Skip to content

Posts from the ‘Jazz’ Category

Aug 12

4 Comments

‘The Black Chord’

David Corio is a fine British photographer whose book The Black Chord, with text by the writer Vivien Goldman, first appeared in the UK 25 years ago. A new edition, published by Hat & Beard, a Los Angeles-based imprint, presents his images of black musicians via a much more elegant design.

Corio was born in London in 1960 and had his first work published when he was 18. Where he differs from Roy DeCarava and Val Wilmer, two other great photographers of black music, is that most of his subjects are caught in performance, on or off stage. DeCarava and Wilmer both sought particular kinds of intimacy, spiritual or domestic. Corio’s images tend to look outward, making a direct address to the viewer, which means they work well in magazine features and on album covers, and the 200-odd photographs here, beautifully reproduced, combine to make an exhilarating book.

The subjects range from the drummers of Burundi and a Santeria ceremony in Cuba through John Lee Hooker, Fats Domino, Bobby Bland, Aretha Franklin, Art Blakey, Celia Cruz, Fela Kuti, Abbey Lincoln, Ray Charles, Barry White, Millie Jackson, Lee Perry, Ornette Coleman, Al Green, Toots Hibbert, Salif Keita, De La Soul, August Darnell, Sade, the Last Poets, Alton Ellis, PM Dawn, Miles Davis, Foday Musa Susa, Nile Rodgers, Don Cherry, Missy Elliott, and of course Bunny, Tosh and Bob. And many, many others. Goldman’s love of this music, from blues to jazz via R&B, soul, reggae, salsa, afrobeat and hip-hop, originally on view in her work in the 1970s for Sounds, the Melody Maker and the NME, infuses the lively essays that intersperse the groupings of photographs.

One of the pictures I like best contains no performers: over a double-page spread, half a dozen boys perch together around a sound system in London in 1978, shot from below, exuding life and possibilities despite the implicit challenge of the world around them. It has poetry in it. As, more obviously, does the portrait of Nina Simone seen above and also on the book’s cover, taken during a performance at Ronnie Scott’s in 1984, a photograph to make you think a lot about troubled genius. That, too, is Corio at his best.

* The Black Chord by David Corio with text by Vivien Goldman is published by Hat & Beard (hatandbeard.com), price $60.

Aug 5

3 Comments

On Kit Downes

One night a few weeks ago I was at the Vortex, listening to a hour of free improvisation performed in the downstairs bar by the pianist Kit Downes with the saxophonist Tom Challenger, his familiar colleague, the drummer Andrew Lisle, and two names new to me; the guitarist Tara Cunningham and the bassist Caius Williams. It was a lovely set, full of lyricism and surprises. Downes, Challenger and Lisle are entirely at home in such an environment; it was a pleasure to hear the contributions of Cunningham, making an intriguing adaptation of the innovations associated with Derek Bailey, and Williams, who produced not just supple and responsive lines but the loveliest tone I’ve heard from an upright bass for ages.

Then I went home to resume listening to a new CD sent to me from Amsterdam, where the celebrated Bimhuis club had recorded Downes’s multinational 10-piece band playing an extended piece titled Dr Snap — one of a series of four “composition assignments reflecting the current zeitgeist” commissioned, under the overall heading of Reflex, from four different composers — and to Outpost of Dreams, Kit’s new album of duets with Norma Winstone on the ECM label.

Recorded live at the Bimhuis in November 2022, Dr Snap consists of seven pieces by Downes, one by Challenger and two by the bassist Petter Eldh. It begins in a deceptively mild manner — twitchy rhythms, knotty woodwind themes — before broadening and deepening as it goes on, opening out to expose exceptional work from the trumpeter Percy Pursglove, the saxophonists Ben van Gelder and Robin Fincker, the flautist Ketije Ringe Karahona, the guitarist Reinier Baas, the bassist Petter Eldh, and the drummers and percussionists Sun-Mi Hong, James Maddren and Veslemøy Narvesen, Plus, of course, the composer’s piano.

Like a lot of today’s jazz writing, it requires 11 fingers on one hand and seven on the other if you want to try and decipher the time signatures. But no such technical analysis is required for a simpler enjoyment of the music as it passes by, hastening without rushing, guided through its endless twists and turns by the highly inventive rhythm section.

There’s a lot of variety here, from passages of hustling density to a lovely stretch of serenity in “Pantheon 4”, a feature for Karahona, via the use of free-jazz techniques behind Pursglove on “Snapdraks”. The solos arise naturally, part of the overall design — as they did, for instance, in the recordings of Steve Lehman’s octet. Three-quarters of a century after what became known as the Birth of the Cool sessions, this kind of jazz for medium-sized ensembles continues to evolve in a very stimulating way.

