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Posts from the ‘Jazz’ Category

Nov 5

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Bryan Ferry’s dance to the music of time

Bryan Ferry 2Bryan Ferry is doing a rather brave thing with his current tour, which reached the Albert Hall last night and continues around the country for the next three weeks. Unlike most performers of his age, he is trying to give us more than we bargained for.

The show begins with the nine members of the Bryan Ferry Orchestra, the band that created instrumental versions of Roxy Music songs in the style of Jelly Roll Morton, Bix Beiderbecke and Duke Ellington on The Jazz Age and went on to contribute to the soundtrack of Baz Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby. So we’re presented with a banjo, a bass saxophone, a variety of clarinets, a string bass and a drum kit from a 1920s photograph: but Colin Good, Ferry’s musical director, has such a profound understanding of this form — as do his musicians, notably the trumpeter Enrico Tomasso — that the results go well beyond mere pastiche or novelty.

For some members of the audience, however, it is undoubtedly something of a shock to hear “Avalon”, “Slave to Love”, “The Bogus Man” and “Do the Strand” so radically transformed, and they have to wait until half a dozen pieces have been delivered in this fashion before Ferry himself arrives on stage to sing “The Way You Look Tonight”, joined by his two backing singers. “Reason or Rhyme” also begins in the same idiom, but is transformed by the mid-song arrival of Cherisse Ofosu-Osei, who settles behind a second drum kit, and Oliver Thompson, who plugs in his Gibson Les Paul, heralding a sudden time-shift to the present day.

From that instant the momentum builds, thanks in large part to Ofosu-Osei, who bludgeons her equipment with an unwavering ferocity that would make Paul Thompson, Roxy’s hard-hitting old drummer, sound as though he were playing for tea-drinkers at the Ritz. But Ferry hasn’t stopped taking chances. He’s going to sing what he wants to sing, and what he wants us to hear, and much of the pleasure of the concert is derived from seeing how he and Good marshal their resources to refresh the material, with Martin Wheatley switching from banjo and guitar to mandolin for a delicate “Carrickfergus”, John Sutton adding percussive decoration to Ofuso-Osei’s rolling thunder, and Tomasso and Iain Dixon providing a blast of Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker on “Au Privave” as a prelude to “N.Y.C.” (a song from Ferry’s album Mamouna). And if you have a bass saxophone standing there, why not use it on “Editions of You”?

The set is liberally sprinkled with Dylan songs, including a lovely voice-and-piano treatment of “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right”, and there’s a version of “Shame, Shame, Shame” in which the backing singers interpolate a chorus of “Can I Get a Witness”: a witty and appropriate touch that you can’t imagine coming from anyone who didn’t have a real love and first-hand experience of that kind of R&B.

And that’s what I liked most about the concert. It was about the music, not the image. Ferry seems to have adopted Dylan’s view of time, which is that there is no division between the past and the present. On this evidence he seems to be making it work, for us as well as for him.

Nov 4

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Giorgio Gaslini: maestro of jazz

Giorgio Gaslini 1If I had to nominate the most interesting jazz composer to emerge from the European scene in the past 60 years, the list would certainly include Krzysztof Komeda, Andre Hodeir and Mike Westbrook. But in the end I’d probably settle for a musician hardly known outside his native country, and virtually not at all in Britain: the 84-year-old Giorgio Gaslini, who was a product of the bebop era and made his first recordings in 1948 but remains in possession of a mind so open and inquisitive that his catalogue includes albums devoted to solo piano recitals of the music of Sun Ra, John Coltrane and Albert Ayler.

In 1960 Gaslini wrote and recorded the music for Michelangelo Antonioni’s masterpiece La Notte. Five years later he made a record called Nuovi Sentimenti (New Feelings), with a band including Don Cherry, Steve Lacy, Gato Barbieri, two bassists and two drummers: an early example of a European musician embracing the avant garde. Since then he has written and recorded music in just about every conceivable format, from solos and duos through a regular quartet that featured the fine Italian tenorist Gianni Bedori, to quintets, sextets, septets, octets and many kinds of  large ensemble; he has composed jazz pieces for his own big band and the Italian Instabile Orchestra, symphonies, choral pieces, ballet scores, and an opera called Colloquio per Malcolm X.

