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Aug 31

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John Tilbury, home and away

It isn’t often that I get to write about the noise of dust — which, in a form amplified by the Austrian soundartist Klaus Filip, turns out to be a sort of gentle crackling, used to accompany John Tilbury’s piano on a piece included in an elegant new boxed set called At Home. This beautifully designed little coffret features a mixture of recordings made at Tilbury’s house in Deal on the Kent coast and archive pieces dating back to 1970, when the pianist was already well established as a gifted interpreter of the compositions of Morton Feldman and John Cage and a collaborator with such adventurous spirits as Cornelius Cardew and other members of the improvising group AMM.

In the summer of 2022, Tilbury was to have taken part in the final appearance of AMM, held at Cafe Oto as part of the celebrations of the percussionist Eddie Prévost’s 80th birthday. Instead, health considerations led him to announce his retirement from public performance, meaning that his participation in the event was restricted, as I wrote here, to samples of his playing triggered by the guitarist Keith Rowe. That decision prompted Simon Reynell of the Another Timbre label to ask Tilbury if he would be prepared to collaborate on what became the contents of the box, selecting archive pieces and recording new ones. Over the course of 24 pieces and about 300 minutes, it provides a fine summary of what this master of keyboard minimalism has been up to when communing with his piano over the last six decades, with occasional assistance from partners.

Most of the music here is performed solo, but collaborators include the pianists Tania Chen, Sebastian Lexer, and (on Feldman’s Piece for Four Pianos), Philip Thomas, Mark Knoop and Catherine Laws. There are also the electronics of Rowe, on an improvisation recorded in a Leeds church in 2004, and Filip, on the piece from 2019 called “Dust and piano”.

The shortest standalone piece is Erika Fox’s “J.T. Bagatelle”, which fills its 1 minute and 55 seconds with elegant and unhurried figurations, composed earlier this year as a present for Tilbury’s 90th birthday and also commemorating their first encounter on their first day at the Royal College of Music in 1952. The longest, at 41:39, is “Sycamore”, a 2023 piece by John Lely, a former student of Tilbury, in which intervals — mostly minor seconds, it seems to me — are struck and allowed to resonate, sometimes overlapping; it’s like sitting by a pond and tossing in small pebbles two at a time, watching the effect of the ripples as they meet, merge and vanish — deadpan, but mesmerising.

The box’s first disc opens in the 14th century, with a concert recording of four pieces by Guillaume de Machaut arranged for the pianos of Tilbury and Chen by György Kurtág. Also represented are Feldman, Cardew, Howard Skempton, Christian Wolff, Christopher Hobbs, Michael Parons, Catherine Kontz and others. Several pieces are for the clavichord, which Tilbury acquired in 2015 and whose sound gives the music a slightly rickety ancient-to-the-future appeal.

There are also a couple of pieces in which Tilbury intones texts by Samuel Beckett. “What Is the Word”, Beckett’s final poem, written in 1988, was recorded to very dramatic effect with the organ in the chapel of King’s College, Cambridge, during a concert in 2015. The fathomless pessimism of the second, “Pour rien”, is very affectingly delivered agsinst a plain setting for clavichord by Mark R. Taylor. There is also “For Samuel Beckett”, a 28-minute improvisation for the pianos of Tilbury and Lexer, recorded during a London Musicians Co-op festival in 2005.

At the moment my favourite pieces from the set are Cardew’s “Volo Solo”, written in 1965, recorded around five years later in unknown circumstances, full of abrupt angles and quick contrasts, bristling with the excitement of the new, and Mark R. Taylor’s “Five Nocturnes” (2014-16), which are at the opposite end of the emotional scale in their deliberate but never heavy-handed lyricism. In all these we hear the wonderful touch and timing of a man who, amid what he calls “the new dark ages”, has described himself as “a small island of archaic conservation”. This is much more than that.

* John Tilbury’s At Home: Domestic and Archive Recordings is on the Anothet Timbre label: http://www.anothertimbre.com

Aug 26

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Dolly Parton 1946-2026

In the heat of Sunday afternoon I happened to find myself at a country music festival by the Thames, listening to Definitely Dolly — a Dolly Parton impersonator and her four-piece band. When I told an American neighbour where I was going, she predicted that there would be “heartbreak — and trucks.” She was wrong about that. Instead there were hats and boots. And beer. And a lot of people having a good time listening to decent renderings of immortal songs like “I Will Always Love You”, “Jolene” and “Coat of Many Colors”, while laughing at stage patter based on Parton’s much loved jokes about her hair, her body and her clothes, delivered in a passable imitation of that bright East Tennessee drawl.