Downes’s duo with Winstone is a meeting of minds as well as generations (he is 38, she is 82). His tunes join those of John Taylor, Ralph Towner and Adam O’Rourke as vehicles for her lyrics, which are full of elegant, often wistful references to nature and the seasons, to sky and light and wind and their effect on the senses. There are also fine versions of “Black Is the Colour of My True Love’s Hair” and of a traditional tune arranged by the late Bob Cornford, titled “Rowing Home”. From the latter, was there ever a more ECM-evoking opening to a lyric than “Upon the lake in winter sun / A sun that bleaches the sky…”?

As further evidence of Downes’s scope, there’s a forthcoming trio LP called Breaking the Shell on which he plays pipe organ with the guitarist Bill Frisell and the drummer Andrew Cyrille. A track called “Este a Székelyeknél”, released on Bandcamp by the Red Hook label this week, suggests that this, too, will be a notable addition to the body of work being assembled by one of the most consistently stimulating musicians of our time.

* Dr Snap is on the Bimhuis label and Outpost of Dreams is on ECM, both albums out now. Breaking the Shell is released by Red Hook on September 27. The photograph of Kit Downes with the Dr Snap band was taken at the Bimhuis by Maarten Nauw.

Jul 30

18 Comments

And on drums, Jimi Hendrix…

Stevie Wonder can play the drums (listen to “Creepin'”). So can Paul McCartney, after a fashion (“Maybe I’m Amazed”). But I didn’t know that Jimi Hendrix knew how to use a pair of sticks, too.

The proof is in American Drummers 1959-88, Val Wilmer’s new book of 36 photographs of drummers she has observed on and off the stage — and in the case of Hendrix (the only one of her subjects better known for something else), during a sound-check before his show with the Experience at the Royal Albert Hall in London on November 14, 1967.

It’s tempting to assume that Hendrix was just messing around when he sat behind Mitch Mitchell’s kit and picked up a pair of his sticks. But the photo is the evidence that he knew what he was doing. He was left-handed, of course. And he’s holding his right-hand stick in the way that a right-handed drummer would hold his left stick, were he using what is known as the orthodox grip, in which the stick rests in the cradle formed by the clefts between the thumb and forefinger and the second and third fingers.

You can see it on the opposite page in the photo of Andrew Cyrille, a great jazz drummer who has played with Cecil Taylor and many others. Cyrille is a high accomplished technician and most of the time he uses the orthodox grip. The alternative is the matched grip, in which both hands hold the sticks in the same way, as if (to make a crude analogy) they were saucepan handles. Charlie Watts used the orthodox style, Ringo Starr the matched grip.

Drummers sometimes switch from orthodox to matched when they want a particular kind of power — playing the Bo Diddley beat, for instance. And it’s the way most people who aren’t drummers hold the sticks if they’re given the chance to hit something.

But Hendrix is unmistakably using the orthodox grip, which set me thinking. Did he learn it from someone who played drums in one of the bands he’d been in, backing the Isley Brothers and others? Or from Mitch Mitchell, whose early leaning was towards jazz? That seems a bit unlikely to me. You don’t generally learn the orthodox grip unless there’s a very good reason.

So it sent me back to his days in the US Army, drafted into the 101st Airborne Division (the “Screaming Eagles”) in 1961 as an alternative to a jail sentence for joyriding in stolen cars when he was still in his teens. He hated it and lasted barely a year, given a discharge after breaking his ankle in a parachute jump. The only reference I can find to musical involvement during that year was when he asked his father in a letter from Fort Campbell on the Kentucky-Tennessee border to send him the guitar he’d left at a girlfriend’s house in Seattle.

But what if he’d been given the chance to join a marching band, and received basic tuition in playing a shoulder-slung snare drum? That would require a mastery of the orthodox grip, because that’s what it was invented for. And although it might seem at first to be awkward and unnatural, once you learn it, it never goes away.

Val’s photos are full of all the qualities that make her work so special (and which I wrote about when she had an exhibition last year). Yes, there are pictures here of musicians playing on stage — Philly Joe Jones, Max Roach, Kenny Clarke, Tony Williams, Billy Higgins, Elvin Jones, Milford Graves — but also in other, different moments: Sunny Murray reading the paper, Marquis Foster getting his drums out of the trunk of his car, Denis Charles loosening up with a practice pad.

And there are other stories, hidden and half-hidden. A well known New Orleans drummer called Freddie Kohlman is pictured playing a snare drum with the Onward Brass Band at a funeral in 1972. Val told me this week that Kohlman — who died in 1990, aged 75 — had told her how the fledgling Motown label had paid for him, and one or two others, to travel to Detroit to teach the company’s studio musicians how to play the New Orleans rhythms that were the basis of R&B and rock and roll.

Musicians trusted Val, so she could capture them in less formal settings. Below you can see a scene in the Professional Percussion Center on New York’s Eighth Avenue one day in 1971, with the proprietor, Frank Ippolito (who played with Glenn Miller’s Army Air Force Band during WW2), behind the counter, chatting to a trio of customers.

