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Posts from the ‘Jazz’ Category

Apr 8

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The music of Gatsby

The moon had risen higher, and floating in the Sound was a triangle of silver scales, trembling a little to the stiff, tinny drip of the banjoes on the lawn.

Coinciding with the first publication of The Great Gatsby a hundred years ago (April 10, 1925), a new musical version of F. Scott Fizgerald’s masterpiece opens shortly in the West End of London. The trailer for this latest iteration of Gatsby makes it look like an all-singing, all-dancing, good-time entertainment. It would be unfair to prejudge, but the songs by Jason Howland and Nathan Tysen certainly sound as though they adhere to the Rice/Lloyd-Webber template for modern musical theatre.

Not much room there, one imagines, for the darker undertones beneath the careless rapture, for the portrayal of the corruption of extreme wealth (and the swipe at racism) that gave Fitzgerald’s narrative a resonance which has kept it alive in the minds of its readers for a hundred years.

The musical aspect of the original novel is hardly its most significant feature, but it does provide the story with an intermittently intriguing soundtrack. Early on, for instance, there’s a band at Jay Gatsby’s house playing something he describes as “yellow cocktail music” — and even though you may not be able to define it, you know exactly how it might sound. And that “stiff, tinny drip”: I can’t hear a banjo in a band playing early jazz without those words — as good as Whitney Balliett or Philip Larkin — coming to mind.

At another of Gatsby’s summer parties on his estate, where “in his blue gardens men and girls came and went like moths among the whisperings and the champagne and the stars,” is something titled “Vladmir Tostoff’s Jazz History of the World”. A composition on a grand scale, we’re told that it was first performed at Carnegie Hall, where it created a sensation. Now it’s delivered on the lawn to Gatsby’s guests by an orchestra that was “no five-piece affair, but a whole pitful of oboes and trombones and saxophones and viols and cornets and piccolos, and low and high drums.”

Nick Carraway, Fitzgerald’s narrator, doesn’t tell us what Mr Tostoff’s work actually sounds like, at least not in the final published version. In a passage Fitzgerald deleted from a draft manuscript, Nick describes it as “starting with a weird spinning sound, mostly from the cornets. Then there would be a series of interruptive notes which coloured everything that came after them, until before you knew it they became the theme and new discords were opposed outside. But just as you’d get used to the new discord one of the old themes would drop back in, this time as a discord, until you’d get a weird sense that it was a preposterous cycle, after all. Long after the piece was over it went on and on in my head — whenever I think of that summer I can hear it yet.”

The year before the book appeared, George Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue” had received its première at the Aeolian Hall in New York, performed by the 23-piece Paul Whiteman Orchestra, with the composer at the piano. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald were living in Great Neck, Long Island at the time. Whiteman had commissioned the piece, orchestrated by Ferde Grofé, for a concert called “An Experiment in Modern Music”. It’s what I imagine Tostoff’s music must have resembled.

A few chapters later there’s also young Ewing Klipspringer, Gatsby’s house guest, roused from his sleep one afternoon and reluctantly acceding to his host’s request to play the piano, despite claiming to be out of practice. He responds with “The Love Nest”, a song by Louis A. Hirsch and Otto Harbach from a 1920 George M. Cohan musical titled Mary, while thunder rumbles and summer rain falls outside on Long Island Sound.

Three years after The Great Gatsby‘s publication, Paul Whiteman would assemble his orchestra in New York to record an arrangement of “The Love Nest”. It’s nothing special until, just before the end, Bix Beiderbecke steps forward for a sublime eight-bar cornet solo that perfectly evokes what we imagine to be the spirit of the Jazz Age.

Finally, when Daisy Fay is enjoying the social life of Louisville, Kentucky while Gatsby, her besotted swain, is making his way back from army service in the Great War, she is “young and her artificial world was redolent of orchids and pleasant, cheerful snobbery and orchestras which set the rhythm of the year, summing up the sadness and suggestiveness of life in new tunes. All night the saxophones wailed the hopeless comment of the ‘Beale Street Blues’ while a hundred pairs of golden and silver slippers shuffled the shining dusk.” Written by W. C. Handy in 1917, the song was a hit in 1921 for Marion Harris, who recorded many blues songs and was perhaps the first white female vocalist to achieve success by imitating (rather than caricaturing) the style of black singers.

