense. Zero Gravity is pretty much the perfect tribute to an extraordinary human being.

* The film Wayne Shorter: Zero Gravity is available on Amazon Prime.

Sep 8

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Tension and release

While writing about Nik Bärtsch recently, I mentioned his practice of giving all his compositions the same title — each is called “Modul”, with a distinguishing number attached, thereby establishing no preconceptions in the listener’s mind. In that respect Darcy James Argue, the Canadian-born, New York-based composer, could hardly be more different. In the past, the pieces on his albums with his big band, Secret Society, have variously directed our attention towards an imagined dystopian Brooklyn, a philosopher of ancient Greece and a distinctly realistic dystopian deep state. His latest, a 2CD set called Dynamic Maximum Tension, consists of pieces inspired by specific individuals, ideas and events, bearing dedications clearly signposting their themes, and reflecting those origins in their sound and structures.

This can be almost literal in something like “Codebreaker”, dedicated to Alan Turing, in which the staccato brass phrases evoke the chatter of an Enigma decoding machine, opening up for a lovely soft-toned alto saxophone solo by Rob Wilkerson. Or it can be implied, as in “Tensile Curves”, a multipart work dedicated to Duke Ellington, with seven individual soloists and lasting 35 minutes, which in past times would have been a respectable length for a single long-playing album. It was inspired by the unorthodox extended structure of Ellington’s “Diminuendo and Crescendo in Blue”; there is nothing particularly Ducal about the sound, but he would surely have appreciated the grace with which the piece, having opened with shrill brass fanfares against Jon Wiken’s galloping drums, creates a kaleidoscope of moods before it winds down through a passage featuring Sara Caswell’s hardanger d’amore (a modern Norwegian fiddle with 10 strings, five of them sympathetic), Adam Birnbaum’s sombre piano chords and a Mingus-like passage of collective polyphony, with Sam Sadigursky’s clarinet closing a darkly glowing coda.

More unexpected is “Last Waltz for Levon”, a tribute to Levon Helm — the only member of the Band, of course, who was not Canadian — which summons as much backwoods spirit as a 20-piece band can, with the trombonist Mike Fahle as its featured soloist (over mellow writing for clarinets) and incorporating sidelong quotes from “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down”, introduced by Mike Clohesy’s bass guitar. Cécile McLorin Salvant pops up to do a turn on “Mae West: Advice”, singing a jolly lyric based on a sort-of-Dadist poem by Paisley Reckdal: Ban tobacco: do bacon abed, be delectable, collectible, a decent debacle. Décolleté don’t conceal; acne, do...

The title of the opening track, “Dymaxion”, is the short form of Dynamic Maximum Tension, the principle on which the engineer-architect Buckminster Fuller, the dedicatee, created his structures, including the geodesic dome before which Argue is standing in the picture above. You can sense in the writing the measured use of tension to ensure that an unreinforced structure retains its shape, while Carl Maraghi’s gorgeous baritone saxophone improvisation reminds us that Fuller worked with people and nature as well as geometric formulae in mind. At times such as this, Argue’s confident manipulation of his resources makes me think that finally someone has taken the theory behind Bob Graettinger’s controversial modernistic Third Steam pieces of the early ’50s (such as City of Glass, written for Stan Kenton) and turned it into actual music.

But out of this densely packed sequence of 11 compositions and 110 minutes of music, “Your Enemies Are Asleep” is the piece that will stay with me longest. Here Argue metabolises his debt to Gil Evans quite brilliantly in the opening passage: a slow, well-spaced string bass figure to set an ominous mood, spare woodwind voicings, a half-concealed bass clarinet beneath lightly sketched brass. Then the bass figure is augmented, the brass becomes a choir, and Ingrid Jensen — another Canadian — enters for a solo which, for the subtlety of its entry and the enthralling development of its trajectory over an increasingly dense and emphatic orchestration, reminds me of nothing less than the way Evans turned “The Barbara Song” into a concerto for Wayne Shorter 60 years ago. Jensen’s improvisation is a masterpiece in its own right: flaring, squeezing, dodging, soaring and fluttering around the contours of the writing. The closing passage is another example of Argue’s gift for ending a piece on a quietly dramatic note of reflection.

