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Jan 26

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Son of a drum

Vinnie Sperrazza grew up in Utica, New York as the son and great-grandson of drummers. He’s played the drums all his life, while thinking about drums and drumming and drummers. We’ll get to his own playing in a minute, but what first alerted me to his existence were his Substack posts, which appear under the heading of “Chronicles”. They’re not always about drumming, but they’re always interesting. And the ones that are about drumming contain the most perceptive and eloquent writing about drummers that I’ve ever read.

Sperrazza doesn’t describe the art of a drummer with the kind of literary eloquence with which the New Yorker‘s Whitney Balliett could bring, say, a solo piece by Papa Jo Jones to life on the page. (But then Balliett once claimed that Max Roach didn’t swing.) Sperrazza finds different but equally compelling ways to tell you what a Roach, a Gerald Cleaver, a Billy Hart or an Ed Blackwell is doing, and perhaps why, and certainly how it affects the surrounding music.

When I had a cup of coffee with Sperrazza during in London before Christmas, he was keen to hear my memories of seeing Tony Williams, who is his special subject, and about whom he writes with great insight. I was able to tell him about things he’s too young to have seen for himself, like Lifetime’s gigs at Ungano’s and the Marquee, a later edition of the band in Berlin, VSOP at the Grosvenor House and the Albert Hall, the quartet with Herbie Hancock, Ron Carter and Wynton Marsalis in Nice, and Tony’s own great quintet — the one with Wallace Roney, Bill Pierce and Mulgrew Miller — in Camden.

Most of all, I think he liked me describing the unforgettable experience of listening to Tony tuning his drums during the soundcheck for the gig in the Grosvenor House ballroom, for a gig that, believe it or not, was part of the 1977 Columbia Records international sales convention. That music is still in my ears.

Before we parted, he gave me a copy of Sunday, the third album in 10 years by his quartet, which is called Vinnie Sperrazza Apocryphal and also includes Loren Stillman on soprano and tenor saxophones, Brandon Seabrook on guitar, mandolin and banjo, and Eivind Opsvik on double bass — all great players from the contemporary New York scene. Frankly, I didn’t much mind whether I was going to like it or not, because I admire his writing so much and enjoyed his company. But when I put it on, it had me entranced.

The eight pieces making up the album are intended, he says, to depict “the moods and actions of one man in NYC on a random Sunday.” It’s probably typical of Sperrazza that the opening track doesn’t feature him at all: just Stillman’s affectingly human tenor tone, Seabrook’s pinched harmonics and distortions and Opsvik’s rich arco playing in an enticing prologue full of hints of what’s to come. But then the drums have the second track more or less to themselves, creating a subtly shaded, carefully developed, bombast-free soliloquy that Max or Papa Jo would surely applaud.

All four musicians then come together on a low-down, behind-the-beat groove with a blues feeling given its spice by Seabrook’s spacey and increasingly asymmetrical guitar chords, which fade away to the ticking of Sperrazza’s rimshots. Banjo colours the next piece, a solemn chink above shivering bass and sombre drums, shadowing Stillman’s lyrical ruminations, before Seabrook cuts loose with a jittering, jabbing solo.

And those four pieces are just the half of it. Like them, each of the remaining four creates its own microclimate, exploiting the available resources with a sense of variety and wit. When Stillman switches to soprano, something about the open rhythm reminds me of John Coltrane with Steve Davis and Elvin Jones on Coltrane Plays the Blues. There’s a joyful guitar feature with an 8/8 backbeat, not entirely unlike the early Lifetime. The banjo reappears for a quiet piece that could reasonably be described as giving Americana a good name.

It made me think of The President, Wayne Horvitz’s old band, as does a lot of this album, in its ability to to make sure that every track has its own little story to tell, while presenting music that, without compromising its spirit of inquiry, is extremely easy to like.

* Sunday by Vinnie Sperrazza Apocryphal is on the Loyal Label: https://vinniesperrazzaapocryphal.bandcamp.com/album/sunday His Substack archive is here: https://substack.com/@vinniesperrazza

Jan 22

22 Comments

The history of Les Cousins

Named after a 1959 Claude Chabrol film, Les Cousins operated as a folk club from 1964 to 1972, having taken over a basement in Soho run by John Jack as the Skiffle Cellar during the 1950s. On the ground floor was the restaurant of Loukas and Margaret Matheou, immigrants from Cyprus. Les Cousins, down a steep staircase, was run by their son, Andy. On stage at 49 Greek Street every night of the week he presented singers and musicians whose work would create a platform for the folk-rock and singer-songwriter movements of the late 1960s and early ’70s.

