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Posts from the ‘Jazz’ Category

Nov 25

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Outer and inner space

On the 243 bus ride to yesterday’s matinee show at Cafe Oto, I finished Samantha Harvey’s short novel Orbital, the winner of this year’s Booker Prize. Starting as a description of the lives of six astronauts aboard a space station, it finishes as a meditation on the world — the planet, the universe — and our place in it.

With that in my head, listening to Evan Parker, Matthew Wright and their four colleagues in this edition of Transatlantic Trance Map create their intricate musical conversations was like zooming in on the smallest level of earthly detail: an example of our human potential, in the face of cosmic irrelevance.

For two shortish sets of unbroken free improvisation, Parker (soprano saxophone) and Wright (turntables and live sampling devices) were joined by Hannah Marshall (cello), Pat Thomas (electronics), Robert Jarvis (trombone) and Alex Ward (clarinet). The music was calm, collective, and often very beautiful in its constant warp and weft. Maybe it was the occasional (very subtle and always appropriate) pings and hums from the electronics that reinforced the connection in my mind with Orbital: the whoosh of a closing airlock, the light clang of a piece of space junk against a titanium hull. But that was obviously just me.

Many years ago I went to interview Evan at his home in Twickenham. One thing I noticed was that his shelves of LPs had a particularly long stretch of orange and black spines: John Coltrane on the Impulse label, of course. Evan has never sounded like Coltrane, but his study of the great man was foundational to his own development and his interest remains deep. Yesterday, for example, he was keen to tell me about the extraordinary sound quality of the reissue of the 1962 Graz concert by Coltrane’s classic quartet on Werner Uehlinger’s ezz-thetics label. “You can hear the ping of Elvin’s ride cymbal,” he said.

So it was by an interesting coincidence that I went on from Dalston to another event on the last day of the EFG London Jazz Festival, a concert at the Queen Elizabeth Hall called Coltrane: Legacy for Orchestra. For this performance of arrangements by various hands of some of Coltrane’s compositions (“Impressions”, “Central Park West”, “Giant Steps”, “Naima” etc), and a few other pieces that he recorded (including “So What”, “Crepuscule with Nellie” and “Blue in Green” and a handful of standards, including “My Favourite Things”), the full BBC Concert Orchestra, conducted by Edwin Outwater, was joined by two horn soloists, the young American trumpeter Giveton Gelin and the experienced British saxophonist Denys Baptiste, and the trio of the pianist Nikki Yeoh, with Shane Forbes on drums and Ewan Hastie on bass.

Inevitably, I suppose, there were times when it felt as though Coltrane was being reduced to something close to light music; there was certainly no attempt to get to grips with the turbulence of the music he made in the last three years of his life in albums such as Interstellar Space. But there were moments of distinction, too. Baptiste tore into “Impressions”, while Gelin — a New York-based Bahamian in his mid-twenties — earned ovations for his poised reading of “My One and Only Love” and for a lovely coda to “In a Sentimental Mood”, mining the elegant post-bop tradition of Clifford Brown, Lee Morgan and Freddie Hubbard.

In terms of the response from a full house, it was a great success. But there was one moment when the music went deeper, closer to what Coltrane was really about, and it came in the arrangement of “Alabama” by Carlos Simon, a composer in residence at the John F. Kennedy Centre for the Performing Arts in Washington DC, and the principal begetter of this project.

“Alabama” is Coltrane’s most sacred song, a slow, heavy hymn to the memory of the four African American schoolgirls murdered by racists in the bombing of a church in Birmingham, Alabama on September 15, 1963. Simon chose to orchestrate it in the way Eric Dolphy and McCoy Tyner might have done, had it been written in time for inclusion in 1961 in Coltrane’s first Impulse album, Africa/Brass, on which Dolphy and Tyner made dramatic use of low brass.

Here, Simon added trombones and French horns, using tympani and a gran cassa to augment Shane Forbes’s mallets on his tom-toms, thus amplifying the effect of Elvin Jones’s original rolling thunder behind Baptiste’s emotionally weighted statements of the rubato theme. Like the tenorist’s extended but carefully shaped solo on the in-tempo passage, it honoured not only Coltrane’s memory but his intentions, and will be worthy of special attention when Radio 3 broadcasts the concert later this week.

* Transatlantic Trance Map’s album Marconi’s Drift is out now on the False Walls label (www.falsewalls.com), which is also about to release a four-CD box set of Evan Parker’s solo improvisations, titled The Heraclitean Two-Step, Etc. The live recording of Coltrane: Legacy for Orchestra will be broadcast on BBC Radio 3 between 19:30 and 21:45 on Thursday 28 November, thereafter available on BBC Sounds.

Nov 22

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Almost like a scientist

“Almost like a scientist.” That’s what someone says near the beginning of Ingredients for Disaster, Julian Phillips’s new 67-minute documentary about the music of the Swiss composer, pianist and bandleader Nik Bärtsch. Almost like a scientist. Well, yes. When Bärtsch talked after a screening in London this week, words like “architectonics” and “topography” entered the conversation. And Phillips chooses to illustrate the polymetric structures of the music through cunningly devised computer graphics that actually illuminate the interior design of pieces which tend have the four players working in different time signatures simultaneously.

On the other hand, not like a scientist at all. Not in effect, anyway. Listening to Bärtsch’s bands, either the “Zen funk” of Ronin or the “ritual groove music” of Mobile, can be a profoundly emotional experience, particular when he gives one of his shouted cues and the whole band changes gear like a sudden shot of adrenalin.

