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Sep 4

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The return of Pete Atkin

It’s often said, with an air of puzzled regret, that Britain lacks the equivalent of chanson. We certainly had an influential Anglo-Scottish folk tradition, and we had the Beatles and Radiohead. But we didn’t exactly have a Georges Brassens, a Léo Ferré or a Jacques Brel. There never seemed to be a market for that kind of grown-up, ballad-based popular music. Some might say that Jake Thackray, the sardonic, saturnine Yorkshireman who died 20 years ago, came the closest. Others would make the case for Pete Atkin, who emerged at the end of the 1960s singing songs in which he put the melodies to the lyrics of Clive James, and who returned to live performance at the Pheasantry in Chelsea on Saturday night.

For a few years at the beginning of the ’70s, it looked as though Atkin and James, who had met as members of the Cambridge Footlights, might be on the brink of some sort of commercial success with albums such as Beware of the Beautiful Stranger, Driving Through Mythical America and A King at Nightfall. But things tended to get in the way. One example would be Kenny Everett getting sacked from the BBC for making a joke about a cabinet minister just as he was playing one of their songs every week on his Radio 1 show.

Another might be James becoming famous for his weekly Observer TV review, in which he found his comic voice. Polyglot, polymathic, he translated Dante, wrote a series of best-selling memoirs, hosted an annual Formula 1 review on TV, befriended Princess Di, and took tango lessons in Buenos Aires. Atkin, for his part, had a long and award-winning career with BBC Radio as a script editor, producer and head of network radio in Bristol — as well as voicing the part of Mr Crock in a Wallace & Gromit movie. In the early 2000s they reunited and toured together, writing new songs before James succumbed to leukaemia in 2019.

Atkin’s dry, classless English voice was always a long way from the tone of his male singer-songwriter contemporaries produced by the English folk scene, from Ralph McTell to Nick Drake. Lacking any hint of assumed American inflection, his delivery suited James’s agile, witty and erudite lyrics, even though James took so much of his subject matter from American popular culture. Together they aimed for a modern take on the great Broadway songwriting partnerships, absorbing the pop-culture influences of their own time alongside historical references just as their predecessors had. Cole Porter’s “You’re the Top” — “You’re an old Dutch master / You’re Mrs Astor” — might have been their template.

It’s a combination that appealed to a certain sensibility, one well represented at the Pheasantry, where Atkin was making a rare appearance in order to launch a new CD, The Luck of the Draw, the second volume of revisions of some of the old songs and a handful of hitherto unrecorded collaborations (the first, Midnight Voices, was released in 2007).

He sang and played guitar, accompanied for much of the time by Simon Wallace’s beautifully fluent piano. Wallace is one of the musicians on the new album, along with an A-team of Nigel Price on guitar, the bassist Alec Dankworth, Rod Youngs on drums, Gary Hammond on percussion and the saxophonist Dave O’Higgins, together reupholstering the older songs with care and imagination. (Atkin and James always had good taste in musicians: Chris Spedding, Kenny Clare, Alan Wakeman, Tony Marsh and Herbie Flowers were among the supporting cast on the early albums.)

The dramatic highlights of the live set were “Beware of the Beautiful Stranger” and “The King at Nightfall”, two songs for which Atkin, as was his underrated habit, found melodies at least the equal of the beguiling lyrics. The latter’s portrayal of a fallen and hunted despot, its title taken from a line in Eliot’s “Little Gidding”, seems even more resonant today than it was in 1973.

Sometimes James’s erudition could be stretched a bit thin in pursuit of wittiness, as in “I’ve seen landladies who lost their lovers at the time of Rupert Brooke / And they pressed the flowers from Sunday rambles and then forgot which book” (from “Laughing Boy”). During the show Atkin mentioned that the lyricist had self-critically dismissed “The Only Wristwatch for a Drummer” as an example of his own tendency to show off, and I suppose the same charge could be levelled at things like “Screen-Freak”, with its kaleidoscope of Hollywood images, or “Together At Last”, which plays games with pairs (“Two-gether at last / Hearts that beat as one / Swift and Stella, Perry and Della / Dombey and Son”). But they’re audience-pleasers, a facet of a talent that incorporated the audacity required to attempt something like “Canoe”, in which two time-frames, pre-technology and space age, are seamlessly blended.

