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Posts from the ‘Jazz’ Category

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.

Sep 17

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Autumn books 3: Brad Mehldau

The first time I saw the pianist Brad Mehldau in person, playing with a pick-up rhythm section at the Pizza Express in the early 1990s, I was astonished by the intellectual and technical power of his playing, and by its emotional impact. The version of “Moon River” he played that night lives with me still. He was in his early twenties, still with boyish looks, and he sounded like the next thing in jazz piano. A couple of dozen years later I booked him and the tenor saxophonist Joshua Redman, his contemporary, colleague and friend, to play at JazzFest Berlin, where they gave a duo performance sensational in its virtuosity, interplay and, again, emotional depth. I had no real idea of the back-story to these two performances.

Back in the ’90s, Mehldau was in the grip of heroin addiction. By the end of the decade he had freed himself from that prison without bars and found a new life. Sharing a stage with Redman in 2016, he was reunited with a contemporary who had finally lost patience with him 10 years earlier, kicking him out of his quartet just when they were achieving recognition. That rejection was one of the factors that eventually forced the pianist to take the action that saved him.

On the subject of addiction and the jazz life, the first volume of Mehldau’s autobiography, titled Formation: Building a Personal Canon, is as harrowing as anything I’ve read in a genre that includes Hampton Hawes’ Raise Up Off Me, Art Pepper’s Straight Life and Peter King’s Flying High. Here’s how he introduces it: “There are detailed descriptions of drug and alcohol abuse in this book. I want to stress that, although I describe the pleasure of using them, I hope I will have shown that they were a mistaken path, one that injured me and almost took my life. They are part of my story. I do not know why I survived when close friends of mine did not. Perhaps because of that, I feel an obligation to tell that story honestly.”

The book is dedicated to three of those young friends who did not survive, and whose stories — using only their first names — are interwoven into the tale of his own childhood, upbringing, schooling and early experiences in the jazz world.

It’s a serious book, sometimes obsessive in pursuit of its themes, in which Goethe, Rilke and Kierkegaard are often quoted as the author describes his search for meaning and beauty. He is sufficiently comfortable with such concepts as gnosis and teleology to deploy them without explanation. Dream sequences are occasionally reconstructed to illustrate his youthful anxieties, particularly those concerning his sexual identity. A publisher wanting a more commercial book would have winnowed many of these passages, removing repetition, but one imagines the accumulated weight of testimony is what Mehldau wanted, perhaps as an additional form of therapy — or as part of that obligation “to tell that story honestly”. For a sympathetic reader, it works.

There’s music, of course. No shortage of it, starting with a description of his youthful tastes, which incorporated an unaffected love of several kinds of pop music — particularly British prog-rock, on which he is clearly an expert — alongside his developing interest in jazz. There’s an abundance of how it felt while he was discovering his musical character, absorbing his influences while at school and college and eventually learning directly from the elders. The rewards of first-hand exposure to pianists of an earlier generation, such as Hank Jones, Tommy Flanagan, Barry Harris and Cedar Walton, makes good reading, as does his veneration of another one in particular.

“There was a whole swath of us piano players who were trying to play like Wynton Kelly,” he says. “Sometimes, someone would simply play a whole stretch of one of his solos, transcribed from a beloved record. Normally, that kind of thing would be frowned on, because it went against the principle of improvisation, but here the fellow piano-players who knew the solo as well would nod in approval. I did this with several choruses of (his) solo on ‘No Blues’ from Smokin’ at the Half Note. I still quote from that solo regularly. It’s a bedrock of joyous swing, melody and badassed fire all at once.”

Drummers have always been important to him. Listening to Elvin Jones and Ed Blackwell, playing with Billy Higgins and Jimmy Cobb, he’s alert to the attitude and the nuances of their playing, to the way it sits within the beat. “Blackwell’s drumming changed everything for me,” he notes. “He showed how you could play in a formally unhinged context, yet create your own shifting grid, one with simplicity and integrity which nevertheless moved easily within the free current of the music.” He makes the point that while listening to such great jazz musicians on record is one thing, hearing them in person is quite another.

He dives into deeper currents, too, employing his appreciation of aesthetic theory drawn from the likes of Theodor Adorno and the literary critic Harold Bloom (compiler of The Western Canon). “Where to find oneself as an over-thinking, aspiring jazz musician? Music, in its steady abtractness, would not supply a road map. Literature has been the closest analogue thus far. At its best, it used language to break out of language, into something more like music.”