Definitely Dolly lost me when she inserted “We Are the Champions” into the repertoire, but she won me back near the end when she shattered the fourth wall by suddenly announcing, in a broad Scouse accent, that she was actually Dani Graham from Liverpool, before reverting to a Dollyness which had led her, during the course of an hour-long show, through at least four costume changes.

I didn’t think much of country music until Bob Rafelson’s Five Easy Pieces came out in 1970, with its brilliant use of Tammy Wynette’s records in the soundtrack. Then I went to Nashville, and it all made complete sense. It’s still not something I listen to often, but I wouldn’t want to be without Kathy Mattea’s “Eighteen Wheels and a Dozen Roses”, Martina McBride’s “Independence Day”, Charlie Rich’s “A Woman Left Lonely” or Billie Jo Spears’ “’57 Chevrolet”, or everything by the Stanley Brothers.

Or those songs of Dolly’s, of course. The obituaries are saying what an extraordinary person she was, inspired by her tough background to live her life with the sort of generosity that is being officially discouraged in her native USA. “I love the poorly educated,” said Trump. “Give them books,” said Dolly, the child of a father who never learnt to read, and then she did something about it. I hope Dani Graham and others like her keep singing her songs for many years to come.

Aug 16

Tunes of peace

Earlier today I closed the last page of Regime Change, Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan’s epic dissection of the first 15 months of Donald Trump’s second term at president of the United States. It’s a close-quarters observation of megalomania operating in real time, reaching its climax as the US/Israeli attack on Iran founders in the Strait of Hormuz, a hubristic miscalculation which one profoundly hopes will eventually define Trump’s reputation in the eyes of history. One can only wonder at the identity of the source who gave the two New York Times reporters such extraordinary material.

Now I need something to listen to, and here at hand is Peace Anthems, a new album of 10 short pieces by artists associated with Red Hook Records, the label founded five years ago by the producer Sun Chung, whose first release was Hanamichi, by the late pianist Masabumi Kikuchi. The new release, timed to coincide with the anniversary, is specially commissioned by Chung from the artists, who were invited to contribute pieces inspired by the theme of peace.

The trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith and the pianist Amina Claudine Myers, whose album Central Park made many best-of-the-year lists in 2024, provide two sketches, “Sonic Requiem X” and “Reflections on Palestine”. Smith also appears on “Three Years Later” with the drummer Andrew Cyrille and the modular synthesiser player Qasim Naqvi, whose solo piece, “Al Badawi”, opens the album. Moor Mother’s invocations and BlankFor.ms’ electronics combine on “Imaginary Lines”. The singer Martha Deribe and the pianist Simone Maggio are heard on “War Is Over”. The guitarist Taylor Deupree, the trombonist Kalia Vandever and the bassist Thomas Morgan contribute Deupree’s composition “Wither Light and Airy”. Kit Downes gets two chances to demonstrate his skill with a pipe organ on “Into the Woods — Three Weary Calls” and “Closing Meditation for OM”, the second of which concludes the sequence.

The mood is restrained and reflective, as if the performers agreed that the message would be allowed to find its way gently into the listeners’ ears. These are little tone poems whose delicacy is their strength. And nowhere is that more apparent than on a piece called “The River of Imjin” by the Korean saxophonist and composer Sungjae Son (photographed above), whose previous release, Near East Quartet, appeared in 2016, at a time when Sun Chung was an in-house producer for the ECM label.

“The River of Imjin”, bearing a name made famous by a battle between Chinese and UN (predominantly British) forces during the Korean War in 1951, finds Son overdubbing his tenor, bass clarinet and pump organ on two choruses of something that sounds like an old Methodist hymn tune. If you have fond memories of Thelonious Monk’s “Abide With Me”, John Surman’s “Doxology” or Don Cherry’s “Desireless”, then this fits right alongside them. After 414 pages describing Trump’s attempt to drag the world into his own darkness, sometimes two minutes and 15 seconds of music is all it takes to switch the light back on.

* Peace Anthems is out now on Red Hook Records. All proceeds will go to the International Red Cross: https://redhookrecords.bandcamp.com/album/peace-anthems

Jul 12

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Henry Lowther at 85

It seemed entirely typical of the trumpeter Henry Lowther that, during last night’s concert in celebration of his 85th birthday, he should wait to deliver his first solo until the third piece of the evening. As ever, his improvisation was beautifully conceived and perfectly flighted, with that perfect tone. But Henry is a man whose modesty is as deeply rooted as his talent, despite a career that has made him one of the most remarkable figures in contemporary British music.