In my view, James was at his very best at a provider of song lyrics when he was expressing deep emotion in relatively simple language. This was perfectly displayed in three songs Atkin performed at the Pheasantry, each of them a lament for love departed or unanswered. Atkin described the first of them, “An Empty Table”, as resembling a film, shot part in black and white and part in colour, the unadorned lyric perfectly matched by a tune which begins from an unexpected trajectory, then soars and settles with unassuming elegance. The second, “The Trophies of My Lovers Gone”, takes its title from Shakespeare’s Sonnet XXXI, its search for a complex emotional truth reflected in a melody that wanders gracefully. The third, “Girl on a Train”, more typical of James in that the girl he’s yearning after is absorbed in a volume of Verlaine, was presented on Saturday as a final encore, finishing the evening with an elegiac cadence of guitar and piano, drifting into silence.

* Pete Atkin’s The Luck of the Draw is released on the Hillside label (www.peteatkin.com). Ian Shircore’s book Loose Canon: The Extrordinary Songs of Clive James & Pete Atkin, first published in 2016 by RedDoor and now in paperback, is also recommended.

Aug 29

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A man of wealth and taste

It’s rather charming when someone who spent most of his life signing autographs for fans turns out to have been a collector of famous signatures himself. In Charlie Watts’s case, they’re a bit different from the one he signed for me on a paper napkin in 1964. They’re the signatures of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Agatha Christie, Samuel Beckett, James Joyce, Tennessee Williams, H.G. Wells and Raymond Chandler on their own first editions (including, respectively, The Great Gatsby and Tender Is the Night, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, Waiting for Godot, Ulysses, A Streetcar Named Desire, The War of the Worlds, The Lady in the Lake), of Charlie Parker on a pleading letter to the American Federation of Musicians and menu cards from Birdland and the Royal Roost, of John Coltrane on the front cover of a copy of Giant Steps, of Duke Ellington on a set of acetates containing the premiere of Black Brown and Beige at Carnegie Hall in 1943.

All these, and much, much more of the same, are included in the catalogue for Christie’s aucxtion of some of Charlie’s possessions, due to take place in London on 28 September. The £40, 200-page catalogue is a lovely thing in itself: if you want to know what Dean Benedetti’s acetates of Parker recorded at the Hi-De-Ho club in Los Angeles in 1947 look like, or the ones Boris Rose recorded in 1950 that became Bird at St Nick’s, here they are, along with notes scribbled by Parker to Chan Richardson, his partner. Here are an autograph lyric (“Looking at You”) by Cole Porter, a letter from George Gershwin to his music teacher and autographed copies of the piano scores of An American in Paris and Rhapsody in Blue, a first edition of Langston Hughes’s The Weary Blues inscribed to Gershwin, and a first edition of a book of Picasso engravings dedicated by the artist to the jazz impresario Norman Granz (with added caricature of the dedicatee).

I could go on, and on, and on. Agatha Christie first editions by the dozen. Ditto Dashiell Hammett. Hemingway. Waugh, Waugh and more Waugh. Ditto Wodehouse. Orwell. Dylan Thomas’s first book of poems. All signed. John and Alan Lomax’s Negro Folk Songs as Sung by Lead Belly, signed by Huddie Ledbetter himself. A Miles Davis doodle and a first edition of trumpeter’s autobiography, with a lengthy dedication to a cousin.

Charlie was a collector who could indulge all his desires. Now he’s gone and other people will have the pleasure of owning the precious objects he so lovingly assembled — people in a position to contemplate the estimates ranging from £200,000-£300,000 for the signed first edition of Gatsby, dedicated to a fellow screenwriter at MGM, down to £1,000-£1,500 for a signed photograph of Chet Baker in 1956.

If you saw his episode of the recent TV series of profiles of the individual Rolling Stones (My Life As a Rolling Stone, 2022), you’ll know that this catalogue doesn’t tell the whole story. Where is the beautiful pre-war Lagonda, kept in perfect running order despite the fact that Charlie couldn’t drive? Where are the 78s that he bought in bulk but never played? Where are the kits of famous drummers from the swing and bop eras? Where are the Savile Row suits and the handmade shirts and shoes?