On the left is “Papa” Jo Jones, whose work with Count Basie in the 1930s survives somewhere within the work of every jazz drummer today. In the middle is Jeff Williams, a 21-year-old Berklee graduate from Ohio about to embark on a professional career with the bands of Lee Konitz and Stan Getz (and who has been based for many years in the UK, teaching at the Royal Academy of Music and the Birmingham Conservatoire). On the right is Oliver Jackson, one of Papa Jo’s acolytes, an underrated player with a sense of swing to match that of Roach, Higgins or Frank Butler, as you can hear if you listen to King Curtis’s “Da Duh Dah”.

Just a bunch of guys shooting the breeze in a drum shop one day half a century ago. And, like a lot of Val’s photos, it invites us to share the privileged access that produced this lovely little book.

* Val Wilmer’s American Drummers 1959-1988 is published by Café Royal Books (caferoyalbooks.com), price £6.70.

Jul 19

6 Comments

‘In the Brewing Luminous’

Champagne, sorbet and cocaine. Who would have guessed, while falling under the spell of Cecil Taylor’s music at the beginning of the 1960s, that these formed the basis of the great pianist’s diet? From listening to Jazz Advance, “Excursion on a Wobbly Rail”, the “Pots”/”Bulbs”/”Mixed” session and the sublimely sombre trio reading of “This Nearly Was Mine”, I had him pegged as an artist of the ascetic variety. How utterly wrong.

Actually, I was given a clue at the end of a post-gig interview in London in 1969, when he asked if I could recommend a good discothèque. As Philip Freeman demonstrates in the course of In the Brewing Luminous, Taylor lived on his own terms, resistant to cliché in his life as much as in his music.

A full-scale biography of Taylor has long been needed, and Freeman’s densely packed 250-page volume is as good a one as we are likely to get. I say “densely packed” because the author has made the decision to include as much detail as possible of all the gigs Taylor played and all the recordings he made throughout his long career, along with impressionistic descriptions, where evidence survives, of how they sounded.

To begin with, I worried that this was going to produce the kind of play-by-play narrative familiar from sporting biographies, where one match or competition follows another in a way that can try the reader’s patience. Eventually my reservations faded to nothing. Apart earning our gratitude for the intrinsic value of having all this information assembled in one place, Freeman inserts enough first-hand testimony from participants and bystanders to bring Taylor, who died in 2018, aged 89, back to life.

In 2016, when the reopened Whitney Museum hosted a season to celebrate Taylor, Freeman interviewed him for The Wire. Although highly articulate and sometimes loquacious to a fault, the pianist was not always the most forthcoming or enlightening of witnesses on the subject of his own career. But enough exists for the author to have pieced together the remarkable story of his early life, his rise to notoriety as the first member of the avant-garde to send ripples through the jazz establishment, and his progress, as Freeman eloquently puts it, “from insurgent to institution”, from enduring the scorn of Miles Davis and others to becoming the recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship in 1973 and a MacArthur “genius grant” in 1991.

Writing about Taylor’s music in descriptive terms is straightforward enough. Almost any would-be Whitney Balliett can raid the adjective cupboard to produce a satisfactory review of a single concert or recording. As many of us have, Freeman makes considerable use of similes and metaphors drawn from the natural world, so there are lots of thunderstorms and tidal waves in his accounts of the sound and effect of Taylor’s music, particularly the solo work. Again, at first I thought this might become wearying. It doesn’t, because there’s a lot of other important stuff going on.

Freeman examines Taylor’s relationships with the music’s facilitators and gatekeepers, such as George Wein, a perhaps unlikely early champion, and the record producer John Snyder, and with the educational institutions where he taught and assembled groups as test-beds for his compositional techniques. This isn’t a book of musicology, so there isn’t much real analysis, but we hear enough from former sideman and students to get a glimpse of a man so supremely musically literate would write his pieces down in alphabetical form — a string of notes, such as D-B-E flat-A-F sharp-G — and give them to players without much else in the way of detail (no note values or registers) or instruction.

Over the course of the book, and without labouring the point, Freeman persuades us that Taylor, far from being a man with a mission to connect modern jazz with the Second Viennese School, as many assumed in the early days, was actually concerned with creating a language based on non-Western rituals and practices.

He could seem perverse. There are several accounts of how he would sometimes rehearse a band relentlessly, searching for something, only to abandon all the preparation once they had taken the stage. But that wasn’t always the case. I have a vivid memory from one night in 1969 of how intently Jimmy Lyons and Sam Rivers, his saxophonists, followed the scores on their music stands while performing his music at Hammersmith Odeon.