But it’s certainly complex music, particularly in its layered polyrhythms. He made me laugh yesterday when he briefly turned the conversation to good old 4/4. If you work all the time in less conventional metres, he said, then you decide to play something that superimposes 4/4 on, say, 5/4, it’s 4/4 that ends up sounding odd, implying that it gives you something new to work with.

In the film, he talks about some of his influences: the pianists Lennie Tristano (whose polymetric “Turkish Mambo” he recorded on one of his early albums), Ran Blake and Monk, and Stravinsky. In the discussion after the film there was also mention of James Brown’s band and of Zigaboo Modeliste, the drummer with the Meters (drummers are important to Bärtsch; that’s how he started out). But his great success is to have metabolised his influences so thoroughly that they became invisible as, over the years, he developed a music of true and complete originality.

This month marks 20 years since he began his Monday night sessions at the Exil club in Zurich, where the music has taken gradually shape. Ronin currently consists of Sha (Stefan Haselbacher) on bass clarinet and alto saxophone, Jeremias Keller on bass guitar, and the drummer Kaspar Rast, with whom Bärtsch has been working since they were nine or 10 years old. Each of them has something illuminating to say in the film, none more so than Sha, master of the bass clarinet, who demonstrates how one of the parts written for his instrument can lead, as the piece unfolds in its long narrative, to variations such as “ghost notes” and percussive tapping.

Like the Quintet of the Hot Club of France, the MJQ, the MGs, Astor Piazzolla Quintet and the Chieftains, Ronin is a band with a highly evolved, distinctive and patented character. There’s a new album by the basic quartet, called Spin. With the addition of three horns and a guitar, it becomes the Ronin Rhythm Clan, which performed at Kings Place in London a few years ago. I liked that line-up very much, and Bärtsch guided me to a couple of tracks released on Bandcamp earlier this year.

I wrote about Nik when he performed with the London-based visual artist Sophie Clements at the Barbican in 2019, and when Ronin played a night at Ronnie Scott’s last year. Tonight I’m going to see him playing piano duets with Tania Giannouli at the Wigmore Hall, as part of the EFG London Jazz Festival. He’s one of the most interesting musicians around, and it’s a pleasure to keep up with him.

* Ronin’s Spin is released on November 24 on the Ronin Rhythm Records label. The film Ingredients for Disaster will be available to stream on Amazon Prime and Apple+ from November 29. Bärtsch’s book Listening: Music Movement Mind is published by Lars Müller Publishers.

Nov 17

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‘Soundtrack to a Coup d’état’

Sixty years ago Archie Shepp wrote a provocative column for Down Beat magazine in which, if memory serves, he compared his tenor saxophone to a machine gun in the hands of a Vietcong guerrilla. In the early ’60s it seemed that jazz’s New Thing, or whatever you wanted to call it, possessed a powerful political dimension, exemplified by Max Roach and Abbey Lincoln’s Freedom Now Suite, John Coltrane’s “Alabama”, and Shepp’s own “Malcolm, Malcolm — Semper Malcolm”. Even the music that had no explicit political content, such as Ornette Coleman’s “Free Jazz”, somehow seemed to express revolutionary feelings.

It’s with great brilliance that the Belgian film director Johan Grimonprez makes that music (and indeed those very pieces, plus others) into an integral component of his award-winning documentary Soundtrack to a Coup d’état. The two-and-a-half-hour film’s subject is the murder in 1961 of the activist and politician Patrice Lumumba, whose tenure as the first prime minister of the newly independent Republic of Congo — formerly the Belgian Congo — was ended after only three months by a military coup fomented by those with interests in the country’s rich deposits of rare minerals, notably Belgium, the withdrawing colonial power, the United States government of President Eisenhower, and the British government of Harold Macmillan.

Lumumba was a symbol not just of the independence of former colonies but of pan-Africanism. Given the activities of the CIA and the British and Belgian intelligence services, it was no surprise that he welcomed support from Castro’s Cuba and Khrushchev’s Soviet Union, or that he should pay the ultimate price for it, his body hacked to pieces and dissolved in acid by the mercenaries who killed him. Names familiar to those of my generation — Moïse Tshombe, Joseph-Désiré Mobutu, Joseph Kasa-Vubu, Dag Hammarskjöld — stud the narrative, while Grimonprez deploys archive interviews of varying degrees of blatant or sly self-incrimination with participants including Larry Devlin, the CIA station chief, and the MI6 officer Daphne Park.

What makes this film different is the use of music. Grimonprez has spotted the US government’s soft-power deployment of jazz during the Cold War through State Department-sponsored international tours. In 1956 Dizzy Gillespie and an 18-piece band spent 10 weeks touring Europe, Asia and South America. A year earlier Louis Armstrong had pulled out of what would have been the inaugural tour in protest against racial segregation in schools in the Southern states, but in 1960 he travelled to Congo, where he played to an audience of 100,000 people in Léopoldville (as Kinshasa was then known) in the middle of the political disturbances, before returning to Africa in 1961 to perform in Senegal, Mali, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Sudan and the United Arab Republic.

We see Armstrong in Africa in the film, but more novel and powerful is the juxtaposition of the avant-garde jazz of the time with footage of the political events: not so much a soundtrack as an active commentary. So we hear Abbey Lincoln’s anguished screaming, Max Roach firing off snare-drum fusillades, the contorted sounds of Eric Dolphy’s bass clarinet (with Charles Mingus’s group, shortly before his death), Nina Simone simmering through Bob Dylan’s “Ballad of Hollis Brown”, and Coltrane, on fire in “My Favourite Things” and intoning the sorrow of “Alabama”. Fast cutting is usually the enemy of understanding, but Rik Chaubet’s shrewdly paced editing creates a non-stop tapestry of emotions, making the rhythms and the cry of the music mirror the events being depicted.

