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May 28

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‘Won’t last for ever…’

There’s a moment in Love and Mercy, the 2014 Brian Wilson biopic, when Paul Dano, as the young Brian, sits at the piano to play a song he’s just written. When his hands form the opening chords of “God Only Knows”, we’re overwhelmed by a sense of sheer wonder. You can’t watch it and not think that Derek Taylor, the English publicist who went to Los Angeles in 1966 and took on the Beach Boys as his clients, was absolutely right to propagate the idea that the oldest of the three Wilson brothers was a genius. I mean, where did that stuff — those voicings, that progression — come from?

I thought about that, and a lot else, when I read with great sadness earlier this month that, as a result of Brian’s advancing dementia, and only a few weeks after the death of his second wife, Melinda, he had been put into a formal conservatorship. “Won’t last for ever,” the 22-year-old sang with great prescience on a magnificent single in 1964. Sixty years later, a court in LA has ruled that his personal, medical and financial affairs will now be in the control of his family and associates.

In the car that day, I listened to some favourites, from “Surfer Girl” to “Surf’s Up” and beyond. “Please Let Me Wonder”. “Wendy”. “Girls on the Beach”. “Caroline, No”. “When I Grow Up (To Be a Man)”. “Let Him Run Wild”. “The Little Girl I Once Knew”. “She Knows Me Too Well”. “The Warmth of the Sun”. “Kiss Me Baby”. And, of course, “Don’t Worry Baby”, which probably encapsulates more of the essence in a single track than any of them: the sun-kissed harmonies, the cars, the girls, the youthful rapture and the underlying sadness. And the way Brian was starting to make a standard guitar-keys-bass-drums line-up sound like a new kind of orchestra.

And then I watched The Beach Boys, a new 112-minute authorised documentary directed by Frank Russell and Thom Zimny, which tells the group’s story from its creation in the Wilson family garage in Hawthorne, California in 1961 to the comeback in the early 1980s. That’s a sensible limitation, although it means omitting Brian’s triumphant 21st century renaissance with the Pet Sounds concerts and the SMiLE recreation. But the saga is so vast that many of its salient features are necessarily overlooked.

It’s the survivors’ tale, in a way, which means that Mike Love gets another chance to tell his side of the story, although not to an unbearable extent, at least until “Kokomo” is chosen to play over the final credits — and he does thoughtfully identify Brian’s “melancholy” as being a vital ingredient in their music. Archive interviews with Carl and Dennis Wilson are included, and we’re reminded of how their long-hidden talents emerged during the period covered by the film. Al Jardine and David Marks provide interesting insights (Jardine describes “Don’t Worry Baby” as “definitely a turning point for us, and for Brian”), as does Marilyn Rovell, Brian’s first wife.

Interviews with some of the LA studio musicians who played on the great records, including the pianist Don Randi, the bass guitarist Carol Kaye and the drummer Hal Blaine, paint an interesting picture of Brian’s relationship with these highly professional, mostly jazz-trained players. From very early on, he was pursuing an approach very different from most of those who enlisted their help in search of hit records, earning their respect through his seriousness of purpose and originality of thought. There’s a tiny but very telling clip in which he’s explaining to Blaine the rhythmic emphasis he wants on the out-of-tempo introduction to “California Girls”, itself a small miracle of creative imagination. Blaine has heard it all before, but not this.

There have been many Beach Boys-themed films, but this one is still worth watching for its wealth of archive footage, on and off stage. Their difficulties in coming to terms with change could hardly be better illustrated than by a truly teeth-grinding sequence from a 1969 TV show called Kraft Music Hall, in which they attempt to hold the counter-culture at bay by miming to “California Girls” surrounded by bikini-wearing girls, with Love wearing a yacht skipper’s cap and blazer. Some of the scabs are picked at — mostly to do with the behaviour of Murry Wilson, who gave his sons his genes but also a lot of unhappiness, and whose legacy of poor management eventually caused a permanent rupture.

But there’s enough remembered joy here — capped by a silent reunion of the four survivors at Paradise Cove, where the famous early photo of the group with a surfboard was shot — to make it a good way to start the summer, with immeasurable gratitude to Brian for all he gave us.

* The Beach Boys is streaming on Disney+.

