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Oct 16

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Terry Riley in Japan

In the early weeks of 2020, at the outset of a world tour, Terry Riley was in Japan when the Covid-19 epidemic began. The tour was cancelled. He was 85 years old, and his wife — the mother of their three children — had died five years earlier. In his words: “As I had no particular place to go, I decided to stay for a while.” He’s still there.

Before long he was recording in a friend’s studio. That’s not unexpected. What might be surprising is the nature of the resulting album, which consists mostly of solo piano interpretations of Broadway songs with a couple of original pieces, one of them featuring a synthesiser.

Before he became celebrated as the composer of In C, A Rainbow in Curved Air, Cadenza on the Night Plain and Salome Dances for Peace, and as the creator of beguiling extended organ improvisations given titles like Persian Surgery Dervishes and Shri Camel, Riley played the piano in San Francisco bars. When I was writing the book from which this blog takes its name, I talked to him about his experience of visiting the city’s jazz clubs — particularly the Blackhawk — to hear Miles Davis and John Coltrane. Jazz was an important part of his own evolving music. The nature of this new album, he says in the sleeve note, was suggested by friends and family members who had heard him warming up for his solo concerts by improvising on standards.

The album, called STANDARDSAND: Kobuchizawa Sessions #1, begins with “Isn’t It Romantic”, “Blue Room” and “The Best Thing for You (Would Be Me)”. These all very poised and charming mainstream-modern treatments of well known items from the American Songbook. Riley’s touch is sure, his conception that of a somewhat less introspective Bill Evans but his lines nevertheless probing and sometimes surprising. In particular, “Blue Room” is beautifully interpreted. Then comes “Round Midnight”, in which he treats Monk’s great ballad with proper respect and evident fondness while discreetly finding one or two little extensions and decorations that perhaps no one has thought of before among the many thousands of versions of a tune currently celebrating its 80th anniversary.

“Ballad for Sara and Tadashi”, a discursive original, is given in two versions. The first is for solo piano, and follows seamlessly on from the standards. After a six-minute piece for synthesiser titled “Pasha Rag”, which works its way towards a light-hearted reminder that ragtime piano was among Riley’s early accomplishments, “Ballad of Sara and Tadashi” returns with the synth adding an electro shadow-texture to his pensive melodic lines.

There’s a return to Broadway with “Yesterday”, eight minutes of variations on Jerome Kern’s melody swimming in some sort of light electronic reverb against synth backwashes, and Jimmy Van Heusen’s “It Could Happen to You”, the tolling of isolated chords introducing an unadorned treatment somewhere between pensive and sombre, and for me the most satisfying thing here. The album ends with a 43-second miniature in which voices apparently singing some sort of ritual chant fading in and out before they’ve even had time to register properly. A little jeu d’ésprit, maybe, to close one of the more surprising additions to the long and varied discography of one of the most extraordinary musicians of our times.

* Terry Riley’s STANDARDSAND: Kobuchizawa Sessions #1 is released in Japan on Star/Rainbow Records. The uncredited photograph is from the booklet with the album.

Oct 13

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The Isleys’ folk-rock moment

Dress me up for battle when all I want is peace / Those of us who pay the price come home with the least…

The news of Rudolph Isley’s death took me back to a particularly cherished period in the Isley Brothers’ long history: the time between 1971 and 1976 when they found an effective way of bringing Laurel Canyon singer-songwriter music into their world of gospel, soul and R&B.

After putting the commercially disappointing Motown years behind them and scoring a huge hit in 1969 on their own label, T-Neck, with the funky “It’s Your Thing”, the three of them — Ronald, Rudolph and O’Kelly — posed for the cover of the 1971 album Givin’ It Back in sepia tones and casual dress with acoustic guitars. The album included Bob Dylan’s “Lay Lady Lay”, a conga-driven version of Stephen Stills’ “Love The One You’re With”, James Taylor’s “Fire and Rain” and Neil Young’s “Ohio”. With their next album, Brother, Brother, Brother in 1972, they covered three songs from Carole King’s Southern California period, including a perfectly paced 10-minute version of “It’s Too Late”. The cover of that album was a bleached-out black and white triple portrait, like a Black Panthers pamphlet.

The secret behind this new direction for a veteran group was the arrival of three younger members. Ernie and Marvin Isley on guitar and bass guitar and Chris Jasper on keyboards brought with them new sounds and new attitudes. In 1973 this realignment was made explicit in the title of the group’s first album under a new deal with Columbia Records: 3+3 was one of the best albums of the decade, full of wonderful tracks, including a couple of original compositions, “If You Were There” and “What It Comes Down To”, that showed how their writing had been positively influenced by the borrowed material and how far their arrangements had moved from standard R&B moves.

