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Sep 11

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Autumn books 2: Chris Charlesworth

Chris Charlesworth has a good memory and loves to tell stories, which makes Just Backdated — subtitled “Melody Maker: Seven Years in the Seventies” — very good value for those with an interest in the rock scene of that era in the UK and the USA, and in the contemporaneous history of the British music press.

He was recruited to the MM in June 1970, shortly after its editor, Jack Hutton, had left and taken many of the younger members of staff with him to start a rival weekly called Sounds. Chris Welch, Alan Lewis and I were among those who rejected his invitation to join them, as did our photographer, Barrie Wentzell. Ray Coleman, a former MM writer, was appointed editor in Jack’s place and set about the job of filling the empty desks and rewarding those who’d stayed put with swift promotions.

Just as Welch, Lewis and I had all come from local papers, so had Ray. He wanted properly trained young journalists, so among his hires were Michael Watts from the Walsall Observer, Roy Hollingworth from the Derby Evening Telegraph, and Charlesworth from the Bradford Telegraph & Argus. We had two things in common: we’d all been in bands, and we’d all written weekly pop columns for our respective local newspapers.

I think their experience was like mine at the Nottingham Evening Post & News: the editors were older men who knew that teenagers were up to something, hadn’t a clue what it was, and so decided that the best people to write about it would be the teenagers on their staff. After that, they tended to leave us to it. So when I showed a sheaf of cuttings to Hutton during my own job interview in 1969, it included pieces on Albert Ayler and the Velvet Underground.

Charlesworth remembers arriving for his first day at our offices on the second floor of 161-166 Fleet Street, the headquarters of IPC Specialist and Professional Press. We were at the far end of a long corridor also housing several other publications: Rugby World, Cage and Aviary Birds, Cycling Weekly and Disc & Music Echo. The last-named, which had been edited by Coleman until his return to the MM, was the home of two female journalists, Penny Valentine and Caroline Boucher, who were great friends and very good company.

On that first day, Charlesworth remembers being told by Laurie Henshaw, the veteran news editor, to call Ginger Baker to ask him about personnel changes with his band, Air Force. He was soon in the swing of things, and in his first full week he interviewed the singer of Free, whose “All Right Now” was heading up the charts.

“I met Paul Rodgers in his poky little flat in a big old redbrick block in Clerkenwell and we chatted in a nearby greasy spoon café,” he writes. “The same issue featured my interview with Don Everly, done in his suite at the Inn on the Park. After I left him, my head spinning at meeting an old hero, I found myself sharing an elevator with Dustin Hoffman.”

That week he also interviewed Cliff Richard on the phone, reported on Jethro Tull adding the keyboards player John Evan, and reviewed gigs by Pete Brown’s Piblokto! and Status Quo. A few days later, he was at the Shepton Mallet festival, listening to Pink Floyd and Frank Zappa and to Led Zeppelin, with whom he was soon spending quite a lot of time. Not as much, however, as he would soon be spending with the Who, once Keith Moon had rung him up to thank him for a kind review of their show at Dunstable Civic Hall.

As we all did, Chris was soon going on the road with these and other bands, and his anecdotes are amusingly illustrative of the rock and roll lifestyle of the time. There’s plenty of drinking, a certain amount of drugging, and plenty of sex — although at the Status Quo gig, in his first week, he turns down their publicist’s offer to bring along “a bird” for him for the night. That PR man was the later-to-be-notorious Max Clifford. As he makes clear, Chris was perfectly capable of finding companionship without assistance.

A quick promotion to news editor was followed in 1973 when Coleman invited him to become the MM‘s man in North America. The paper was selling 200,000 copies a week and could afford such an appointment, although the technology of the day meant that copy had to be typed up and handed to a courier — in a package that also included 10×8 prints of photographs to go with the stories — to be transported by air to London in order to meet the weekly deadline.

Most of the book is taken up by his American adventures, starting with a few months in Los Angeles (where he stayed first in the Chateau Marmont and then in Phil Ochs’s apartment) before he relocated to New York, where he would spend the next three years. From an apartment on the Upper East Side he ventured out to interview Lou Reed, Donald Fagen and Walter Becker, Sly Stone, John Lennon, Paul Simon, David Bowie, John Hammond, Bruce Springsteen, Alice Cooper, the Bay City Rollers and countless others, including testy encounters with Neil Diamond and Rod Stewart, and to attend shows ranging in scale from Madison Square Garden to CBGBs, where he encountered the fledgling Ramones, Talking Heads and Blondie (and went on a date with Debbie Harry).

The front page pictured above, from the MM of August 7, 1976, features a story about Lennon winning his fight to stay in the US. That was Chris’s, with his full report inside of the New York hearing and the subsequent press conference. Just another day’s work from an era when you interviewed stars from the next seat in a plane, or in the back of a stretch limo, or in a hotel room with no PR in attendance. There were lots of post-gig parties or album launches where musicians and journalists mingled.