His most recent release, a set of solo piano pieces titled Incanti, appeared on the CamJazz label in 2011. Recorded at a concert in Messina, it featured his improvised meditations on classical pieces by Monteverdi, Faure, Tchaikovsky, Bartok and others, and it was among my favourite albums of that year, thanks not least to a magical version of Handel’s aria “Lascia ch’io piange”: four minutes and 49 seconds of magically understated beauty.

Gaslini has spent much of his time as an eminent teacher at conservatories in Rome and Milan, but he’s also made a huge number of records over the years, and it doesn’t take much effort to find quite a decent proportion of them. In 1997 the Italian label Soul Note issued a pair of two-CD sets documenting his early work, starting with a 1948 piano trio version of the bop classic “Ow!” and including the soundtrack to La Notte and the fantastic Nuovi Sentimenti. Ten years later they issued two more, devoted to his work with various ensembles between 1968 and 1974. Now another Italian label, Dischi della Quercia, has filled in a large gap in his recent output by issuing a box containing 11 albums recorded between 1976 and 1985, all remastered and packaged in card facsimiles of their original sleeves.

For your £40 you get a great deal of music, much of of it excellent and some of it a great deal more than that. To my ears, the least interesting items are the duo albums with Roswell Rudd, Eddie Gomez and Anthony Braxton. Two album-length suites for octet, Indian Suite and Monodrama, are uneven, but contain interesting passages. There is a very nice quartet album — another suite — called Murales, featuring Bedori, and a decent quintet set recorded live at New York’s Public Theatre; you can hear the influence of Monk on Gaslini’s angular, playful tunes, but there’s never a sense of imitation.

The most fully realised music, however, is contained on the two albums devoted to a sextet he led in the late ’70s, with Bedori on tenor and soprano saxes, Gianluigi Trovesi on alto and soprano sax and bass clarinet, Paolo Damiani on double bass, Gianni Cazzola on drums and Luis Agudo on percussion. The first of them, dating from 1977, is called Free Actions and sounds today as fresh and compelling as any post-Coltrane jazz that was being played anywhere in the world at the time. Better than that: anyone listening to the brilliantly imaginative solos of Bedori and  Trovesi against an active, hard-swinging ostinato figure during the fifth and final movement of the suite from which the album takes its name might well find themselves thinking of the current Wayne Shorter Quartet, and concluding that the Italians are not shamed by such an exalted comparison, even though they were making their music almost three and a half decades ago.

The second sextet album, Graffiti, was recorded live in Milan the following year and is almost as good: just four and a half stars against the five of its predecessor, you might say. Again it’s a suite, and one of the movements — called “Soul Street” — brilliantly captures the spirit of the Charles Mingus of East Coasting and Jazz Portraits. It’s also in this track that Gaslini’s piano solo demonstrates how well he can blend the free with the funky. Once again Bedori and Trovesi are outstanding throughout, while Damiani’s sinewy bass lines remind me of his British contemporary, the late, lamented Jeff Clyne.

Once you enter Giorgio Gaslini’s world, there’s a lot to discover. How nice it would be if, even at this late stage, somebody gave him the chance to show British audiences what he can do.

* The photograph of Giorgio Gaslini is from the sleeve of Incanti and was taken by KDPhoto.

Oct 17

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Ribot, Grimes & Taylor

Ribot Grimes Taylor 1

On a small table in front of the chair on which he sat to play guitar at the Cafe Oto last night, Marc Ribot had a large egg-timer. I’ve often wonderered how musicians — improvising musicians in particular — know when they’re reached the end of their alloted time. Most of them seem to have an internal clock, its calibration refined over the years. But I’ll never forget the morning after a particularly mesmerising performance by Art Pepper at St Paul’s Church in Hammersmith at the end of the ’70s, when a photographer came into the Melody Maker‘s office with a set of pictures from the concert, including one that showed the great saxophonist taking a surreptitious look at his wristwatch.