The cover picture may have been back in full high-styled Soul Men mode, which perhaps betrayed an uncertainty about the response from their established following, but musically the album persisted with their new direction and contained their masterpiece from this period. “Don’t Let Me Be Lonely Tonight” was a decent song when James Taylor recorded it on his fourth solo album, One Man Dog, in 1971. In the Isleys’ hands it took on a new dimension.

The opening three seconds alone are magical: Ernie’s acoustic guitar figure, Marvin’s bass, Jasper’s piano and George Morland’s drums are like an indrawn breath, gently tipping Brother Ronald into the opening line. “Do me wrong, do me right, baby / Tell me lies, but hold me tight.” The vocal delivery is exquisite, every phrase subtly teased and inflected, bringing all the arts of the Baptist church-trained soul singer to bear on the task of creating emotional torment, without for a moment overdoing it. The rhythm section remain focused on their task of providing one of the greatest singers of his type with a platform of impeccable steadiness and infinite sensitivity.

All that — and an almost equally stunning version of Todd Rundgren’s “Hello, It’s Me” on Live It Up in 1973 — would lead in 1976 to “Harvest for the World”, their own composition, a thoughtful and carefully crafted protest song in which all these resources are brought to bear: the gentle but resilient strummed acoustic guitar, the chorded acoustic piano, the supple bass underpinning, the handclaps on the backbeat and the shrewdly timed tom-tom turnarounds, deployed with a gentle restraint and a quiet grace that strengthen the song’s impact. The two lines quoted at the top show how the message of a good anti-war song can pass from one generation to the next, always sadly relevant.

Oct 7

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Sly Stone’s testament

On Thursday, September 3, 1970, a few days after Sly and the Family Stone had appeared at the Isle of Wight festival, I had an appointment to interview him for the Melody Maker at the Londonderry House Hotel on Park Lane. He blew me out, and the appointment was rearranged.

I turned up again at the hotel promptly at 6.30pm on Monday, September 14. I was shown up to his suite and invited to take a seat in the drawing room, where I could wait for him to emerge. Then I was left alone.

The door to the bedroom was ajar. From inside I could hear the sounds of what sounded like two people. They were intimate sounds. Giggling. Gasping. Other noises. It was hard to know whether someone was putting on a show for my benefit, but I chose to assume it wasn’t an invitation to join in.

So I stayed in my chair and waited. The sounds continued. No one emerged. After what may have been 15 or 20 minutes, I gave up and left, without an interview. Two nights later I saw Sly and his band give a performance at the Lyceum that started late and lasted barely an hour but in the end comfortably overcame the handicap of a very poor PA system.

What had been going on? There’s a clue in Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin), Sly’s new autobiography. Writing about that visit to London, he mentions meeting up with Ginger Baker. “Ginger showed off some high-quality coke, pharmaceutical grade, and then he mentioned a big party that night where Jimi Hendrix would be. He had an idea of sharing the coke with Jimi, only the best for the best. I was eager to see Jimi. We were scheduled to have a jam session the night before, or maybe that night, but Jimi had gone to Ronnie Scott’s instead to jam with Eric Burdon and War. And Jimi wasn’t at the party either. ‘We’ll catch him tomorrow,’ someone said. As it turns out, there was no tomorrow, at least for Jimi.”

Most drug-related deaths of stars who came up in the ’60s happened fast, their lives ending while they were still shockingly young. By contrast, Sly’s happened in slow motion, killing first his concentration and then his creativity, and of course it isn’t over yet.

Now he’s 80, apparently freed from his long-term crack addiction and seemingly in good enough shape to have given a co-writer, Ben Greenman, the material from which to fashion a ghosted autobiography. I read it without, I’m afraid, much enthusiasm. You may feel differently about the blurred, indistinct story of a man whose most characteristic utterance, at least as far as the specificity of the narrative is concerned, is “I heard about it later, but it was too late.”

He was, of course, a genius. If you were around in 1967, you’ll know that “Dance to the Music” proposed nothing less than a new kind of pop music. The only other record of that year which brought black and white into such fruitful creative miscegenation was “Purple Haze”. Out of those two records came an entire universe. With another hit single, “Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin)”, Sly kicked funk up a gear. And There’s a Riot Goin’ On, in all its self-indulgence, is one of the key documents of the early ’70s. Nothing quite chills the blood like that rusted-out voice opening a No. 1 single with “One child grows up to be / Somebody that just loves to learn / Another child grows up to be / Somebody you’d just love to burn.”