Anyway, Charlie deserved it all, and much joy it must have given him. He also deserved a catalogue editor capable of spelling “Thelonious”, but that’s another matter.

Aug 26

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Summer books 3: Ray Connolly

It would surely surprise anyone familiar with London’s Evening Standard only in its shrivelled, almost content-free current version to learn that it was once a substantial newspaper, a proper reflection of the city’s vitality. In the days when it was edited by Charles Wintour, its pages thrummed with big names as well with as the classified ads for flats and cars that paid their salaries: the likes of Alexander Walker, the film critic, Suzy Menkes, the fashion editor, and Sam White, the Paris correspondent, who filed his column from the bar of the Hôtel de Crillon. And, of course, Ray Connolly, who succeeded Maureen Cleave as the byline attached to interviews with the pop stars and other showbiz celebrities of the time. On billboards outside newsagents, “BEATLE TO RETURN MBE” would inevitably refer to one of Connolly’s stories. It was an enviable gig, and he made the most of it.

Although he never gave up journalism, he moved beyond it in the early 1970s when he wrote the screenplays for two films, That’ll Be the Day and Stardust, which examined the years of his own youth with a fondly nostalgic eye and made a star out of David Essex. He went on to write TV and radio plays, novels, and books about John Lennon and Elvis Presley (his radio plays included a smart counterfactual called Sorry, Boys, You Failed the Audition, which imagined a future for the four Beatles had their stars not aligned with success).

Three years ago he caught Covid-19 in a very serious way, spending six months in hospital, most of that time in intensive care. When he emerged alive, somewhat to his own surprise, he needed to relearn some of the things he had previously taken for granted, such as how to walk. He also set to work on a memoir, just published under the title Born at the Right Time.

The story of his journey from a post-war Lancashire childhood (he was born in 1940) to Fleet Street is interesting for the sharp contrasts it draws with today’s world, in which such priority is given to ambition and career planning. But the real value of the book comes when he raids his own cuttings file for excerpts from his interviews with the celebrities of his era. Ray was an exceptionally good interviewer at a time when there were no filters between journalist and subject. A PR person would set the time and place of the appointment, and then retire gracefully. Ray’s gentle but persistent stammer was, he believes, a help in enlisting the sympathy of those answering his questions.

He was the person to whom Ringo Starr described the Maharishi’s ashram in Rishikesh as being “just like Butlin’s”, and to whom Cynthia Lennon confessed that she “didn’t know the tricks” of how to stimulate John. When Ray asked Bob Dylan in 1969 why he always looked so moody, he got this reply: “When I ask photographers how to look, they always say, ‘Don’t smile.’ So I don’t.” Interestingly, when Dusty Springfield spoke to him for the first time about being attracted to girls (and afterwards he drove her back to the house where she was living with Norma Tanega), he and his editor decided not to highlight her responses in a piece that appeared under the headline “Dusty at 30”.

Don and Phil Everly — among his great heroes — talk to him about the origins of their hits. Don on writing “Till I Kissed You” on a place returning from Australia: “I’d fallen in love with a French girl called Liliane and I was afraid I’d never see her again. In those days Australia seemed like the end of the world.” Phil on performing “The Price of Love” in concert: “While Donald plays to the band, I like to look around the audience and maybe pick up a pretty face, a girl I’ll never see again. ‘You talk too much, you laugh too loud. You see her face in every crowd.'”

Away from music, Peter Fonda and Edward Fox behave as if still in character for Easy Rider and Edward and Mrs Simpson. Michael Caine talks while returning to London from Shepperton Studios in his chauffeured Rolls-Royce about his command of French and German and of the craft of acting: “Somehow I seem to have got the image of the world’s luckiest half-wit. But in my view, I’m not half-witted and I’ve never had an ounce of luck in my life.” Well, maybe just a bit when Terence Stamp and Anthony Newley turned down the lead role in Alfie.