I’d be surprised if anyone was clock-watching last night. The trio of Ribot, the bassist Henry Grimes and the drummer Chad Taylor started with a medley of Albert Ayler tunes, providing the guitarist (who is probably best known for his work with Tom Waits and Marianne Faithfull) with a canvas for the scrabbling, string-scrubbing, sound-splintering techniques that place him somewhere on the spectrum between Jimi Hendrix and Derek Bailey. As he eased away from adding country inflections to Ayler’s march-hymn structures and wound himself up into a state of near-catharsis, I was reminded of Robert Fripp’s startling solo on King Crimson’s “A Sailor’s Tale” (from the album Islands), one of my favourite guitar improvisations.

There can’t have been more than a handful among the capacity crowd who were born when Grimes disappeared off the jazz map in 1970, having spent a dozen years establishing himself — via such important recordings as Don Cherry’s Complete Communion, Cecil Taylor’s Unit Structures and Albert Ayler’s Live in Greenwich Village — as one of the foremost members of an unusually gifted generation of double bassists. The story of his rediscovery more than 30 years later, living in Los Angeles, surviving on non-musical jobs, writing poetry and unaware of any developments in the music during the intervening period, has passed into legend. Now, at 77, he overflows with energy, ideas and purpose, the strength and fluidity of his playing absolutely unscarred by that extended lay-off.

The second tune of a long set began with a less than convincing rock beat but soon doubled up into fast bebop time and felt all the better for it. The third and last item opened with a slow, abstract passage in which Grimes played the violin, reminding us of his Juilliard training in the ’50s, before the adroit use of a volume pedal enabled Ribot to produce jolting note-cluster explosions. Taylor concluded the piece with a marvellous solo reminiscent of the immortal Elvin Jones, suggesting rhythm without specific metre or pulse and building excitement without the use of licks or repetition.

If Grimes’s tale reminds us how many years have passed since this music first turned the jazz world on its ear, a gig such as last night’s demonstrates how much scope it still offers to the creative mind.

* Before the first set, the audience was asked not to use recording or photographic equipment. The picture above was taken 20 minutes earlier, while the musicians were setting up their instruments. No protocols were breached.

Sep 23

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In Flanders fields the jazzmen blow

Stan Tracey 2

In Flanders fields the poppies blow / Between the crosses, row on row, / That mark our place; and in the sky / The larks, still bravely singing, fly / Scarce heard amid the guns below…

Those lines, the opening of the much loved poem written in 1915 by John McCrae, a Canadian soldier and physician who had fought in the Second Battle of Ypres, came to mind while I was listening to The Flying Pig, Stan Tracey’s new album. Those who know about such things will recognise Tracey’s chosen title as an allusion to a particular type of gun used by British forces during the Great War. Indeed the titles of all the six original compositions on the CD, played by the pianist’s current quintet, make such references, either to wartime weapons or places or soldiers’ sayings. The inspiration is the experience of Stan’s father, who served in the East Kent Regiment and, still only 18, was wounded on a Flanders battlefield in the year McCrae wrote the poem (he survived capture and imprisonment by the enemy and died in 1957, aged 60).

For those uncertain about the most suitable way to acknowledge next year’s centenary of the start of the war to end all wars, and perhaps ambivalent about the British government’s apparent determination to turn the event into a great patriotic celebration, here’s a solution: buy a poppy, by all means, but also spend some time listening to The Flying Pig.

There is nothing programmatic, overtly descriptive or propagandist about the music. This is not a jazz version of Joan Littlewood’s Oh! What a Lovely War, but simply a very fine contemporary version of the sort of post-bop jazz associated with the Jazz Messengers and the Horace Silver Quintet in the late 1950s and early 1960s. There are no pretensions, no extraneous flourishes: just music of real substance, played by Tracey with his son Clark on drums, Andy Cleyndert on bass, Mark Armstrong on trumpet and flugelhorn and Simon Allen on saxophones.

Given that the two Traceys and Cleyndert have formed a regular trio for several years, it’s not unexpected to find that the rhythm section runs on well lubricated ball-bearings. The surprise for me is Armstrong, whose solos evoke the best work of the young Freddie Hubbard, characterised by a gloriously burnished tone and a relaxed intensity but without Hubbard’s occasional tendency to get hung up on repeated phrases. He and Allen (whose alto saxophone solos are particularly enjoyable) combine to create the kind of lean front-line blend that is ideal for this material.