So it made me sad to read this book, a chronicle of waste and unreliability. What might Sly Stone have achieved, had he grow out of his addictions much earlier in the way that, say, John Coltrane did? Some will respond that what he achieved was enough, that he could only do those things by being himself, and maybe that’s right. Many of those people will no doubt enjoy what he has to say, and I wouldn’t want to put them off.

His ghostwriter has clearly mined the cuttings file in order to provide the detail. That makes reading it an uneven experience, as passages of woozy semi-recall concerning family feuds or disputes with managers and record companies are suddenly interrupted by something curiously precise, whose source might be a TV interview preserved on YouTube. Sadly, my experience of failing to interview him means that I can’t tell you whether Greenman has found a way, as a good ghost should, to translate Sly’s authentic voice on to the page. But in the end I didn’t feel I’d been told anything surprising. It’s the book of the guy who, one September evening in 1970, wouldn’t come out of his bedroom.

* Sly Stone’s Thank You (Falettin Me Be Mice Elf Agin) is published in the UK by White Rabbit on 17 October.

Oct 3

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The great-grandmother’s tale

The series of audio collages that Matana Roberts calls Coin Coin, now reaching its fifth chapter (of a projected 12) with the release of In the Garden, may one day come to be seen as a kind of Bayeux Tapestry of Black American life: an extended narrative portrayal of the struggles, the pain, the joy, the successes and reverses of the successive generations which Roberts, through her own family’s post-emancipation history, can touch and bring back to imagined life.

Each chapter has a theme and here is how, in her sleeve note, she introduces the latest:

There is something quite rancid going on in America right now, more so than any time I have seen… a growing cohort of ghoul-like humans who seem to think that your body does not belong to you. We have seen some of this before, and we eradicated some of the issues. It wasn’t perfect how we did it, but we did it. And yet, like a never-ending train wreck, here we are again.

She is referring to last year’s decision of the US Supreme Court, stacked with conservatives during the Trump administration, to reverse the decision in the case of Roe vs Wade, made in 1973 and guaranteeing every woman’s constitutional right to an abortion. That was a landmark case, won after a long campaign, and its reversal was equally significant in what it said about the prevailing social tides.

She continues: “The lack of access to safe and legal abortion services disproportionately affects marginalised and low-income communities, who often lack the resources and support to obtain safe reproductive health care. Reproductive health care includes abortion. The issue specifically of black folks’ mortality concerning abortion is a complex and sensitive one.” They are, she says, three or four times more likely to die from pregnancy-related causes than their white counterparts.

As usual, Roberts tell stories of women, apparently drawn from her family’s history, affected by those tides: stories of survival in response to oppression, sometimes tragic. This one is based on the story of an ancestor, three generations back, who “perished at a young age, leaving her growing children motherless”. She did not have to die, Roberts says, but “the negative consequences of her death have reverberated down through generations in my family line, in the same way that a similar resounding might happen to someone else’s ancestral line generations from today.”

Her brilliance as a musician is to find the tones and blends that underscore, reflect and amplify these stories, carrying the sounds of both the past and the present in their combinations of reeds, fiddle, tin whistles, percussion, electronics and voices. The turbulent, swirling horns of the mid-’60s “fire music” (including the composer’s own eloquent alto saxophone), the tintinnabulating “little instruments” of the Art Ensemble of Chicago and Corey Smythe’s piano are blended with a simulacrum of the fife-and-drum bands of the 19th century to create an orchestral language that functions as a backdrop to her recitations while richly endowed with the capacity to move to the forefront when required.

Roberts inhabits her ancestor’s story, her voice and the music a palimpsest through which the outlines of history emerge. She is a superb narrator, wry and vigorous, and her alto saxophone solos are a match for her recitations in emotional impact. “At least I know through the eyes of my great-granddaughter [that] I am seen and I have been heard,” she concludes, channeling proudly, and suddenly, in Eliot’s phrase, “all time is eternally present.”

* Matana Roberts’s Coin Coin Chapter Five: In the Garden is released on the Constellation label, available along with its predecessors at https://matana-roberts.bandcamp.com/album/coin-coin-chapter-five-in-the-garden

Sep 28

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Miles à l’Olympia

Miles Davis arrived in Paris on the morning of November 30, 1957 for a tour booked by a local promoter, Marcel Romano. He was met at the airport by the singer and actress Juliette Gréco, whose lover he had become during his first visit to France, in 1949, and by the young film director Louis Malle, who wanted him to provide music for the soundtrack to his film Ascenseur pour l’échafaud.