Born in Leicester, Henry learned to play the cornet with a Salvation Army band. He came to London to study the violin at the Royal Academy of Music but gave up those studies in favour of a life in jazz and related fields. I wrote a bit about his remarkable CV five years ago, when he turned 80 and played the Vortex with his quintet, Still Waters, but here at the American International Church in Tottenham Court Road there was a chance to hear his compositions for large ensemble interpreted by the London Jazz Composers Orchestra, of which he has been a member for 30 years.

The 19-piece band — five trumpets, four trombones, five reeds, four rhythm — was last night conducted by Scott Stroman, the orchestra’s co-founder back in 1991 with Noel Langley, who was sitting next to Henry in the trumpet section. Other distiguished members and soloists included the saxophonists Pete Hurt and Tori Freestone, the bassist Callum Gourlay, the pianist Liam Noble, the drummer Paul Clarvis and the guitarist Nick Costley-White. The lead altoist, Matt Sulzmann, is the son of another founder member, the great Stan Sulzmann.

Having played in aggregations led by John Dankworth, Kurt Edelhagen, Mike Westbrook, Graham Collier, Mike Gibbs, Kenny Wheeler, Gil Evans, George Russell, Stan Tracey and others, Henry knows what makes a big-band arrangement work. It’s a field in which opportunities today are limited, to say the least, so this was a wonderful opportunity to hear compositions such as “Primetime”, “Shropshire Glad” and “Can’t Believe, Won’t Believe” in their fullest form. His familiarity with so many kinds of music, from free improvisation to the wonderful, unclassifiable albums of Talk Talk, isn’t in evidence in these compositions, which represent what we used to call modern jazz operating at an extremely high level. There are a few brassy climaxes, but also woodwind passages of subtle grace along with some clever combinations, like a pair of muted trumpets and a pair of flugelhorns, or bass and bass clarinet. And there is always the spirit of Gil Evans, of whose London Orchestra he was a member, aerating the voicings.

His pieces tend to run between eight and 10 minutes, which allows space for introductions, variations, backgrounds, recapitulations and codas, with soloists carefully encouraged and deployed. At one point during a suite whose movements are titled “Jadran”, “Emona” and “Golovec”, The tenors of Hurt and Freestone engaged in a lengthy and particularly fruitful dialogue. But there was always something interesting going on and, on an unusually joyful occasion, the absence of amplification combined with the modern church’s friendly acoustic to enable us to hear it all.

* All the compositions I’ve mentioned, and some others, are contained in Primetime, a new vinyl double-album with basically the same personnel, released to coincide with Henry’s birthday. Recorded in 2022 at Morley College Studio, it’s on the Analogue October Records label, mastered and pressed to audiophile standards in an edition of 300 copies: https://analogueoctober.com/product/ljo-henry-lowther-primetime/. Henry’s 1970 debut album, Child Song, is due to reappear later this year as part of a Universal Music Group programme of vinyl reissues of British jazz albums on the Deram and Argo labels.

Mar 2

Alice’s adventures on the astral plane

As one of those who didn’t pay enough attention to Alice Coltrane during the days when she was making what is now acclaimed as a series of classic albums, I welcome Andy Beta’s Cosmic Music. The first full-length biography of the pianist, harpist and composer, subtitled “The Life, Art and Transcendence of Alice Coltrane”, will no doubt help to ensure that she is remembered and properly valued in all her dimensions.

Born Alice McLeod in Detroit in 1937, she studied classical piano and orchestral percussion before becoming a member of the vibraphonist Terry Gibbs’s combo. In Paris in 1960, where she arrived with her first husband, the singer Kenny Hagood, she heard John Coltrane playing with Miles Davis, befriended Bud Powell, and was filmed for French TV at the Blue Note club in a group with the tenorist Lucky Thompson and the drummer Kenny Clarke. Watching the clips from that show, in which she plays a gorgeous “Lover Man” and a hectic “Strike Up the Band”, you can hear her using gospel figures alongside bebop runs but also injecting the blend with an unusual kind of fluidity, a quality that she took into her second husband’s band in 1965 and thence into her own recordings, particularly in her work on organ and concert harp.

Andy Beta relies heavily on Shankari Adams’s Portrait of Devotion and Franya Berkman’s Monument Eternal,.both written after Alice Coltrane’s death in 2007, in which the authors which analyse the spiritual life of the woman who became known as Swamini Turiyasangitananda. But he also has material of his own gleaned from conversations with such musical associates and friends as Terry Gibbs, the saxophonist Bennie Maupin, the pianist Kirk Lightsey, the trombonist George Bohanon, the bassist Vishnu Wood and Alice’s nephew, the record producer, DJ and rapper Steven Ellison. better known as Flying Lotus, as well as with acolytes from her later years as a spiritual leader.