Many interesting people slip in and out of this narrative, from Amiri Baraka to Mikhail Baryshnikov to Pauline Oliveros. Some were collaborators, some were friends, some were adversaries. Death, alas, robbed Freeman of the chance to talk to many who would have had something interesting to say, such as Lyons, the Johnny Hodges to Taylor’s Duke Ellington, or Buell Neidlinger, the bassist in his early groups, a man with perfect recall of every session he ever played on, and with pungent views. I wish he’d talked to Evan Parker, who saw the classic Taylor-Lyons-Sunny Murray trio in New York and played with Taylor during the pianist’s stay in Berlin in 1988. But there are enough survivors, albeit inevitably weighted towards the later decades (including the pianist Vijay Iyer, the drummer Pheeroan akLaff and the trumpeter Amir ElSaffar), to provide a pretty rich portrait.

In his later years, Taylor’s performances increasingly involved the dramatic recitation of his poetry, a gloriously forbidding jumble of polysyllabic arcana. I was present one night in the year 2000 at St Mark’s Church on East 10th Street in New York when he shared a Poetry Project evening with Baraka. I had no idea what to make of his poetry. Nor, perhaps, was I meant to. Freeman can’t do much more than briefly describe it, which is not surprising. Impossibly gnomic, fearlessly impenetrable, it probably contained the key to the mystery of Cecil Taylor.

Freeman’s diligence enables him to preserve for us the details of events such as the ceremony surrounding Taylor’s acceptance of the 2013 Kyoto Prize in Tokyo, including a moving description of his duet with the dancer Min Tanaka at the ceremony and the pianist’s words in a subsequent interview: “The question is simply this: is the secret in the symbol of the note, or is it the feeling that exists before you translate the note into music? Music proceeds from within. The note is merely a rather uninteresting symbol that equates to the sound. But sound is always with us.”

Alas, a man posing as a friend and helper managed to separate Taylor from the prize money that went with the Kyoto award: a small matter of $492,725. For a man in his mid-eighties, in increasingly frail physical health, the ensuing legal battle for restitution was traumatic. Eventually he was granted a court-appointed legal guardian, who looked after him until his death.

Not surprisingly, the book becomes more emotionally compelling as it moves towards and through this final chapter. As I finished it, I realised that In the Brewing Luminous (which, of course, takes its title from one of Taylor’s compositions), is a work not just of heft but of sensitivity towards an awkward, sometimes forbidding subject.

Freeman notes that Taylor’s ashes were interred in the Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx, also the resting place of the remains of King Oliver, Coleman Hawkins, Miles Davis, Max Roach, Ornette Coleman, and Taylor’s own idol, Ellington, key figures in the tradition to which he made his own tumultuous, enigmatic, sometimes exasperating, but utterly original contribution.

* Philip Freeman’s In the Brewing Luminous was published on July 5 by Wolke Verlag. The photograph of Cecil Taylor was taken by Andrew Putler and is from Jazz: A Photographic Documentary, published by Studio in 1994. A previously unheard 1980 recording of Cecil Taylor with a sextet including Jimmy Lyons and Sunny Murray at Fat Tuesday’s in New York has just been issued by Hat Hut Records in the Ezz-thetics First Visit series.

Jul 1

34 Comments

On visiting a friend

The front of the home of Robert Wyatt and Alfie Benge, a pretty Georgian house on a quiet street close to the centre of the Lincolnshire market town of Louth, was bathed in sunshine as I pressed the bell one day last week. The door was opened by Dee, Robert’s daughter in law, who took me inside to see him.

I’ve known Robert since the end of the ’60s, when he was still with the Soft Machine. He and Alfie tell the story of how I officiated at their marriage one night at Ronnie Scott’s in the early ’70s, before his accident, using a twisted-up piece of silver paper from a cigarette packet as an improvised wedding ring. A couple of years later they were formally married at Sheen register office on the day of the release of the extraordinary Rock Bottom, his great 1974 album of songs expressing fathomless emotions.

Alfie was in London for attention to her eyes on the day I visited to see Robert for the first time since before the pandemic. She’d warned me that a near-fatal encounter with something nasty called Lewy Body Dementia had impaired his memory, although “he’s far less away with the fairies than he was.” And his sight had improved after long-awaited double cataract surgery.

His eyes were bright as we started to talk, his conversation just about as animated and every bit as surreally funny as I remembered. A mention of that first informal wedding ceremony prompted him to talk about how he had been 10 years old when he first met Ronnie Scott, when they were both guests at Robert Graves’s famous house in Mallorca (Robert’s mother, Honor Wyatt, was a friend of the poet, and may have named her son after him). He loved Ronnie and his co-director Pete King — whose name provoked a chuckling mention of “The great smell of Brut!” — and the whole vibe of the club, where Alfie had worked behind the bar. He remembered young Henry, who looked after the cloakroom and saw the ageing Ben Webster safely home every night during the great and hard-drinking tenorist’s residencies.