One of the pieces is called “Ballad for Loos”: a reference to the particular battlefield in northern France where Stan’s father was wounded. That’s the location of the photograph above, which shows Stan (centre) and Clark (right) with Ben Tracey, Stan’s grandson. (A couple of years ago Ben contributed the narration to an album of Stan’s inspired by and titled after Dylan Thomas’s A Child’s Christmas in Wales.)

In an interview with Alyn Shipton in the latest issue of Jazzwise, Stan says that nowadays he prefers working with the trio or his quartet; those line-ups, he says, offer him more space to play. But no sense of restraint or restriction afflicts The Flying Pig, which is released on the pianist’s own Resteamed label and surely deserves a place among the most satisfying products of a recording career that is now in its seventh decade. At 86, Stan is three years older than Ahmad Jamal, whose longevity is held to be a thing of wonder; just listen to the long piano solos on the title track or “Silent Percy”, as full of character, wisdom and sharply focused energy as ever.

Sep 3

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The girl who cried champagne

Carla BleyThe photograph above, taken by Caterina di Perri, comes from the insert to Carla Bley’s new album, Trios, the latest instalment of her collaboration with the bass guitarist Steve Swallow and the saxophonist Andy Sheppard. It’s the pianist/composer’s first album for ECM — and, she says, the first in which she has submitted herself to the demands of a producer (Manfred Eicher, the label’s founder) other than herself.

I’d started listening to the album when, while doing a bit of research into another subject entirely, I found an early mention of her in an issue of Down Beat dated September 5, 1965, from a review of a concert in the garden of New York’s Museum of Modern Art by the Jazz Composers Orchestra and the New York Art Quartet. The magazine’s reviewer was evidently having trouble with what was then known as “the new thing”, with only Ms Bley’s appearance to give him relief from what he clearly found to be an ordeal. Here’s what he wrote:

The evening did have three points of interest, all visual. The first was scored before a note was blown, when (John) Tchicai appeared, conventionally garbed, but with his face decorated with warpaint and what looked like chickenbones stuck into his cheeks. The second was (Milford) Graves, continually assaulting his drums and kicking at his cymbals in a manner that had, so far as I could tell, nothing to do with anything else that was going on. The third, and greatest, was Mrs Bley at the piano in the second half, one of the most authentically ravishing women you ever clapped eyes on, with nothing lacking of slim grace and brooding intensity to complete the picture of musical genius as only a Hollywood director would have the nerve to present it — a vision that, while it lasted, almost compensated for the regrettable noises that went with it.

I’m not going to name the critic in question. History has a way of making fools of all of us from time to time.

Anyway, Trios is an exceptional recording, in which she and her collaborators revisit some familiar themes — including the ever-entrancing “Vashkar”, first recorded in a standard piano trio format by her then-husband, Paul Bley, for the Savoy label 50 years ago this month. “Les Trois Lagons (d’apres Henri Matisse)”, “Wildlife” and “The Girl Who Cried Champagne” will all be familiar to her fans in various other versions; the opener, “Utviklingssang”, has previously been recorded by a nonet, a duo (Ms Bley and Swallow) and an octet, but I’d be surprised if this is not the definitive treatment of a gorgeous hymn-like tune.

For me, the surprise of the album was the way it converted my hitherto rather guarded admiration for Sheppard’s playing to a much warmer response, and made me drop my normal resistance to Swallow’s work on bass guitar. I’m afraid I could never understand why the man who was so articulate on the double bass on those classic George Russell Sextet albums from the early ’60s (and on the Paul Bley session that produced the original “Vashkar”) would want to devote himself full-time to an instrument far less appropriate to jazz. In this exposed setting, however, he plays with a guitar-like fluency and lyricism, the lack of the acoustic instrument’s tonal flexibility never hampering his contribution in the way it has — possibly to my ears alone — in the past.

And “The Girl Who Cried Champagne”? That’s a private joke between Bley and Swallow, who are long-time partners. It’s her.