Direct action also played a part, and if you see this extraordinarily compelling film, you won’t forget the spectacle of Lincoln, Roach and dozens of others courageously disrupting a session of the UN Security Council in New York to protest against the assassination of the figure Malcolm X called “the greatest black man who ever walked the African continent.”

Lumumba’s death was a crime and a tragedy of enormous significance. Grimonprez alludes to its enduring importance through reminding us that the Democratic Republic of Congo, whose mines produced the uranium for the atom bombs that fell on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, remains the world’s major source of coltan, the rare and precious commodity that powers our iPhones. In other words, a country of 100 million people, whose mineral deposits are said to be worth $24 trillion, but where two million children are at risk of starvation, and which currently ranks 179th out of 191 countries in the UN’s Human Development Index, is safe for civilisation.

* Soundtrack to a Coup d’etat is being screened at various independent cinemas.

Nov 5

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Back to Berlin

“A lot of people have died recently,” Otomo Yoshihide remarked to his Berlin audience on Sunday night, halfway through a set by his 16-piece Special Big Band. “This is for them.” The band’s marimba player, Aikawa Hitomi, began to trace out some quiet, limpid phrases, with a sound like pebbles dropping in a pond. One by one, her colleagues joined in. I don’t really know how to explain what was happening, whether or not it was a written composition or completely improvised, but each player added a layer of sadness to the piece until it gradually, and completely without ostentation, reached a critical mass of emotion.

It was amazing. The non-specific nature of Yoshihide’s introduction allowed the listeners — and the musicians, I guess — to direct their mourning wherever they wished. And having created something so sombre and profound, Yoshihide didn’t take the bandleader’s easy option by then lifting the mood with one of the absurdly entertaining rave-ups in which his band specialises, and with which they would eventually send the audience home smiling fit to burst. Instead his accordionist, Okuchi Shunsuke, squeezed out the gentle melody of “Années de Solitude”, a graceful composition by the great Astor Piazzolla. Soon the lonely accordion was joined the baritone saxophone of Yoshida Nonoko, before the other horns entered in a rich arrangement ending with hymn-like cadences.

After that, it was time to change the mood in a set that contained an unusually large proportion of the gamut of human emotions, from cheesy film and TV themes and a perky “I Say a Little Prayer” through a pretty version of Eric Dolphy’s “Something Sweet, Something Tender” and a suitably stirring reading of Charlie Haden’s “Song for Che”. The encore was a completely bonkers piece of Japanese pop music featuring the all-action singing and dancing of three of the group’s women — Hitomi, the electronics player Sachiko M and the saxophonist Inoue Nashie — with a kind of rap from Yoshihide.

For the closing performance of the 2024 JazzFest Berlin, Yoshihide’s ensemble was the perfect choice. Twenty four hours after the Sun Ra Arkestra had occupied the same stage in their tinsel and cooking-foil Afrofuturist costumes, recessing from the stage one by one with a chanted recommendation for Outer Spaceways Incorporated, the men and women of the Japanese band came dressed like refugees from a Comme des Garçons sample sale. Were they from the West, Felliniesque would be one obvious way of describing their presentation. With two drummers, a tuba and a very emphatic bass guitarist, and with the leader’s guitar sometimes throwing in some of the noise elements for which he is well known, they made me think of what might happen if you merged the Willem Breuker Kollektiev with the Glitter Band, with Carla Bley providing the arrangements.

One amusing thing they did in the up-tempo pieces was to have each member leap up to give cues and perhaps conduct a few bars before resuming their places: a kind of daisy-chain of instructions and cheer-leading. It made me think of something I’d seen that morning on stage at the Jazz Institut, where the festival’s Community Sunday, centred on the multicultural Moabit district of Berlin, began with a concert featuring children. While a young piano trio played, a group of kids, perhaps six to 10 years old, stood in front of them, giving the sort of signals — faster! slower! stop! start! — familiar from the techniques of conduction.

It was a good game, everyone enjoyed it, and it made me wonder whether, a few decades ago, someone had tried something similar in Japan, laying the foundations for Otomo Yoshihide’s Special Big Band. Almost certainly not, but there was the same sense of play at work, as it were. And if you give that opportunity to a bunch of kids, there must be a chance that it will open up a world for some of them.

The Moabit adventure continued with a mass walk through the streets, audience and musicians stopping off at various points for pop-up musical events. It ended in a church, where Alexander Hawkins played the organ and members of the Yoshihide band and the Swedish bassist Vilhelm Bromander’s Unfolding Orchestra took part, along with a young people’s choir and local musicians with various cultural backgrounds. The special project of Nadin Deventer, now seven years into her tenure as the festival’s artistic director, it proved to be a brilliant way to involve a community and its children, and deserves to become a permanent feature of an institution celebrating its 60th birthday.

For me, other highlights of the four days included Joe McPhee reading his poetry with Decoy; the French pianist Sylvie Courvoisier’s new quartet, Poppy Seeds, featuring the vibraphonist Patricia Brennan, the bassist Thomas Morgan and the drummer Dan Weiss, playing compositions of great intricacy with superb deftness; and the trio of two British musicians, the pianist Kit Downes and the drummer Andrew Lisle, and the Berlin-based Argentinian tenor saxophonist Camila Nebbia, entrancing a packed A-Trane with warm gusts of collective improvisation. In the main hall on Saturday night there was also a moving ovation for the pianist Joachim Kühn, who made a speech announcing that, at 80, this appearance with his current trio would be his last at the festival, having made his first in 1966, aged 22.