May 26

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Passion / Compassion

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

May 20

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The return of Beth Gibbons

Thirty years after Portishead’s debut, 22 years after her last album of original songs, Beth Gibbons’ Lives Outgrown is indeed long awaited. Anyone who fell in love with the lush mysteries of Out of Season in 2002 will have wondered not just whether a follow-up would ever arrive, but if it did, whether it would manage to equal the rare combination of delicacy and strength, of glowing textures and unresolved feelings.

Just as Out of Season was made in partnership with Rustin Man (Paul Webb of Talk Talk), the new album is the product of collaboration. Six of these 10 graceful pieces are Gibbons’ own, but four were co-written with the percussionist Lee Harris, also formerly of Talk Talk, one of the two main contributors to the album, along with the multi-instrumentalist James Ford of Simian Mobile Disco, Gibbons’ co-producer. Harris is also credited with “additional production”, and one imagines that his presence is responsible for the subtle foregrounding of rhythm, starting with the measured pacing of soft mallets on tom toms behind fingerpicked acoustic guitar and cloudy harmonium on the opening “Tell Me Who You Are Today”.

The sound of the album is a step on, but no less beautifully detailed: the vibraphone and the small choir on “Floating on a Moment”, the violin and baritone viola of Raven Bush on “For Sale”, the care lavished on the timbre of an acoustic guitar, the twang of a dulcimer and the sudden eruption of skronk on “Beyond the Sun”. There’s the contrast between, say, the controlled but definitely sawtoothed climate-protest anger of “Rewind” and the pastoral reverie of “Whispering Love”. Strings are used with strategic subtlety. Some songs refuse to end in silence, preferring the real world of distant children’s voices or, at the very end, blackbirds and cockerels.

Gibbons seems to have abandoned completely the pinched, acrid tone that drew comparisons with Billie Holiday and prefigured Amy Winehouse, the sound familiar from Portishead’s “Glory Box”, which she was still employing on Out of Season‘s “Romance”. Instead she now relies on a natural open vocal sound, perfectly suited to the introspection that drives these songs, apparently a decade in the making and seemingly the product of much thinking about change, mortality and responsibility.

Two literary voices from the last century came into my head as I listened to these songs and tried to understand their mixture of deceptive fragility and guarded optimism. The first, that of Samuel Beckett, in the oft-repeated advice from Worstward Ho: “Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.” The second, that of Philip Larkin, the last line of An Arundel Tomb: “What will survive of us is love.” Maybe those are her perspectives, too.

* Beth Gibbons’ Lives Outgrown is out now on the Domino label. The photograph, borrowed from the CD insert, is by Netti Habel.

May 17

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Bill Frisell in Bristol, Brussels, Orvieto…

At the end of Bill Frisell’s concert in Bristol last night, my son (who had bought the tickets as a belated birthday present) asked me which of all the times I’d seen him live was my favourite. That took some thinking, but eventually I told him that it was probably a solo concert at Cadogan Hall in London half a dozen years ago. Although perhaps not the most spectacular, it seemed to capture so much of the essence of an extraordinary musician.

But Frisell is one of those players who put his essence into every note, whatever the context and the demands it makes. At last night’s gig in the beautiful St George’s, a repurposed 200-year-old neoclassical church, he was joined by the bassist Thomas Morgan and the drummer Rudy Royston, long-time partners with whom he has a rapport that may be well grooved but never precludes the element of quiet surprise.

Their two unbroken 45-minute sets were intimate conversations that flowed from theme to theme with a beautiful sense of dovetailing, full of subtle allusions that looked both backwards and forwards, maintaining a gentle but persuasive continuity.

Some of the themes I recognised were Frisell favourites: a gorgeous “Lush Life” (including the prefatory verse); the loping “Lookout for Hope”, with its light reggae inflection; the staccato flourishes of Thelonious Monk’s “Evidence”; Bacharach and David’s “What the World Needs Now Is Love”, with a lovely moment in which Frisell simply stroked out the chords; and, as an encore and parting benediction, a quietly glowing “When You Wish Upon a Star”, written for the 1940 Disney film Pinocchio, a song that he once said “has been in my bloodstream for as long as I can remember.”