Oh yes, and Martin Johnson’s sleeve essay informs us that “Your Enemies Are Asleep” is dedicated to Ukraine’s resistance to Russia’s invasion, its title taken from a 19th century Ukrainian poem set to music by Vasyl Ovchynnikov, a bandura player who disappeared during the Stalinist terror of the 1930s. The notes beyond the notes add another layer of resonance to this outstanding album of completely modern music whose precision — whether of conception or execution — never excludes the human component.

* Dynamic Maximum Tension by Darcy James Argue’s Secret Society is released on the Nonesuch label: https://darcyjamesargue.bandcamp.com/album/dynamic-maximum-tension. The photograph of Argue is by Lindsay Beyerstein.

Aug 29

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A man of wealth and taste

It’s rather charming when someone who spent most of his life signing autographs for fans turns out to have been a collector of famous signatures himself. In Charlie Watts’s case, they’re a bit different from the one he signed for me on a paper napkin in 1964. They’re the signatures of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Agatha Christie, Samuel Beckett, James Joyce, Tennessee Williams, H.G. Wells and Raymond Chandler on their own first editions (including, respectively, The Great Gatsby and Tender Is the Night, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, Waiting for Godot, Ulysses, A Streetcar Named Desire, The War of the Worlds, The Lady in the Lake), of Charlie Parker on a pleading letter to the American Federation of Musicians and menu cards from Birdland and the Royal Roost, of John Coltrane on the front cover of a copy of Giant Steps, of Duke Ellington on a set of acetates containing the premiere of Black Brown and Beige at Carnegie Hall in 1943.

All these, and much, much more of the same, are included in the catalogue for Christie’s aucxtion of some of Charlie’s possessions, due to take place in London on 28 September. The £40, 200-page catalogue is a lovely thing in itself: if you want to know what Dean Benedetti’s acetates of Parker recorded at the Hi-De-Ho club in Los Angeles in 1947 look like, or the ones Boris Rose recorded in 1950 that became Bird at St Nick’s, here they are, along with notes scribbled by Parker to Chan Richardson, his partner. Here are an autograph lyric (“Looking at You”) by Cole Porter, a letter from George Gershwin to his music teacher and autographed copies of the piano scores of An American in Paris and Rhapsody in Blue, a first edition of Langston Hughes’s The Weary Blues inscribed to Gershwin, and a first edition of a book of Picasso engravings dedicated by the artist to the jazz impresario Norman Granz (with added caricature of the dedicatee).

I could go on, and on, and on. Agatha Christie first editions by the dozen. Ditto Dashiell Hammett. Hemingway. Waugh, Waugh and more Waugh. Ditto Wodehouse. Orwell. Dylan Thomas’s first book of poems. All signed. John and Alan Lomax’s Negro Folk Songs as Sung by Lead Belly, signed by Huddie Ledbetter himself. A Miles Davis doodle and a first edition of trumpeter’s autobiography, with a lengthy dedication to a cousin.

Charlie was a collector who could indulge all his desires. Now he’s gone and other people will have the pleasure of owning the precious objects he so lovingly assembled — people in a position to contemplate the estimates ranging from £200,000-£300,000 for the signed first edition of Gatsby, dedicated to a fellow screenwriter at MGM, down to £1,000-£1,500 for a signed photograph of Chet Baker in 1956.

If you saw his episode of the recent TV series of profiles of the individual Rolling Stones (My Life As a Rolling Stone, 2022), you’ll know that this catalogue doesn’t tell the whole story. Where is the beautiful pre-war Lagonda, kept in perfect running order despite the fact that Charlie couldn’t drive? Where are the 78s that he bought in bulk but never played? Where are the kits of famous drummers from the swing and bop eras? Where are the Savile Row suits and the handmade shirts and shoes?

Anyway, Charlie deserved it all, and much joy it must have given him. He also deserved a catalogue editor capable of spelling “Thelonious”, but that’s another matter.