That same night the tour began at the historic Olympia music hall on the Boulevard des Capucines, with Miles at the head of a band completed by the 20-year-old Franco-American tenor saxophone prodigy Barney Wilen, the great American drummer Kenny Clarke, and two excellent French musicians, the pianist René Urtreger and the bassist Pierre Michelot. They performed, as Urtreger told his biographer, Agnès Desarthe, “sans répétition” — without rehearsal.

The soundtrack was recorded on December 4, with the same quintet; it was a turning point in Miles’s music, representing a move away from the standard ballads-and-blues repertoire towards pieces of indeterminate length based on minimal harmonic information rather than closed-loop chord sequences, played live in fragments as Davis watched the film being projected on to a screen in the studio.

Meanwhile, however, the material was more conventional when the band played at the Olympia and at another concert in Amsterdam’s Concertgebouw a few days later, followed by a return to Paris for three weeks at the Club Saint-Germain, apparently arranged when Romano failed to secure the concert bookings across Europe for which he had been hoping. After a concert in Brussels on December 20, Miles flew back to New York, where he began putting together the sextet that would record Milestones early in the new year.

The Amsterdam concert was recorded for radio broadcast, and has been bootlegged several times, most recently on a CD on the Lone Hill label, with lamentably anachronistic packaging and a rather brittle, toppy sound. No complete recording of the Olympia concert was known to exist until, after Romano’s death, his nephew and heir found a set of reel-to-reel tapes among his possessions. He sold them to Jordi Pujol, the Barcelona-based specialist in historical reissues, who commissioned the audio engineer Marc Doutrepont to restore and master them. Doutrepont has achieved a sound as good as the best live recordings of the time: true, clear, warm and perfectly balanced.

Davis and Clarke were old friends and colleagues, and the trumpeter had played with Urtreger and Michelot during his second trip to Europe with the Birdland All Stars, 12 months earlier. Wilen was new to him, but the whole band sounds at ease from the start of their first appearance as a unit. They play a dozen pieces: “Solar”, “Four”, “What’s New”, “No Moe”, “Lady Bird”, “Tune Up”, “I’ll Remember April”, “Bags’ Groove”, “‘Round Midnight”, “Now’s the Time”, “Walkin'” and “The Theme”.

The American writer and musician Mike Zwerin, a steel baron’s son who had played trombone with Davis’s nonet at the Royal Roost in 1948 (aged 18!), was in the audience at the Olympia. Much later Zwerin wrote that the concert had begun with “Walkin'” and that — “in an entrance worthy of Nijinsky” — Miles appeared on stage only midway through that opening tune, to wild applause. No sign of any such thing here.

Miles’s tone and attack were at their most exquisite at this time, between the sessions for Miles Ahead and Milestones, the alertness of his mind ensuring that the poignancy of his sound never became self-indulgent. His solo on “Four” is the sort of thing, like his improvisations on the studio versions of “Milestones” and “So What”, that could be transcribed and studied for the details of its nuanced perfection. He takes “What’s New” as a solo ballad feature, producing elegant variations that can be listened to over and over again.

Wilen, precociously poised and inventive, gets Tadd Dameron’s “Lady Bird”, “I’ll Remember April” and a bouncy “Now’s the Time” to himself with the rhythm section. They are respectively the fifth, seventh and tenth tracks on the album, making me wonder if this is the same order as the actual set list. Would Miles have left the stage and returned so often? Given that he had only stepped off a transatlantic flight a few hours earlier, perhaps so.

Other joys include the trumpeter’s intense blues playing on “Bags’ Groove” and his relaxed exchanges with the immaculate Clarke on Sonny Rollins’s “No Moe”. A couple of fluffed phrases at the start of “Walkin'” are rare blemishes on a a release whose artistic value is the equal of its historical interest. If you love Miles, don’t miss this.

* The Miles Davis Quintet’s In Concert at the Olympia Paris 1957 is on Fresh Sound Records. The uncredited photo is from the booklet accompanying the album. If you want to know why the soundtrack to the Louis Malle movie — released in the UK as Lift to the Scaffold — was such a significant moment in Davis’s career, you might like to read the book after which this blog is named: The Blue Moment: Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue and the Remaking of Modern Music (Faber & Faber).

Sep 26

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Exhuming Nico

It was out of sheer curiosity that I went along to Café Oto last night to hear a performance of Nico’s The Marble Index by the string quartet Apartment House (Mira Benjamin and Chihiro Ono on violins, Bridget Carey on viola and Anton Lukoszevieze on cello) augmented by Kerry Yong on piano and other keyboards. The part of Nico was taken by the singer Francesca Fargion.

The room was sold out and the audience expectant. The original album, in which John Cale added his viola, other instruments and post-production touches to Nico’s seven songs, has a special status within the history of rock: barely half an hour long, it arrived as a message from a different world, seemingly shaped by the sensibility of European art-song and the practices of the American classical avant-garde, completely uncompromising in the challenge it offered the listener in 1968.