The trio is also present throughout his new album, Orchestras, which combines one disc recorded live at two halls in Belgium with the Brussels Philharmonic and another captured at a theatre in Orvieto with the Umbria Jazz Orchestra. Both ensembles are arranged by the great Michael Gibbs, now 86 years years old, who pours all his decades of knowledge and wisdom into providing inspiring settings for the guitarist.

If Nelson Riddle had been a jazz arranger on the level of a Gil Evans, he might have come up with the subtly shaded orchestrations Gibbs delivers for the full symphony outfit on his own “Nocturne Vulgaire” and “Sweet Rain”, Ron Carter’s “Doom” and several of the guitarist’s own compositions, including “Electricity”, “Throughout” and “Richter 858 No 7”, from his album of pieces inspired by the German artist. Strings, brass and woodwind are everywhere deployed with subtle grace.

On the second disc, Gibbs uses the 11-piece Umbria ensemble — six brass, four reeds and a lone cellist — to bring out the shades in Frisell’s music that evoke an America of bayous, of prairies, of woodsmoke rising from remote farmsteads. It’s much more of a jazz sound, like an expanded version of the three-horn sextet with which the guitarist made the gorgeous Blues Dream album — a particular favourite of mine — in 2001.

Thanks to Gibbs, everything on both discs has combines an almost weightless elegance with deep soulfulness, something the arranger absorbed from his reverence for Gil Evans. You can hear it perfectly on “Strange Meeting”, with echoes of Evans’s fondness for the Spanish tinge in its luscious sway and Moorish blues tonality, drawing the very best from Frisell, to whose vast discography this is a recommended addition.

* Bill Frisell’s Orchestras is out now on the Blue Note label, as two CDs or three LPs.

May 10

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The sound of London

It’s been exciting to watch the blossoming of a new young UK jazz scene in recent years, and now it’s possible to welcome a historical survey of its emergence. André Marmot’s Unapologetic Expression, published this month, is an insider’s explanation of why and how it happened, by whom and to whom. This is history almost in real time, with the con trails still visible in the sky

Marmot is a musician who has worked for the last few years as agent, promoter and label owner. Perhaps that makes him an unusual person to write such a work. But it also gives him access to the people on the scene, justifying the subtitle: “The Inside Story of the UK Jazz Explosion”. More important, he can really write. Not in a fancy way, but with a clarity of thought and a simple elegance of expression that make it a pleasure to turn from page to page.

It’s a story of the music’s evolution in London; there are a few mentions of Soweto Kinch and GoGo Penguin, but none of Xhosa Cole or Nat Birchall. And its focus excludes the parallel world of free improvisation, the descendants of the SME and AMM. But at least we know where we are, and where the author is coming from.

The narrative takes in United Vibrations, Steez, Brainchild, Total Refreshment Centre, Steam Down, Brownswood and We Out Here, Jazz Re:freshed, Church of Sound, Tomorrow’s Warriors and more. The soundtrack might be Moses Boyd’s “Rye Lane Shuffle” and Yussef Kamaal’s Black Faces. One of the key events might be the appearance of Boyd, Shabaka Hutchings and Theon Cross at South by Southwest in Austin, Texas in 2017, when it became obvious that this scene could gain traction with listeners beyond Peckham and Dalston.

It’s quite a political book, in the sense that Marmot is not afraid to spend time criticising the effect of government policy on the arts and on young jazz musicians in particular, and propounding his belief (impeccable in my eyes) that jazz is essentially a black music in which others are welcome to take part. He puts his arguments concisely and chooses his supporting voices well.

For this is, in large part, an oral history. And whatever the perspective he’s examining — there are chapters called “Jazz Ownership and Appropriation”, “Jazz and Postcolonial London” and “New Industry Models and the End of Musical Tribalism” — he allows the musicians themselves to have their unmediated say. It’s no surprise that people like Sheila Maurice-Grey, Dave Okumu, Poppy Ajudha, Jason Yarde and Emma-Jean Thackray turn out to have interesting opinions.

If those chapter headings make the book sound academic, it isn’t. It’s anything but. It’s as full of life and energy, as sparky and challenging, as the music itself. It might even convert some of those who look with scepticism on audiences — some of whose members perhaps don’t know Lester Young from Coleman Hawkins and may never have heard “West End Blues” or “Parker’s Mood” — dancing and cheering as these musicians play for people who look, think and live like themselves.