We talked about a little about how Robert had enjoyed contributing vocals to three tracks on Artlessly Falling, Mary Halvorson’s second Code Girl album in 2020, about Duke Ellington, and about Gil Evans, another venerated figure whose “Las Vegas Tango” Robert turned into a mesmerisingly wayward two-part invention on his first solo album, End of an Ear, in 1970. And about the 1971 Berlin jazz festival, where Robert — having just left the Softs — was selected by the festival director, Jo Berendt, for the rhythm section accompanying a Violin Summit starring Don “Sugarcane” Harris, Jean-Luc Ponty, Michal Urbaniak and Nipso Brantner (“I don’t think they liked my playing — I was either too rock or too jazz”). When I remarked that a mutual acquaintance perhaps “fell in love too easily”, he picked up the cue, hummed the opening of “I Fall in Love Too Easily” and talked about how much he still enjoyed listening to Chet Baker singing such songs.

I stayed an hour and a half, longer than expected. On the drive home I listened to Comicopera and …for the ghosts within, two late masterpieces. It had been a joy to find that Robert is still entirely himself, one of the most original and loved figures of his generation, still living his “improvised life”, not making music any more but continuing to incarnate his socialist principles and thereby justifying his friend Brian Eno’s description of him (in Marcus O’Dair’s excellent authorised biography) as living without “any glaring inconsistencies between what he claims to believe in and what he does as a person and as an artist.”

Alfie wanted to leave me a copy of Side by Side, the book of poems, lyrics and drawings that she and Robert published in 2020. “It came out during the lockdown,” she said, “so it didn’t get much notice.” I told her I’d already bought one. If it escaped your attention, this might be the time to rectify that omission — maybe as a way of celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of their wedding (the official one), which falls on July 26**: a milestone in a remarkable, wonderfully creative and happily enduring partnership.

* Side by Side by Robert Wyatt and Alfie Benge is published by Faber & Faber. Marcus O’Dair’s Different Every Time: The Authorised Biography of Robert Wyatt was published by Serpent’s Tail in 2014. The photograph of Robert and me was taken by his son, Sam Ellidge.

** Correction: the piece originally said that the anniversary is on July 24. It’s the 26th. Alfie also points out that that they originally chose the date to coincide with the first day of Fidel Castro’s first attempt to start the Cuban Revolution: the attack on the Moncada garrison in 1953.

Jun 17

3 Comments

A stroll in the park

Although Wadada Leo Smith and Amina Claudine Myers are both longtime members of Chicago’s Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, they had never recorded together before going into the studio to make Central Park’s Mosaics of Reservoir, Lake, Paths and Gardens. Both are originally from the South — Wadada from Mississippi, Amina from Arkansas — but here they are in a suite of duets for trumpet and keyboards whose title refers to Manhattan’s 843-acre green space.

All but one of the pieces were written by Wadada, who likes to tie his compositions to specific sources of inspiration. In the past, these have included Rosa Parks, Thelonious Monk, Emmett Till, Billie Holiday, Martin Luther King and America’s national parks. His six pieces on Central Park find the two musicians conjuring solemn meditations, perhaps informed by the knowledge that part of the vast acreage was seized by compulsory purchase from the inhabitants of Seneca Village, a largely black settlement on what is now the Upper West Side, with a population of just over 200 (some of them Native Americans and Irish immigrants) in about 50 houses when it was taken and razed in 1857.

Individual sections are named after the Conservatory Garden — formal gardens located near 105th street — and two water features: the Harlem Meer, a man-made lake in the north-eastern corner, created at the confluence of three streams, and the Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis Reservoir, a little further south, between 86th and 96th Streets. Two others are titled “Albert Ayler — A Meditation in Light” and “Imagine — A Mosaic for John Lennon”. Ayler lived mostly in Harlem between 1963 and his death in 1970. Lennon died outside the Dakota building, where he and Yoko Ono lived, on Central Park West.

There’s nothing programmatic about these pieces, nothing to provide an explicit reminder of Jackie O, Ayler, Lennon or large expanses of water, although I suppose “Central Park at Sunset”, the sixth piece, could be described as a tone poem, at a push. But there is a sense of weight and contemplation to them all, and a powerful continuity of mood. These are veterans — both are 82 — but their playing is poised, firm, probing and heartfelt. Variations are provided by Wadada’s occasional use of a mute and Amina’s switch to a Hammond B3 on the Jackie dedication. And at the midpoint of the album she gets five minutes to herself for a solo called “When Was”, the piano ringing with echoes of hymns and ragtime airs until she gathers them up and and shakes them out in a terse, pounding finale.

From Louis Armstrong with Earl Hines through Ruby Braff with Ellis Larkins to Arve Henriksen with Harmen Fraanje, trumpet and piano duets are a precious jazz tradition. This, from two of the elders, is a very special one.

* Central Park’s Mosaics of Reservoir, Lake, Paths and Gardens is on the Red Hook label. The composite photo of Wadada Leo Smith and Amina Claudine Myers is by Luke Marantz.