There were other important folk venues in London, notably Bunjie’s, just the other side of Charing Cross Road, and the Troubadour in Earl’s Court. But the Cousins had a special place in history, very well memorialised in a new three-CD box from the Cherry Red label, compiled and annotated by Ian A. Anderson, the singer, guitarist and editor of fRoots magazine.

It is, as you’d expect, a splendidly varied selection, starting and ending with big names — Bert Jansch and the Strawbs — and containing both even bigger ones (Paul Simon, Al Stewart, Ralph McTell, Nick Drake, Roy Harper and Cat Stevens) as well as many more of those whose reputations never really escaped the folk world, like the brilliant guitarists Davy Graham, Mike Cooper, John James, Sam Mitchell and Dave Evans.

So far I’ve mentioned only male performers, but the Cousins was a place where women shone: not just Shirley Collins, Sandy Denny, Bridget St John and Maddy Prior but Dorris Henderson, Jo Ann Kelly, Beverley Kutner (later Martyn) and Nadia Cattouse. And, of course, the sublime Anne Briggs. They’re all here, represented among the 72 tracks licensed from labels such as Topic, Island, Transatlantic, Village Thing and Harvest.

There are the traditionalists: Bert Lloyd singing “Jack Orion”, the Watersons delivering “The Holmfirth Anthem”, and Dave and Toni Arthur’s “A Maiden Came from London Town”. And there are the influential Americans: Jackson C. Frank (“Milk and Honey”), Dave Van Ronk (“Baby, Let Me Lay It On You”), and Tim Hardin (“If I Were a Carpenter”).

You can hear the music going off in all sorts of directions, with weirder stuff coming from the Third Ear Band, Kevin Ayers, the Incredible String Band and Dr Strangely Strange. Ron Geesin’s “Two Fifteen String Guitars for Nice People” is in a class of brilliant weirdness all by itself.

The well produced brochure includes facsimiles of a couple of pages from Andy Mattheou’s diary in April 1965, listing the people he’s booked: Sandy Denny for £3 on a Wednesday night, Davy Graham for £15 on the Saturday, Van Morrison for £3 on a Tuesday, the American guitarist Sandy Bull on a Friday for £10 against half the door takings. Sandy Bull! How I wish I’d been there for that.

The programme isn’t predictable. There’s no “Scarborough Fair”, no “May You Never”, no “She Moved Through the Fair”. The sequencing is thoughtful: tracks from John Martyn and Duffy Power follow immediately after those by their respective mentors, Hamish Imlach and Alexis Korner. I’d only quibble with the inclusion of a small handful of songs — including Drake’s “Northern Sky” and Beverley’s “Get the One I Want To” — where the presence of orchestral arrangements takes them away from the mood of a basement folk club.

If I had to pick some personal favourites, the first would be would be the dazzling violin and guitar of Dave Swarbrick and Martin Carthy on “Byker Hill” and the second would be the magical guitar interplay of Jansch and John Renbourn on “Soho”. The third would be the intense voice and bottleneck guitar of Sam Mitchell’s “Leaf Without a Tree”: a hellhound stalking the lanes of Soho, half a century ago.

* Les Cousins: The Soundtrack of Soho’s Legendary Folk & Blues Club is out now on the Cherry Red label. The image is the club’s logo, the wagon wheel a reference to a feature of its décor.

Jan 16

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Written in air

Jan Bang is one of the people responsible for the great wave of creative music from Norway over the past three decades. As a producer and player, he’s collaborated with Dhafer Youssef, Nils Petter Molvaer, Arve Henriksen, David Sylvian, Bugge Wesseltoft and many others. In the fishing port of Kristiansand, where he was born in 1968, he and his friend Erik Honoré founded the annual Punkt Festival, where since 2005 live performances have been subjected to immediate remixes. (I wrote about a visit to the 2019 edition here.)

His new album, Reading the Air, is a sequence of songs with music mostly by himself and lyrics by Honoré. The musicians include Henriksen on trumpet, the singers Simin Tander and Benedikte Kløwe Askedalen, the guitarist Eivind Aarset, the bassist Audun Erlien, the drummer Anders Engen and the percussionist Adam Rudolph.

What does it sound like? I was put in mind of late Blue Nile filtered through Jon Hassell’s Fourth World recordings: fragile-sounding melodies, introspective lyrics, voices singing from some private sphere, gauzy textures shaped and layered with great care, on the edge of decay. Through the 10 tracks, there’s a consistency of mood, elegant and reflective.