But in order to exalt the new, it’s not necessary to denigrate the past, and there are some passages here that may annoy jazz fans of former generations. It’s easy to pour scorn on views expressed in earlier times, which is what Marmot does here with, for example, an autobiography from 1998 in which John Dankworth — who did much to popularise the music in Britain in the past-war decades — claimed that jazz “since its beginnings… [has been] an instrument of goodwill and peaceful and gradual change rather than anything really revolutionary.” I tend towards Marmot’s view rather than Dankworth’s, but I’d caution him that the passage of time can distort as well as clarify.

In between sessions of reading his book, I was listening to two new British jazz albums. The first is the latest from Empirical, who receive only a single slighting mention for their “dressed-up-for-the-wedding, jazz-cliché” look, which he compares unfavourably with the dressed-down, funky-Peckham vibe of Binker Golding and Moses Boyd on the cover of their 2015 debut album. I think it’s a ridiculous criticism, as irrelevant as dissing the MJQ for wearing tuxedos, and — like the Dankworth swipe — unworthy of what is otherwise a valuable piece of work.

Empirical’s Wonder Is the Beginning features the basic quartet with guests Jason Rebello on piano and Alex Hitchock on tenor saxophone. Most of the knotty but engaging tunes are written by Tom Farmer, the bassist, with one apiece from Nat Facey, the alto saxophonist, and Lewis Wright, the vibes player. Anyone who has ever enjoyed their work will find plenty to digest here, in a well established groove that enters the room occupied by Andrew Hill, Bobby Hutcherson and Eric Dolphy in their Blue Note period and pushes the walls out slightly. The addition of the guests enriches the range of tone and gesture without disturbing the group’s fine balance.

Cassie Kinoshi belongs firmly in the generation promoted by Marmot, and is among those providing the author with interesting opinions on his chosen topics. Her latest album finds an 11-piece version of her group Seed operating in partnership with the London Contemporary Orchestra and the turntablist NikNak on a 22-minute, six-part suite called Gratitude (from which the album takes its title), recorded at the Purcell Room in March 2023, and in a 10-piece formation performing a five-minute piece called “Smoke in the Sun” at Total Refreshment Centre in 2021.

This isn’t a long album, then, but it gets a lot of substance into its half-hour duration, thanks to Kinoshi’s fast-developing gift for deploying the instrumental resources at her command. Her music is astringent in its sound and strong in its movements. The strings and woodwind, for instance, carry as much weight as the brass, reeds and rhythm: there’s no danger of anything sounding effete or chamber music-y here. The double bass of Rio Kai and the drums of Patrick Gabriel-Boyle provide both line-ups with a loose-limbed swing.

There is plenty of space in the music, and a great deal of variety. When she clears a space for a soloist, she does it very adroitly: the guitarist Shirley Tetteh, the trumpeters Jack Banjo Courtney and Joseph Oti-Akenteng, and eventually herself, with an improvisation that really soars, leading the sixth and final movement to a dramatic but graceful conclusion. Nothing sounds pasted-in or anything less than organic.

Both these albums, and André Marmot’s book, tell a very encouraging story about the condition of British jazz: not just about the skill and originality of its practitioners, but about their continuing ability to find, expand and stay close to their audience.

* André Marmot’s Unapologetic Expression is published by Faber & Faber. Empirical’s Wonder Is the Beginning is on Whirlwind Records. Gratitude by Cassie Kinoshi’s Seed with NikNak and the London Contemporary Orchestra is on International Anthem.

May 5

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Daniel Kramer 1932-2024

Bob Dylan was fortunate in the photographers who recorded his progress from his arrival in New York in January 1961 to his motorcycle accident in Woodstock in July 1966. John Cohen, a member of the New Lost City Ramblers, and the Village Voice staffer Fred W. McDarrah chronicled his early days in Greenwich Village. Richard Avedon caught him on the New York waterfront in 1963. Jim Marshall was at Newport and in San Francisco when Dylan hung out with the Beat poets. Don Hunstein took the Freewheelin’ cover shot on Jones Street and was there for the “Like a Rolling Stone” session, as was W. Eugene Smith. Jerry Schatzberg caught the amphetamine Dylan of early 1966 in formal portraits and took the Blonde on Blonde cover. Barry Feinstein was in the limos and the dressing rooms on the European tour that summer, present as Dylan spent time with John Lennon and Françoise Hardy.