A festival with an ending, then, in more than one sense, but also full of beginnings and new possibilities, just as the visionary jazz critic and impresario Joachim-Ernst Berendt envisaged 60 years ago when he persuaded the West German government that its slice of Berlin, marooned in the GDR, needed something with which to demonstrate a sense of vibrant modernity to the world, and that thing was jazz. In very different circumstances, it still is.

Oct 30

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Other sounds 5: Feat. Arve Henriksen

A fugitive sound, soft, glancing, indirect: the Norwegian trumpeter Arve Henriksen has a signature I love, in pretty much whatever context it appears. It could be in his group Supersilent, or with Jan Bang, Christian Wallumrød, Dhafer Youssef, Terje Rypdal, Iain Ballamy or Trygve Seim, or on his own albums, particularly Places of Worship (Rune Grammofon, 2013), which I think of as this century’s Sketches of Spain.

He’s developed the European equivalent of Jon Hassell’s trumpet sound, using electronics and a natural tendency towards understatement to take the instrument out of its normal brassy universe and into somewhere more mysterious. And he finds two soulmates in the Danish drummer Daniel Sommer and the Swedish bassist Johannes Lundberg on Sounds & Sequences, a trio recording made in a Gothenburg studio.

A series of 11 pieces evolving from free improvisations subjected to post-production processes of editing and shaping, this is a very beautiful thing indeed. Sommer’s playing draws the ear throughout, pulling gentle grooves out of the air and adding the finest of detail. Lundberg and Henriksen both contribute electronic beds and textures (Henriksen also uses his counter-tenor voice from time to time), nudging the music towards something that touches the celestial sublime.

The trumpeter pops up in Triage, the new album from Erik Honoré, one of the founders of Kristiansand’s remix-based Punkt festival, which celebrated its 20th edition last month. Deploying colleagues including Sidsel Endresen, Eivind Aarset, Ingar Zach, Nils Petter Molvaer and Jan Bang, Honoré creates little tone poems, some of them used as settings for found texts.

These include Emily Dickinson’s poems “Hope Is a Thing With Feathers” and “Pain Has an Element of Blank”, portions of Ezra Pound’s Cantos — read by Bang — and a section from the US Surgeon General’s undated instructions on early care of combat wounds: “A not uncommon occurrence in the present war are those distressing wounds of the face and jawbones which have attracted particular attention not only on account of the disfigurement which they cause but even more so from the difficulty that was first encountered on dealing with them…”

The use of different readers adds variety and surprise, as if there were not already enough in the music itself, which also makes use of radio samples and field recordings. An instrumental piece called “Prague”, featuring Molvaer’s trumpet over Bjørn Charles Dreyer’s guitar and Mats Eilertsen’s treated double bass, is particularly striking, as is “In the Station of the Metro”, in which Henriksen’s breathy trumpet emerges between Pound’s lines and Honoré’s manipulated samples with typical probing grace.

Finally, Henriksen’s recent album of duets with the Dutch pianist Harmen Fraanje, Touch of Time, is more conventional in terms of exploitation of the available sonic materials, allowing a clearer view of the trumpeter’s playing, with only the occasional effective touch of electronics. Compositions by both men create music that is delicate, pensive, carefully weighted, devoid of affectation or allusion to outside worlds. The closer you listen, the stronger it gets.

* Sounds & Sequences is on the April Records label (www.aprilrecords.com). Triage is on Punkt Editions/Jazzland. Touch of Time is on ECM. All are out now.

Oct 25

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The lost genius of Albert Stinson

This is a piece about the bassist Albert Stinson (1944-1969). It’s something I’ve been meaning to write for a long time. The great drummer Jim Keltner was kind enough to talk to me about his boyhood friend, as was another drummer from Los Angeles, Doug Sides, who toured and recorded with him in John Handy’s band. I first heard Stinson in 1963 on Passin’ Thru, Chico Hamilton’s very striking Impulse album, recorded when the bassist was all of 18 years old. To my 16-year-old ears, he was exceptional even then; goodness knows what he might have become.

It’s the evening of Friday, April 7, 1967 in the Harmon Gymnasium at the University of California, Berkeley. Your name is Albert Stinson, you play the double bass, and you’re about to deputise for Ron Carter in what might be the greatest small jazz group of all time: the Miles Davis Quintet as constituted between the autumn of 1964, when Wayne Shorter arrived to join Davis, Carter, Herbie Hancock and Tony Williams, and the middle of 1968, when Carter became the first to leave. The greatest? Certainly the one applying new levels of freedom and near-telepathic interplay to the business of improvising on tunes.

So this group has been together and constantly evolving for the best part of three years and you’re being dropped into the middle of it. You’re only 22 years old but you’re ready, in the sense that you have the chops and the experience. You were a prodigy, and you’ve played alongside Charles Lloyd and Gábor Szabó in a brilliant Chico Hamilton Quintet, and with other heavyweights.

But to play in this band, at this stage, you had to be ready for anything. Accelerando or ritardando, not always synchronised. Stopping on a dime without warning, restarting at the merest twitch of a nerve-end, intuiting the leader’s moves but following without following, waiting out a silence, hitting the short, sharp ramp from triple-p to triple-f without a moment’s doubt. Playing against or through what someone else was doing.

You’re not the first bassist to deputise for Carter, a busy guy on call for many sessions. Gary Peacock was the first. Then Reggie Workman, then Richard Davis. After you, there’ll be Miroslav Vitous before Carter goes for good and Dave Holland becomes a permanent member. All great, great bassists. And now it’s your turn.