Here are the opening lines of Honoré’s lyric for the exquisitely beautiful title song: Moving on /We’re planning our escape / Preparing to leave / The disconnected state / Bridges burned / The tables turned / Reading the air / To reconnect with fate. A piano is played in an empty ballroom. A swaying groove emerges and simmers quietly. Bang’s ruminative vocal is sometimes doubled by a female singing over his shoulder. What sounds like a section of shakuhachis turns out to be overdubbed trumpets played by Henriksen, who steps forward for a lighter-than-air solo. I could easily imagine successful covers of this by Annie Lennox, Bryan Ferry or Beth Gibbons with Rustin Man.

The other track I want to mention is the only non-original composition, a version of the old folk-blues song called “Delia” or “Delia’s Gone”, which exists in many versions. This is not the murder-ballad variant recorded by Bob Dylan on World Gone Wrong in 1993 (credited as “traditional”) or the bloodier iteration that Johnny Cash included on the first volume of his American Recordings in 1994 (credited to Cash, Karl Silbersdorf and Dick Toops). Curiously, it’s the smoother and more lyrical variation that Harry Belafonte sang in 1954 on his debut album, “Mark Twain” and Other Folk Favourites, credited to Lester Judson and Fred Brooks. Judson was a commercial songwriter. Brooks was a temporary nom de plume for Fred Hellerman, a member (with Pete Seeger) of the Weavers, who were then under investigation by the FBI for alleged Communist sympathies.

Bang’s version is a sort of Nordic Americana: the bell of a wooden church in the snow, muffled drums, the refined twang of Arset’s lightly picked guitar. No murders in the lyric, but three-part vocal harmony like a bluegrass family stranded up a fjord, in danger of death from exposure to the cruel elements. The line about “everything I had is gone” can rarely have sounded so final.

* Jan Bang’s Reading the Air is released on 19 January on the Punkt Editions label. The photo of Bang is by Alf Solbakken. You can hear “Delia” on this link: https://janbang.bandcamp.com/album/reading-the-air

Jan 10

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Semper Max

Max Roach, a vital link in the chain of jazz drummers that stretches from Baby Dodds to Tyshawn Sorey, was born in North Carolina a hundred years ago today, on January 10, 1924. After moving with his family to New York at the age of four, he played the bugle and the drums in gospel ensembles in Brooklyn. He was still a teenager when he depped for Sonny Greer in the Duke Ellington Orchestra. At 21 he played on the Charlie Parker session that produced the eternally breathtaking “Ko Ko”. After that he was on many of Parker’s celebrated recordings, including “Parker’s Mood” in 1948 and the Massey Hall concert in 1953.

Roach was the one who took Kenny Clarke’s proto-bebop drumming to the next stage, freeing the left hand and the right foot from the obligation of symmetry, enabling them to respond to what a soloist was doing in the moment: enhancing, encouraging, propelling, providing a spontaneous commentary. Just what Parker needed.

All that was in my head — along with his presence in Miles Davis’s historic nonet at the Royal Roost in 1948, his subsequent quintets with the trumpeters Clifford Brown and Booker Little in the ’50s, and the sequence of albums including We Insist: Freedom Now Suite and Percussion Bitter Sweet that he recorded during the civil rights era in the ’60s — when I went to interview him in his hotel during the 1971 Montreux Jazz Festival.

By then he was an elder, and that was how he seemed to me: a man of wisdom, elegance and sophistication, with something reserved and almost austere about him, someone who had been through the fires of the creative life and come out having cast aside all non-essentials, with his humanity intact. He talked freely and eloquently, and said many interesting things. But I what I remember chiefly is just the feeling of being in his presence, in a room with the embodiment of so much history.

At Montreux he was playing with a student orchestra, so I asked him about his history with big bands. “The first big band I played with was Dizzy Gillespie’s,” he said, “which had Charlie Parker, Fats Navarro and Miles Davis, who were very young, Freddie Webster, Kenny Dorham — fantastic trumpet section — Dexter Gordon, Gene Ammons, Leo Parker, Bud Powell…”

Then he corrected himself. “No, the first big band I played with was Duke’s. I remember now. That was at the Paramount Theatre in New York. I was still in school and I played with them for four or five days because Sonny Greer got sick. It was during the war and the reason I played with them was Billie Holiday’s brother-in-law, Jimmy Monroe’s brother Clark, whose protégé I was — he made sure I got in the union and he knew all these people, so when he found that Duke Ellington needed a drummer, he called me for it.”

Clark Monroe’s Uptown House, on West 134th Street in Harlem, was one of the cradles of the bop revolution. By 1942, Roach was the house drummer. Parker played there that year, so perhaps it was where they first met. I wish I’d asked him. I wish I’d asked him a whole lot of things.

I did get him to talk about Clifford Brown. “In my music I’m inspired by human values,” he said, “because I believe that human beings are supposed to live together. As artists, we feed on the past. All the things that we hear today are really extensions of things that were laid down by people who came before — and of course I’ve been fortunate enough to have been associated with many, many great musicians. One that was a turning point in my own career was Clifford.