I suppose the nearest it ever came to being played in concert in its original form during Nico’s lifetime was when she performed a couple of its songs with accompaniment by Cale and Brian Eno at the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin in 1974, where they were received with the mixture of applause and outright derision that had greeted the album’s release six years earlier. I certainly never expected to hear the music performed live again after her death in Ibiza 35 years ago.

It was brave of Yong to attempt a modified transcription of the full work, and of Fargion to deliver Nico’s words and melodies. Of course it wasn’t remotely like hearing Nico herself, whose strong, unabashed, wilfully inflexible and uninflected voice defined the music every bit as much as the sound of her harmonium and her strangely memorable melodies, with their echoes of folk tunes and lullabies.

Very wisely, Fargion did not attempt an imitation. But although she is a fine, classically trained singer with a pleasant tone, her interpretations seemed colourless, fading into the strings rather than dominating them. Only “Frozen Warnings”, where the string writing was at its most economical, and “Nibelungen”, a lovely acappella song unreleased until Elektra put out an expanded edition in 1991, allowed the emergence of an attractive poignancy at a worthwhile creative variance from that of the original.

If you wanted to do something really interesting with The Marble Index, to try and match its own inherent challenge, you’d probably have to take it apart and reconstruct it in a different form. This was a careful and respectful performance, observing some of the details of the original, such as the tiny vocal echo on “No One Is There” and a modest version of the pealing piano on “Evening of Light”, although the sound of the harmonium was not heard until “Julius Caesar (Memento Hodie)”, the fifth song in the sequence.

The audience listened intently, and the warmth of their response spoke of the veneration in which this extraordinary piece is now held. In the end, though, what was completely missing was the sense of outright shock and enigmatic purpose that the original artifact itself still conveys, 55 years later, and which is such a part of its eternally untranslatable meaning.

Sep 25

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Requiem for a soft-rocker

Terry Kirkman (extreme left) with the Association at the Monterey Pop Festival

The members of the Association were still wearing suits and ties when they played the Monterey Pop Festival in 1967, the opening act on a bill including Jimi Hendrix, the Who, Jefferson Airplane, Big Brother and the Holding Company and other heroes of the new counter-culture. Their qualification for inclusion might have been their first Top 10 single, “Along Comes Mary”, a three-minute proto-psychedelic masterpiece written by Tandyn Almer.

The follow-up, “Cherish”, a No. 1, had swiftly recast them as purveyors of soft-rock before the great “Pandora’s Golden Heebie Jeebies”, with its koto intro and inner-light lyric, earned praise from no less a psychedelic authority than Dr Timothy Leary, despite going no higher than No. 35. But then “Windy” (another No. 1) and “Never My Love” (No. 2) put them firmly back in the middle of the road, where they have remained in the public mind ever since.

Anyone interested enough to turn over “Never My Love”, however, found a B-side that restated their claim to hippie credibility. It was called “Requiem for the Masses” and it begins with military snare drum rolls introducing a choir singing acappella: “Requiem aeternam, requiem aeternam…” Then a young man’s voice sings the opening lines against an acoustic guitar: “Mama, mama, forget your pies / Have faith they won’t get cold / And turn your eyes to the bloodshot sky / Your flag is flying full / At half-mast…” The snare drum tattoo continues behind the second verse: “Red was the colour of his blood flowing thin / Pallid white was the colour of his lifeless skin / Blue was the colour of the morning sky / He saw looking up from the ground where he died / It was the last thing every seen by him…” The backing falls away and the unaccompanied choir returns: “Kyrie eleison, kyrie eleison…”

And here’s the chorus: “Black and white were the figures that recorded him / Black and white was the newsprint he was mentioned in / Black and white was the question that so bothered him / He never asked, he was taught not to ask / But was on his lips as they buried him.” The song ends with a lonely bugle against snare drum and muffled tom-tom.

In 1967 this song could be about only one thing: the war in Vietnam. Of course there already had been “Masters of War” from Dylan, “Universal Soldier” from Buffy Sainte-Marie and “Eve of Destruction” from P. F. Sloan. And perhaps “Requiem for the Masses” is not a truly great record, but it stands alongside things like Country Joe and the Fish’s “I-Feel-Like-I’m-Fixin’-to-Die Rag” and Earth Opera’s “The Great American Eagle Tragedy” as an ambitious and powerful contemporary statement from the world of white rock music.