But I’m probably not the only one who has a special fondness for the photos taken in 1964-65 by Daniel Kramer, who has died aged 91. Brooklyn-born, the young Kramer worked as an assistant to Diane Arbus and Philippe Halsman. He had just set up his own studio and knew little about Dylan when he first saw him on TV early in 1964 but then spent six months petitioning Albert Grossman to allow him access. The first session, at Grossman’s house in Woodstock that August, established a rapport between the photographer and the singer, and there would be many more encounters over the following 12 months.

Kramer photographed Dylan being swept off his feet — quite literally — by Joan Baez at a post-concert party, cheerfully (and top-hattedly) signing photographs for fans in Philadelphia, and relaxing by playing pool and pinball and (see the photo above) reading the NY Herald Tribune, again at Grossman’s house, with Sally Grossman, who has just come in from swimming, at the edge of the shot. She was also featured on the front of Bringing It All Back Home, the first of Kramer’s two great narrative cover photos (the other being Highway 61 Revisited). And he was there in Columbia’s Studio A as Dylan rewrote and recorded “Positively 4th Street”, framed by a forest of microphone booms and music stands.

In 1967 Kramer published a book of his work with Dylan, adding a commentary. His words and pictures were, as Michael Gray observes in his Bob Dylan Encyclopedia, “recurrently revealing but never prurient or obtrusive… respectful but clear-sighted.” As well as their observational and technical qualities, there was a humanity in Kramer’s photographs that gave us Dylan from a very special perspective.

* Daniel Kramer’s photographs of Dylan, along with those of Barry Feinstein and Jim Marshall, are in Early Dylan, published in the UK by Pavilion Books in 1999, and in Bob Dylan: A Year and a Day, published by Taschen in 2018.

Apr 26

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Matana Roberts at the Roundhouse

Note: After this piece was first posted, Matana pointed out to me that her pronouns are “they/them”. I’ve rewritten it to take account of that preference.

Matana Roberts did a lot of talking at the Roundhouse last night. A lot more talking than playing, in fact. Alone on the stage, opening the show for Lonnie Holley with an hour-long set, they restricted the saxophone — a soprano, rather than her usual alto — to the occasional short phrase or two, often prefaced with the words “This is an improvisation.” We heard a handsome tone on the straight horn, and an ardent delivery, but nothing was allowed to build or cohere into a greater scheme.

Instead we were addressed with verbal riffs on a variety of topics, from the general reaction to the artist’s wild new hair to what a border control officer said about their tattoos. They spoke of a photo of a recent protest in which students had barricaded their doors and windows in the manner taught in “active shooter” drills. “I’m from the Mid-West,” Matana said. “We only had tornado drills.”

That provoked their observations on protest songs, during which we were encouraged to hum a single tonic note in accompaniment as they sang “Wade in the Water” in a pleasant, unemphatic voice. Eventually we were persuaded to join in “I Shall Not Be Moved”.

There was also a story to tell about being invited to play at the Whitney Museum on the day in 2015 when Michelle Obama, a fellow Chicagoan, was opening a new wing. Matana was invited to perform on the roof while the First Lady was doing the ribbon-cutting thing, so that the music would cascade down. The surprise discovery up there was the presence of a detachment of snipers.

“They were surrounding me,” Matana remembered. “Three of them. And they were kind of happy-go-lucky. They wanted to show me their guns. ‘I don’t want to see your guns!'” The ceremony over, Michelle Obama was taken away in an armoured vehicle.

“That was really a symbol of America today,” Matana observed, before returning to the business of singing and playing and musing, trying to summon the better spirits of our troubled world.

Apr 22

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Chan Romero 1941-2024

There was a time when Chan Romero’s “The Hippy Hippy Shake” was a song you had know. It was to the Beat Boom as “I Got My Mojo Workin'” was to the R&B scene. When Paul McCartney got hold of a copy and started singing it with his then-unknown group at the Star Club in Hamburg and the Cellar Club in Liverpool, it caught on fast. And when the Swinging Blue Jeans, another Liverpool group, recorded it in 1963, they took it to the top of the UK charts.