“The association was one that was full not only of friendship and love for each other as human beings but as musicians we both spent as much time as we could involved in music as a craft. I noticed particularly that Clifford was a human being, number one, which I guess was the reason he could get so much beauty out of playing the way he did at such an early age. To sound so mature before he was 25…

“I can say this: during our whole relationship he was a very dedicated musician and an extremely responsible person as a leader, as young as he was. He was almost 24 hours immersed in music, every aspect of it, from the piano to the drums to his trumpet, and the thing we can all learn from that is that the more time you put in sincerely, the more that you will get out of it in a shorter space of time.”

Luckily, Max was granted a longer span. I was fortunate enough to see him play on a handful occasions, notably in New York in 1972 with M’Boom, his percussion ensemble, and at the Bracknell Jazz Festival about 10 years later with his regular quartet. What was striking was how he played with his back straight and shoulders still, most of the work done by his wrists. He was as crisp and precise as any jazz drummer I’ve ever seen, but without forfeiting a sense of surprise or the inner relaxation vital to swing. Carrying the joy and the responsibility of the music’s history, he was everything you’d imagined him to be.

* The image above is grabbed from a BBC recording of the Max Roach quartet with Abbey Lincoln in London in 1964, performing “Triptych: Prayer/Protest/Peace” from We Insist! The Freedom Now Suite. It’s on YouTube.

Jan 5

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Dalston rhapsodies

There seemed to be an unusually high percentage of people in a sold-out Vortex last night wearing the sort of minimalist beanie hat long associated with Django Bates, who was there to give a rare solo piano recital. Bates talked about his brothers being present, and a son, so maybe it’s clan thing and they were all family. Anyhow, the rest of us could share a joyful evening in which the seriousness of the music was counterpointed by the impish humour of the 63-year-old pianist and composer.

He began with some new pieces. “A Flurry in the Desert” was a rhapsody in blues in E-flat, followed by “Sophie in Detail”, a rhapsodic ballad, both demonstrating a facility and an imagination in exalted balance. The multi-sectioned “Dancy Dancy” contained a Brazilian-tinged part with a la-la vocal and some lovely right-hand lines near the end that reminded me of Wynton Kelly. “Ballo”, dedicated to the saxophonist Iain Ballamy, his old friend from Loose Tubes days, had the quality common to many of Bates’s compositions, at least when performed solo: even when perfectly formed, they give the illusion of being created from scratch in real time, by spontaneous magic.

“Yard Games” was like that, although pivoting around a three-note figure constantly shifting shape and register. So was the older “For the Nurses”, written before the arrival of Covid, which had its melody doubled by whistling. (“It’s not a sentimental piece,” he said. “It’s not a sentimental profession. I imagine it’s bloody hard work.”) Something called, I think, “The Teachings of Dewey Redman” featured a high-velocity single-note boppish line played by both hands, a couple of octaves apart. The encore was another older piece, “Horses in the Rain”, a meditation on stoicism with a lyric by its original interpreter, the Norwegian singer Sidsel Endresen.

Before that, he’d produced the biggest surprise of the set: a couple of choruses of “Bridge Over Troubled Water” dedicated to “anyone with a weirdly unhealthy obsession with Rwanda”. Taking Larry Knechtel’s piano part from the original S&G recording and adding his own depth, weight, shaded voicings and exquisite timing, it was about as perfect as anything could be.

Dec 14

20 Comments

2023: The best bits

Sometimes it takes me a while to catch up. This year I caught up with my late mother’s fondness for Death Comes for the Archbishop, a novel written by Willa Cather in 1927. A hardback copy had been on her bookshelves since I was old enough to notice, and she spoke often of how much she admired it. When she and my father died a few years ago, within months of each other, I took away her 1933 hardback edition as their house was cleared. And this year I finally got around to reading it.

Set in the mid-19th century, the story of two French priests sent by the Pope to New Mexico shows how Cather could paint on a vast canvas. Born in 1873, she was brought up in rural Nebraska, giving her a feeling for striking and often bleakly beautiful landscape and dramatic weather. The climate and the topography of New Mexico become an intrinsic part of her narrative, as alive as the characters. In that, and in a sudden, unexpected episode of shocking violence, I was reminded of Cormac McCarthy, who died in June, just as I was reading it.

I was reminded of him even more forcefully when I moved on straight away to Cather’s Great Plains Trilogy: O Pioneers!, The Song of the Lark, and My Ántonia, written between 1913 and 1918, all very different, each with its own female protagonist, each casting a spell. McCarthy, of course, wrote a celebrated Border Trilogy in the 1990s: All the Pretty Horses, The Crossing and Cities of the Plain. None of his obituaries mentioned a possible influence, and it’s a long time since Cather (who died in 1947) was fashionable, but I’d be very surprised if he were not familiar with her work.