Aug 15

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Ronin at Ronnie’s

Nik Bärtsch’s Ronin at Ronnie Scott’s (photo: Robert Crowley)

Somewhere between an “oh!” and an “ow!”, the abrupt vocal command with which Nik Bärtsch cues his musicians for a shift in musical pattern is the polite zen-funk equivalent of James Brown’s exhortation to take it to the bridge. The reaction is immediate, the players switching from one polyrhythmic cell to another in perfect unison, reframing not just the abstract geometry of metre and tempo but the weight, tone and landscape of the music.

If you own any of the Swiss pianist-composer’s albums, on ECM or his own Ronin Rhythm label, you’ll know that his pieces all go under the bland title “Modul”: “Modul 17”, “Modul 44”, “Modul 55” and so on. I find it rather refreshing not to be primed to think about whether or not a particular piece is a successful portrayal of a nightingale singing in Soho Square. You can just get on and listen to the notes, free from baggage.

But although it may be programmed, there is nothing cold about it. Bärtsch’s music is sometimes attached to such categories and minimalism and systems music, but it’s too abundant to qualify for the former and too warm-blooded for the latter. Any superficial impression of austerity is profoundly misleading. To hear one of his bands live is to share an audience involvement that expresses itself at the end of each long and intense set in a roar of pure exhilaration.

That’s what happened when Bärtsch returned to Ronnie Scott’s Club last week with Ronin, currently a quartet with Jeremias Keller, a relative newcomer on bass guitar, joining the stalwarts Kaspar Rast on drums and Sha on bass clarinet and alto saxophone. Ronin was assembled in 2001 and plays every Monday night at Exil, Bärtsch’s club in Zurich, its members applying their virtuosity to perfecting what their leader calls “ritual groove music”.

I’ve heard Bärtsch’s music in several environments: with Ronin in churches in London and Bremen, solo (with a light artist) at the Barbican, with a horn section at Kings Place and with the Frankfurt Radio big band, orchestated by Jim McNeely, in Berlin. In the set I heard at Ronnie’s, they played the six pieces from their latest ECM album, Awase, blended together into two long sequences, plus an encore. Compared to those earlier performances, this sounded mellower, less edge-of-the-seat, a little more lyrical and reflective, particularly in something like the swooning chordal descent of one section of “Modul 36”.

Even in its gentler moments, however, it was still imbued with that characteristic sense of coiling and uncoiling while still held in tension. And the quality of the playing of all four was extraordinary, with Bärtsch delving into the grand piano’s innards to pluck, strum and damp strings, occasionally striking its frame with a stick, the devoted Sha in the role of Jimmy Lyons to his Cecil Taylor, Rast tireless in nailing down the complex metres and displaced beats, and Keller’s alertness and agility fitting in so well that he might have been with them since the beginning rather than a mere three years.

It was great to see a big crowd assembled to hear this music. Of course the majority of the audience knew exactly what they had come for and received their reward. But also it was interesting to watch the more casual type of customer, the sort who basically turn up for a night at a famous jazz club, as their initial scepticism turned to curiosity and then to intrigue and ultimately to delight, shared with the rest of us.

Aug 4

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Summer books 1: Henry Threadgill

As a primer on how to grow up amid communities of creative musicians while asserting and developing your own individuality, Henry Threadgill’s Easily Slip into Another World is exemplary. It also happens to belong, in my view, in the very highest rank of autobiographies by jazz musicians.

One of the great contemporary composers and bandleaders, Threadgill grew up amid the blues, the jazz and the black church music of Chicago in the 1950s, but with an ear open to European classical music. He’s old enough to remember the impact of the lynching of Emmett Till in 1955. Hearing the recordings of Charlie Parker made him want to play the saxophone.

He may be the only Chicago musician of his era to benefit from not having studied under Captain Walter Dyett, the venerated director of music at DuSable High School on the city’s South Side. Threadgill was enrolled at Englewood High, where he played in the school’s concert band but was constantly in trouble. Knowing that Dyett had taught so many of the people he really admired, such as Gene Ammons, Johnny Griffin and Wilbur Ware, he applied for a transfer. Dyett looked at his disciplinary record and turned him down flat. When Englewood let him back in, he resolved to change his ways. I suppose the clearest proof of his success came in 2016, when he became the third jazz musician (after Wynton Marsalis in 1997 and Ornette Coleman in 2005) to receive the Pulitzer Prize for Music, for his composition In for a Penny, In for a Pound.