There’s a buzz in the Harmon Gymnasium. For starters, Miles calls “Gingerbread Boy”, the brusque, flaring Jimmy Heath tune featured on Miles Smiles, the quintet’s second studio album, the one that made everyone realise something different was happening here. At a rocket-propelled 80 bars a minute, the theme hurtles past, with Williams’s drums at their most volcanic. You play time, straight. You survive, although you miss the cue at the end and the piece finishes with your phrase trailing off, as if surprised by the sudden silence around you.

Miles leads into “Stella by Starlight”, his tone at its purest, the trumpet holding a long note into what feels like infinity as you join Hancock in a free background that seems to be inventing itself outside the tune. Eventually you move into a walking medium 4/4, deploying your big, strong tone but keeping the elasticity that enables you to move with the others when the tempo doubles and Williams starts to force the issue. You’re okay, and a little more than that when you respond to the wind-down of Shorter’s solo with something that shows you’re getting the hang of this particular freedom of narrative. Hancock’s solo begins out of tempo and you invent figures to support him before you slide back into the 4/4, seamlessly.

And then, on Shorter’s “Dolores”, a post-bop epigram also from Miles Smiles, the tempo goes back up, and now you’re no longer feeling your way but fully contributing, the equal of these four giants as they charge through a warp-speed exercise in musical plasticity, in aural geometry, in listening, hearing and responding at some Zen level of intuitiveness. In fact you’re almost too ready when Miles creates the silence from which he goes into “Round Midnight”, and you let your lower-register notes bloom in a way that Carter would probably consider excessive. But you’re part of the excitement as Williams’s snare-drum fusillades overwhelm the two-horn fanfares and soon you’re shifting the time around behind the flickering, nudging phrases of Shorter’s solo.

And now you’re home, riding the waves as the set continues with something based on the bones of “So What” and concludes with “Walkin'”. After just under an hour, it ends with an ovation.

—ooOoo—

“Albert brought something different to that band,” the drummer Jim Keltner told me when I asked him to talk about his longtime friend. “Ron Carter is one of the greatest musicians ever, but Albert brought a different kind of fire. They were so highly evolved, and Albert was one of them. I don’t really want to talk about genius-this and genius-that, but I do believe that he was a genius. He came back and told us that Miles had asked him to join the band, but he said he couldn’t because he had too many gigs lined up with Chico. That’s mind-boggling. But it’s the kind of player and person he was.”

Keltner, who would go on to play with Bob Dylan, John Lennon, George Harrison, Ry Cooder, Neil Young and countless others, was in his last year at the mostly white Pasadena High School when he met Stinson, who was two years younger and attending the mostly black John Muir HS. They were neighbours in the Altadena. “I was always aware that I was older than Albert,” Keltner said, “but I knew that I would never be as smart as him. A very, very smart cat. A very high IQ.” Another neighbour, the vibraphonist Bobby Hutcherson, had just graduated from John Muir, and the three played together constantly.

“Albert lived in a kind of cul-de-sac about five minutes from my house. It was a very diverse community, very well integrated. White people had black or Asian neighbours, and there were a lot of Mexicans around. And I’m half-Mexican.”

He remembered that Stinson lived with his mother, a former dancer, and her steady flow of boyfriends. His father had left the family early. When Keltner got married young, to a girl he’d known in high school, Stinson envied him. “He always loved the fact that Cynthia, my wife, and me, we made the long haul, which is very unusual for musicians. I think he wanted that and thought he could have it, but it wasn’t to be. I can’t really bring myself to talk about his personal life, but he was hurt badly by his relationship. His very first girlfriend was really young, a young beautiful black girl, and he was young, too… he was in love with her. I can’t speak for her but he was really in love with her. They were a little team. At some point he married and had a baby. He’s called Ian Stinson. He looks just like Albert, but with dreads… a beautiful kid. He’s a drummer and lives up north.”

Keltner remembered an early visit to the Stinson house on Shelly Street. “One afternoon I went over and he was sitting on the floor with his cigarette and ashtray and his weed and a little half-smoked doobie and a glass of cheap Ripple white wine, with a newspaper and glue and a huge massive book. He was making his own bass from a library book. I’m not sure how he did it, but the bass that he built himself was the one that I used to put in my car, because I would drive him everywhere. An upright bass and my drums in a Volkswagen.”

But before long they’d all hooked up with another young star of the future, the saxophonist and flautist Charles Lloyd. “I told Charles Lloyd about Albert when we were driving down from a little gig in a country club up in the mountains,” Keltner said. He was subbing for Mike Romero, Lloyd’s regular drummer. Hutcherson was already in the band, along with the pianist Terry Trotter and the bassist George Morrow. Soon Stinson would be replacing Morrow and also persuading Keltner, who thought he would never be as good as Romero, out of giving up music altogether.

“Mike Romero would come into the music store where I worked and I just thought he was the coolest guy in the world. One day he said to me, ‘You want to sub for me for half a set?’ I acted very confident and yet I was scared shitless. So I played, then I stayed and watched Mike, and I was so demoralised. Albert lit into me and told me how dumb I was. He said, ‘I would rather play with you any day than with Mike Romero.’ I said, you’re just saying that because you’re my friend. But I never forgot it. It carried me through.”

Of Stinson’s six albums with Chico Hamilton, recorded between 1962 and 1965, Passin’ Thru is the one that made a deep impression on me at the time. On pieces like “Lady Gabor” and the title track, he seemed to have metabolised the deep-groove drone effects created by the multiple bassists on such John Coltrane recordings as Olé and Africa/Brass. Barely 18, his strength and maturity were extraordinary.