Jun 9

Croeso y Cafe Oto

Cafe Oto, 8/6/24. From left: Melvin Gibbs, Eadyth Crawford, Mark O’Connor, Tomos Williams, Mared Williams and Nguyen Le

A welcome in Welsh from the trumpeter, composer and bandleader Tomos Williams prefaced the performance in Dalston of the third part of his Cwmwl Tystion series: Empathy, to follow the live recordings of Witness (released in 2021) and Riot! (2023) made during earlier tours. In all three, Williams blends the language of contemporary jazz with stories from the last 200 years of Welsh history.

For each part, he deployed different resources: the harp of Rhodri Davies and the voice of Francesca Simmons on Witness, the saxophone of Soweto Kinch and the vibes of Orphy Robinson on Riot!. For Empathy, he retained the voice of Eadyth Crawford and the drums of Mark O’Connor and added the Vietnamese guitarist Nguyen Le, the American bass guitarist Melvin Gibbs and a second voice, that of Mared Williams.

The two non-Welsh guests, both virtuosos of effects-enhanced stringed instruments, played powerful roles in setting the tone and trajectory of the music chosen and written to accompany pieces inspired by Paul Robeson’s recital to the mining families of Aberpennar (Mountain Ash) in 1938, the eviction of the villagers of Mynydd Epynt in Powys by the Ministry of Defence in 1940, the Aberfan disaster of 1966 and the miners’ strike of 1984. All these were accompanied by Simon Proffitt’s back-projected visuals.

Gibbs, once a member of Defunkt, has few equals in turning a five-string bass guitarist into an electronic orchestra. Le is one of the most adept of post-Hendrix guitarists. They found a willing accomplice in the powerful and dextrous O’Connor. At times I was reminded of Miles Davis’s Tutu period, of Jon Hassell’s Fourth World Music, and of Terje Rypdal at his wildest. One late passage raised the volume to death-metal levels.

That made the use of the two voices, sometimes combined in folk-like materials, even more valuable as a contrast, along with the sudden and very moving insertion, during the Aberfan passage, of the pre-recorded sound of a pipe organ and a chapel choir, and Williams’s use of Donald Byrd’s “Cristo Redentor” as a healing balm towards the conclusion. Earlier, the trumpeter had excelled in a tightly muted solo over a lovely habanera rhythm.

After six concerts at various venues around Wales in the preceding days, this visit to Llundain represented the tour’s finale: the final performance of this particular work by this particular band. As they laid down their instruments and stepped back from microphones, the sense of exhilaration had a special resonance.

* Parts one and two of Cwmwl Tystion are available on the Ty Cerdd label.

Jun 2

6 Comments

Artistry in algorithm

This morning’s newspaper headlines included one suggesting that artificial intelligence will play a significant role in the UK’s coming general election. My first response was that, given the mess humans have made of selecting the last four prime ministers, maybe the machines should be given a chance.

Music, though — well, that’s something else. Who, for example, wants the unique voice of Steve Marriott, 30-plus years dead, sliced and diced by AI algorithms and applied to songs he never sang, apparently with the endorsement of his widow?

But there are other applications of this slightly terrifying technology that may have a different and more benign outcome. At the Vortex last night, two sold-out houses heard France’s Orchestra National de Jazz play the compositions of Steve Lehman and Frédéric Maurin, specially written to make use of AI software developed by Jérôme Nika, a researcher at the celebrated IRCAM — the Institute for Research and Co-ordination in Acoustics/Music, founded in Paris by Pierre Boulez in 1977, at the request of Georges Pompidou, and now housed in the centre bearing the former president’s name.

The music was recorded last year as a live performance in the Tonstudio Bauer in Ludwigsburg and released as an album titled Ex Machina. It comes with extensive sleeve notes which I’ve read twice without really coming close to an idea of what the software actually does. But I do know that Lehman, who played the alto saxophone parts on the album and in London, and Maurin, the orchestra’s director and conductor, also based their compositions on prolonged study of the movement known as spectral music, in which such post-Messaien composers as Gérard Grisey and Tristan Murail experimented with creating microtonal ambiances.

I found the album interesting but not, on early hearings, as stimulating as Lehman’s work with his great octet or in his multilingual rap group, Sélébéyone. At the Vortex, however, where they were stopping off en route to performing tonight at Southampton University’s AI Arts Festival in Winchester, the music exploded into three dimensions and full colour, retaining all its complexity and subtlety while grabbing the audience and refusing to let them go until the final shimmer of a quarter-tone vibraphone had faded to silence.

Much of this had to do with the vigour of the playing, which ensured that the compositions never sounded dry or academic. Textures vibrated, rhythms were sprung. The shifting syncopations and abrupt stop-time figures had the excitement of James Brown’s band meeting Sun Ra in some distant galaxy.