Its composer was Terry Kirkman, a founder member of the group, who sang, played percussion and brass and woodwind instruments (maybe including the bugle part). Before “Requiem for the Masses”, he had written “Cherish” and another soft-rock classic, “Everything That Touches You”. Born in rural Kansas, he was brought up in Los Angeles, where he studied music, but it was while working as a salesman in Hawaii that he met Jules Alexander, with whom he would go on to found several groups in LA, including the Inner Tubes (with Mama Cass and David Crosby), before the Association came together as a six-piece band in 1965. He left for the first time in 1972, returned in 1979, left again in 1984, and thereafter took part in various reunion concerts while working as an addiction counsellor.

Terry Kirkman died this week, aged 83. It would be absolutely wrong to underestimate the courage it must have taken for a band famous for their soft-rock hits to record such an unequivocal song of protest during a year in which the B52s were pounding Hanoi and Lyndon Johnson was sending ever more ground troops into the fight against the Vietcong, still with support from the majority of the American public. Respect to him, then.

Sep 24

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Mike Westbrook’s Band of Bands

From left: Mike Westbrook, Kate Westbrook, Karen Street, Pete Whyman, Chris Biscoe, Marcus Vergette (out of shot: Coach York)

You might have noticed, Mike Westbrook said as the second of today’s two lunchtime sets at the Pizza Express drew to a close, that a lot of this music we’ve been playing has something to do with the blues. And then he quoted Duke Ellington: “When times get tough, I write another blues.” That, Westbrook said, is what he found himself doing rather a lot these days. And then he and the new septet he calls his Band of Bands played “Gas, Dust, Stone”, which he described as “a blues for the planet”.

Its slowly wandering theme, first sung by Kate Westbrook and then voiced for the alto saxophones of Chris Biscoe and Pete Whyman and the accordion of Karen Street, reminded me at times of Ellington’s world-weary “4:30 Blues” before the mood switched, charging into the 12/8 of Charles Mingus’s “Wednesday Night Prayer Meeting”, powered by Marcus Vergette’s bass and Coach York’s drums, with a beautiful Street solo.

Westbrook, who is 87, formed his first band in Plymouth in 1958, and the Band of Bands celebrates longevity. Mike and Kate have been working, writing and performing together for 50 years. Biscoe first joined them 40 years ago, to create the Westbrook Trio. Street and Whyman have been with them on various projects for 30 years. Vergette and York, the newcomers, were called to the colours a mere 20 years ago, and are now the heartbeat of the Uncommon Orchestra.

The septet is both an expansion of the trio and a reduction of the big band, capable of handling everything from the fast bebop of the opening “Glad Day”, one of Westbrook’s pieces inspired by William Blake, through a brilliantly recast version of Billy Strayhorn’s “Johnny Come Lately” to the slow-rolling gospel cadences of “Blues for Terenzi” and the open spaces of “Unsigned Panorama”, with marvellous unaccompanied solos by Whyman (on clarinet) and Street.

Several songs from Fine ‘n’ Yellow, their 2010 song cycle, made an impression. Throughout “Yellow Dog”, York maintained a pulse (on his beautifully clear Murat Diril ride cymbal) three times that of the rest of the band, allowing Biscoe to float in his typically expressive solo between the drummer’s tempo, the much slower one being paced by Vergette, and the unstated one in between. “My Lover’s Coat”, finely sung, seemed to have “Blue Monk” in its bones.

If there were frequent reminders of how thoroughly Westbrook has metabolised his love of Ellington, Mingus and Monk, there was also evidence of a new enthusiasm for the songs of Frederick Hollander, a German composer of film music. Born Friedrich Hollaender in London in 1896 and brought up in Berlin, he wrote for Max Reinhardt’s theatre productions, accompanied artists in the Weimar-era cabarets, and wrote the music for Josef von Sternberg’s The Blue Angel, including “Falling in Love Again”, delivered by the film’s star, Marlene Dietrich. Leaving Germany when the Nazis took power, he arrived in Hollywood in 1934, anglicised his name, and had written for more than 100 films before his return to Germany in 1956, where he died in 1976.

One of those Hollywood films was A Foreign Affair, a 1948 comedy-drama set in post-war Berlin, directed by Billy Wilder and again starring Dietrich. Kate Westbrook delivered two of Hollander’s songs from that film, both concerned with the perils of emotional and sexual transactions: the sardonic “Black Market”, a Weill-esque piece on which she departed from the text to display her command of vocal effects, and “Illusions”, a gorgeous ballad on which she was exquisitely supported by Street and Biscoe.

Pointing out to the audience that this was the first public appearance of the Band of Bands, Westbrook expressed the hope that there would many more. An album devoted to the music of Frederick Hollander might not be such a bad next step*.

* See a comment below.