Sharp assessments are made without leaving the subjects lying in a pool of blood, as would later become the Fleet Street fashion. Marc Bolan, the teenybop hero of 1972, sits in his flat in Maida Vale and claims that he can fly and make himself invisible. “Bolan was one of those stars who bubbled up in the vacuum left after the Beatles’ dissolution,” Connolly remarks.

There are stories about failures as well as successes in the movie business, the best of them being the protracted and painful saga of trying to get Bianca Jagger to star in the film version of Trick or Treat?, Ray’s 1975 novel, produced by David Puttnam and directed by Michael Apted. “A sort of erotic Chabrol piece about sexual relationships and emotional ambivalences”, it turned into a disaster both predictable and expensive.

Ray’s father was lost at sea during the 1944 landings in France. Unsurprisingly he developed an interest in talking to famous people about their war experiences, from Harry Secombe and Paul Raymond to Tony Benn, Karlheinz Stockhausen and Group Captain Leonard Cheshire, who won the VC for bravery after flying 200 bombing missions to Germany and tells Connolly about being sent by Churchill to observe the nuclear explosion that destroyed Nagasaki: “One part of me was thinking in relief, ‘That’s it. The killing of six years is finished. And another part was thinking about the people who had just died.” Cheshire devoted the rest of his life to charitable work.

In part, this is the sort of memoir you might write because you want your children and grandchildren to know who you really were, trying answer the questions they might never get around to asking. At 80-odd, too, your recall is unlikely to be flawless, and it’s not worth quibbling here about the year Dylan performed in the UK with the Hawks or whether it was Stormy Tempest and the Hurricanes that Ringo played with before the Beatles. The value of the book is elsewhere: in the reminder of how a fine journalist got people to talk, and what happened when he spread his wings.

* Ray Connolly’s Born at the Right Time is published by Malignon.

Aug 21

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Summer books 2: ‘Pledging My Time’

I don’t imagine I’m alone in sometimes glancing at a stack of books about (or by) Bob Dylan and thinking, OK, that’s enough now. The last two new volumes, bought hot off the press in the past couple of years, turned out to be expensive time-wasters, prompting the thought that maybe I’d be better off re-reading some of the old ones. Anthony Scaduto’s early biography, maybe, or Suze Rotolo’s memoir, or The Nightingale’s Code. Or even the one Patrick Humphries and the late John Bauldie published in 1990, called Oh No! Not Another Bob Dylan Book. But there’s always an exception, and one such is Pledging My Time by Ray Padgett, subtitled “Conversations with Bob Dylan band members”.

All I know about Padgett is that he has an erudite and entertaining email newsletter called Flagging Down the Double E’s, on which he discusses topics related to Dylan’s live performances. The book is an outgrowth of that newsletter, consisting of interviews with 40 people who have played with Dylan, either in his band or in briefer encounters, or, in a handful of cases, worked with him in slightly different capacities, such as Betsy Siggins, who ran a folk club in Cambridge, Massachusetts in the late ’50s and early ’60s, Chris O’Dell, the Rolling Thunder tour manager, and Keith Dirks, a sound engineer in the early stages of the Never Ending Tour.

You don’t want big names in a book such as this. Most of them have already told their stories many times. You want Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, Happy Traum, David Mansfield, Spooner Oldham, Fred Tackett, Stan Lynch, Christopher Parker, Dickey Betts, Larry Campbell and Benmont Tench, whose impressions are not worn thin by overexposure. You want someone like Jim Keltner, with a lifetime of service to music and a deep love of how it feels to explore it in Dylan’s company: “The thing I love about Bob is his fearlessness. There’s a fearlessness from some artists that transmits to the musicians playing. When that happens, you get the best from the musicians, because the musicians are not worried about tempo or about whether they’re rushing or they’re dragging or whether they’re not in the pocket. It’s not about finding a pocket. It’s more about searching for the vibe, searching for the thing that makes the song live.”

Keltner is not the only one here who likens the experience of playing with Dylan to jazz. It’s not jazz, of course, but it shares some important characteristics. Gary Burke, who played percussion on the 1976 Rolling Thunder dates, says: “Dylan lived more in the present than most musicians I know. The most common question I get is, ‘What’s it like to play with Dylan?’ I say, ‘Oh, it was the greatest jazz gig I ever played.’ People look at me like I’m crazy. I don’t mean stylistically it was like a jazz gig, but in terms of the mindset. It was very spontaneous. You never know where he’s going to go. You weren’t given directions ahead of time.”