To get the most from the book, readers may need to come to terms with their feelings about its subject’s religious beliefs. The author clearly buys into the world of swamis and ashrams. He has no problem with reporting the vision of Jesus Christ that appeared to her in the Nile Valley, the occasional bit of astral travelling, a visit from the long-dead Igor Stravinsky, or instructions regularly received from above: “At some point in her meditations for that year, Turiya Coltrane as told directly by the Supreme Lord that she would move to California and establish a Vedantic Center.” Without raising an eyebrow, Beta tells us how, towards the end of her life, her touch could heal those suffering from “an array of maladies: back pain, leg injuries, torn knee cartilage, infertility, multiple sclerosis, coccidoidal meningitis, abnormal growths, injured wrists, scoliosis, and class III ovarian cancer.”

You can pour scorn on this, or you can accept it on its own terms. I choose to accept it as part of the story of an exceptional woman who used the years of her widowhood to give shelter and comfort to others (including Nina Simone), and whose music resonates more widely and profoundly as the years pass. Whatever their spiritual source, the volcanic duet with Rashied Ali’s drums on “The Battle of Armageddon” (from Universal Consciousness, Impulse, 1971) or the rapturous sweep of her setting for strings of “Galaxy in Satchidananda” (World Galaxy, Impulse, 1972) are unlikely ever to lose their power. And the posthumously released vocal music heard on The Ecstatic Music of Alice Coltrane (Luaka Bop, 2017) and Kirtan: Turiya Sings (Impulse, 2021) possesses a beauty of its own.

Cosmic Music is a life story, not a musicological analysis. As such, and despite Beta’s fondness for such verbs as “ideate” and “concertize”, it does its job well. Talking about Infinity, the John Coltrane album released five years after the saxophonist’s death, he also tackles the thorny issue of Alice’s decision to overdub a string section, harp and other instruments on to her late husband’s original tracks. “It is the lone album,” he writes, “to offer a tantalising glimpse of what a truly equal John and Alice Coltrane album might have sounded like.”

Again, there will be those who dismiss such a claim. But, all these years later, listening again to the music Alice recorded under her own name, and particularly the pieces featuring strings, can help us to understand why her husband welcomed her into his band: her music contains elements of non-western ritual, just as his came to do in his last couple of years. This displeased many of those who admired the technical rigour of the music made in the period between Giant Steps and A Love Supreme but who could not stomach the apparent leap into the unknown that began with Ascension and was truncated by his death. Inviting other musicians to share the stage on a permanent, temporary or ad hoc basis, as he did in those last years, was a symbol of his desire to expand his universe. For him, the music had become something greater than itself. For Alice, too. Her story is certainly worth reading.

* Andy Beta’s Cosmic Music is published by White Rabbit Books on March 19. The photograph of Alice Coltrane in India is from The Ecstatic Music of Alice Coltrane and was taken by Radha Botofasina.

Dec 17

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2025: The best bits

The brutish reality of Donald Trump’s second term as president of the United States was beginning to emerge when Bruce Springsteen arrived for the first date of his 2025 European tour in Manchester on May 14. I wasn’t there, which meant I didn’t hear him perform, as his final encore, Bob Dylan’s “Chimes of Freedom”, a song that could be seen as the last, magnificent expression of its creator’s 1963-64 incarnation as a singer of protest ballads. The clip above shows that Springsteen, seeking to take a stand at another moment in history, gave it everything he had. In October, Al Stewart made a similarly fine choice when, during his farewell tour, he closed his London Palladium show with Dylan’s “Love Minus Zero/No Limit”, one of the compositions that had shaped his own career as a songwriter. With proper humility, but with their own creative spirit still demonstrably alive and alert, Springsteen and Stewart were reminding us of the enduring significance of the greatest artist of our time, whose own emergence was explored in the finest archival release of the year.