Characteristically, he uses the example of James Joyce and Thomas Mann to discuss the dichotomy between music of the flesh and music of the spirit, embodied in the contrast between Miles Davis’s In a Silent Way and John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme, both of which he quite properly venerates, just as he does Joyce’s Ulysses and Mann’s Dr Faustus.

“Of course, Miles wasn’t only carnal any more than Coltrane was only spiritual.” he writes. “Yet each led to one pole in my experience of listening to them. I began to have an aspiration for my own output: to close the gap between the divine and flesh, to reconcile sexual and spiritual ecstasy in the musical expression.” He finds an answer in Ulysses.

In jazz-historical terms, he’s fascinating on how it felt to come up in the late ’80s and early ’90s, working alongside the Marsalis-led revival that was supposed to use tradition to blow away the allegedly stale irrelevances of the avant-garde and fusion music.

“‘Postmodernism’ was an explanation for anything and everything,” he remembers, “but it was a term that seemed to eat itself, as it tried to account for the breakdown of linear history in linear, historical terms. In a way, it had no utility, by its own definition. Perhaps that lack of utility was embedded in its meaning, though, and the idea was to start from a place of no meaning. The old set of integral tools did not work. They no longer constructed anything whole. The ’90s were all about coming to terms with that. In that process of reckoning, there was ultimately a strong creative input from all quarters. But it took a minute.” And there was certainly a resentment, directed at the Marsalis brothers, to be worked through.

The narrative ends with Mehldau on the brink of rescue from the fate that had long been beckoning. You know it’s coming, of course, but on the way to his redemption he spares us nothing of the squalor into which his life descended in just about all its aspects — including, for a while, even the music. It’s a gruelling narrative, and a brave one.

* Brad Mehldau’s Formation: Building a Personal Canon, Part One is published by Equinox (www.equinoxpub.com)

Sep 1

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The vision of Scott LaFaro

Invited to talk about the bassist Scott LaFaro, Ornette Coleman came up with a typically gnomic insight. “Scotty could change the sound of a note just by playing another note,” Coleman told LaFaro’s biographer in 2007. “He’s the only one I’ve ever heard who could do that with a bass.”

There’s a chance to consider what Ornette might have meant while listening to a new three-CD set that compiles work from throughout LaFaro’s sadly abbreviated career, which ended when he was killed in a car crash in 1961, aged 25. Starting with tracks from a 1958 trio album by the pianist Pat Moran, it continues through sessions with the pianists Victor Feldman and Hampton Hawes, the clarinetists Buddy DeFranco and Tony Scott, the trumpeter Booker Little, the arranger Marty Paich, the altoist Herb Geller, the composer John Lewis and the tenorist Stan Getz, as well as Coleman — and, of course, the pianist Bill Evans, with whose celebrated trio he came to fame.

In New York in 1960 Coleman called LaFaro to play alongside his usual bassist, Charlie Haden, in the famous double-quartet session called Free Jazz. Although the two young bassists were friends (LaFaro was then aged 24, Haden 23), it would be hard to imagine a single generation producing two exponents of the instrument with more contrasting styles: Haden darkly thrumming, happy to dig in and walk a basic 4/4, never using two notes where one would do, LaFaro all lightness and velocity and complex phrases executed with quicksilver grace.

When Haden was soon thereafter taken off the scene by drug problems, LaFaro assumed his place in Coleman’s working band and recorded again with him on the album titled Ornette!. But by the summer of that year he was back in his regular place with the Evans trio, playing a summer engagement in a 7th Avenue South basement club that produced two live albums which had an extraordinary impact on jazz: Waltz for Debby and Sunday at the Village Vanguard.

Together with two studio sessions, Portrait in Jazz and Explorations, these albums effectively turned the piano trio from “piano with rhythm accompaniment”, as it used to say on the labels of 78s, to three-way exchanges between creative equals, with the drummer Paul Motian as the third voice. Booker Little, with whom LaFaro recorded in 1960, described him admiringly as “much more of a conversationalist behind you than any bass player I know.”

Little died of uraemia in October 1961, aged 23. Three months earlier, three days after appearing with Stan Getz at the Newport Jazz Festival, LaFaro had died in an accident while visiting family in upstate New York, seemingly after falling asleep at the wheel. Both were prodigies, serious-minded young musicians equally determined to avoid the traps set by the jazz life, with golden creative futures ahead of them. (LaFaro had just begun to compose, and the legacy of the Evans trio to jazz impressionism is unthinkable without his only two recorded pieces, “Jade Visions” and “Gloria’s Step”.)