He’d also recorded for Pacific Jazz with the pianist Clare Fischer (Surging Ahead, 1962), the guitarist Joe Pass (Catch Me!, 1963) and Charles Lloyd (Nirvana, 1965). He’d played (although not recorded) with Gerald Wilson’s mighty big band in Los Angeles. In 1964 he’d visited London with Hamilton, Szabó and the altoist/flautist Jimmy Woods to record the soundtrack for Roman Polanski’s Repulsion. He’d been in Rudy Van Gelder’s famous studio in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, one day in 1967 to record a quartet session for Blue Note under Hutcherson’s leadership, with Hancock on piano and Joe Chambers on drums, featuring a fantastic Stinson solo on a piece called “My Joy”, although the album wouldn’t be released until 1980, under the title Oblique.

“Albert loved playing music and he loved jazz,” Keltner said. “He was a thorough jazz musician. All of our friends, jazz players, were completely inspired by him. He was a leader, a ringleader. I was always round at his house, listening to music. We listened to Bartók, we listened to Coltrane. Everything I heard, I heard it first with Albert. Bobby Hutcherson lived even closer to him than I did. Those 3 a.m. calls to rescue Albert, it was always Bobby and me who went to save him.”

Those 3 a.m. calls came when he’d overdosed on heroin, something that had existed in his life alongside music well before, in 1967, he, Hutcherson and Keltner joined the band of the altoist John Handy, whose reputation had been made by an incendiary performance at the 1965 Monterey Jazz Festival. “Albert got me that gig,” Keltner said. “It was a fantastic time for me. It was at a club in San Francisco called the Both/And. I don’t remember playing very good, just hanging on and trying to get it right. I didn’t have the confidence. Jazz playing is a huge amount about confidence. Not like rock and roll, where you do your thing. Not that I’m belittling it. But jazz is a different thing. And even though I wasn’t cutting it, and I knew it, Albert would make it right.”

By the time the new line-up made a well received album, New View, recorded live at the Village Gate in New York for Columbia, featuring a wonderful version of Coltrane’s “Naima”, Keltner had been replaced by Doug Sides, another young musician from Los Angeles.

“Albert was one of these kids who just had a glorious talent, and he was a person that almost anybody would love,” Handy told David Brett Johnson, a deejay on Indiana University’s radio station, in 2008. “A very easy, sweet young guy, and his playing was just incredible. He seemed to have a bunch of natural ability, which I understood because I came that way myself, without that much experience, but just kind of knew how to do it. However, I was afraid — even with those guys in my band, there were drugs. They kept it away from me. They were younger, they kind of… you know, when you‘re the bandleader the little cliques kind of take place, and they weren‘t vicious, they just… I could see the half-generation difference in age and all.”

Doug Sides, who moved to the UK in 2010 and died at his home in Kent this month (October 2024), aged 81, remembered meeting Stinson at jam sessions in an LA place known as the Snake House — actually the home of a musician who kept pet snakes.

“Albert a very special human being,” he told me. “He was one of the nicest guys I ever met. He didn’t have animosity toward anybody. He just liked to have fun. But he had one problem. He liked to get high and he liked to shoot up with the junkies. And he tried to keep up with them, which caused him to overdose a few times before he died in New York doing the same thing.

“He was a really great player. He had a big sound, too, and he could play any tempo. For a small cat – he was short – but he was very strong, strong like somebody who was 6’5 or something, he had that kind of strength. In those days they had beer cans that you couldn’t crush very easily, not like the modern ones where you just squeeze and they fold up. He used to crush them like they were the modern ones.”

His seven months with Handy included a stint in San Francisco performing an opera, The Visitation, written by Gunther Schuller for 19 voices, woodwind and string sections and a jazz quartet, applying ideas from Kafka’s The Trial to the world of civil rights in America, and blending 12-tone composition with jazz.

“Albert had never played with a conductor,” Handy told David Brent Johnson. “Well, man, he learned those parts by just — with one or two rehearsals, and they were very difficult, as you can imagine if you know anything about Gunther Schuller‘s music. And at one point Gunther Schuller stopped the rehearsal and said to the bass players, ‘Do you hear this bass player? He sounds as big as almost all of those guys put together back there!’ And poor Albert was so sick, I didn‘t realise it, from doing crazy things, you know, and vomiting during the breaks because he was taking drugs… I didn‘t know that. He kept it away from me. All I know is he played his butt off.”

Jim Keltner said he thought one of the reasons Stinson turned down Miles Davis’s offer was that he didn’t want to leave Altadena, where his mother had left him their house on Shelly Street. “My own life had really changed by that time,” the drummer recalled. “I’d done rock and roll with Gary Lewis and the Playboys in 1965. Albert thought that was cool. He wasn’t judgmental. Some of the others were jazz snobs. By 1968-69 I was playing in a couple of bands and Albert was travelling more so I was seeing him less, but I’d hear things.”

Stinson joined the band of the guitarist Larry Coryell, whose popularity had taken off during his time with Gary Burton’s quartet. “When I heard he’d joined Coryell,” Keltner continued, “someone said he was playing electric bass, or thinking about it. I thought, oh wow, that’s incredible. He’ll burn that thing up. He’ll make it his own and he’ll be one of the baddest cats and maybe at some point we’ll play together again. But then, bam.”

On the road in June 1969, a few weeks short of his 25th birthday, Stinson overdosed again in a New York hotel room. This time he would not be saved. “It wasn’t a shock,” Keltner said, “but it was incredibly sad. Then I started hearing stories about the guys he was getting high with. Instead of trying to save him, they got scared and ran away. That’s one of the things I learned in the earlier days, one of the sad, dumb things, about how you don’t do that. You’ve got to save them. Which then, in turn, I got saved two times later. Bobby and I weren’t there to save him.