The individual playing was uniformly brilliant in its response to the material. As well as Lehman’s serpentine, sweet-and-sour alto and the vibraphone of his octet colleague Chris Dingman (the only other American in the band), powerful impressions were left by improvisations from the bass trombone of Christiane Bopp, the tenor saxophone of Julian Soro, the clarinet of Cathérine Delaunay, the flute of Fanny Ménégoz, the baritone saxophone of Fabien Debellefontaine, and the trumpets of Fabien Norbert and Olivier Laisney. But what really fired the orchestra was the rhythm team: the deep power and agility of the double bassist, Sarah Murcia, in collaboration with the magnificent drive and awe-inspiring precision of the drummer, Rafaël Koerner. Thanks to them, the music never flagged.

It made me recall the last time I heard a largeish ensemble playing music that took the composition/improvisation dialogue in such a stimulating new direction. That was in 2016, when I first heard the White Desert Orchestra, led by the French composer/pianist Eve Risser — a graduate of the Orchestre National de Jazz. Obviously not a coincidence.

* Ex Machina by Steve Lehman and the Orchestra National de Jazz is on the Pi Recordings label.

May 30

5 Comments

The sound of style

John Simons, who turns 85 this Friday, remembers being 17 years old in 1956 and going to see Stan Kenton at the Albert Hall. He remembers the tall, imposing figure of the bandleader, and the thrilling sound of the music, one piece in particular: “‘Concerto to End All Concertos’!”

He also remembers that one of the band’s musicians had been sent home before they’d played a note on the hugely successful 53-date UK tour. It was the tenor saxophonist Spencer Sinatra, who’d been caught trying to score drugs soon after their arrival in London. Kenton packed him straight off back to the USA, along with his apparently blameless roommate, the baritone player Jack Nimitz. Simons claims that his memory for names isn’t so good any more, but he remembers the British replacements who were called in: Don Rendell and Harry Klein.

Perhaps less surprisingly, he also remembers how beautifully dressed the musicians were and the item of clothing he himself bought for the occasion: “It was a trenchcoat. Six guineas from Millet’s.” For John Simons, jazz and fashion have always been woven together.

A decent clothes shop that plays good music adds something to one of life’s pleasures. In Simons’ shop on Chiltern Street in Marylebone, the music is always good because it’s going to be something that refers in some way to the modern jazz on which the proprietor got seriously hooked as a young man in the 1950s. He’s not in the shop very often these days. His sons run it now, but they keep it on the Ivy League path he and his early partners established many years ago: button-down shirts, loafers, nice raincoats, soft-shouldered corduroy jackets, knitted ties. And the music, of course.

He was born into a tailoring family in 1939 and left school to study shop design and window dressing at St Martin’s School of Art. He was working at Cecil Gee in Shaftesbury Avenue when he was offered a job with Hope Brothers, whose stores included Burberry’s on Regent Street. Before long he and a friend started a business of their own, with a stall off Petticoat Lane and then a little shop called Clothesville next to Hackney Empire. He could design something, send it over to a tailor, and expect to have it back for sale the next day.

In the summer of 1964 he opened the Ivy Shop in Richmond, two doors up from L’Auberge, the café where the mod fans of the Stones and the Yardbirds would meet. His next venture was the Squire on Brewer Street in Soho. Then came the Village Gate, with branches on the King’s Road and Old Compton Street, named after the celebrated Greenwich Village jazz club, which he’d visited on a trip to New York. “I wrote to the owner of the Village Gate, Art D’Lugoff, for permission. He said, ‘As long as it’s not a jazz club, be my guest.'”

At the start of the 1980s he started a shop called J. Simons in Covent Garden, which became a haven for those to whom, in the words of Robert Elms, the classic modernist wardrobe represents “the only youth culture uniform that doesn’t look ridiculous in retrospect.” When the lease ran out he looked around before, in 2011, opening the current shop in a district which, as with Covent Garden, he has played a part in reshaping.

When I asked him to name some musicians whose work he really loves, he mentioned the Clifford Brown-Max Roach quintet, Chet Baker’s singing, the MJQ and Billie Holiday. And Thelonious Monk. “At the youth club I went to,” he said, “people danced to Monk. Can you believe that?”

May 26

7 Comments

Passion / Compassion

Back in the early 1970s, Santana were my favourite live band. I saw the original line-up — more or less as heard at Woodstock — at the Albert Hall in 1970 and twice the following year, at Hammersmith Odeon and the Olympia in Paris. They were thrilling, and surrounded by a sense of excitement; before the show in Paris, I remember Mick Jagger and Bianca Pérez-Mora Macias sweeping through the backstage bar, a week ahead of their wedding.

Then the music changed, and they became even better. Carlos Santana and Michael Shrieve had been listening to John Coltrane and Elvin Jones and to Miles Davis’s Sketches of Spain and Bitches Brew. Santana’s fourth album, Caravanserai, brimmed over with the effect of those influences, starting with an unaccompanied solo by the saxophonist Hadley Caliman and culminating in the ecstatic nine-minute “Every Step of the Way”, a Shrieve composition. Clive Davis, the president of their record company, called it “career suicide”. At the Wembley Empire Pool in November 1972, just after the album’s release, an expanded line-up rose to a different level, musically and spiritually.