There were great bass players in jazz before LaFaro. Some of them — Jimmy Blanton, Oscar Pettiford, Ray Brown, Charles Mingus, Ray Brown, Red Mitchell — helped to change how the instrument was played, just as Coleman Hawkins or Charlie Parker changed the saxophone and Louis Armstrong or Miles Davis changed the trumpet, in ways that no classical player could ever have imagined. So when LaFaro arrived on the scene at the end of the 1950s, in his early twenties, he was firmly in a tradition of extending and influencing an instrumental vocabulary.

In the biography, many musicians describe the shock they felt at his death and try to describe what it was that made him so remarkable: the way that he took such a big step in helping to free the bass from the subservient role of walking a steady 4/4 at whatever the tempo might be. Gary Peacock, another friend and contemporary, who later took on his mantle with the trios of Evans and Keith Jarrett, describes him as “anchoring the time without playing it”.

That’s a beautiful way of explaining his effect, and it ties in with a simple but very telling observation made by the bassist and educator Phil Palombi in an essay on LaFaro’s playing included in the biography: “LaFaro rarely began a phrase on the downbeat of a bar.” He avoided the obvious, playing games with symmetry, leaving space for others (and for silence), created a feeling of suspense and suspension, mobilising the music and making it float in new ways. Evans and Motian were his willing and brilliant accomplices, but he was the one who set the tone and made it happen.

He played a three-quarter size bass built around 1825 by Abraham Prescott of Concord, New Hampshire, found for him in Los Angeles by Red Mitchell. Another great bass player, George Duvivier, helped him to get it rebuilt in New York. (Badly damaged by impact and fire in the fatal car accident, it was completely restored 20 years later.) The height of the bridge was adjusted to lower the action and LaFaro was a pioneer in the technique of plucking the strings with the index and second fingers of his right hand, like a finger-picking guitarist, giving him the ability to articulate phrases of great complexity.

The new set of CDs includes some beauties, such as a couple of cool-as-a-breeze tracks by a sextet co-led by Getz and the vibraphonist Cal Tjader with Billy Higgins on drums, Paich’s characteristically intriguing and beautifully swinging arrangement of “It’s All Right With Me” as a bass feature, a lovely version of “Wrap Your Troubles in Dreams” by a Hawes-led quartet with Harold Land on tenor, and the whole 37 minutes of “Free Jazz”. “Gloria’s Step” and “Jade Visions” are there, as are other Evans classics, including “My Man’s Gone Now” and “My Foolish Heart”.

There’s the occasional oddity, like John Lewis’s arrangement of his classic “Django” for a group including Evans, the guitarist Jim Hall and a string quartet. There’s a version of Dizzy Gillespie’s “BeBop” from The Arrival of Victor Feldman in which Feldman, LaFaro and the drummer Stan Levey flail away at a tempo of 96 bars per minute (that’s bars, not beats), making it to the end without having achieved anything beyond a demonstration of youthful ambition and athleticism (and one that the session’s A&R man, Lester Koenig of Contemporary Records, should have quietly binned).

Out of everything I’ve ever heard of LaFaro’s work, my favourite piece is the Evans trio’s Village Vanguard recording of “Milestones”. Miles Davis’s modal tune received a flawless and historic interpretation when the composer recorded it in 1958 with a sextet (the Kind of Blue band with Red Garland on piano and Philly Joe Jones on drums), but Evans, LaFaro and Motian re-examined, dissected, anatomised and reassembled it in a completely different way.

Curiously, it’s not included in the new set. So here it is. One masterpiece fashioned from another. LaFaro in full flow. Animating and driving the conversation. Rhythmically, melodically, harmonically and conceptually astonishing. Each note changing the one before it. And, in some weird and inexplicable way, only enhanced by the random guffaw from an audience member with which it concludes.

* The Alchemy of Scott LaFaro: Young Meteor of Bass is released on September 20 by Cherry Red. The biography, Jade Visions: The Life and Music of Scott LaFaro by Helene LaFaro-Fernández, was published by University of North Texas Press in 2009 and is the source of the photograph above, taken by the Pat Moran trio’s drummer, Gene Gammage.