She could write about music and its effects, too. In The Song of the Lark her protagonist, Thea Kronborg, the young daughter of Scandinavian immigrants settled in the town of Moonstone, Colorado, and destined (although she has no idea of this yet) to become a great opera singer, is invited to a railroad workers’s ball by a character called Spanish Johnny:

The Mexican dance was soft and quiet. There was no calling, the conversation was very low, the rhythm of the music was smooth and engaging, the men were graceful and courteous. Some of them Thea had never before seen out of their working clothes, smeared with grease from the round house or clay from the brickyard. Sometimes, when the music happened to be a popular Mexican waltz song, the dancers sang it softly as they moved. There were three little girls under twelve in their first communion dresses, and one of them had an orange marigold in her black hair, just over her ear. They danced with the men and with each other. There was an atmosphere of ease and friendly pleasure in the low, dimly lit room, and Thea could not help wondering whether the Mexicans had no jealousies or neighbourly grudges as the people in Moonstone had. There was no constraint of any kind there tonight, but a kind of natural harmony about their movements, their low conversations, their smiles.

NEW ALBUMS

1 Billy Valentine and the Universal Truth (Flying Dutchman/Acid Jazz)

2 Matana Roberts: Coin Coin Chapter Five: In the Garden (Constellation)

3 Sylvie Courvoisier: Chimaera (Intakt)

4 Darcy James Argue’s Secret Society: Dynamic Maximum Tension (Nonesuch)

5 Blind Boys of Alabama: Echoes of the South (Single Lock)

6 Fire! Orchestra: Echoes (Rune Grammofon)

7 Vilhelm Bromander: In This Forever Unfolding Moment (Thanatos)

8 Steve Lehman & Orchestre National de Jazz: Ex Machina (Pi)

9 Bob Dylan: Shadow Kingdom (Columbia Legacy)

10 PJEV/Hayden Chisholm/Kit Downes: Medna Rosa (Red Hook)

11 Tyshawn Sorey Trio: Continuing (Pi)

12 Sebastian Rochford: A Short Diary (ECM)

13 Paul Simon: Seven Psalms (Owl)

14 The Necks: Travel (Northern Spy)

15 Ambrose Akinmusire: Beauty Is Enough (Origami Harvest)

16 Cécile McLorin Salvant: Mélusine (Nonesuch)

17 Alexander Hawkins Trio: Carnival Celestial (Intakt)

18 jaimie branch: fly or die fly or die fly or die ((world war)) (International Anthem)