The pianist Alan Pasqua had played with the New Tony Williams Lifetime when he joined Dylan for the Street Legal sessions and the 1978 tour. “Bob was a great bandleader,” he says. “I was lucky enough to play with Tony Williams early on in my life. He learned from Miles Davis. Miles never told him what to play, but by how Miles played, he showed Tony what he needed to do. I found Bob to be quite a bit similar to Miles.” He adds: “I didn’t know at the time that Bob was a jazz fan.”

In 2017 Pasqua was asked, out of the blue, to provide piano music against which Dylan could read his Nobel Prize acceptance speech. And then, a couple of years later, he was invited to play on “Murder Most Foul”. “They were playing a demo. I heard it and I just couldn’t believe it. In rock music, things usually have a specific beat and pulse. This was free. The time was free. It was elastic. It wasn’t specific to a certain time, feel, or tempo. It just moved and flowed. When I was done listening to the track, I turned to Bob and I said, ‘My God, Bob, this sounds to me like A Love Supreme.’ He just stopped and looked at me.”

Sometimes other aspects of being Bob Dylan are sharply illuminated. Burke remembers the business that went on at the end of every gig, when Dylan’s security men took charge: “When we would leave a place on the tour, security would go into the room where he was staying and take everything out. Every piece of garbage, everything. They would put it in bags and take it with them so that nobody went in and tried to find the lost verse to ‘Tangled Up in Blue’ or something like that.” That’s a tough way to live, Padgett observes. “It is. You got the feeling he was rubbed raw by it all.”

To Billy Cross, who played guitar in the 1978 band, he seemed “very friendly and very warm. He was lovely, absolutely lovely, considering what he’d been subjected to through his life at that point. Everywhere he goes, someone thinks he’s got the answer that’s blowin’ in the wind. I thought it was unbelievable that he could be as normal and personable and pleasant as he was.”

Padgett is a marvellous interviewer: not just enthusiastic and sympathetic but alert and perceptive, equally good at prompting and just letting people talk. Of course, the testimony is mostly admiring. There’s nothing resembling the interview with the veteran soul singer Betty LaVette in the Daily Telegraph earlier this month, where she described her “contempt” for Dylan, five years after enjoying a warm reception for an excellent album of his songs titled Things Have Changed.

She was annoyed that he never told her how good it is, and to underline her irritation she mentioned an incident from several years earlier, when they encountered each other in Spain and “he ran over to me. He put my face in his hands and kissed me square in the mouth. I don’t offer Bob Dylan a kiss and I’m not a f—ing fan. I was not looking to be kissed. If he thinks I’m good enough to put his mouth on, then he should have opened it to say just one good word about my record. When you’re as big as he is, that can make a huge difference to sales.” She didn’t mention whether she’d ever got in touch to thank him for the songs.

More than most people, Bob Dylan presents himself to the world as a jigsaw puzzle, full of complexities and seeming contradictions and bits that are hard to fit together. Maybe some missing bits, too, and others that once fitted but no longer do. Each of us assembles the puzzle as best we can. The keyboards player Benmont Tench, who once found himself playing “Desolation Row” — which he had listened to “a million times” but never played — with its composer to a festival audience of tens of thousands, is among the most thoughtful interviewees in Padgett’s book. He’s allowed to close it with some words that seem to express the feelings of many who’ve worked with Dylan.

“You can read about Bob’s life,” he says, “and you can pay attention to what he says, and you can learn from it, but when you play music with somebody of that calibre, you learn something entirely different. It can only be passed on by that person. And those of us who have the opportunity to play with that person can pass on what we took away, but we only each take away a certain part of our experience with someone like that. Long may he live, because he’s something else.”