Sep 23

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Fire of London

The flight of Mike Osborne’s alto saxophone was like that of the swift: its entire existence was spent on the wing, soaring high or swooping in shallow dives, twisting back on itself before arcing again towards the heavens, as if desperate to avoid contact with the ground.

Something remarkable was happening in London in the early ’70s, at places like the 100 Club, the Phoenix in Cavendish Square, the Plough in Stockwell, and Peanuts, a regular session run by Osborne at a place near Liverpool Street station. A few dozen young musicians, most of whom had emerged late in the previous decade as sidemen in the bands of Mike Westbrook, Chris McGregor, Graham Collier and John Stevens, were now playing together in shifting combinations. The economics of jazz dictated a preference for small groups, and one of the most remarkable was Osborne’s trio, completed by two South African emigrés, Harry Miller on bass and Louis Moholo on drums.

What I remember from that scene is the absolute lack of pretension. There was no interest in surfaces or self-presentation. The musicians appeared before the audience wearing the clothes they’d arrived in. There wasn’t much in the way of introducing or explaining — but neither was there the kind of self-conscious detachment that even someone as natural as the bassist Dave Holland, once a member of that London scene, felt compelled to adopt on stage when he crossed the Atlantic and joined Miles Davis.

On the bandstand, the Mike Osborne Trio was typical of its time and milieu in that there was only one priority: to burn. Strategies learnt from Coltrane, Coleman and Ayler were bent to their own ends, creating a platform for their own individual voices. Osborne loved Ornette and Jackie McLean, his fellow altoists (I remember a copy of the latter’s great Blue Note LP Destination…Out! propped beside the record player in his flat when I interviewed him in 1970), but he became one of the era’s great originals on his instrument.

Sadly, his own era didn’t last long. In 1959 he arrived from Hereford as an 18-year-old to study at the Guildhall in London. Fifteen years later he suffered a breakdown at the end of a six-week gig at the Paris Opéra, where he had played onstage for a ballet alongside the other two members of the group SOS, his fellow saxophonists Alan Skidmore and John Surman. Prolonged treatment meant that there would be only sporadic gigs until 1982, when he returned to Hereford, his playing days at an end. He died of cancer in 2007, aged 65.

His discography is not huge, but it is of extraordinary quality, whether in sessions with Westbrook, SOS, the one-off quartet of the trumpeter Ric Colbeck, Surman’s octet, the big bands of Kenny Wheeler and John Warren, Miller’s Isipingo, McGregor’s Brotherhood of Breath, or a duo with Stan Tracey. And now there’s a wonderful addition in the shape of a session said to have been recorded (surprisingly well) at the 100 Club in December 1970, where Ossie, Harry and Louis were joined by Skidmore to make a fire-breathing quartet of ferocious intensity but immaculate balance.

As I remember him, Ossie always played with his eyes closed, everything else shut out. His tone is at its most beautiful on this session, whether making an assembly of staccato phrases or, more frequently, sliding through faster-than-light near-glissandi that never lose coherence or a sense of proportion. At this stage of his life, his emotions had located the perfect musical register. No wonder, after he had dropped out of SOS, Surman and Skidmore found him impossible to replace, and the group’s own short life was over.

On a winter’s night in an Oxford Street basement in 1970, Skidmore, Miller and Moholo matched him every step of the way, and Starting Fires is a very appropriate title for an album containing 40 minutes of music that never lacks light and shade but is driven by its unwavering sense of purpose. Short, epigrammatic themes appear and then dissolve, giving shape to the performance. Near the beginning and again towards the end, the two horns improvise together quite brilliantly, twining and tangling with complete commitment. It’s life-and-death stuff, which is how so much of this music felt at the time, and never more so than when Mike Osborne was on the stand.

* Mike Osborne’s Starting Fires: Live at the 100 Club 1970 is out now on the British Progressive Jazz label. I don’t know who took the photograph. My Guardian obituary of Osborne is here.

Sep 21

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The voices of Thom Bell

On November 5 in Brooklyn, the Spinners will be be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Known to British fans first as the Motown Spinners and then as the Detroit Spinners, in order to distinguish them from a Liverpool folk group active between 1958 and 1989 under the same name, their string of hits began with “I’ll Be Around”, “Could It Be I’m Falling in Love”, “Ghetto Child” and “One of a Kind (Love Affair)”. All four were plucked from their self-titled first album for the Atlantic label, after they had moved from Motown and came under the supervision of the producer, arranger, pianist, songwriter and genius Thom Bell. Subsequent successes included “Mighty Love”, “I’m Coming Home”, “The Rubberband Man”, “Then Came You” (with Dionne Warwick) and “They Just Can’t Stop It (The Games People Play)”.