NEW ALBUMS

1 Ambrose Akinmusire: Honey From a Winter Stone (Nonesuch)

2 Mavis Staples: Sad and Beautiful World (Anti-)

3 Arve Henriksen / Trygve Seim / Anders Jormin / Markku Ouaskari: Arcanum (ECM)

4 Masabumi Kikuchi: Hanamichi / The Final Studio Recording Vol II (Red Hook)

5 The Necks: Disquiet (Northern Spy)

6 Patricia Brennan: Of the Near and Far (Pyroclastic)

7 Amina Claudine Myers: Solace of the Mind (Red Hook)

8 The Waterboys: Life, Death and Dennis Hopper (Sun)

9 Peter Brötzmann: The Quartet (Okoroku)

10 Chris Ingham Quintet: Walter / Donald (Downhome)

11 Vilhelm Bromander Unfolding Orchestra: Jorden Vi Ärvde (Thanatosis)

12 Nels Cline: Consentrik Quartet (Blue Note)

13 Bryan Ferry & Amelia Barratt: Loose Talk (Dene Jesmond)

14 Lucy Railton: Blue Veil (Ideologic Organ)

15 Charles Lloyd: Figures in Blue (Blue Note)

REISSUE / ARCHIVE

1 Bob Dylan: Through the Open Window: The Bootleg Series Vol 18 1956-1963 (Columbia Legacy)

2 Charlie Parker: Bird in Kansas City (Verve)

3 Dionne Warwick: Make It Easy on Yourself — The Scepter Recordings 1962-1971 (SoulMusic)

4 Mike Westbrook Orchestra: The Cortège / Live at the BBC 1980 (Cadillac)

5 Pharoah Sanders: Izipho Zam (Strata East)

6 Tomasz Stanko Quartet: September Night (ECM)

7 Larry Stabbins, Keith Tippett, Louis Moholo-Moholo: Live in Foggia (Ogun)

8 A New Awakening: Adventures in British Jazz 1966-1971 (Strawberry)

9 Emahoy Tsege Mariam Gebru: Church of Kidane Mehret (Mississippi)

10 Irma Thomas: Wish Someone Would Care (Kent)

LIVE PERFORMANCE

1 The Weather Station (Islington Town Hall, March)

2 Tyshawn Sorey Trio (Cafe Oto, February)

3 Paul Brady (Bush Hall, April)

4 The Necks (Cafe Oto, May)

5 Maria Schneider / Oslo Jazz Ensemble (Barbican, March)

6 Tom Skinner (Queen Elizabeth Hall, November)

7 Patti Smith Plays Horses (London Palladium, October)

8 Schlippenbach Trio (Cafe Oto, Jan)

9 Bang on a Can All Stars: Terry Riley 80th birthday tribute (Barbican, May)

10 Wadada Leo Smith / Vijay Iyer (Wigmore Hall, October)

11 Olie Brice Quartet (Vortex, July)

12 Adrian Dunbar / Guildhall Sessions Orchestra: The Waste Land (Queen Elizabeth Hall, November)

13 Al Stewart (London Palladium, October)

14 Sebastian Rochford’s Finding Ways (Jazz in the Round, Cockpit Theatre, November)

15 Louis Moholo-Moholo Memorial (100 Club, August)

MUSIC BOOKS

1 Billy Hart w/Ethan Iverson: Oceans of Time (Cymbal Press)

2 Tom Piazza: Living in the Present with John Prine (Omnibus)

3 Jonathan Gould: Burning Down the House (Mariner Books)

4. Neil Storey (ed.): The Island Book of Records Vol 2, 1969-70 (Manchester University Press)

5 Sonny Simmons w/Marc Chaloin: Before You Die Later (Blank Forms)

FICTION

1 Vincenzo Latronico: Perfection (Fitzcarraldo)

2 Sam Sussman: Boy from the North Country (Grove Press)

3 Andrew Miller: The Land in Winter (Sceptre)

NON-FICTION

Paul Gorman: Granny Takes a Trip (White Rabbit)

FILMS

1 Nickel Boys (dir. RaMell Ross)

2 From Hilde, With Love (dir. Andreas Dresen)

3 Sinners (dir. Ryan Coogler)

4 The Ballad of Wallis Island (dir. James Griffiths)

5 A Complete Unknown (dir. James Mangold) 

DANCE

Quadrophenia: A Mod Ballet (Sadler’s Wells, July)

EXHIBITIONS

1 Noah Davis (Barbican, May)

2 Jean-François Millet (National Gallery, October)

3 Lee Miller (Tate Britain, December)

Oct 12

2 Comments

Silence and slow time

“Silence and slow time…” John Keats’s beautiful phrase finds an echo in some of the music I love, the kind that emerges from a stillness to which it eventually returns, taking its time and not raising its voice to attract attention. Here are five brand-new examples of music with healing qualities, all highly recommended.