“Because of that rumour, I remember just hating Larry Coryell and everything about him. It was a misplaced anger. I didn’t know the details or anything. Eventually I had to let go of blaming him for Albert’s death.”

Whatever his habits, and the problems they may have caused for himself and others, Albert Stinson was someone who inspired powerful feelings of love and loss in fellow musicians. In Keltner and Sides, obviously, and also in Charles Lloyd, who cherishes his memory. Four months after Stinson’s death, Bobby Hutcherson wrote and recorded a lament called “Now”, dedicated to his late friend, with a lyric by Gene McDaniels delivered by the soprano Christine Spencer: “At the end, no more need…”

“Later in life,” Keltner told me, “I came to appreciate that although people will compliment you on your talent, generally speaking your talent is based on who you’re playing with. Every time I played with Albert, under any situation, whether it was some little silly gig like a bar mitzvah or whatever, it was incredible. It was always great. I always felt like I was somebody.

“It shows how amazing Albert was. He was so soulful. And he was too sensitive a cat for the world. A sensitive, beautiful old soul.”

* The fine photograph of Albert Stinson is by Ave Pildas, whose work in jazz and many other fields can be seen at http://www.avepildas.com. A bootleg of the radio broadcast of the Miles Davis Quintet’s Harmon Gymnasium concert was released on a CD some years ago by the recordJet label.

Oct 21

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Other sounds 4: ‘Za Górami’

Ladino is a language spoken by Sephardic Jews, with its origins in medieval Spanish, Hebrew and Aramaic. In her wonderful book Ornament of the World, subtitled “How Muslims, Jews and Christians Created a Culture of Tolerance in Medieval Spain”, María Rosa Menocal describes it and its equally Romance language-based Muslim equivalent, Aljamiado, as not just “languages of exile and persecution” but as “quixotically defiant memory palaces”.

Five traditional Ladino songs are included in Za Górami, a new album by Alice Zawadzki, Fred Thomas and Misha Mullov-Abbado, providing a kind of structure for the 11-track sequence featuring Zawadski’s voice, violin and viola, Mullov-Abbado’s double bass and Thomas’s piano, drums and vielle (a fiddle favoured by French troubadours between the 11th and 13th centuries). The remainder of the programme consists of songs taken from a variety of sources.

Here’s what the three London-based musicians say, in a jointly authored sleeve note: “Collected on our travels and taughgt to us by our friends, these are songs we have learnt and loved together. Though our musical and cultural backgrounds encompass Europe, Russia and South America, we were all three born in England. This happenstance was the product of love, war, exile, the arbitrariness of borders and the yearning for a new life.” All those themes, they say, are woven through the songs.

Za Górami is Polish for “behind the mountains”. Other songs come from Argentina (Gustavo Santaolalla’s “Suéltate Las Cintas”), Venezuela (Simón Diaz’s “Tonada De Luna Llena”) and medieval France (“Je Suis Trop Jeunette”). “Gentle Lady” is Fred Thomas’s setting of a text by James Joyce: “Gentle lady, do not sing / Sad songs about the end of love / Lay aside sadness and sing / How love that passes is enough.”

Recorded in Lugano and produced by Manfred Eicher, the music could be said to be a perfect manifesto for the ECM philosophy: the creation of a frontierless chamber music based on the instincts and practices of jazz but entirely porous in its acceptance of other cultures and idioms.

The Ladino lyrics are interesting for their closeness to more familiar languages: “Arvoles lloran por lluvias / Y montañas por aire / Ansi lloran los mis ojos / Por tí querido amante” translates as “The trees weep for rain / And the mountains for air / So weep my eyes / For you, my love.” That’s the closing track, a restrained lament consisting of three haiku-like verses that concludes: “I turn and ask — what will become of me? / I will die in foreign lands.” These are lieder for a modern world in which echoes of the past are inescapable.

If, as it happens, nothing here sounds much like jazz, it couldn’t exist without jazz, either. The clarity and subtle shadings of Zawadzki’s soprano, the handsomely shaped bass sound and calm phrasing of Mullov-Abbado, and Thomas’s reflective piano and subtle percussion work together to create a pan-national music in which elegance, economy and ardour are held in perfect balance. In its quiet way, this is one of the year’s outstanding albums.

* Za Górami is out now on the ECM label: the trio will perform at Kings Place on November 23 as part of the EFG London Jazz Festival. The photo of Mullov-Abbado, Zawadzki and Thomas is by Monika Jakubowska.

Oct 4

Other sounds 2: Vazesh

The Persian tar is a cousin of the lute, the saz and the oud, a long-necked instrument with three double courses of strings — sort of like half a 12-string guitar, another relative — and an unusual double bowl made of mulberry wood with a membrane of stretched lambskin. Perhaps you already knew that, but I didn’t until I encountered the playing of the Iranian-born tar virtuoso Hamed Sadeghi in Vazesh, a trio in which he’s joined by two Aussies, the saxophonist and clarinetist Jeremy Rose and the bassist Lloyd Swanton.

Their first album, released in 2021, was a live recording at Sydney Opera House and won awards. Its successor, Tapestry, was recorded during a single night of improvisation at an arts centre in Annandale, a suburb of Sydney. Just under an hour long, Tapestry seems to be an unbroken performance, although on the sleeve it’s divided into 14 tracks, each jointly credited and given a single-word title that might be the result of a game in which the three members contributed their favourite words: “Lilac”, “Pagoda”, “Calabash”, “Demitasse”, “Musk” and so on.