Aug 29

9 Comments

Joe Locke’s respite music

Joe LockeJoe Locke says his new album, Lay Down My Heart, is intended “to provide respite for folks who work hard every day and need an opportunity to slow down and be reacquainted with that certain something which eludes most of us in the midst of the whirlwind which is modern life”. We can all do with some of that from time to time.

After Bobby Hutcherson, who performs less frequently nowadays, Locke has a plausible claim to being thought of as the leading contemporary exponent of the vibraphone. In a recent post I wrote of being impressed by his playing on Centennial, Ryan Truesdell’s album of rediscovered Gil Evans arrangements, and by his solo on “The Barbara Song” in particular, and I was sorry to miss him in London recently, when he performed with the orchestra of the Royal Academy of Music. This new recording provides a clear sight of the 54-year-old Californian’s maturity and inventiveness.

It’s a quartet album, and although you probably wouldn’t be able to pick the pianist Ryan Cohan, the bassist David Finch and the drummer Jaimeo Brown out in an identity parade, that doesn’t always matter: their playing here is perfectly attuned to the leader’s conception, and sometimes, even in jazz, you don’t need to be original to sound sparklingly fresh.

The programme starts with a measured version of Bill Withers’ “Ain’t No Sunshine” that sounds like the sort of intelligently soulful jazz that might result if you could get Milt Jackson guesting with the old Ramsey Lewis Trio. But it’s the ballads that are the core of the album, particularly a lovely treatment of “I Can’t Make You Love Me”, a definition of heartbreak from the repertoire of Bonnie Raitt; a reading of Bobby Troup’s “The Meaning of the Blues” that carries only the faintest echoes of the versions Gil Evans devised for Miles Davis’s trumpet (on Miles Ahead) and George Adams’s tenor saxophone (on There Comes a Time); and the slinkiest version of “Makin’ Whoopee” since Dr John and Rickie Lee Jones gave it a whirl a few years back.

I’m going to file this one next to Hutcherson’s Happenings, a 1967 album on Blue Note with a similar quartet format, featuring Herbie Hancock, Bob Cranshaw and Joe Chambers, ready for use on Sunday mornings and in times of stress. It’s not an album to challenge the listener (although a version of Frank Foster’s “Simone” has the darker, more convoluted intensity of some of Hutcherson’s other Blue Note quartet work — on Andrew Hill’s Judgment, say, or his own Oblique). On its own terms, however, it is perfectly satisfying. And, as promised, good for whatever ails you.

* The photograph of Joe Locke was taken by Joseph Boggess and comes from the sleeve of Lay Down My Heart, which is released on the Motema label. 

Aug 25

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Ten Freedom Summers / 1

Wadada Leo SmithFifty years ago, a wholehearted embrace of American culture made even those of us 3,000 miles away feel we had a stake in the country’s destiny. So although we may have been neither American, nor black, nor even socially or economically disadvantaged, the March on Washington — which took place on August 28, 1963 — in some way felt as though it involved us, too, even if all we could do was cheer from the sidelines.

Tens of thousands of people gathered in Washington DC this weekend to mark the anniversary. What I’ve been doing is reading my sometime colleague Gary Younge’s fine new book The Speech, which describes the process by which the Rev Martin Luther King came to write his “I Have a Dream” address, and listening to Ten Freedom Summers, a suite by the trumpeter and composer Wadada Leo Smith. If you don’t already know the latter, this is a set of four CDs containing four and a half hours of music divided into 19 individual movements based on themes from the civil rights struggle, performed by Smith’s quartet/quintet and a nine-piece chamber ensemble. Recorded over a three-day period in November 2011 and released last year on the Cuneiform label, it was one of three finalists for this year’s Pulitzer Prize.

The titles of the individual pieces are sometimes suggestive — “Black Church”, “Democracy” — but usually more explicit in their references. “Dred Scott: 1857” is the first movement, referring to the Missouri slave who unsuccessfully sued for his freedom in that year. “Rosa Parks and the Montgomery Bus Boycott: 381 Days” is another. There are references in other titles to Medgar Evers and Emmett Till, to JFK and LBJ, to the Supreme Court justice Thurgood Marshall and to Malik Al Shabazz, better known as Malcolm X.