After Wembley they went off to play some concerts in Europe before returning towards the end of the month for dates in Manchester, Newcastle and Bournemouth. On Thursday, November 23 they had a day off in London, and, being American, arranged a small Thanksgiving Day dinner in the private room of a restaurant on Davies Street in Mayfair. I’d raved about Caravanserai in the Melody Maker, so they were kind enough to invite me to join them for what turned out to be a very pleasant evening.

While they were in London I interviewed Shrieve, who talked eloquently and passionately about the changes they’d made in the music, and about the jazz influences inspiring them. He spoke of his admiration for Elvin, Roy Haynes, Philly Joe Jones and Tony Williams and of studying their playing with his friend Lennie White, who had just joined Chick Corea’s Return to Forever. And he said something that struck me when I read the piece again the other day: “What’s so beautiful about the band, apart from the popularity which we know we’re fortunate to have and which we’re grateful for, is that right now it’s the perfect situation to be open. Specially at our age, because we realise that there’s still a lot of time.” Fifty years later, it’s clear the time hasn’t been wasted.

I loved Shrieve’s playing from the start, the way he meshed perfectly with the percussionists José “Chepito” Areas, Mike Carabello, Armando Peraza, Coke Escovedo and James Mingo Lewis. Since then I’ve followed his career mostly from a distance, although we reconnected when I was at Island Records in the mid-70s and he and Steve Winwood were part of Stomu Yamash’ta’s Go project, and then when the label signed Automatic Man, a rock band he was in with the singer/keyboards player Bayeté (Todd Cochran) and the guitarist Pat Thrall, and whose 1976 single “My Pearl” sounds today like a presentiment of Prince. Of his solo albums, I’ve always loved Stiletto, released in 1989 on RCA’s Novus imprint, in which he and a band including the trumpeter Mark Isham and the guitarists David Torn and Andy Summers created a very fine version of Gil Evans’s “Las Vegas Tango”.

If you have a copy of Lotus, the live triple album recorded in Osaka during the Caravanserai tour, you’ll know the 10-minute drum solo called “Kyoto” that shows what a superlative drummer he had already become, at the age of 23. It has none of the bombast of his rock contemporaries and much of the fluency of his jazz heroes. It’s music.

His new album, recorded over a period of years, is called Drums of Compassion — a reference to the hugely popular album titled Drums of Passion recorded in 1959 by the great Nigerian drummer Michael Babatunde Olatunji, who died at his home in Northern California 2003, aged 75, but whose voice is the one you hear first and again from time to time on an album that has been long in the making. Shrieve says that the title is also an acknowledgement of the Dalai Lama’s call for a Time of Compassion.

Of course, percussion instruments play an important role in this music. But the whole thing, although its 39 minutes are sub-divided into nine pieces, some with different composers, is like a lush, constantly shifting sound painting in which other instruments — guitar, saxophone, oud, electronic keyboards — emerge with utterances that seem less like solos than simply part of the fabric.

Shrieve can put together a multi-faceted track (“The Call of Michael Olantunji”) including himself, Jack DeJohnette, Airto Moreira and Zakir Hussain on various percussion instruments without making it sound for a second like an old-fashioned drum battle or a display of egos and techniques, even when Shrieve’s orchestral tom-toms come to the fore. The percussionists’ work is blended into the overall picture, here creating an armature for Olantunji’s voice and Trey Gunn’s guitar.

Shrieve can make the space for one performer alone on the eponymous “The Euphoric Pandeiro of Airto Moreira” (chanting and Brazilian percussion) and “Zakir Hussain” (tablas). He shares another track, the sultry, drifting “Oracle”, in a duet with another Brazilian, the electronic musician Amon Tobin. The ambience swirls and drifts without relaxing its subtle grip.

A steamy tone poem titled “On the Path to the Healing Waters” features the tenor saxophone of Skerik (Eric Walton), a Seattle-based musician who has played with Wayne Horvitz and Charlie Hunter, and who here plays a Wayne Shorter-ish less-is-more role. And I’m particularly happy to lose myself inside “The Breath of Human Kindness”, five minutes of one-chord jam in which the oud of Tarik Banzi makes its single eloquent appearance, a voice from ancient Al-Andalus amid the glistening keyboards of Pete Lockett and Michael Stegner, paced by Farko Dosumov’s stealthy bass guitar riff.

There’s a rare combination of majesty and humility at work in this music, something that speaks of the deep and lasting impact of Coltrane’s influence on Shrieve’s instincts and decisions. More than half a century after Caravanserai, this is an album for listeners who followed Shrieve and Santana on that journey into a wider world, one where frontiers and prejudices dissolve.

* Michael Shrieve’s Drums of Compassion is out now on the 7D Media label and available via Bandcamp: https://michaelshrieve7d.bandcamp.com/album/drums-of-compassion

« Older Entries
Newer Entries »