In a wonderful piece for the FT at the weekend, seeking Gatsby‘s echoes in our present condition, the author Sarah Churchwell concluded that the book “anticipates precisely the kind of society that would find Trumpism appealing: a culture losing its imaginative capacity, surrendering its ideals… The Great Gatsby captures a truth that repeats across generations: the powerful consolidate their control even as the dream of something better gleams ahead. Again and again, those with wealth and privilege fortify themselves against the possibility of a more just or democratic world, transforming progress into another cycle of entrenched power.”

Oh, well. Roll over, Vladmir Tostoff, and tell George Gershwin the news.

* The passage of musical description deleted from a draft of Gatsby is quoted from Some Sort of Epic Grandeur, Matthew J. Bruccoli’s biography of Fitzgerald, published in the UK by Hodder & Stoughton in 1981.

Apr 4

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All this beauty

So much wrong in the world, and yet so much wonderful new music. How to explain the existence, amid the trauma and violence and chaos agents and the encroachment of threat, of all this beauty? Here are five new albums I wouldn’t want to be without: Billy Hart’s Just (ECM), Yazz Ahmed’s A Paradise in the Hold (Night Time Stories), Nels Cline’s Consentrik Quartet (Blue Note), Vilhelm Bromander’s Jorden vi ärvde (Thanatosis), and — most of all — Ambrose Akinmusire’s Honey From a Winter Stone (Nonesuch). Each of them offers jazz pushing the edge of its current possibilities, moving forward as it has always done, drawing influences from wherever it sees potential, respecting the past, suggesting futures.

Hart’s album is full of beautifully balanced and flexible interplay between four masters: the drummer with Ethan Iverson (piano), Ben Street (bass) and Mark Turner (tenor saxophone). Ahmed explores her Bahraini heritage in lustrous tunes with the help of singers including Natacha Atlas and Brigitte Beraha. Cline’s quartet, completed by the saxophonist Ingrid Laubrock, the bassist Chris Lightcap and the drummer Tom Rainey, explores the guitarist’s bracing and multi-faceted compositions which, while offering nothing specifically unfamiliar, create an original and constantly stimulating sound-world. Bromander’s Unfolding Orchestra, featuring the fantastic bass clarinetist Christer Bothén, extends the vision of Charlie Haden’s Liberation Music Orchestra with great success.

But for some time now Ambrose Akinmusire has moving towards a music that sounds completely new, finding ways of incorporating elements of hip-hop and contemporary classical music into his compositions. It could be gruesome. Instead, with Honey From a Winter Stone, it’s a quiet revelation.

Has anyone yet used the term Fourth Stream to describe such music? If not, its time might have come. Akinmusire takes the post-Bartókian astringency of the Mivos Quartet and brings to it an improvising musician’s fluency. He draws in a rapper, Kokayi, whose words, tone and rhythms make a flow lucid and persuasive enough to convert any sceptic. And weaving in and out is his own trumpet work, representing in its liquid grace and constant unpredictability a kind of celestial marriage of Booker Little and Don Cherry, supported by two familiar accomplices, the pianist Sam Harris and the drummer Justin Brown, plus the synthesiser and vocals of Chiquitamagic.

Akinmusire has found a way to make all this work, to create from it a coherent and entirely contemporary statement. The longest track, the 29-minute s-/Kinfolks, cycles through various dimensions, from an exploratory opening trumpet flight of sumptuous inventivness through deep grooves, a dramatic change of temperature as Kokayi freestyles, and a passage for the strings that sounds effortless but strikes deep.

As I listened, I found myself thinking back to 1969 and the Art Ensemble of Chicago’s People in Sorrow. What s-/Kinfolks shares with that epic from half a century ago is a combination of rarified beauty, emotional heft (its elegantly understated play of mourning and defiance), and relevance to the present condition. Probably the album of the year already, with the others not far behind.

Mar 17

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Silencing the Voice of America

Time for jazz… Willis Conover speaking… This is the Voice of America Jazz Hour…

When, as a schoolboy in the late 1950s, I started to discover the music I love and write about, that process took some work. The music wasn’t easy to find, which of course added to the sense of its value. One priceless resource was the nightly Jazz Hour on the Voice of America station, beamed around the world from studios in Washington DC as a tool of the US State Department’s soft-power policy.

Willis Conover, a white man in early middle age, spoke slowly and clearly in an Eisenhower-era sort of voice, so that listeners in other countries with perhaps only a smattering of English could get his meaning. It wasn’t a voice that indulged in hip vernacular, but somehow it conveyed a love of the music, as did the fact that the show’s signature tune was Duke Ellington’s “Take the A Train”.