Like “I Got My Mojo Workin'”, it was basically a 12-bar blues — as was “Hound Dog”, the song that, when the 15-year-old Romero saw Elvis Presley singing it on the Ed Sullivan Show on his family’s black and white TV at home in Billings, Montana in 1956, introduced him to his destiny. “It just took me over,” he remembered. “I said, this is what I want to do.”

Romero, who has died aged 82, was born in Billings to a father of Spanish and Apache heritage and a mother of mixed Mexican, Cherokee and Irish descent. His mother sang and his brothers played guitars. He followed their example, and began writing songs. During his summer holiday from Billings Senior High School, he hitchhiked to East Los Angeles to stay with some relatives. A cousin drove him to Specialty Records in Hollywood, where the A&R man, Sonny Bono, liked his song “My Little Ruby” and told him to come back when he’d polished it up.

Back in Billings, Romero auditioned for a local DJ, Don “The Weird Beard” Redfield, who became his manager and sent a demo to Bob Keane at Del-Fi Records in Hollywood. Keane had recorded the Chicano singer Richie Valens, enjoying hits with “Donna” and “La Bamba”. It seemed a good match and Keane promptly signed Romero.

When Valens was killed at 19 years of age, along with Buddy Holly and the Big Bopper, in the February 1959 air crash in Iowa, Romero must have seemed his logical heir. Indeed, Keane introduced him to Valens’s grieving parents, with whom he later often stayed at their home in Pacoima, East LA.

“The Hippy Hippy Shake” was his first release on Keane’s label. It didn’t make much impact in the US, but it went down well in Canada and Australia. In the UK it was released on EMI’s Columbia label. “My Little Ruby” was the B-side of the the follow-up, “I Don’t Care Now”, and that was pretty much that, although Romero toured with his backing band, the Bell Tones, and found himself turning away girls. “I haven’t got a girlfriend,” he told the Billings Gazette, “because I can’t tell if a girl likes me for myself or because I’m a singer.”

The original version of “The Hippy Hippy Shake” has everything you’d want from a rock and roll record in 1959: the urgent teenage voice, the twangy guitar, the rackety drums, all wrapped up inside a minute and 45 seconds. Thank you, Chan Romero, for your moment in history.

Apr 15

4 Comments

Sounds for summer

Tall enough to be unmissable in any environment, and with a truly remarkable fashion sense, Shabaka Hutchings had presence from day one of his career. To me, as an observer, that was the concert at the Royal Festival Hall in June 2009 at which he was one of several UK guests with Charlie Haden’s Liberation Music Orchestra (others included Robert Wyatt, Jason Yarde, John Parricelli and Andy Grappy). He had just one solo but when he stepped forward, the sounds coming from his tenor saxophone commanded everyone’s attention.

Since then, we’ve heard him with Sons of Kemet, The Comet Is Coming, the Ancestors and Louis Moholo-Moholo’s Five Blokes, and in a reinterpretation of Coltrane’s A Love Supreme at the Church of Sound a few weeks ago which I was very sorry to miss. And now he has enough presence to allow him to drop his surname and become just Shabaka.

He’s also dropped the saxophone, which is more of a surprise, in order to study the flute — specifically the Japanese shakuhachi and other iterations, including the Andean quena and the Slavic svirel. His new album — titled Perceive Its Beauty, Acknowledge Its Grace — is evidence of this turn of interest.

It’s a radical departure from anything he’s given us before. A series of sketches deploys varying personnel, including the pianists Nduduzo Makhathini and Jason Moran, the guitarist Dave Okumu, the singer Lianne La Havas, Moses Sumney, Laraaji and ESKA, the harpists Brandee Younger and Charles Overton, the drummers Marcus Gilmore and Nasheet Waits, the speakers Saul Williams, Miguel Atwood-Ferguson and Anum Iyupo, the rapper Elucid, the percussionist Carlos Niño and the bassists Esperanza Spalding and Tom Herbert.

That’s an impressive line-up, but as you listen to the album you’re never really thinking of individuals or their virtuosity. In that sense it’s a quite different experience from that of listening to a “jazz album”. But neither is it a kind of New Age tapestry of sound, slipping by without disturbance, merely a bit of aural decoration.