“Being rejected is the best thing that can happen to you, if you know how to think laterally,” he observes. “I ended up getting a much broader and deeper education.” The scope and volume of his work over the years is astonishing. Many musicians would have made an entire career merely out of the projects he undertook with dancers. Others would have invented the hubkaphone, as he did in 1970 after seeing a display of shiny chrome car hubcaps laid out on a stall in the famous Maxwell Street market, and settled for renown as the creator of the American version of the gamelan orchestra.

He could have pursued a life as an R&B musician, after touring with the Dells and the Chi-Lites in the ’70s, or in Latin music after working with the trumpeter Mario Bauzá in New York. He could even have stayed safely within the circle of Chicago’s AACM. Instead he formed one band after another, following the instinct to push things further. The trio Air, with the bassist Fred Hopkins and the drummer Steve McCall, was followed by many, many others, usually with unorthodox line-ups (e.g. four reeds and four double basses) and sometimes with strange names, such as X-75, Very Very Circus, Zooid and the 14 or 15 Kestra. (Oddly, his latest album, titled The Other One, is by something called the Henry Threadgill Ensemble.)

With the aid of the writer and academic Brent Hayes Edwards, Threadgill tells his story at a relaxed pace and with a depth of detail that is always compelling and never tiresome. The Vietnam section is a serious addition to the literature on that terrible war, from an unusual perspective: about drafted in 1966, thinking he’d done a smart thing by volunteering as a musician, a year later he was the Central; Highlands with his clarinet in one hand and a rifle in the other, encountering the Montagnards and experiencing the African American version of the horror and squalor familiar to some extent from Michael Herr’s Dispatches but here described with even greater clarity and revulsion. “I didn’t shed my war experiences when I got off that plane from Vietnam… Vietnam stayed with me, and it took me to some dark and twisted places even once I returned to Chicago.” But he had survived, and eventually the trauma receded.

Back in the world, his surreal encounter with Duke Ellington in 1971 — with the suggestion that he might have been momentarily lined up as the next Billy Strayhorn — is a Murakami short story in itself. His description of a gig with Cecil Taylor is both hilarious and enlightening: “I was completely befuddled. I was standing there wondering why what we were playing didn’t sound like the piece I remembered rehearsing.” Eventually he discovers, on the stand at Fat Tuesday’s, that “to play Cecil’s music, you had to get to a place where you could let the pieces reconfigure themselves as you went along. It was disconcerting in the moment, but the experience with Cecil impacted the way I came to think about my own bands. It’s important to keep your people a little bit off balance.”

The four pages on his grandfather, Luther Pierce, who often took him to the Maxwell Street market, explain something about Threadgill. Pierce worked in a steel mill but was also the family’s self-taught, trial-and-error electrician, cobbler, plumber, tailor, barber, carpenter, bedbug exterminator and medicine man. “He was resourceful — or reckless — to a degree I have never encountered in any other human being,” his grandson writes. “The most amazing thing about it was his nerve. I think he would have been capable of performing open-heart surgery on one of us had he considered it necessary. Whatever it took, he was ready to do it: nothing was out of bounds. And I suspect that a little of his spirit of radical experimentation rubbed off on me.”

His theory of intervallic harmony was developed for Zooid in the mid-’90s during a stay in Goa, reading about “maths and physics and astronomy and warfare, studying philosophical treatises, reading books about various musical systems.” It resembles George Russell’s Lydian chromatic concept or Ornette Coleman’s harmolodic theory in that it clearly takes a lot of preparation for his musicians to become conversant with the new language, and — although there are several pages of explanation — it’s impervious to casual comprehension. But you’ll probably know it when you hear it.

Simultaneously, while reading Ulysses, he came up with the idea of a 1/4 metre: “James Brown used to talk about getting back to the one. He’d cajole his band, talking about it, calling for it, demanding it — stretching things out to build anticipation. That’s funk in a nutshell: that tantalising expectation of the downbeat. Here it is — and here it is again. With Zooid, the question is almost the opposite: what if you never get off the one? Everything is always the one.”