As I recall, the Jazz Hour was part of a nightly two-hour strand labelled Music USA. The first hour was devoted to the last knockings of the Swing Era. What followed, I think at 10pm UK time, was 60 minutes of what interested me. This was where, in late 1959, I first heard “All Blues”, that mesmerising track from Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue, igniting a relationship that would lead 50 years later to the writing of the book that gave this blog its title. I can still remember the first time I heard those little syncopated muted trumpet figures that Miles laid over the fade. A whole new world was opening up, right there on the family radio.

Similarly, I remember being hypnotised again a few months later when Gil Evans’s “La Nevada” came over the VOA airwaves. It was the lead track from Evans’s latest album, Out of the Cool, and Conover played all 15 minutes of it, complete with solos from the trumpeter Johnny Coles, the bass trombonist Tony Studd, the tenor saxophonist Budd Johnson, the bassist Ron Carter and the guitarist Ray Crawford, all propelled by Charlie Persip’s restlessly propulsive snare-drum accents and Elvin Jones’s maraccas, with Evans’s piano and Crawford’s guitar and the background tapestry of semi-improvised woodwind and brass figures adding a commentary to what is still the richest and most compelling extended piece of jazz I know.

To be honest, I haven’t listened to VOA since the ’60s. I don’t even know whether it still broadcasts jazz alongside its news and other programming. But I have a lot for which to thank the Jazz Hour, even though its true intended audience during the years I listened was much further to the east, behind the Iron Curtain, where it reached people in Poland and Russia and East Germany who were even hungrier for the music and the culture for which it seemed to stand, one of freedom from repression.

I remember one particular sign of VOA’s effectiveness. On many nights the music on the Jazz Hour would obliterated by a loud and sometimes prolonged burst of static. The Soviet bloc’s jamming stations were doing their job.

This past weekend, the 1,300 employees of the Voice of America were told of an executive order signed by President Trump stripping the station of its resources. The document instructed its managers to reduce its output “to the minimum presence and function required by law” in order to “ensure taxpayers are no longer on the hook for radical propaganda.”

The knowledge that VOA was launched in 1942 to beam anti-Nazi propaganda to Germany and its occupied territories adds a layer of irony that would be funny were it not essentially tragic. Among those likely to be gratified by the decision are Elon Musk, who called for it to be shut down, and Vladimir Putin, who blocked its broadcasts to Russia after the invasion of Ukraine.

Willis Conover died in 1996, aged 75. He’s buried in Arlington National Cemetery. I imagine he’d be glad not to be around for all this.

* The photograph of Willis Conover interviewing Louis Armstrong was taken in 1955.

Mar 10

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The world and Don Cherry

Wherever, whenever and by whomsoever the idea of “world music” was invented, it had no finer exponent, explorer and exemplar than Don Cherry. In a few months’ time it will be 30 years since Cherry died in Malaga of liver cancer, aged 58, leaving a world in which he was, to quote Steve Lake’s happy phrase, “a trumpet-playing lyric poet of the open road, whose very life was a free-flowing improvisation.” I suppose it was fitting that he should have died in Andalucia, a region where many cultural influences met in the Middle Ages to create a foundation of song.

Cherry’s life and work demand a full-scale biography, along the lines of Robin D. G. Kelley’s standard-setting study of Thelonious Monk. In the meantime, it’s worth welcoming Eternal Rhythm: The Don Cherry Tapes and Travelations, a new book consisting mostly of interviews conducted in various locations around the world by the author Graeme Ewens, who met the trumpeter in the 1970s and became his “confidant, travel companion, witness and friend” over the subsequent two decades. They are augmented by Ewens’ memories of their times spent together from Bristol to Bombay, by biographical notes, and by an interesting selection of photos and other visual material.

A useful addition to Blank Forms’ The Organic Music Societies, a Cherry compendium published in 2021, it’s full of worthwhile stuff. Here’s Cherry on playing with Ornette Coleman in the great quartet that changed the direction of jazz: “Ornette would never count a song off: ‘One, two, three, four, go.’ We would feel each other in the silence before playing and then we would play. And the first accent, or the first attack, would determine the tempo and temper of the composition.” And this, which goes to the heart of Cherry’s conception: “One day when Ornette was working on notation, we talked about how you couldn’t notate human feelings. For me, there was always this problem of notated music sounding like notated music. In the older days you never saw black musicians playing with music stands. They learnt it by heart, which is important. For me, when I learn a song with notes it will take time for me to really memorise it, but it’s important to learn it by heart because then you will know it.”