* Ray Padgett’s Pledging My Time is published in hardback and paperback by EWP Press. Padgett’s email newsletter is at dylanlive.substack.com

Aug 15

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Ronin at Ronnie’s

Nik Bärtsch’s Ronin at Ronnie Scott’s (photo: Robert Crowley)

Somewhere between an “oh!” and an “ow!”, the abrupt vocal command with which Nik Bärtsch cues his musicians for a shift in musical pattern is the polite zen-funk equivalent of James Brown’s exhortation to take it to the bridge. The reaction is immediate, the players switching from one polyrhythmic cell to another in perfect unison, reframing not just the abstract geometry of metre and tempo but the weight, tone and landscape of the music.

If you own any of the Swiss pianist-composer’s albums, on ECM or his own Ronin Rhythm label, you’ll know that his pieces all go under the bland title “Modul”: “Modul 17”, “Modul 44”, “Modul 55” and so on. I find it rather refreshing not to be primed to think about whether or not a particular piece is a successful portrayal of a nightingale singing in Soho Square. You can just get on and listen to the notes, free from baggage.

But although it may be programmed, there is nothing cold about it. Bärtsch’s music is sometimes attached to such categories and minimalism and systems music, but it’s too abundant to qualify for the former and too warm-blooded for the latter. Any superficial impression of austerity is profoundly misleading. To hear one of his bands live is to share an audience involvement that expresses itself at the end of each long and intense set in a roar of pure exhilaration.

That’s what happened when Bärtsch returned to Ronnie Scott’s Club last week with Ronin, currently a quartet with Jeremias Keller, a relative newcomer on bass guitar, joining the stalwarts Kaspar Rast on drums and Sha on bass clarinet and alto saxophone. Ronin was assembled in 2001 and plays every Monday night at Exil, Bärtsch’s club in Zurich, its members applying their virtuosity to perfecting what their leader calls “ritual groove music”.

I’ve heard Bärtsch’s music in several environments: with Ronin in churches in London and Bremen, solo (with a light artist) at the Barbican, with a horn section at Kings Place and with the Frankfurt Radio big band, orchestated by Jim McNeely, in Berlin. In the set I heard at Ronnie’s, they played the six pieces from their latest ECM album, Awase, blended together into two long sequences, plus an encore. Compared to those earlier performances, this sounded mellower, less edge-of-the-seat, a little more lyrical and reflective, particularly in something like the swooning chordal descent of one section of “Modul 36”.

Even in its gentler moments, however, it was still imbued with that characteristic sense of coiling and uncoiling while still held in tension. And the quality of the playing of all four was extraordinary, with Bärtsch delving into the grand piano’s innards to pluck, strum and damp strings, occasionally striking its frame with a stick, the devoted Sha in the role of Jimmy Lyons to his Cecil Taylor, Rast tireless in nailing down the complex metres and displaced beats, and Keller’s alertness and agility fitting in so well that he might have been with them since the beginning rather than a mere three years.

It was great to see a big crowd assembled to hear this music. Of course the majority of the audience knew exactly what they had come for and received their reward. But also it was interesting to watch the more casual type of customer, the sort who basically turn up for a night at a famous jazz club, as their initial scepticism turned to curiosity and then to intrigue and ultimately to delight, shared with the rest of us.

Aug 8

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The grain of sound

Between takes: the Blind Boys of Alabama in the studio (photo: Abraham Rowe)

The Blind Boys of Alabama’s new release is called Echoes of the South. In the time since they recorded it last year, two of their six members — Ben Moore and Paul Beasley — have died and one, the great James Carter, has retired. This album has time in its bones.

The group was founded in 1939 by a bunch of teenagers as the Happy Land Jubilee Singers, and is the embodiment of that old saying about a garden spade: as the years pass, you can replace the worn-down blade, the snapped shaft and the broken handle, and somehow it’s still the same spade. The lineage from the original members — Clarence Fountain, George Scott, Vel Bozman Traylor, Johnny Fields, Olice Thomas and J. T. Hutton — to this latest incarnation, completed by Ricky McKinnie, Joey Williams and the Rev. Julius Love, is unbroken.

The producers, Matt Rose-Spang, Ben Tanner and Charles Driebe, stay out of the way and let the voices do the talking over a skilled and supportive but unobtrusive rhythm section at Nuthouse Studios in Muscle Shoals, in the group’s home state. That’s just what’s needed to provide the right ambiance for a set of songs with which the singers sound completely comfortable, from the rousing opening of “Send It on Down” to the sober closing invocation of Stevie Wonder’s “Heaven Help Us All”.