Aug 26

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The timekeeper of Damascus

Intrigued by the title of Pat Thomas’s new album of solo piano music, The Solar Model of Ibn al-Shatir, I did a bit of online research into its source of inspiration. Born in Damascus in 1304, Ibn al-Shatir studied astronomy in Cairo and Alexandra before returning home to become the official timekeeper of the city’s main Umayyad Mosque. His extensive research into the relative movements of the sun, moon and planets enabled him to publish findings that represented an advance on the discoveries made in Ancient Greece and Egypt by Aristotle and Ptolemy, furthering a science whose subsequent luminaries included Copernicus and Newton. He died in 1375.

It’s hard to grasp now the eminence of such a figure in a world before clocks, a world of astrolabes and equants and epicycles. Al-Shatir designed a sundial for one of the minarets of his mosque — an engraved slab of marble 2m tall and 1m wide — and was responsible for determining the hours of the five daily prayers and the dates of the beginning and end of Ramadan. If you look online, you’ll find diagrams and calligraphy of great beauty.

He would probably have had interesting conversations on heliocentric matters with Sun Ra, another source of inspiration for Thomas, who was born in the UK in 1960 to music-loving parents from Antigua and is based in Oxford, from where he has worked with countless distinguished improvisers, notably the vibes-player Orphy Robinson in their shape-shifting group Black Top. Although Thomas decided he wanted to play piano as a small child after seeing Liberace on TV, and then adopted Oscar Peterson as an early model, today he belongs in a loose tradition of jazz pianists that includes Ellington, Monk, Herbie Nichols, Elmo Hope, Hasaan Ibn Ali, Dick Twardzik, Cecil Taylor, Andrew Hill, Muhal Richard Abrams and two Alexanders, von Schlippenbach and Hawkins.

The titles of the individual pieces also throw up some interesting information. “The Oud of Ziryab” refers to the 9th century Arab musician, born in Baghdad, who added a fifth pair of strings to the oud and spent most of his life in Al-Andalus, running an influential music school in Cordoba. “For George Saliba” salutes a contemporary academic, a professor at Columbia University and an expert on Arabic astronomy. “For Ibn al-Nafis” refers to a 13th century native of Damascus, an expert in law, literature theology and human anatomy who was the first to identify the way the blood circulates from the heart. “For Mansa Musa” is a dedication to a 14th century ruler of the Malian Empire, a man of enormous riches who famously went on an improbably lavish hajj in 1324-25, during which Musa allegedly built a mosque every Friday, wherever he stopped along his 2,700-mile route to Mecca.

That’ll do for the history lesson, although it might be enough to suggest how little those of us educated in the West actually know about the history and achievements of the Islamic world. What about the music? There’s nothing programmatic about the compositions and improvisations, in the sense that you could listen to them and remain unaware of any of the above associations. But I find it extremely stimulating, not least for the way that Thomas makes the piano sound very different: it sounds like wood and steel, and like something being struck. Not exactly “eighty-eight tuned drums” — a phrase generally attributed to Val Wilmer, although she’s not sure she coined it — but still very distinctive.

Thomas’s playing is marked by its clarity and control, even in the most intense moments. It’s rhythmically charged without being oppressive, and the counter-movement of his hands is often very compelling — sometimes reminding me, unlikely as it may seem, of Lennie Tristano in the mode of his “Descent into the Maelstrom”, a startling 1953 solo improvisation prefiguring Cecil Taylor’s flight from convention.

Thomas’s album is a follow-up to The Elephant Clock of Al Jazari, recorded at Café Oto in 2015 and released last year, inspired by a water clock devised in what is now Northern Iraq in the early 13th century by another visionary of the Islamic world. I don’t know whether Thomas intended these new pieces, recorded at the Fish Factory studio in North London on a single day in March of this year, to suggest the work of measuring movement of time in the world before the 17th century invention of the pendulum clock, but they certainly suggest something, though, even though it’s hard to pin down.

But however much or however little the listener cares to delve into the background of Thomas’s pieces, his high-tension creativity, his balance of contrast and continuity, and on this occasion his ability to coax an unusual timbre from the instrument make the album a very absorbing experience.

* Pat Thomas’s The Solar Model of Ibn al-Shatir is out now on the Otoroku label: https://patthomaspiano.bandcamp.com The photograph, taken during the session at the Fish Factory, is from the album cover and was taken by Abby Thomas.

Aug 12

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‘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

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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

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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.

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