1 The Necks: Disquiet (Northern Spy)

Three hours of glorious studio-recorded collective interplay on three CDs. “Rapid Eye Movement” is a 57-minute exploration of densities, starting with Chris Abrahams’ Rhodes piano, punctuated by Lloyd Swanton’s abrupt double bass figures. It changes slowly, like the weather, eventually reaching a passage of single-note cascades from the acoustic piano over Tony Buck’s rumbling tom-toms, leading to an exquisitely tapered ending. “Ghost Net” is 74 minutes of lurching, clattering, gradually darkening polyrhythmic layering, with each musician apparently playing in 12/8, but in three different 12/8s. Using what sounds like a Farfisa organ, it’s as though they’ve suddenly found the sweet spot between Thelonious Monk and ? and the Mysterians. The other two tracks divide an hour between them. “Causeway” opens with echoing guitar and celestial organ and contains a completely intoxicating E minor/B minor/A minor vamp — the Necks’ own three-chord trick — with piano above guitar and organ before a sudden gearchange, involving the addition of thrashing drums, turns a reverie into something soaringly urgent. “Warm Running Sunlight” is an essay in textures and the contemplative space between them: string bass going from plucked to bowed and back, splashing cymbals, Rhodes heavy on the reverb. A lot to take in, but among their very best, I’d say.

2 Tom Skinner: Kaleidoscopic Visions (Brownswood)

The drummer and composer whose Voices of Bishara project I liked so much, in both its studio and live incarnations, takes a slightly different tack here. The music is built around his regular bandmates — the saxophonists Chelsea Carmichael and Robert Stillman, the bassist Tom Herbert and the cellist Kareen Dayes — but with a handful of guests: Meshell Ndegeocello layering her voices on one track, Portishead’s Adrian Utley adding his guitar to a couple more, the singer Contour (Khari Lucas) from South Carolina gently intoning the poetic lyric of “Logue”, and Yaffra (London-born, Berlin-residing Jonathan Geyevu) reciting the poem “See How They Run” over his own piano and Skinner’s overdubbed keyboards, vibes, bass, guitar and percussion. Music without boundaries, full of human feelings, ancient to the future.

3 Jan Bang / Arve Henriksen: After the Wildfire (Punkt Editions)

The two Norwegians devise eight pieces featuring Henriksen’s distinctive trumpet with Bang’s samples, Eivind Aarset’s guitar, Ingar Zach’s percussion, three singers, the Fames Institute Orchestra, a cellist, two Balkan instruments — the tapan (a double-headed drum) and the kaval (an end-blown flute) — and the zurla, a Turkish double-reed instrument. Ravishing from beginning to end, starting with “Seeing (Eyes Closed)”, which made me think that Miles Davis and Gil Evans had been reincarnated as graduates of the contemporary Norwegian jazz scene, to “Abandoned Cathedral II”, a continuation of Henriksen’s classic 2013 album, Places of Worship.

4 Rolf Lislevand: Libro Primo (ECM New Series)

Another Norwegian, this time an exponent of the archlute and the chitarrone, examining the works written for the lute and its variants by the 16th and 17th century composers Johann Hieronymus Kapsberger, Giovanni Paolo Foscarini, Bernardo Gianoncelli and Diego Ortiz. Lislevand’s sleeve essay explains the revolution in which these composers were involved, and he brings them into the present day with free, fluid interpretations that make this music ageless. His own riveting “Passacaglia al Modo Mio” is both a salute and a declaration of possibilities. Anyone with a fondness for Davy Graham or Sandy Bull will enjoy this enormously.

5 Charles Lloyd: Figures in Blue (Blue Note)

For the latest in his series of drummerless chamber trios, the great saxophonist is joined by an old colleague, the pianist Jason Moran, and a newer one, the guitarist Marvin Sewell. This two-CD set begins with what is surely the first version of “Abide with Me” to appear on a jazz album since Monk’s Music in 1957 and ends with a exquisite rumination on the standard “My One and Only Love”. In between Lloyd invokes the spirits of Duke Ellington, Billie Holiday, Langston Hughes and Zakir Hussain. On two tracks he also makes fine use of Sewell’s command of bottleneck techniques, leading one to wish that more modern jazz musicians would explore the blues in the way Gil Evans did with “Spoonful” and Julius Hemphill with “The Hard Blues”.

Sep 9

132 Comments

Every beat of my heart

This is the bass-drum head from the kit I used as a member of an R&B band in 1964-65. Last week, two days after I’d taken it to the recycling centre as part of a general clearout of superfluous possessions, a mid-evening collapse on a platform at St Pancras station saw me in an ambulance, where a pair of paramedics gave me an ECG that showed I was suffering from cardiac arrhythmia.

What kind of a drummer, even an ex-drummer, suffers from arrhythmia? To injury was added insult.

I was admitted, via A&E, to St Thomas’s Hospital, directly across the river from the Houses of Parliament. For the first four days I was in a ward on the seventh floor, in a bed by a window giving me a view across the Thames that would cost you £5,000 a night were it a hotel room. At some time during those first four days under the care of the National Health Service the monitor showed that my heart stopped for four seconds — I thought only Aretha Franklin could do that to me — and then restarted itself.