It’s a beautiful and unclassifiable record. The individual sounds are exquisite — the tar strummed and plucked with a tiny hint of twang, the reeds (bass clarinet, soprano and tenor saxophones) elegant, the double bass resonant (Swanton, of course, is also one-third of the Necks). But the point is the sense of conversation, ebbing and flowing without rhetoric or exhibition meditative but never passive. When musicians from different cultures can do this together, with so much ease and naturalness, maybe we’re not in such a terrible state after all.

* Vazesh’s Tapestry is released on October 25 on the Earshift Music label: https://vazesh.bandcamp.com/album/tapestry

Oct 1

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Other sounds 1: Rachel Musson

Olie Brice’s new quartet made a very promising debut at Café Oto last night, and one the reasons was Rachel Musson, whose tenor saxophone traced and explored the contours of the bassist’s characteristically intriguing themes (and Don Cherry’s perky “Awake Nu”) with alert and graceful lyricism. The piano of Alexander Hawkins and the drums of Will Glaser rounded out a group that was heading into a studio the next day to record what will surely be a most interesting album.

A fellow listener observed that Musson’s playing in this context made quite a contrast with her work in her more familiar setting of free improvisation, where multiphonics and other techniques come into play. Last night her fibrous tone and mobile phrasing suggested that she’d located a very fruitful spot within an area defined by Sam Rivers and Pharoah Sanders (at his most songlike). I was reminded, too, that one of her early inspirations was Lee Konitz.

At the merch table during the interval I bought her new CD, titled Ashes and Dust, Earth and Sky in English and Lludw a Llwch, Daear a Nef in Welsh. To be honest, I bought it not just because I’d been enjoying her playing in the first half, or because of the Welsh element, but because I liked the look and feel of the packaging. Sometimes a sleeve design really can tell you about what’s inside.

Inspired during lockdown by researches into her family’s history in Pembrokeshire/Sir Benfro during lockdown, the album was recorded and mixed in 2021. It combines field recordings in West Wales with her saxophones, flute, piccolo, wind chimes, singing bowl and tro (a Cambodian spike fiddle).

Birdsong, wind, church bells — these form the material into which Musson weaves her own contributions, shaping a 40-minute tapestry beyond definition. Birds are the first thing you hear, chirping and cawing, and soon a song is being mimicked by her flute, which reminded me of something Eric Dolphy, another flautist, said long ago: “At home I used to play, and the birds always used to whistle with me. I’d stop what I was working on and play with the birds.” A piccolo joins in, while a singing bowl and the patter of saxophone pads add to the mix before a brief passage of restrained free-style tenor ends the piece.

The music creates and sustains its own space, with frequent individual highlights. The second and fifth of the six tracks, “Bethink and Lay to Heart” and “Windblown”, contain lovely saxophone chorales emerging out of the ambiance and speaking to it, while the finale, the 10-minute title track, opens with a pair of piccolos conversing like blackbirds, introducing the altered sound of bells and other distorted samples which loom and linger until they recede into the silence, having made their quiet but lasting impression.

* Rachel Musson’s album is on Soundskein Records: https://rachelmusson.bandcamp.com/album/ashes-and-dust-earth-and-sky-lludw-a-llwch-daear-a-nef

Sep 19

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Giovanni Guidi in Fitzrovia

As Giovanni Guidi sat at a grand piano in the Rosenfeld Gallery in London last night, amid a carefully spaced hang of abstract works by the Spanish painter Enrique Brinkmann, the Italian and his audience could be seen through the plate-glass window forming the gallery’s frontage. The occasional stroller along the narrow street in Fitzrovia would stop to look, and the sound must have leaked out to them, because at one point towards the end of the unbroken hour-long recital a young women glanced inside and, barely breaking stride, raised her arms and twirled in a perfect fouetté.

It’s easy to imagine how, even heard through plate glass, Guidi’s music might make a person want to do such a thing. Lyrical, romantic and rhapsodic, his playing reaches great emotional heights without ever lapsing into melodrama or self-indulgence. On this occasion he was playing solo, filling the acoustic spaces normally occupied by the fellow members of his sublime trio, the bassist Thomas Morgan and the drummer João Lobo, but the denser arpeggios and the more intense strumming came without penalising the sense of space and weightlessness he conjures.

Guidi is sparing in his use of standard tunes. When he approaches one, he tends to come at it sideways and by stealth, examining its parts individually and fitting them back together according to a scheme of his own spontaneous devising. To bring this set to a long, tapering close, he nudged phrases from “Over the Rainbow” into view, letting them merge seemingly in their own time, allowing them to settle, then speeding and slowing the process of reassembling Harold Arlen’s melodic components into waves of quietly glowing sound. The yearning of Yip Harburg’s unheard lyric can seldom have found a more powerful echo.

“My Funny Valentine” is the standard similarly anatomised in Guidi’s excellent new album, which finds the trio joined on a few of the seven tracks (the other six are original compositions) by the tenor saxophonist James Brandon Lewis, a New Yorker with a rapidly growing reputation. Lewis fits his playing beautifully into the group’s habitual matrix, adding an extra dimension of careful lyricism. And, as has become customary in Guidi’s series of ECM releases, the album’s cover presents an abstract by another of Ian Rosenfeld’s artists, the French painter Emmanuel Barcilon. A worthwhile partnership all round.

* Giovanni Guidi’s A New Day is out now on the ECM label. Enrique Brinkmann’s paintings are on view until tomorrow (September 20) at the Rosenfeld Gallery, 37 Rathbone Street, London W1T 1NZ.

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