19 Aaron Diehl & the Knights: Zodiac Suite (Mack Avenue)

20 Julian Siegel Jazz Orchestra: Tales from the Jacquard (Whirlwind)

REISSUE / ARCHIVE

1 John Coltrane with Eric Dolphy: Evenings at the Village Gate (Impulse)

2 Mike Osborne: Starting Fires (British Progressive Jazz)

3 Miles Davis: In Concert at the Olympia Paris 1957 (Fresh Sound)

4 Bruce Springsteen: The Live Series: Songs on Keys (nugs.net)

5 Chris Cutler: Compositions and Collaborations 1972-2022 (ReR Megacorp)

6 Evan Parker: NYC 1978 (Relative Pitch)

7 Pharoah Sanders: Pharoah (Luaka Bop)

8 Derek Bailey & Paul Motian: Duo in Concert (Frozen Reeds)

9 Jon Hassell: Further Fictions (Ndeya)

10 Joy: Joy (Cadillac)

LIVE PERFORMANCE

1 Northern Soul Prom (Royal Albert Hall, July)

2 Mette Henriette + Charles Lloyd trios (Barbican, November)

3 Rickie Lee Jones (Jazz Café, June)

4 Kronos Quartet (Barbican, October)

5 Tyshawn Sorey / Pat Thomas (Café Oto, November)

6 Nik Bärtsch’s Ronin (Ronnie Scott’s Club, August)

7 Ethan Iverson: Ellington: Stride to Strings (Grange Festival, June)

8 Empirical (Vortex, May)

9 Decoy + Joe McPhee (Café Oto, July)

10 Mike Westbrook’s Band of Bands (Pizza Express, September)

MUSIC BOOKS

1 Henry Threadgill: Easily Slip into Another World: A Life in Music (Alfred A. Knopf)

2 Laura Flam & Emily Sieu Liebowitz: But Will You Love Me Tomorrow? (Hachette)

3 Richard Morton Jack: Nick Drake: The Life (John Murray)

4 Peter Watts: Denmark Street (Paradise Road)

5 Ray Padgett: Pledging My Time: Conversations with Bob Dylan Band Members (EWP Press)

FICTION

1 Rose Tremain: Absolutely & Forever (Chatto & Windus)

2 Jon Fosse (tr. Damion Searls): A Shining (Fitzcarraldo)

3 Michael Bracewell: Unfinished Business (White Rabbit)

NON-FICTION

1 Laura Cumming: Thunderclap: A Memoir of Art and Life & Sudden Death (Vintage)

2 Ned Boulting: 1923: The Mystery of Lot 212 and a Tour de France Obsession (Bloomsbury)

3 Marc Kristal: Pauline Boty: British Pop Art’s Sole Sister (Frances Lincoln)

FILMS

1 Killers of the Flower Moon (dir. Martin Scorsese)

2 One Fine Morning (dir. Mia Hansen-Løve)

3 Oppenheimer (dir. Christopher Nolan)

EXHIBITIONS

1 Nicolas de Staël (Musée d’Art Moderne, Paris)

2 Impressionists on Paper (Royal Academy, London)

3 Gwen John: Art and Life in London and Paris (Pallant House, Chichester)

Dec 7

15 Comments

Goodbye, Denny Laine

Denny Laine, who has died at his home in Florida, aged 79, was the best thing about the Moody Blues, even though he was only in the band for a couple of years, from its foundation in Birmingham to his departure two years later. It was his voice that made “Go Now”, their No 1 hit, more than just another British beat group’s cover of an American soul record.

The original of “Go Now”, by Bessie Banks, released in January 1964, was itself a classic. Produced by Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, arranged by Garry Sherman, written by Larry Banks (Bessie’s husband) and Milton Bennett, it was first released in the US on the Tiger label. “It shines,” wrote the great enthusiast Dave Godin, who released it in the UK on his Soul City label before including in the second volume of his Deep Soul Treasures series, “like an epic beacon in the history of soul music.”

Alex Murray, a young Decca A&R man, produced the Moody Blues’ version at the label’s West Hampstead studios. Denny Laine said the song had come to them via the journalist James Hamilton, a soul music fan who wrote for Record Mirror and received regular shipments of new records from the New York radio disc jockey B. Mitchel Reed. They speeded it up very slightly and took some of the gospel feel out of the 3/4 rhythm but, crucially, they kept Bessie’s unaccompanied opening vocal line, giving Laine the chance to seize listeners by the lapels: “We’ve already said goodbye…”

“Go Now” was still slipping down the charts when the band I was in supported the Moody Blues at the Dungeon Club in Nottingham in March 1965. No doubt the booking had been made before they hit No 1. In front of an audience of a couple of hundred kids in the basement premises, the Moodies were wearing their early uniform of dark blue Regency-collared double-breasted suits. As they went through their repertoire of covers, including James Brown’s “I’ll Go Crazy”, they were impressively powerful and professional. By the end of the year they were supporting the Beatles on their final UK tour. Two degrees of separation, eh?

Nov 22

35 Comments

22 november 1963

My friend Mark Lewisohn, currently at work on the second volume of his majestic history of the Beatles, broke off from his labours to remind me that today is the 60th anniversary of the UK release of the group’s second LP, an event whose significance might be hard to convey to those who weren’t around at the time.

Within days of its appearance on 22 November 1963, with the beatles was a presence in just about every home in the land containing one or more teenagers, irrespective of social class. For a pop record, that universality was a first. It also arrived just in time for Christmas parties, at which it became a fixture, whether in stately homes or council houses. In my memory, it represents the moment that sealed their acceptance as something much more than just the latest chart sensation.

Unlike Please Please Me, its predecessor, with the beatles was not conceived as a couple of hit singles plus a dozen other assorted tracks. It was a proper album: a package of 14 tracks that sold itself on its own merits. Ignored were “From Me to You” and “She Loves You”, their No. 1s of the spring and summer, and “I Want to Hold Your Hand”, which would come out a week later. That took some commercial nerve, and it paid off, with advance orders of a half a million.

The front cover, which made the album into a new kind of desirable object, is a story of its own. Robert Freeman, a 26-year-old Cambridge graduate who had been working for the new Sunday Times colour magazine, asked Brian Epstein to look at his photos of John Coltrane, Dizzy Gillespie and other jazz musicians. Once he’d been hired to shoot the cover image for the forthcoming album, the Beatles themselves showed him the moody black and white photos Astrid Kirchherr had taken of them in Hamburg. Freeman’s side-lit monochrome multiportrait of four young men holding coolly neutral expressions lifted the group out of the ingratiating banality of glossy publicity images, bringing echoes of French new wave cinema into the lives of young pop fans.