Cherry tells a story about Miles Davis coming to sit in with him and Billy Higgins at the Renaissance in Hollywood and borrowing his pocket trumpet. And then, later in the ’60s, Miles invites Cherry to sit in with his quintet at the Village Vanguard: “So I played something, the changes from ‘I Got Rhythm’ — AABA — and I stopped my solo right before the bridge, which is the B part, and Miles said, ‘You’re the only man I know who stops his solo at the bridge.’ Then later on I heard him doing the same thing. And the next time I saw him he said to me, ‘Hey, Cherry, I play a little like you now,’ which was a big compliment.” Particularly, one might point out, coming from a man who had initially scorned Cherry’s playing.

In an offical note telexed after a concert in Yaoundé in 1981, during a tour of Cameroon sponsored by the US State Department, a consular official writes: “Cherry and companions were real good-will ambassadors: courteous, patient, curious about country, irrepressibly friendly… (the) only problems arose in trying to move them from place to place as they kept striking up conversations in the street.” On page 132 we learn that the pocket trumpet Cherry was playing at the time of his conversation had once belonged to Boris Vian, the writer and critic, and possibly before that to Josephine Baker. On the very next page Cherry mentions an occasion in the 1950s when he and Ornette went to hear a Stockhausen performance at UCLA.

The book doesn’t duck the question of the social conditions under which the music came into being, or the heroin addiction that began for Cherry in the 1950s and continued on and off for the rest of his life. Here, as part of a lengthy disquisition on changes in the heroin trade, is an insight, from the perspective of 1981: “…you always try and keep some morals. There were certain influential white people who were messing with drugs and so I’d be copping for them, and that’s the way I’d survive. But now on the Lower East Side anybody can go and cop. Anybody. Sometimes they’ll ask you to show them your marks before they let you in the building. That world is another kind of world. You cannot compare that world with the people who just smoke grass, because you’re fighting for your life to survive.”

World music hadn’t been invented — or codified as a marketing category — when Cherry moved on from his jazz background. He’d become famous through his association with Coleman, followed by three wonderful albums of his own for Blue Note (Complete Communion, Symphony for the Improvisers and Where Is Brooklyn?), and his work with Albert Ayler, the New York Contemporary Five, the Jazz Composers Orchestra and Charlie Haden’s Liberation Music Orchestra. His new direction denied nothing of his past but incorporated elements drawn from other cultures, exemplified by his use of bamboo flutes, gamelan and the doussn’ gouni, the six-stringed hunter’s harp from West Africa.

His concert at the Berlin Jazz Festival in 1968, released by MPS under the title Eternal Rhythm, gave a clear indication of where his music was heading. Further evidence came with collaborations with the Turkish drummer Okay Temiz (Orient on BYG and Organic Music Society on Caprice), his duo albums with Ed Blackwell (Mu Pts 1 & 2 on BYG, El Corazón on ECM), his guest appearance on the Swedish drummer-composer composer Bengt Berger’s essay in African ritual modes and rhythms, Bitter Funeral Beer (also ECM), and the three ECM albums by Codona, a trio with the multi-instrumentalists Collin Walcott and Nana Vasconcelos, recorded in 1978-82 (and reissued in 2008 as The Codona Trilogy).

Elsewhere, refusing to be limited by notions of idiom and genre, he turned up on Lou Reed’s The Bells, Rip Rig & Panic’s I Am Cold and a lovely half-hour improvised duet with Terry Riley, bootlegged from a 1975 Riley concert in Cologne. In the early ’80s he toured with Sun Ra’s Arkestra and Ian Dury’s Blockheads.

I want to pass on a pithy little description of Cherry’s playing that I’ve just read in a Substack post celebrating Ornette’s 1972 album Science Fiction by the pianist Ethan Iverson: “Folk music, surrealism, the blues, the avant-garde, deep intelligence, primitive emotion.” That’s good. And, as much as I love his work with Coleman, Albert Ayler and Gato Barbieri, my favourite Cherry albums are probably those that best encapsulate the full range of those qualities, and of his imagination.

They would be Eternal Rhythm, Relativity Suite from 1973 (with the JCOA, never reissued in any form since its its first appearance on vinyl), and the wonderful Modern Art: Stockholm 1977, a concert at the city’s Museum of Modern Art, which appeared on the Mellotronen label in 2014, featuring Cherry and a nine-piece band played marvellously rich acoustic versions of the material from his then-recent album Hear & Now, produced by Narada Michael Walden. It includes a spellbound duet with the Swedish guitarist Georg Wadenius on a graceful Coleman ballad called “Ornettunes” and an ecstatic transition from the gentle groove of “California” (a take on Donald Byrd’s “Cristo Redentor”, with Cherry on piano) to the miniature prayer for transcendence of “Desireless” (first composed as “Isla (The Sapphic Sleep)” for Alexander Jodorowsky’s 1973 film The Holy Mountain and then re-recorded under its new title for Relativity Suite).