Unlike some of the music that accompanied the civil rights struggle, from John Coltrane’s miniature masterpiece titled “Alabama” (a threnody for the four black schoolgirls killed in the Birmingham church bombing in September 1963, barely a fortnight after the March on Washington) to Bob Dylan’s “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll”, there is nothing in Smith’s work here that explicitly evokes his subject, no overt gestures that would indicate a relationship to his chosen titles. This does nothing to diminish its extraordinary power.

Smith, who was born 71 years ago in Leland, Mississippi, first came to notice at the end of the ’60s, as a member of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians in Chicago, along with Roscoe Mitchell, Anthony Braxton, Muhal Richard Abrams and others. His bands included the Creative Construction Company, with Braxton and the violinist Leroy Jenkins, and New Dalta Ahkri, whose personnel included  Henry Threadgill, Oliver Lake and Anthony Davis. Along with other members of the AACM, he spent time in Paris in 1969 and became acquainted with the new generation of European free jazz musicians. His many recordings have appeared on the Kabell, Nessa, ECM, Leo and Tzadzik labels, as well as Cuneiform.

As a trumpeter, he had his own character from the beginning. If you wanted a shorthand description, I suppose you could say that he occupies the space between Don Cherry and Lester Bowie. But the originality and substance of his playing are more than enough to command the attention all the way through this mammoth undertaking, in which his is necessarily the dominant voice. I’ve always liked his tone, open or muted, and the crisp assertiveness of his phrasing, and the sense of poise he conveys.

The long-standing nature of his partnership with the pianist Anthony Davis, who appears here, is evident in the closeness of their dialogues. Like Smith, Davis is a quietly original musician who, in his own compositions as well as his playing here, demonstrates complete comfort with the idea of bringing together elements from African American and European musical practices. The basic group is completed by John Lindberg, an exceptional bassist, and two drummers, Susie Ibarra and Pheeroan Ak Laff, who alternate on some pieces and play together on others.

Sometimes Smith employs gestures immediately identifiable as drawn from jazz: “Thurgood Marshall and Brown vs Board of Education” finds Lindberg anchoring the piece with a slow-grooving funky bass figure, while the interplay between Davis and Ibarra on “The Little Rock Nine” is outstanding. Elsewhere the climate resembles that of classical chamber music: passages for flute, harp and strings in “Medgar Evers: A Love Voice of a Thousand Years’ Journey for Liberty and Justice” have a watercolour delicacy that reminds me of Toru Takemitsu. But more often it seems, to employ Duke Ellington’s phrase, beyond category. The chamber group — basically a string quartet plus harp, clarinet, flute, percussion and an extra violin — appears both by itself and with the quartet/quintet. So organic and unselfconscious is Smith’s writing that the frontier between the two groups disappears, as does the line between composition and improvisation.

The prevailing mood, not surprisingly, is soberly reflective. Even so many years after the events Smith is commemorating, there is much to reflect on. This is not a bruising experience;  the writing and playing are characterised by a sustained lyricism. Nevertheless few  will want to absorb all four and a half hours in at one sitting, and it may a take listener years to become as familiar with these individual pieces as with the much shorter jazz classics of earlier eras. But that doesn’t seem to matter. Smith’s work exists on its own terms, a marvellous tribute to its immense subject.

* The photograph of Wadada Leo Smith was taken by Steve Gunther and is from the booklet accompanying Ten Freedom Summers. Gary Younge’s The Speech is published by Guardian Books.

Aug 23

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A poem by Roy Kelly

Roy Kelly’s work appears from time to time in the kind of magazines that still print poetry (there’s one of his in this week’s Spectator). He was born in 1949, and Peterloo Poets published a collection of his work under the title Drugstore Fiction in 1987. Having read my piece on Chet Baker, he sent me this. I wanted to publish it before the summer ends, and he was kind enough to give me permission.

THE COOL SCHOOL

The folded parasols stand guard and stand by,

sentinels of the pool and sunbeds, swathes

of white material fluttering, gathered, ready to spring

up and out, defending this tender skin which bathes

in water, and also in damaging rays that fly

through millions of miles to inflame and sting.