I’ve quoted at length from the book simply in order to give an idea of the richness contained within its 385 pages. Let’s finish with a piece of typical Threadgill wisdom, fashioned by the tools of thought and experience: “If you look at a book on the history of Western classical music, there’s centuries of background you can read about. Black music in America is relatively young. It’s still just the beginning. And it’s too soon to get upset and start making grand declarations about what you like and don’t like in terms of the directions the music is taking. You don’t have to like it all. What you have to recognise is that it’s not the end of the line. In another hundred years, assuming we’re still here, imagine how much more artistic information will have accumulated from Black music. And it’s not going to be the twelve-bar blues from now until the end of time.”

* Easily Slip into Another World: A Life by Music by Henry Threadgill and Brent Hayes Edwards is published by Alfred A. Knopf. The Other One by the Henry Threadgill Ensemble is out now on the Pi label.

Jul 23

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Climate change

On an unseasonably cold, rainy late-July evening in East London, the trio known as Decoy — Alexander Hawkins on Hammond organ, John Edwards on double bass and Steve Noble on drums — and their regular guest, the indefatigable 83-year-old American saxophonist Joe McPhee, provided all the warmth the audience at Cafe Oto could need, and more.

That’s hardly surprising. Almost a decade and a half since their debut, Decoy + McPhee are the ultimate 21st century iteration of the hallowed organ-and-tenor combo, which at its finest — in such meetings as those of Gene Ammons and Richard “Groove” Holmes, Stanley Turrentine and Jimmy Smith, or Sam Rivers and Larry Young — provided an entire central heating system in itself.

The set I caught last night, the last of their four nights in Dalston, began with Noble marking out a fast 6/8, moving straight ahead, encouraging Hawkins to let rip with a rousing improvisation. McPhee entered with a splintered honk before the tempo slowed to a bluesy lope. A dislocated shuffle followed, powered by Edwards’ thrumming, then a modal section (with a tune I’m sure I know but couldn’t place), a fast Latin passage with chattering percussion, and a quiet gospel-tinged fade to a most elegant closure.

That’s a swift précis of 45 minutes of music full of spontaneous creativity and contrast, in which the freedom of any individual was a given. All four were astonishingly inventive, intuitive in their responses, shaping the parts and the whole with complete assurance. I was struck by the sight of a young woman amid the throng, dancing in the semi-ecstatic way people used to dance to, say, the Third Ear Band at rock festivals 50 years ago. Not something you see at many jazz gigs these days, but a pretty good sign.

The occasional bursts of B3-powered intensity reminded me of the first edition of Tony Williams’s Lifetime, a thought that led me to muse on what the classic John Coltrane Quartet might have sounded like had McCoy Tyner suddenly gone missing and been replaced for one night only by Larry Young, Lifetime’s organist, with instructions to go for it. A bit like Decoy with Joe McPhee, maybe. Anyway, the roar and the prolonged ovation at the end of the set said it all.

Jul 14

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Coltrane & Dolphy on the record

When Uncut magazine invited me to review the newly discovered tapes of John Coltrane and Eric Dolphy at the Village Gate in the summer of 1961, which are released today on vinyl and CD, I went and dug out the 12 April, 1962 of issue of Down Beat. Its striking cover announced that the two musicians had given a joint interview defending themselves against the charge that what they were playing was “anti-jazz”. I was 15 years old when I bought this copy of the magazine and exhilarated by what I saw and read.

Down Beat, essentially a magazine of the jazz establishment, had given a platform to two revolutionaries. Interviewed by Don DeMichael, the publication’s editor, they provided long and fascinating responses to his questions, as you can see below. Their patience is exemplary. Much of what they had to say is as valuable today as it seemed 60 years ago.

The way the cover and the two inside spreads were designed somehow echoed the tone of the piece. Whoever “Roth” was, his charcoal portraits seemed to catch a quality of heroic iconoclasm, as did the extreme cropping of the photographic images (taken by Bill Abernathy of Chicago and the Stockholm-based Bengt H. Malmqvist, who later became Abba’s photographer) on the first inside page. The whole thing made an impression that has never faded.

* Evenings at the Village Gate by John Coltrane with Eric Dolphy is on the Impulse label. The September issue of Uncut is out now.

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