There’s another touch of the avant-garde in the use of all-lowercase sans-serif type for the title. Although by Christmas, like every other 16-year-old, I knew the whole album off by heart, it was years before I really noticed that the black letters had been subtly nudged out of strict alignment, as though they’re dancing.

Nov 20

4 Comments

Sounds from silence

Gerald Clayton, Charles Lloyd and Marvin Sewell at the Barbican 17/11/23

Charles Lloyd’s set with his Ocean Trio at the Barbican on Friday felt like a voyage into the core of jazz. Together they created music full of warmth, humanity, experience and spontaneity, ranging from the gently probing lyricism of Lloyd’s tenor saxophone, flute and tarogato through Marvin Sewell’s stunning essay in Delta blues bottleneck guitar to the brilliant pianist Gerald Clayton’s ability to reinvigorate familiar gospel and Broadway material, enriching it with his own personality.

Lloyd is 85 now, and he wears those years with a hard-won but lightly born combination of wisdom and innocence. This is a man born in Memphis, Tennessee, of African, Cherokee, Mongolian and Irish ancestry, whose employers, friends, collaborators and sidemen have included B. B. King, Howlin’ Wolf, Booker Little, Eric Dolphy, Chico Hamilton, Cannonball Adderley, Keith Jarrett, the Beach Boys, Brad Mehldau, Billy Higgins, Jason Moran, Bill Frisell and Lucinda Williams. Even now, his sense of creative adventure remains undimmed. And what you still feel at one of his concerts, even after he has delivered the benediction concluding with “Om shanti shanti shanti”, is that he can’t bear to stop now.

In one way or another, all music emerges from silence. As part of the 2023 EFG London Jazz Festival, Lloyd’s group was preceded on to the Barbican stage by another trio, that of the tenor saxophonist and composer Mette Henriette Martedatter Rølvåg, whose first album appeared on the ECM label in 2015. On Friday she, the pianist Johan Lindvall and the cellist Judith Hamann played pieces from its follow-up, Drifting, released last year. Maybe none of the company’s releases comes closer than Mette Henriette’s music to the ideal expressed in ECM’s famous early slogan: “The most beautiful sound next to silence.”

This was quiet, patient music constructed from slow lines and careful tonal combinations, but none the less intense for an absence of overt drama. Early in her career, Mette Henriette was being told that she sounded like various prominent free-jazz saxophonists before she had even heard of them, although really she sounds like no one but herself. This was the second time I’ve seen her in concert, and on both occasions she demonstrated through her music as well as her poised presence a marked ability to cast a spell over an audience who may not have known much, if anything, about her in advance.

There was no shortage of drama in the short duo set played by the pianist Pat Thomas and the drummer Tyshawn Sorey at Café Oto on Saturday night: half an hour of relentless dynamic and textural contrasts followed by a spirited encore of “A Night in Tunisia” that lasted barely a minute, so short that it didn’t even reach the middle eight. The intensity with which ideas were investigated and compressed made it seem quite enough to satisfy any listener.

Thomas belongs to the school of jazz pianism that proceeds from Ellington through Monk, Elmo Hope, Herbie Nichols and Andrew Hill, splintering off via Cecil Taylor to Alex von Schlippenbach, Misha Mengelberg and Alexander Hawkins. He’s a player of great intellectual weight but also of emotional power, and his partnership with the extraordinary Sorey produced great dividends.

I once heard Sorey hit a very large gong with unimaginable force and precision, producing a sound of such volume that I feared it was going to bring down the walls of the Haus der Berliner Festspiele. Although some of the climaxes he devised with Thomas were quite ferocious, there was no such threat to the fabric of Café Oto. His command of the dynamic spectrum is such that at one moment, when the dialogue was at its most refined, almost transparent, he spent several seconds waving his wire brushes above his drums and cymbals, striking nothing at all. In the silence, I’ll swear you could hear him playing the air.

Nov 13

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In London Town

I’ve lived in London since the last days of the 1960s, and I’m still not sure how I feel about it. But there are certainly bits of the city, usually individual streets, where I feel at home. The photo above is of Meard Street, which joins Wardour Street to Dean Street in Soho. If I could, I’d live in one of the Georgian houses on the right-hand side, dating from around 1720. On the left, at No 6, under the blue awning, is the shop of the tailor John Pearse, who opened Granny Takes a Trip at World’s End on the King’s Road in 1966. Beyond it is what was until not all that long ago, and very obviously, a bordello. On the same side of the road, on the corner of Dean Street, was the club first known as Billy’s and then as Gossips, which hosted the weekly Gaz’s Rockin Blues sessions, run by John Mayall’s DJ son, from 1980 to 1995.