And in the pool a figure is moving through

the ruffled, bubbled surface, the illusory

blue depths, trying to improve a swimming action

while remembering a Chet Baker solo,

the shapely lovely logic of all he blew,

placed note by note, as if physical effort had no

part in his disciplined, pretty perfection,

and the needle life some other loser’s story.

Puffing and chugging the salty outdoor pool

the swimmer tries at least to get the breathing right,

economical, smooth, under the watchful white

umbrellas, and Mr Chet, lyrical, pure and cool.

Aug 16

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Keith Tippett with poetry and strings

Keith TippettLike many British improvisers of his generation, the pianist and composer Keith Tippett could be forgiven for adopting a mildly jaundiced view of the acceptance he is accorded in his own country, at least as measured in the frequency with which he is invited to play before an audience. But last night, as he opened a three-night residency at the Vortex in East London, there was no mistaking the warmth of the response for a well attended concert that satisfyingly expanded an appreciation of the artistic compass of a man whose past exploits have ranged from compelling solo recitals to those celebrated concerts back in 1971 with the mind-bogglingly variegated 50-piece band he called Centipede.

Last night’s gig began with Tippett accompanying his wife, Julie Tippetts, as she recited five of her poems — although “recited” is not quite the appropriate term, since Julie (nee Driscoll) frequently slipped from speech into improvised song. The bringing together of jazz and poetry is a notion with a history of few successes and many honourable failures; this attempt proved very effective, thanks to the engaging and unpretentious quality of Julie’s writing, the sheer musicality of her voice and the beautifully spare commentary from Keith’s piano. “We’ve never tried that before,” Keith said afterwards, “not even at home.”

The remainder of the evening featured the Elysian Quartet — Emma Smith and Jennymay Logan (violins), Vincent Sipprel (viola) and Laura Moody (cello) — by themselves in Tippett’s first string quartet, written for the group in 2008, and then with the composer in his piano quintet, commissioned by the Kreuzer Quartet almost 20 years ago. Astringent writing in the first and third movements of the quartet made room for thoughtful improvisation — imagine trying to get a string quartet to improvise when Tippett was starting out on his career, 40-odd years ago — counterbalanced by a brief second movement based on a lilting country-dance melody. The quintet was full of the dramatic contrasts that have always characterised his music, ranging from the pastoral through the romantic to the motorik, with a couple of floor-shaking passages in which the strings fought against the roiling bottom octave of the club’s Steinway.

Tonight’s instalment finds him leading a new trio (with the drummer Peter Fairclough and the bassist Tom McCredie) and giving the first performance of a suite for octet, The Nine Dances of Patrick O’Gonogon. On Saturday he and the Elysian Quartet will reconvene for an evening of spontaneous composition. If it continues the way it began last night, this short residency will be go down as a triumph for one of the great figures of contemporary British jazz.

Aug 15

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Lee Konitz: the improviser at 85

Lee Konitz 1No musician interrogates a song more thoroughly than the alto saxophonist Lee Konitz: separating its components, wiping off the accumulated dirt and scraping away the rust, holding the bits up to the light, examining them from all angles, and then reassembling them in a more interesting form. He was doing it in 1947, when he made his first recordings with the Claude Thornhill Orchestra, aged 20. He is still doing today, halfway through his ninth decade.

He’s featured on a new CD, Costumes Are Mandatory, released on the HighNote label and recorded in August 2012 with a quartet under the leadership of the pianist Ethan Iverson, noted for his work with the trio The Bad Plus. The bassist Larry Grenadier and the drummer Jorge Rossy complete the group. Together with two other albums released in the past couple of years, Live at Birdland (ECM), recorded in December 2009 with Brad Mehldau, Charlie Haden and Paul Motian, and Enfants Terribles (Half Note), made in June 2011 with Bill Frisell, Gary Peacock and Joey Baron, it provides a view of a great artist in his final years, his work subject to the changes imposed by time and the ageing process.