It’s easy to imagine that there probably isn’t any music ever played by anyone, anywhere, at any time, from prehistoric hunters on the Eastern Steppe to whatever Kendrick Lamar, Billie Eilish or Nils Frahm are doing next, to which Don Cherry could not have made a worthwhile contribution. And the secret to that must have been his openness.

“I’m self-taught in a way,” he says in the book, “but I’ve always been open to learn, because one lifetime I don’t feel is long enough to really learn music.”

* Graeme Ewens’ Eternal Rhythm: The Don Cherry Tapes and Travelations is published by Buku Press: bukupress@gmail.com. The photograph of Cherry on the Lower East Side of Manhattan in 1988 was taken by Val Wilmer and is used by her kind permission.

Mar 4

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Brutalised

Maybe you saw Daniel Blumberg’s acceptance speech for the best soundtrack award during the Academy Awards ceremony at the weekend. Honoured for his work on The Brutalist, he finishes off with a mention of Cafe Oto, which is less of a surprise when you’ve noticed, among the musical credits, the names of such Oto-adjacent improvisers as the saxophonists Seymour Wright and Evan Parker, the pianist John Tilbury and the trumpeter Axel Dörner.

After seeing Brady Corbet’s ambitious film at the IMAX in London today, I came away with mixed feelings. Sometimes it feels like three different and much shorter films, maybe four, trapped together in a very large sack and left to fight it out for three and a half hours.

But the real reason I went was to find out what use Blumberg had made of Evan Parker’s unique qualities. The saxophonist is featured in a sequence filmed amid the marble quarries at Carrara, in the hills above the Tuscan coast, the source of the material from which Michelangelo’s David was wrought, along with Rome’s Pantheon and London’s Marble Arch.

As a camera hovers over the spectacularly gorgeous hewn terraces of white stone, the air is filled with the sound of Parker’s soprano saxophone. Unbroken skeins of squiggling multiphonic sound are shaped with a sound-sculptor’s skill and imagination, soaring like birds above a sombre low-brass chorale.

Given the film’s narrative requirements, it’s a moment of audio-visual magic that can’t last long. But I could happily have taken three and a half hours of that alone, without all the plot-driven drama that surrounds it. Right there, perhaps, was yet another film struggling to escape: a potential classic of slow cinema.

Mar 3

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Data mining with Maria Schneider

“It’s kind of nightmarish, what’s happening,” Maria Schneider said during her performance with the Oslo Jazz Ensemble at the Barbican last night. She was introducing the title piece from her most recent Grammy-winning double-album. And since 2019, when she wrote and recorded Data Lords, the nightmares have got a whole lot darker.

Half of the album is about the threat to humanity from the people who are scraping and exploiting our data, whether relating to consumer patterns or creative imaginations. In the past six years we’ve all grown more aware of the activities of people like Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Mark Zuckerberg, Sundar Pichai and Jeff Bezos. More aware, yes, but seemingly powerless (or unwilling) to halt the tightening of their grip.

The contrasting theme of the other half is the importance of the natural world and its phenomena, from birdsong to handmade objects to poetry. Again, it’s necessary only to read the news to appreciate the individually varying but generally increasing levels of threat.

She mixed up the pieces last night, starting with the powerful lyricism of “Bluebird”, its tone set by the accordion of Kalle Moberg. More sardonic and disquieting was “Don’t Be Evil”, which takes its title from Google’s extraordinary instruction to staff. As waves of brass were finessed down to a chamber trio, this was a demonstration of Schneider’s love of dynamic contrast.

Although she spent several early years as Gil Evans’s protégée, Schneider truly belongs to the genre of composer-arrangers who worked for Stan Kenton in the 1950s: people such as Pete Rugolo, Gene Roland and Bob Graettinger, creators of dramatic charts with plenty of space for fine, characterful soloists. In Schneider’s hands, such music doesn’t have the built-in flexibility associated with Fletcher Henderson, Ellington, Basie, Carla Bley, Mike Gibbs or, for that matter, Gil Evans, but its musicality and integrity are impeccable. Maybe Kenny Wheeler’s big-band writing is the closest comparison, but Schneider’s music is imbued with her own personality.