To his regret, at the beginning of 1977 he was told that his US posting would be coming to an end. A revived NME was winning the circulation war, and budgets were being cut. Soon he would be leaving the MM and eventually returned to London to work at RCA, where his duties included Bowie’s public relations. In 1983 he embarked on three decades as the editorial director of Omnibus Press, where he was responsible for commissioning and editing countless music books, including such best sellers as Dear Boy, Tony Fletcher’s biography of Keith Moon, and Bright Lights Dark Shadows: The Real Story of Abba, by Carl Magnus Palm.

There was never anything pretentious or verbose about Charlesworth’s own writing. His memoir reflects the extraordinary boom of the music business in the rock era, the guilt-free hedonism of the time, and the excesses — sometimes amusing, occasionally grotesque — for which somebody else would always be picking up the tab. That somebody, we assumed, would be the record company. In our naivety, we had yet to understand that the bill for all of it — the flights, the hotels, the drinks, the canapes, probably the drugs, too — would eventually be presented to the musicians.

I’ve never been quite sure what I think of the 1970s. When you remember Watergate and Thatcher, not to mention loon pants and mullets, it seems almost as worthy as the 1930s of Auden’s withering dismissal — “a low dishonest decade”. But there was the music, and with the music came fun and games, exactly as my old colleague describes it.

* Chris Charlesworth’s Just Backdated is published by Spenwood Books. His blog is justbackdated.blogspot.com

Sep 9

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Autumn books 1: Joe Boyd

“Tango comes from the mud,” Brian Eno told an audience at Foyle’s bookshop the other night. He was conducting a public conversation with the author of And the Roots of Rhythm Remain, an 850-page examination of the forms of popular music with which Joe Boyd has engaged in Cuba, Jamaica, Brazil, Argentina, Bulgaria, Senegal, Albania and elsewhere during his six decades as a successful record producer and enlightened facilitator of musical projects.

For many years now it’s been rumoured that Boyd was writing a history of “world music”, a tale perhaps beginning with his presence at the famous meeting at a London pub in 1987 during which that rubric was invented, with the best of intentions and outcomes, as a way of persuading open-minded listeners to pay as much attention to music from other cultures as they did to their own western idioms. The result is much more interesting than a simple history; its eventual subtitle, “A Journey through Global Music”, conveys a much more accurate impression of what Boyd has taken on.

The quote about tango coming from the mud is to be found on page 483, where it’s identified as an Argentine saying. It was clever of Eno to spot it, because it says something larger about pretty much all the music Boyd considers here. How and when it happened, who made it happen, and to whom it happened are all part of his investigations, whether the music under consideration is Tropicália or townships jazz, Django Reinhardt or Béla Bartók.

I’m still working my way through the book, which will take a while even though Boyd writes in the easy, fluent, open-minded, anecdotal style familiar from White Bicycles, the relatively slender book about his adventures in the ’60s underground, published in 2005 to justified acclaim. Vast as his new one might seem, it’s worth reading with full attention, lest you miss some vital socio-cultural connection or valuable information on the roles played by, for example, the Ghanaian drummer Tony Allen, the Sudanese oud-player Abdel Aziz El Mubarak, Rodney Neyra of Havana’s Tropicana nightclub or the ballet impresario Sergei Diaghilev. (I didn’t know, for instance, that, according to Boyd, the names samba, rumba, mambo, tango and cha-cha all have their roots in Ki-Kongo, one of the languages of the Kongo people living in what are now the Republic of Congo, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Angola and Gabon.) Boyd’s enviable skill is to bring the reader an astonishing level of historical detail while wearing his research lightly and enlivening the narrative with exactly the right seasoning of his own views.

After buying the book at the Foyle’s event and getting it signed, I took it home and went straight to the chapter about tango. I like tango very much, although I once spent an evening in a bar in San Telmo, a Buenos Aires quarter then about to make the jump from funky to gentrified, proving to everyone’s satisfaction that I’ll never be able to dance it. I share Boyd’s enthusiasm for the singer Carlos Gardel to such an extent that I once visited the great man’s tomb in the cemetery of Chacarita in Buenos Aires, observing the ritual of leaving flowers at the base of his statue and placing a lit cigarette in the space left by the sculptor between the index and middle fingers of his raised right hand, because that’s how Gardel always sang until his untimely death in an air crash in 1935.

The photo above is one I took in 1994 on a sidewalk in Rosario, Argentina’s third largest city, the birthplace of Che Guevara and Lionel Messi. I was struck by the elegance and dignity of the street singer and his accordionist, who were serenading appreciative shoppers and other passers-by with a selection of songs made famous by Gardel.