The late work of a long-lived great artist is always interesting and can provide a fascinating distillation of his or her career-long preoccupations. Sometimes the reduced powers are physical, sometimes they are mental. The painter Willem De Kooning was suffering from a form of Alzheimer’s disease when, in his eighties, he produced a series of strange, pale, almost luminous canvases that seemed like the ghosts of his former work. Fortunately, any reduction in Konitz’s powers is purely physical; the articulation might not be as swift, but the intellect is as sharp as ever.

No longer the fleet-footed musical athlete of his youth, when he and his fellow saxophonist Warne Marsh leapt with such alacrity over the high hurdles set for them by their mentor, the pianist Lennie Tristano, now Konitz deploys his reduced powers to different ends. The last of his strength is being spent on searching his material — almost always drawn from the standard American songbook — for new connections, new angles, new avenues of approach.

My best memory of Konitz is also one of my best memories of music, full stop. It comes from about 30 years ago, and a night at a short-lived jazz club called the Canteen on Great Queen Street in Covent Garden, occupying premises that had formerly been Blitz, the headquarters of the New Romantic movement, would later become a discotheque and now house a lap-dancing club. The Canteen, although ultimately unsuccessful in its attempt to rival Ronnie Scott’s, was for a while a very good place to hear such people as Esther Phillips, Chet Baker and Lee Konitz.

On the night in question Konitz was accompanied by an excellent British rhythm section: the pianist (and composer) Bob Cornford, the young bassist Paul Morgan and the experienced drummer Trevor Tompkins. What I remember most vividly is that one complete set was taken up by a treatment of “On Green Dolphin Street”, the Hollywood film theme composed by Bronislau Kaper in 1947 and rescued just under a decade later by Ahmad Jamal, who was responsible for its subsequent popularity among jazz musicians. Konitz started out by improvising unfamiliar and seemingly arbitrary phrases, inviting the other three musicians to go along with him as he gradually allowed these shreds of melody to take new forms, uncovered the connective tissue between them. This mesmerising process reached its apogee when, after much feinting and seeming disgression, Kaper’s theme gradually began to emerge and was stated for the first time as the piece ended. It was like watching a film of an explosion being run backwards in super slow motion.

Lee Konitz 3He does something similar, at a more compressed and less exalted level, on the version of “What’s New” included in Costumes Are Mandatory, allowing Iverson to lead the way, before entering with a phrase from the theme which is quickly deformed into a series of glancing allusions to the original tune, inventing their own sense as they go along. This is something that used to be called “thematic improvisation”, and it is almost a lost art. His distinctive tone — which once proposed an alternative to the all-pervasive influence of Charlie Parker — may be more fibrous and less robust than in his youth or his prime, and the comparison with Live at Birdland and Enfants Terribles indicates that time is having an inevitable effect, but it remains the perfect vehicle for his thoughts.

Konitz, of course, was a member of Miles Davis’s famous 1948 nonet, the Birth of the Cool band, and another personal memory of his playing comes from 1991, when he appeared at London’s South Bank with a band billed as Re-Birth of the Cool, an attempt by another original member, Gerry Mulligan, to recreate those celebrated sessions. Lew Soloff played Davis’s parts, and the other original present was Bill Barber, the tuba-player. For me, the outstanding impression was left by the way Konitz approached the project: he was the only one not interested in honouring the past by recreating it note-for-note but was intent on playing as though more than 40 years had passed and the world had moved on.

Working as a soloist for hire suits him because it presents him with a constant variety of challenges. That is how he has operated throughout his career, which has never been short of recorded documentation, from those early sides with Thornhill, Davis, Tristano and Stan Kenton through his own albums on Atlantic and Verve, his fascinating and fearless encounters with Martial Solal, Elvin Jones, Albert Mangelsdorff, Kenny Wheeler and countless others, to this most recent crop of albums. As a body of work, it offers not just a vast quantity of great music but a salutary lesson in the value of living in the present.

* The photograph of Konitz at the top is a detail from the cover of the 1955 Atlantic album Lee Konitz with Warne Marsh, taken by William Claxton. The lower photograph is a detail from the cover of Costumes Are Mandatory, taken by John Rogers. For those who want to know more, I thoroughly recommend Lee Konitz: Conversations on the Improviser’s Art by Andy Hamilton, published by the University of Michigan Press in 2007.

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