Long story short, there was another episode that led to a rush into the Intensive Care Unit, and from there a day later to an operating theatre where a cardiac pacemaker was installed. My problem had been caused by bradychardia: the unnatural slowing of the heartbeat. The pacemaker will ensure that it won’t fall below 70 beats per minute. In a couple of months, a second procedure will lower the safe limit to 60bpm.

That sounds like a nice, steady, medium-pace lope, which probably suits me now. And thinking about it set me to imagining the possibility that one day, when you have a pacemaker fitted, it might come with a variety of settings, based on the characteristic approaches to tempo of great drummers. Naturally, I thought of jazz drummers.

Which button would I want to press? Elvin Jones would be too turbulent, Art Blakey too disruptive, Tony Williams too hyperactive, Tyshawn Sorey too unpredictable. Sunny Murray? Not sure I’d want my heart to run on free rhythm. If I were younger, I’d opt for Billy Higgins, not least because, along with that amazing sense of lift, I’d probably get, as an extra, the lovely smile he always wore. But I’m not young. So the graceful swing of either Kenny Clarke or Jimmy Cobb would do for me.

Anyway, the point of this profoundly self-indulgent story is that between one Sunday and the next I spent part of the time wondering what our elected representatives were up to in the big building on the other side of the river and the rest of it marvelling at the astonishing amount of kindness and consideration shown towards me by the skilled, wise and compassionate NHS staff whose job was to save the life of someone hitherto completely unknown to any of them.

I didn’t get the name of the young female maternity nurse who was getting off the same train and immediately came to my aid, or those of two more fellow passengers, a pair of young women doctors, who stayed with me until the ambulance arrived, or those of the two paramedics who took over, made the initial diagnosis, and decided that St Thomas’s would be the best place for me, or that of the doctor who triaged me in A&E and sent me up to the seventh floor.

But thereafter I did start writing down the first names of as many of those who helped me as I could catch: nurses, doctors, cleaners, cardiologists, electrocardiologists, radiographers and others. Those names, unsorted by function or rank but in more or less chronological order, give a sort of a portrait of the health service that is a riposte to those both working hard to destroy it and to divide us by undermining the stability of our post-colonial, multicultural society. Here they are:

Abdul, Melody, Beth, Eva, Cielo, Jonathan, Alma, Lily, Simran, Isaac, Angelo, Favour, Aba, Aboudin, Lina, Mehari, Precious, Nabila, Chris, Parth, Tracey, Izabela, Konstantinos, Serena, Gloria, Anoup, Shawza, Rawlston, Diego, two Clares, Richard, Sabeen, Emma, Terry, Elorine, Nikki.

I know the NHS is under strain and imperfect, and I’m aware that it was my good luck to find myself at St Thomas’s. But while I was waiting to be sent home on Sunday, the doctor in charge of intensive care at the hospital walked past on his rounds. I told him that while it had been in most respects the worst week of my life, it had also been among the richest. I’d been given an unexpected opportunity to experience and be grateful for human relationships in public service — comradeship among workers, empathy for strangers — at their best. Something I’ll never forget.

Jul 1

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Under the same sky

In the 55 years since the discreet arrival of the first ECM album, Mal Waldron’s Free At Last, Manfred Eicher’s label has released somewhere north of a thousand albums. Contrary to a cynical early view, they don’t all sound the same. They are, however, distinguished by the presence of set of qualities — musical, aesthetic and philosophical — that appear, in varying proportions, in just about every one of them. You can detect those qualities in four of their recent releases, each of which exemplifies a certain characteristic taken to the very highest level.

1 Vijay Iyer / Wadada Leo Smith: Defiant Life

American jazz from the tradition continues to make its presence central to ECM’s output. Smith’s trumpet and Iyer’s keyboards and electronics weave their way through spellbinding duets subtextually infused with a sense of history. Smith’s “Floating River Requiem” is a dedication to Patrice Lumumba, the Congolese independence leader murdered by colonial forces in 1961, while Iyer’s “Kite” acknowledges Refaat Alareer, a leading Palestinian poet killed along with two siblings and four nephews during an Israel air strike on Gaza in late 2023. Sorrow and outrage are present in this music, but it also serves, in Iyer’s words, as a statement of “faith in human possibility.”

2 Anouar Brahem: After the Last Sky

Modes from all over the world find their way into the ECM matrix. The Tunisian oud player and composer Anouar Brahem first recorded for the label 35 years ago. On his latest album he is in the company of three of the company’s regulars: the cellist Anja Lechner, the pianist Django Bates and the bassist Dave Holland. Taking its title from a book by the late Edward Said, this album, too, is driven by reflections on the suffering, recent and historic, of the people of Gaza, as outlined in Adam Shatz’s fine sleeve essay. Unfolding with patience and elegance, metabolising elements from Arabic maqam, jazz and European classical music, these quartet pieces ache with grief.