It has an overall charm and moments of great and singular beauty, too, such as the shakuhachi improvisation against Overton’s harp and the celestial layered voices of Sumney on “Insecurities”, La Havas’s vocal reverie on “Kiss Me Before I Forget”, or Spalding’s springy bass behind Elucid’s rap on “Body to Inhabit”, but it also has depth, and not just in the occasional verbal passages, which are carefully integrated into the quilt of sound. The overall impression is what counts, and somehow that goes beyond words.

The album contains one snatch of tenor saxophone, on a track called “Breathing”, in which Rajni Swaminathan’s mridangam — a Carnatic double-ended hand drum — backs first Shabaka’s treated and looped flutes, then his clarinet, and finally his saxophone, which briefly erupts in a gentle squall with an intonation recalling the great Ethiopian tenorist Getatchew Mekuria.

That little hint of Ethiopian music sent me to a new release in the name of Emahoy Tsege Mariam Gebru, who died this time last year at the age of 99. Born in Addis Ababa, she studied violin in Switzerland as a child, worked as a civil servant and sang for Haile Selassie, was imprisoned by the Italian occupiers during the Second World War, and spent a post-war decade as a nun in a hilltop monastery. The arrival of a new regime forced her to flee to Jerusalem, where she spent the rest of her life in an Ethiopian Orthodox convent and composed music for piano, organ, and various ensembles while running a foundation to encourage music education among children in her native land and elsewhere.

Like Mekuria, she had a volume of the producer Francis Falceto’s Ethiopiques series devoted to her music in 2006, and in the last couple of years there have been more albums on the Mississippi label. The latest is called Souvenirs, a collection of her songs apparently recorded between 1977 and 1985. It’s a primitive recording: the piano sounds like a poorly maintained upright and her voice was probably recorded on the same microphone, in a room that was almost certainly not a recording studio. But that does nothing to diminish the appeal of these songs, with titles such as “Where Is the Highway of Thought?” and “Like the Sun Shines on Meadows”, whose vocal melodies are doubled by the pianist’s right hand against left-hand figurations assembled from scraps of blues and rhumba and gospel tunes.

What’s so appealing, almost mesmerising, about this music? I think it’s the combination of transparent simplicity (and sincerity) with the unexpected guile of the rhythmic undertow, which is always playing appealing tricks on the western ear. There’s something about the distinctive melodic shapes and phrase lengths that is special to this kind of Ethiopian music, springing from some deeper root.

Something else to add pleasure to this summer is After a Pause, the new album of acoustic duo music by two brilliant Welsh musicians, the guitarist Toby Hay and the bassist and cellist Aidan Thorne. I got interested in Hay when he was filming himself outdoors playing ragas during the first Covid-19 lockdown in 2020 and putting the results on YouTube, and wrote a bit more about him when he released some duets recorded in an old chapel with his fellow guitarist David Ian Roberts later that same spring.

I try to avoid talking about what musicians are doing in terms of the work of other musicians, but I suppose a simple — and, I hope, enticing — way of describing the scope of these duets is to imagine what Davy Graham and Danny Thompson might have got up to if they were both in their prime in the 2020s and were able to spend three days together in a studio with no distractions, enhancing their compositions and improvisations with a sparing but highly effective use of overdubbing and electronics.

After living with this album for a few weeks, I’ve come to appreciate not just its surface beauty but the way it reveals more of itself and its spiritual essence the closer you listen. The 12-string arpeggios and bowed bass of the opener are a call to the attention that is never wasted as the music blooms and glows through 10 shortish but unhurried pieces, trajectories shifting and densities varying considerably from bare-bones to near-orchestral (on “Burden” or “Eclipse”) but mood sustained. The brief solo piano coda is a lovely way to finish.

A light shines through these three albums. I’ve a feeling they’re going to be among the summer’s best companions.

* Shabaka’s Perceive Its Beauty, Acknowledge Its Grace is on the Impulse! label. Emahoy Tsege Mariam Gebru’s Souvenirs is on Mississippi Records. Toby Hay and Aidan Thorne’s After a Pause is on Cambrian Records. Links here:

https://spibaig.bandcamp.com/album/perceive-its-beauty-acknowledge-its-grace

https://emahoytsegemariamgebru.bandcamp.com/album/souvenirs

https://cambrianrecords.bandcamp.com/

Apr 5

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The Necks at Cafe Oto

“We’ve never really been an emotional band,” Lloyd Swanton observed drily after the first set on the last of the Necks’ four nights at Cafe Oto in London this week, “but it seems to be creeping in.”