Last night’s selection of pieces was well served not just by the ensemble but by all the soloists, given outstanding support throughout from the supple double bass of Trygve Waldemar Fiske. It was amusing to note that the two women members of the 18-piece ensemble were playing bass trombone and baritone saxophone: between them, Ingrid Utne and Tina Lægrid Olsen were holding up the earth.

Olsen was memorably featured on “Sputnik”, her softly ruminating baritone charged with evoking the innocent wonder once felt by those old enough to remember going outside to see the first satellites (the forerunners of the Starlink system with which Musk can now, should he so wish, control world wars). As she brought her spellbinding solo gently back down from its low orbit, the tone poem closed with one of those tapered endings — a sort of whispered catharsis — in which the composer specialises.

“I don’t want to leave you with the annihilation of humanity,” Schneider said, introducing the encore, the sweet waltz of “Braided Together”, which she prefaced by reading Ted Kooser’s short poem “december 29”: a flicker of candlelight offering hope amid the gathering gloom.

* Maria Schneider’s Data Lords is on the crowdfunded ArtistShare label. I took the photograph above after the performance had ended.

Feb 24

6 Comments

Roberta Flack in London

Roberta Flack, who has died aged 88, made her London debut on July 27, 1972, at an early-evening showcase presented by Atlantic Records before an invited audience of industry and media types at Ronnie Scott’s Club. She’d already released three albums but it was when Clint Eastwood chose to feature a track from the first of them, “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face”, in his 1971 movie Play Misty For Me that she became a hot property.

I sat with my friend Charlie Gillett and we were both overjoyed to discover that her band included Richard Tee on keyboards, the guitarist Eric Gale and the drummer Bernard “Pretty” Purdie. A real New York studio ‘A’ team, the kind you couldn’t quite believe you were seeing in a London club. They provided the perfect platform for the poise and exquisitely chosen material of a singer who was already, at 35, a mature woman.

Of a beautiful little show, in which she also presented two talented young male singers who were her protégés (and whose names I’m afraid I don’t recall), the highlight for me was “Reverend Lee”, a slice of lubricious lowdown funk written by Eugene McDaniels, to whom she had been introduced by her original patron and mentor, Les McCann. She’d already recorded McDaniels’ “Compared to What” on her debut album, First Take, released the day before before McCann and Eddie Harris cut their hit live version at the Montreux Festival.

I prefer her reading, in which the incendiary lyric of a great protest song is rendered all the more powerful for her restrained delivery. Produced with exemplary sensitivity by Joel Dorn, it features the great Ron Carter on double bass, shortly after he had ended his six-year stint with Miles Davis’s quintet.

“I have chills remembering his virtuosity that first day in the studio in New York,” she told me when I asked her about working with Carter during an interview for Uncut magazine in 2020. “He understood that less is more and the importance of the silence between the notes. He was also humble and open to my musical thoughts and suggestions. Our synergy is what you hear on ‘Compared to What’ and ‘First Time’.”

Like Nina Simone, Flack had begun her musical career in the hope of becoming a classical pianist, but fate took them both in a different direction. Simone carried the sense of having been unjustly thwarted with her throughout her life. I asked Flack if she’d ever felt that way, too.

“Life can be so unpredictable,” she said. “One thing I know is that everything changes. I’ve tried to embrace the twists and turns that life’s changes have brought. I took my classical training and used it as the foundation on which I based my arrangements, my dynamics and ultimately my musical expression. I think if you’re rigid about how you see yourself and if you aren’t open to the changes that life brings you, the resentment will show in your music and can interfere with honest expression.”

I’m listening to First Take while writing this. Whether it’s in the quietly spine-tingling gospel of “I Told Jesus”, the laconic protest soul of “Tryin’ Times” or the sublime sophistication of “Ballad of the Sad Young Men”, honest expression from a great artist is what you get.

* The photograph of Roberta Flack at Ronnie Scott’s in 1972, with Eric Gale (right), was taken by Brian O’Connor. If you want to read more about Ms Flack, you won’t find anything better than this piece by Ann Powers: https://www.npr.org/2020/02/10/804370981/roberta-flack-the-virtuoso

Feb 17

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Dave Tomlin 1934-2024

I never met Dave Tomlin, or heard him play live, but the news of his death at the age of 90 rang a bell that echoed back to London in the late 1960s. A Tibetan prayer bell, probably: among other distinctions, Tomlin was the founder of the wonderfully named Giant Sun Trolley, a group who were one of the early attractions, along with Pink Floyd and the Soft Machine, at UFO, the legendary psychedelic club which opened in December 1966 in a Tottenham Court Road basement, where it ran weekly until July 1967.