Only one member survives from the original quintet, formed in 1954, and its Bell-produced incarnation of the 1970s. Henry Fambrough, their baritone singer, will have to stand in for the rest of them: Pervis Jackson, Billy Henderson, C. P. Spencer, Bobbie Smith, Philippé “Soul” Wynne and John Edwards are all gone, along with several others who passed through the ranks at other times (and, of course, Bell himself, who died in December 2022: obit here). There is still a group of younger men legitimately touring as the Spinners, but Fambrough, who is 85, retired earlier this year.

Several other R&B vocal groups of their era, such as the Dells and the Temptations, used more than one lead singer, occasionally within the same song. None, however, pulled it off with as much ease and elegance as the Spinners. On “Could It I’m Falling in Love” and “Mighty Love”, the smooth-toned Smith started off before Wynne took over to add a rougher, more gospel-hued and improvisatory delivery. Such combinations were still working in 1976 when Jackson’s bass introduction gave way first to Smith and Henderson and finally to Wynne on “I Must Be Living for a Broken Heart” on their sixth album, Yesterday and Today.

This sophisticated update of a 1950s doo-wop vocal strategy was typical of Bell, who made great records with the Delfonics and the Stylistics before reaching his peak with the Spinners. The early hits were characterised by an adaptation of the thudding tom-tom backbeat heard on Al Green’s Willie Mitchell-produced hits, again given an extra coat of luxury varnish. Recorded at Sigma Sound in Philadelphia, with the great studio engineer Joe Tarsia, they benefitted from the musicians who became known known as MFSB: Roland Chambers, Bobby Eli and Norman Harris on guitars, Ronnie Baker on bass guitar, Earl Young on drums, Larry Washington on percussion and Vince Montana on vibes, with Bell himself on piano.

One of his trademarks was a subtle use of syncopation and uneven meters: the clipping of a beat from a single bar here, the addition of a couple of extra beats at the end of a line, or the shuffling of stresses that could make it sound, on the choruses of “Then Came You” and “Are You Ready For Love” (written for Elton John), as though he’d turned the beat around when in fact he hadn’t. These little things both seized and satisfied the ear. And no one, not even Burt Bacharach, could integrate a concert harp or an oboe into an R&B record as smoothly as Bell.

Smoothness without blandness was his trademark, as can be heard throughout the eight albums he made with the group, now included intact on a seven-CD box compiled by Joe Marchese and the veteran British journalist David Nathan. You can hit the button on just about any track and find something nourishing (perhaps with the exception of an ill-advised big band jazz version of “Don’t Let the Green Grass Fool You” on that first album, an experiment not repeated). And occasionally you’ll find a masterpiece.

Two of them are on the second album, Mighty Love. The first, written by Charles Simmons, Joseph Jefferson and Bruce Hawes, three of Bell’s regular songwriters is “Love Don’t Love Nobody”, Wynne’s finest seven minutes on a deep-soul track I’ve written about at some length before (here). The second, penned by Bunny Sigler, James Sigler and Morris Bailey, is “He’ll Never Love You Like I Do”, one of those songs about a poor boy pressing his claim on the object of his affection: “His standard of living, his social rating / There’s nothing he can’t afford / He made you think I ain’t it / But when it’s love, I can give you more…”

It opens with an octave guitar, Wes Montgomery-style, accompanied by piano, soon doubled by a muted trumpet and cushioned by a purring bass and Don Renaldo’s gentle strings. Bobbie Smith begins the song, delivering the opening lines in a confiding croon before Wynne takes over halfway through the first verse, the two reversing the sequence in the second verse, with the joins at first barely audible (although Wynne’s ad libs give him away). And just as Motown’s Holland-Dozier-Holland had used the female chorus of the Andantes to lend an extra emotional dimension to the Four Tops’ records in the ’60s, so Bell adds the voices of Barbara Ingram, Yvette Benson, Carla Benton and Linda Creed, his frequent co-composer, to create a refined blend with those of the Spinners themselves.

Like so much of Bell’s output, this track demonstrates the power of restraint, a quality evident throughout these fine albums. Even after the advent of disco, bringing adjustments to rhythmic emphases and the occasional flicker of wah-wah guitar, and with the arrival of John Edwards to replace Wynne halfway through the making of Yesterday and Today in 1977, the combination remained, and remains, exemplary.

* The Spinners’ Ain’t No Price on Happiness: The Thom Bell Studio Recordings (1972-79) is out on 29 September on SoulMusic Records. If anyone knows who took the fine photograph of Bell at the top of this piece, I’d be very pleased to add a credit.

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