I’d been trying to tell him, somewhat incoherently, how moved I’d been by what they’d just played, and in particular how it seemed to express something about the current state of the world. His reflexive response indicated that what he and his colleagues in the Australian trio do is principally about the notes, about the process of three musicians improvising together with no preset material and certainly with no programmatic content in mind. Which is not to say that listening to them isn’t an emotional experience. It is, almost invariably, but the emotions they generate are usually non-specific.

To me, at least, it seemed that there was something different about Thursday’s first set. It started out normally enough, after they and the audience had settled, with one member — Swanton, on this occasion — breaking the silence. As he plucked an isolated note on his double bass, repeating it and echoing it an octave down, sometimes switching to his bow, and initially with long pauses, Tony Buck joined in with mallets gently rolling around his tom-toms and cymbals, followed by Chris Abrahams picking out pensive Moorish figures in the middle-upper octaves of the piano.

For a while, not much seemed to be happening. No surprise there, necessarily. Later Buck said that he’d worried it had started out “a bit washy”. But in 20 years of attending their performances I’ve learnt to wait, to show the kind of patience as a listener that they show as players, in the knowledge that the surprise will come. In fact, they are the proof that the sound of surprise can emerge slowly, by gradual accretion.

This time the process of accretion led to something extraordinary. As the playing of all three grew busier, the textures thickened, the spaces closed and the volume increased, all of it occurring almost imperceptibly, you began to feel that you were hearing things: bells, cries, gunfire. It was an illusion. They weren’t there, and neither was anyone trying to produce them. But somehow they were present — for me, anyway — in the harmonics reflecting off the piano lid, the scrabbling and keening of the bass, and the hard crack of the bass drum against the overlapping splashes of the cymbals.

Eventually it reached a pitch of intensity that was sustained for maybe 15 minutes before being gradually wound down through a collective diminuendo into silence once again. And in those 15 minutes I couldn’t help replaying the images we’ve been seeing on the TV news every night for months — images of buildings, streets, whole cities lying in ruins, of the dead being counted and the living in flight, the sort of total war we may stupidly have believed was safely consigned to a distant past.

That’s not, I’m sure, what the members of the Necks were thinking of while they were summoning the music into being. It’s more the sort of thing the pianist Vijay Iyer had in mind when, with the bassist Linda May Han Oh and the drummer Tyshawn Sorey, he recorded a new trio album whose title, Compassion, explicitly indicates its theme. “Music is always about, animated by, and giving expression to the world around us: people, relations, circumstances, revelations,” Iyer writes in the sleeve note, describing the responsibility, as he sees it, of making art in a time of suffering.

I’ve heard the Necks play music unafraid of ugliness before (a hair-raising triple-forte set at Café Oto in 2013 stands out in the memory), but never anything in which the kind of responses they normally evoke — including but not restricted to euphoria and elevation — were so strikingly replaced by this very different kind of transcendence, a sustained howl expressing something beyond words yet somehow very specific.

So that was the fifth of the six sets I heard them play this week, and the sixth was, as usual, quite different. Abrahams opened it with a reversion to the sort of thing that provokes the use of adjectives like “luminous” and “lambent”. But again there was a surprise when the piece evolved into an essay in the use of asynchronous rhythms, a field they’ve opened up in recent years, in which each one establishes his own pulse or metre and, without forfeiting closeness of listening to the others, maintains it as the piece develops. At its best, it leads to a kind of higher interplay — and this was the practice at its very best, creating a rhythmic maelstrom that activated a very different response in the audience.

All a long way from the sort of passive music for Zen meditation with which they are sometimes erroneously associated, and irrefutable evidence of their commitment, now extending well into its fourth decade, to a constant self-regeneration of which we are the fortunate beneficiaries.

* The Necks continue their European tour at Peggy’s Skylight in Nottingham on Monday (already sold out) and the Tung Auditorium in Liverpool on Tuesday, April 8 and 9 respectively. Their most recent album, Travel, was released in 2022 on the Northern Spy label. Compassion, by Vijay Iyer, Linda May Han Oh and Tyshawn Sorey, was released earlier this year by ECM.

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