Boyd traces the idiom’s origins in the bars and bordellos of Buenos Aires, examining its sources and tracking its destiny. He doesn’t share my fondness for the late composer and bandoneon virtuoso Astor Piazzolla, who became, he believes, “for tango what John Lewis and the MJQ were to jazz, ‘elevating’ it from the dancefloor and giving it concert-hall respectability.” He’s both right (in the comparison) and wrong (in the implicit criticism). Nobody who went, as I did, to see Piazzolla and his astonishing quintet for three out of their five nights in the intimate environment of the Almeida Theatre in London during the summer of 1985 could accuse them of forfeiting the sensual charms of tango in a pursuit of respectability. For a lot of worthwhile music with roots “in the mud”, the need to get people dancing is no longer a priority. But it’s a good and worthwhile argument to have, and I expect there’ll be many more as I work my way through what is shaping up to be not just an exceptionally enjoyable book but perhaps also an important one.

* Joe Boyd’s And the Roots of Rhythm Remain: A Journey Through Global Music is published by Faber & Faber (£30)

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 16

4 Comments

Before the lights go up

I try to make a habit of staying to the very end of a film’s credits, because you never know what you’re going to hear. I learnt that while sitting through Wim Wenders’ Until the End of the World. The film had seemed determined to live up to its title, but the reward was to discover Robbie Robertson’s magnificent “Breakin’ the Rules”, from his Storyville album, with its exquisitely understated Paul Buchanan second vocal and Wardell Quezergue’s barely-there horn arrangement.

Sitting through three and a half hours of Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s About Dry Grasses last week was no ordeal. Ceylan is possibly my favourite living director, and his new one lives up to Climates, Once Upon a Time in Anatolia, Winter Sleep and the rest. And while the credits were rolling, there was a bonus.

It was this. Philip Timofeyev’s “Adagio for Bassoon” is a piece of fake baroque music, written specially for the film. It’s an obvious homage to the popular “Adagio for Strings and Organ in G minor” supposedly written by Tomaso Albinoni in the 18th century but actually based on fragments of a manuscript left by the Venetian composer, turned into a piece in 1958 by his biographer, Remo Giazotto.

So a fake of a fake, then, in a way. But Timofeyev’s stately composition does its job perfectly. At the end of a dialogue-driven film in which the audience has been encouraged to reflect on all sorts of important issues, not least truth and lies, there is no rupture when the lights come on. We emerge into the street still thinking the thoughts that Ceylan implanted there.

* The still from About Dry Grasses shows the young Turkish actress Ece Bagci, whose performance is among the film’s highlights.

Aug 13

14 Comments

‘Whoops! La-di-dah…’

If I had to nominate a favourite tiny moment, lasting no more than a couple of seconds, from any piece of music I know, it might be the one that occurs 1 minute and 30 seconds into “Stay”, by Maurice Williams and the Zodiacs.

The record — the shortest ever to hit No 1 in the US pop charts — is already fading out when Maurice suddenly cries: “Whoops! La-di-dah…” Goodness knows why, but somehow it fits perfectly and it sticks in the mind. Or at least it’s stuck in mine for six and a half decades, and I like the record enough to own it on a 45, an EP and an LP (for which I see I paid 50 cents — in an oldies store in Greenwich Village in the early ’70s, I think).

Maurice’s death has just been announced. He was 86, and he died at his home in Charlotte, North Carolina. I’ve been writing a full obituary for the Guardian this morning; it includes the charming story behind the song, as well as mentioning its various and very successful reincarnations. No doubt the piece will appear online before long.

Meanwhile, I thought those who already know the moment of which I’m so fond might like to be reminded of it, and those who don’t might enjoyed being introduced.

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.

Jul 26

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Another night on E Street

The epiphany came early at Wembley last night, only a couple of songs into an unbroken three-hour set. That monster freight train called “Seeds” howled into the stadium, carrying with it all the dread and desolation that can be packed into the repetition of a single word: “Gone… gone… gone…”

I wrote about “Seeds” the last time Bruce Springsteen played Wembley Stadium, so I won’t repeat myself. But something about it moves me in a way I haven’t been moved by rock and roll since Elvis recorded Chuck Berry’s “Promised Land”, finding all of America in a song you could get on one side of a 45.

Last night I wanted it to go on for ever. But there were other good things. “The E Street Shuffle” turning into a soul symphony that made perfect use of the horn section. The way “Land of Hope and Dreams” did the same for the backing singers, with a gospel coda of “People Get Ready”. Steve Van Zandt strapping on a Stratocaster painted to resemble the flag of Ukraine for “No Surrender”. A beautiful “Racing in the Street”, the patina on its bodywork deepening as the decades pass. The Latino trumpets and cowbell turning “Twist and Shout” back into something of which Bert Berns would be proud. The softly spoken introduction to “Long Walk Home”: “This is a prayer for my country.”

It’s a show now, of course, carefully routined and built with the help of high technology to reach a crowd of 50,000 in a sports stadium. But there are still moments when the place goes dark, the spotlight picks up the lone figure at the front of the stage, a harmonica wails, and those opening words — The screen door slams / Mary’s dress sways / Like a vision she dances across the porch / As the radio plays — bring all the magic back to life once again.

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