3 Alexander Knaifel: Chapter Eight

By cultivating a widespread audience for the work of the Estonian composer Arvo Pärt via its New Series offshoot, ECM helped create the genre known as “holy minimalism”. Alexander Knaifel (1943-2024), born in Tashkent, studied cello with Rostropovich in Moscow in the 1960s before making a reputation writing operas and film music. A kind of an Uzbek version of Anthony Braxton, he also wrote an extended piece for 17 double basses and another for 35 Javanese gongs. But the pieces on this album, performed by an ensemble of three Latvian choirs and the Swiss cellist Patrick Demenga, are settings of verses from the Song of Solomon. Proceeding with great deliberation under the baton of Andres Mustonen, they achieve the required meditative glow to very satisfying effect, fully exploiting the acoustic resonance of the Jesuit church in Lucerne, where they were recorded in 2009.

4 Arve Henriksen / Trygve Seim / Anders Jormin / Markku Ounaskari: Arcanum

The crucial role played by ECM in the emergence of Nordic jazz needs no acknowledgement. Here are four leading players — the trumpeter Henriksen and the saxophonist Seim from Norway*, the bassist Anders Jormin from Sweden, and the Finnish drummer Ouaskari — at the height of their powers, taking memories of Ornette Coleman’s quartet as a starting point from which to develop conversations of great beauty and originality. All four of these albums are outstanding, but this is the one that sounds to me like a future classic.

* Due to a moment of brain-fade, this piece originally claimed that Henriksen and Seim are Finnish. My thanks to those who noticed and gently pointed out the error.

May 16

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Rainbows for Terry Riley

Terry Riley has been living in Japan for the past few years, passing on the teachings of Pandit Pran Nath in Kamakura, the country’s medieval capital, and Kyoto, the city of temples. Ahead of his 90th birthday on June 24, he announced this week that he’ll be scaling back his activities, handing his classes over to an acolyte while restricting himself to private lessons with advanced pupils.

On Thursday night the New York ensemble Bang on a Can All Stars, longtime performers of Riley’s work, arrived at the Barbican to celebrate his birthday by presenting two of his most famous compositions, with the help of several guests. Riley, of course, was 6,000 miles away, but he welcomed the audience warmly with a recorded video message transmitted via large screens.

The evening began with the basic band — keyboard, clarinet/bass clarinet, electric guitar, cello, double bass and drum kit/vibes — performing A Rainbow in Curved Air, such a strong influence when it appeared in 1969 on the likes of Pete Townshend, Brian Eno and others experimenting with early synthesisers, although the original work itself was performed by Riley on organ, electric harpsichord, rocksichord, dumbec and tambourine, via overdubs.

Arranged for the sextet by Gyan Riley, Terry’s son, and slightly stretched from the original 19 minutes to 25, it preserved the sense of genially interlocking patterns, although Riley’s 14-beat measures seemed to have become a distinct 7/4, strongly articulated by the group’s drummer, David Cossin, before he switched to vibes for the later passages. The sudden halts and resumptions were as gently startling as they seemed on the album five and a half decades ago.

In C, first performed in 1964 and recorded in 1968, is the piece that made Riley’s reputation in the world of contemporary classical music. A remarkably versatile composition, open to any number of players and all musical instruments in any combination, its 53 modules — short musical phrases using all 12 tones of the tempered scale except C sharp and E flat — must be played in order but can be repeated according to each performer’s feeling for the piece’s overall collective development. For last night’s 65-minute performance, Bang on a Can were joined by Shabaka on flutes, Valentina Magaletti on marimba, Soumik Datta on sarod, Portishead’s Adrian Utley on guitar, Raven Bush on violin, Gurdain Rayatt on tablas and Jack Wyllie on soprano saxophone. (Pete Townshend was billed to appear but withdrew following a knee operation.)

I found the result entirely true to the original spirit of the composition, preserving the constant momentum and the sense of conversation without the presence of a conductor. The instrumentation produced wonderful fluctuations of density and shifting polyrhythmic layers; there were beautiful isolated moments, like a brief sarod/cello combination and the emergence of a clarinet melody, and the general lightness of tone brought the closing passage close to the texture of baroque music.

It was like lying on your back and watching clouds moving at a variety of altitudes across a busy but unthreatening sky, endlessly mutating and utterly absorbing until it was brought, with an act of intuitive collective decision, to the most graceful close. Happy birthday, Mr Riley.

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