Originally an army bugler, then a clarinetist with Bob Wallis’s Storyville Jazzmen during the Trad boom, Tomlin switched in the mid-’60s to soprano saxophone, the instrument on which he was featured in the Mike Taylor Quartet, a Coltrane-influenced group led by a strikingly adventurous but troubled British pianist. A recording of a January 1965 gig, with Tony Reeves on bass and Jon Hiseman on drums, emerged under the title Mandala four years ago, supplementing their official release, Pendulum, recorded in October of that year by Denis Preston in his Notting Hill studio.

Taylor’s mental problems, seemingly exacerbated by the prolonged use of LSD, would soon destroy his musical career. According to Ron Rubin, who took over from Reeves as the group’s bassist and played on Pendulum, he was so disturbed that at one point he threatened to kill Tomlin. In January 1969, after a period during which he had been seen busking on the streets with an Arabian clay drum, Taylor’s drowned body was found washed up on an Essex shore, the cause of his death, whether accident or suicide, unexplained.

Tomlin, by contrast, survived the mind-expanding journeys of the time. Glen Sweeney, a jazz drummer when he joined Giant Sun Trolley, met him at the London Free School in 1966 and said in an interview with the archivist Luca Ferrari that he “was known as an ace guy — he’d taken a lot of drugs and dropped out.” Sweeney became Tomlin’s first recruit to Giant Sun Trolley; they were sometimes joined by bassist Roger Bunn (later to become the original Roxy Music guitarist) and a trombonist named Dick Dadem. They split up when Tomlin decided to spend some time in Morocco in 1967, leaving behind no aural evidence of the band’s time together.

Sweeney switched to tablas and formed the Third Ear Band, who became a fixture at underground events. One track of their 1969 debut album for EMI’s Harvest label featured a guest appearance by Tomlin, playing violin on his own composition “Lark Rise”.

Thereafter music seemed to play a smaller role in Tomlin’s life. He was a poet, novelist and memoirist, and between 1976 and 1991 devoted much of his time to the Guild of Transcultural Studies, a community of artists from many disciplines who took informal occupation of London’s unoccupied Cambodian Embassy.

He died three months ago, but I didn’t know about it until one of his sons wrote a short obituary for the Guardian. His death removes another link with the particular Notting Hill microclimate of artistic and social optimism embodied by UFO, the Free School, Blackhill Enterprises, Joe Boyd’s Witchseason and IT. He never became a big name, and probably never wanted to be, but the sound of his soprano saxophone survives on those challenging, sometimes exhilarating Taylor quartet recordings as evidence of a man in his element.

* The Mike Taylor Quartet’s Mandala is a CD on the Jazz in Britain label. Pendulum, originally issued on Columbia, was reissued in 2007 on Sunbeam Records. The Third Ear Band’s three albums were reissued in 2021 in a box set of CDs titled Mosaics by Esoteric/Cherry Red. The photo of Tomlin is taken from Luca Ferrari’s archive: http://www.ghettoraga.blogspot.com

Feb 14

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Keyboard studies

Perhaps it was last month’s 50th anniversary of Keith Jarrett’s Köln Concert that got me thinking about solo jazz piano. As it happens, I’d been listening recently to the incomparable Art Tatum, particularly to the unaccompanied pieces from Jewels in the Treasure Box, recorded in 1953 at the Blue Note in Chicago and released last year, and to Paul Bley’s 1972 very different solo classic Open, to Love, now being given a vinyl reissue.

Then Mike Westbrook got in touch to tell me that his four volumes of solo recordings, made in various locations between 2022 and 2024 for private circulation under the title The Piano and Me, were now — thanks to entreaties from several quarters, including this one — available to everyone via download. And, kicking off a three-night season at Cafe Oto, I heard Alexander Hawkins play a half-hour solo set that achieved marvels of modernistic sonic architecture on material that will form part of a forthcoming solo release.

All this solo piano made me wish there was a place in London today similar to Bradley’s, the piano bar that existed in Greenwich Village between 1969 and 1996. A few months after it opened, I saw two significant pianists playing solo there. The first was the bebop veteran Al Haig, whose touch and lucidity made an understated but indelible impression. The second was Dave McKenna, in whose large frame were gathered all the virtues of mainstream jazz pianism. Like Jimmy Rowles and Alan Clare, McKenna seemed to know every standard ever written, and then some. He died in 2008, aged 78. A priceless film of him was made at a private party in 1991.