That’s the historic London I cherish. Billy’s and Gossips weren’t my scene but on Meard Street I’m a minute or two’s stroll away from the sites of the 2 Is, the Flamingo, the Marquee, the Pizza Express jazz basement on Dean Street, the 100 Club, the Astoria, Les Cousins, Ronnie Scott’s original and current clubs, Bill Lewington’s and Macari’s instrument shops, the record stores of long-gone days — Dobell’s on Charing Cross Road, James Asman’s on New Row, Collet’s on New Oxford Street and its successor, Ray’s Jazz, on Shaftesbury Avenue, One Stop and Harlequin on Berwick Street, and Transat Imports on Lisle Street — and the newsagents on Old Compton Street where you could buy the latest Down Beat.

Two new books — Robert Elms’s Live! and Peter Watts’s Denmark Street — deal, in very different but equally enjoyable ways, with London’s musical history. Elms is best known as a long-standing host on BBC Radio London whose show was unaccountably moved, a couple of years ago, from its daily slot to the weekends. Unlike most people who could be described as professional Londoners, he’s never boring on the subject of his home city. He’s the ideal host: genial without being effusive, genuinely interested in what his guests have to say. And on his show you’re never far away from an excellent piece of music.

He started his career writing for The Face and the NME before becoming a prime mover of the New Romantic movement. We won’t hold that against him. Had he been born 10 years earlier, he would have been a perfect Mod. And his tastes evolved to include all sorts of music, including reggae, jazz, flamenco and tango, all of which he writes about in his new book.

Live! — subtitled Why We Go Out — is an account of his gig-going career filled with the characteristic enthusiasm of a man who describes himself as a gadfly. “I’ve been an honorary member of every passing trouser tribe,” he writes, “sported every silly haircut imaginable and enjoyed almost every style of music, bar heavy metal and opera.”

There are chapters on the time he almost became a member of Spandau Ballet, on his life as Sade Adu’s boyfriend when she was on the way up, on the eternal strangeness of Van Morrison, on his affection for and encounters with the Faces, Bruce Springsteen, Tom Waits, Paul Weller, and Gillian Welch and David Rawlings. He felt his life transformed by witnessing the Jackson 5 at Wembley Arena, saw Little Feat at the Rainbow and now regrets that doesn’t remember much about it, turned up to play football with Bob Marley wearing entirely the wrong sort of kit, listened to the young Amy Winehouse sing in his Radio London studio, and attended the last-ever gig by Dr Buzzard’s Original Savannah Band in New York (how I envy that).

Elms isn’t Lester Bangs or Simon Reynolds. He doesn’t polemicise or analyse. What he’s good at is sharing the thrill of being in the right place at the right time. To me, nowhere is this better conveyed than in his descriptions of falling for flamenco music while living in Spain (he’s sent me off to listen to José Montje Cruz, known as Camarón de la Isla) and the music of Astor Piazzolla while visiting Buenos Aires. Now it’s my turn to make him jealous: when Piazzolla’s Quinteto Tango Nuevo played the Almeida Theatre in Islington for five nights in 1985, I was there for three of them, and the experience was unforgettable.

Peter Watts’s history of Denmark Street is a diligent but also lively and amusing trawl through the origins and evolution of London’s Tin Pan Alley, a narrow street in an area of ill repute in which Lawrence Wright became the first of many music publishers to open an office in 1911. Later, at No 19, Wright would start a weekly paper called the Melody Maker in 1926, followed in 1952 by the New Musical Express, founded by Maurice Kinn at No 5.

Other important addresses on the street were No 9, where a ground floor café called La Gioconda became a meeting place for ambitious young musicians; No 4, where the Rolling Stones recorded “Not Fade Away” and their first album at Regent Sound Studios in 1964; No 24, the home of KPM, specialists in jingles and library music; No 6, where Hipgnosis — Storm Thorgerson and Po Powell — designed elaborate album covers for Pink Floyd and 10cc and where the embryonic Sex Pistols lodged in a back room, later taken over by the embryonic Bananarama; and No 7, where the Tin Pan Alley Club offered a welcome to assorted crooks and gangsters.

Denmark Street: London’s Street of Sound preserves for posterity the story of a piece of London now half-destroyed by a development that has turned the top end of Charing Cross Road into something resembling a cross between Times Square and the Las Vegas Strip: a garish high-tech entertainment facility that could have been born in the imagination of J. G. Ballard at his most dystopian. Like the east side of the bottom end of Charing Cross Road or the east side of Berwick Street, the south side of Denmark Street survives relatively untouched, forced to stare across at its latest iteration.

* Live! by Robert Elms is published by Unbound. Denmark Street by Peter Watts is published by Paradise Road.

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