I love it when a pianist, whether on a concert platform or a railway station concourse, has the time to follow a train of thought wherever it may lead. That’s what I cherish about the Westbrook recitals, which follow on from his previous solo albums: Paris (2017) and Starcross Bridge (2018). He takes the opportunity to wander, but never without purpose. In the fourth volume of the new set, recorded at Ashburton Arts Centre in Devon, he moves seamlessly from his own “View from the Drawbridge” to Monk’s “Jackie-ing” and then John Ireland’s hymn tune “Love Unknown”. In the second volume, recorded at the Pizza Express, “My Way” runs into “Falling in Love Again”, then into “Lover Man”, and then into Billy Strayhorn’s “Blood Count”.

It’s a look inside the mind of a musician who, now in his eighties, finds nourishment in Mingus, Bacharach, Rossini and the Beatles. The pace is steady, the mood reflective. There’s time to explore the melodic byways, the harmonic implications. No Tatum-style technical fireworks, yet the result is mesmerising. And, as with all the music and musicians I’ve mentioned in this piece, it’s a reminder that the piano really is one of humanity’s noblest inventions.

* You’ll find Mike Westbrook’s The Piano and Me here: https://mikewestbrook.bandcamp.com/. Art Tatum’s Jewels in the Treasure Box is on the Resonance label. Paul Bley’s Open, to Love is reissued in ECM’s Luminessence vinyl series. Alexander Hawkins’s new solo album, Song Unconditional, will be out in the spring on Intakt. The photo is a screen-grab from a fine TV documentary on Art Tatum: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VXJb14qufe4

Feb 11

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Tour de force

As we queued in the Dalston drizzle outside Cafe Oto for last night’s sold-out show by the Tyshawn Sorey Trio, I don’t suppose many of us realised quite the extent to which we were about to enter a better world.

Outside: the return of territorial conquest as a mode of historical change, the revived persecution of minorities, the increasing contrast between private affluence and public squalor, the plight of bankrupt councils trying not to close libraries and other basic services, the destruction of humanities courses in universities, the malign manipulation of such digital-era innovations as AI and cryptocurrency, the exaltation of spite, revenge and mistrust in public life, and the general deprecation of the public good. Inside: playing non-stop, without a break, for two and a quarter hours, Sorey and his colleagues, the bassist Harish Raghavan and the pianist Aaron Diehl, reminding us of what human beings can do, at their very best.

There was too much to describe. This is a group that thinks in long durations, in slow development, in whispers as well as roars. Its three albums (the first two of which had Matt Brewer on bass) fully demonstrated those priorities. In person, however, the effect is more than redoubled, thanks to the brilliance with which they manage the flow and its sometimes radical transitions through nothing more than eye-contact cues, twice managing gradual and beautifully calibrated accelerations that transported the crowd as well as the musicians.

Each player is a virtuoso, a product of intense learning and dedication as well as innate talent. But the machine they build, as with any great group, is superior to the sum of its constituent parts. There were elements of blues and gospel in some of the vast, surging climaxes that drew shouts from the audience, and of ballads and different shades of blues in the passages that flirted with silence. Sorey’s rattling Latin rhythms bounced off the walls; his gossamer shuffle barely disturbed the air. Diehl’s dizzyingly fast upper-register filigree phrases spun with a centripetal force. Raghavan’s assertive agility was balanced by deep thoughtfulness.

Their repertoire avoids original material in favour of extended explorations and dissections of generally lesser known pieces by significant jazz composers: Ahmad Jamal, Duke Ellington, Muhal Richard Abrams, Wayne Shorter, Horace Silver, Brad Mehldau, McCoy Tyner, Harold Mabern. Since the chosen themes are not the obvious ones, and are not identified in performance, the audience listens with fresh ears, unaffected by the comfort of familiarity, open to everything they do.

“See you on the other side,” Sorey had said before the start of the journey. After an hour or so, during a quiet passage, he asked: “Y’all still with us?” Not only were we still with them, both then and at the reluctant end of the performance, but many of us were probably still with them on the journey home and on the morning after, and will be with them for some time to come. An unforgettable night.

* The Tyshawn Sorey Trio’s three albums — Mesmerism, Continuing and The Susceptible Now — are on Pi Recordings, available at tyshawn-sorey@bandcamp.com

** In the original version of this I had a moment of brain fade and wrote “public affluence and private squalor”. Now corrected.

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