The Staple Singers’ “The Last Time” has a special resonance: “This may be the last time we sing/shout/pray together,” they sing, over the sparest of backings. “Friendship”, by Homer Banks and Lester Snell, hitherto recorded by Norah Jones, Roebuck Staples and Mavis Staples, again shows itself to be a modern gospel classic. Curtis Mayfield’s “Keep on Pushin'” is slowed down, and the composer himself would appreciate the way the economy of string bass, brushes and electric piano is deployed to highlight the dignified ardour of the voices.

And those voices: the sense of grain in every one of them, of surfaces worn by use, but never worn down, with a warmth now even more effective for the measured restraint imposed by age, suffusing an album to play anywhere, at any time, in any mood, for any reason or none.

* Echoes of the South by the Blind Boys of Alabama is released on Single Lock Records on 8 September.

Aug 4

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Summer books 1: Henry Threadgill

As a primer on how to grow up amid communities of creative musicians while asserting and developing your own individuality, Henry Threadgill’s Easily Slip into Another World is exemplary. It also happens to belong, in my view, in the very highest rank of autobiographies by jazz musicians.

One of the great contemporary composers and bandleaders, Threadgill grew up amid the blues, the jazz and the black church music of Chicago in the 1950s, but with an ear open to European classical music. He’s old enough to remember the impact of the lynching of Emmett Till in 1955. Hearing the recordings of Charlie Parker made him want to play the saxophone.

He may be the only Chicago musician of his era to benefit from not having studied under Captain Walter Dyett, the venerated director of music at DuSable High School on the city’s South Side. Threadgill was enrolled at Englewood High, where he played in the school’s concert band but was constantly in trouble. Knowing that Dyett had taught so many of the people he really admired, such as Gene Ammons, Johnny Griffin and Wilbur Ware, he applied for a transfer. Dyett looked at his disciplinary record and turned him down flat. When Englewood let him back in, he resolved to change his ways. I suppose the clearest proof of his success came in 2016, when he became the third jazz musician (after Wynton Marsalis in 1997 and Ornette Coleman in 2005) to receive the Pulitzer Prize for Music, for his composition In for a Penny, In for a Pound.

“Being rejected is the best thing that can happen to you, if you know how to think laterally,” he observes. “I ended up getting a much broader and deeper education.” The scope and volume of his work over the years is astonishing. Many musicians would have made an entire career merely out of the projects he undertook with dancers. Others would have invented the hubkaphone, as he did in 1970 after seeing a display of shiny chrome car hubcaps laid out on a stall in the famous Maxwell Street market, and settled for renown as the creator of the American version of the gamelan orchestra.

He could have pursued a life as an R&B musician, after touring with the Dells and the Chi-Lites in the ’70s, or in Latin music after working with the trumpeter Mario Bauzá in New York. He could even have stayed safely within the circle of Chicago’s AACM. Instead he formed one band after another, following the instinct to push things further. The trio Air, with the bassist Fred Hopkins and the drummer Steve McCall, was followed by many, many others, usually with unorthodox line-ups (e.g. four reeds and four double basses) and sometimes with strange names, such as X-75, Very Very Circus, Zooid and the 14 or 15 Kestra. (Oddly, his latest album, titled The Other One, is by something called the Henry Threadgill Ensemble.)

With the aid of the writer and academic Brent Hayes Edwards, Threadgill tells his story at a relaxed pace and with a depth of detail that is always compelling and never tiresome. The Vietnam section is a serious addition to the literature on that terrible war, from an unusual perspective: about drafted in 1966, thinking he’d done a smart thing by volunteering as a musician, a year later he was the Central; Highlands with his clarinet in one hand and a rifle in the other, encountering the Montagnards and experiencing the African American version of the horror and squalor familiar to some extent from Michael Herr’s Dispatches but here described with even greater clarity and revulsion. “I didn’t shed my war experiences when I got off that plane from Vietnam… Vietnam stayed with me, and it took me to some dark and twisted places even once I returned to Chicago.” But he had survived, and eventually the trauma receded.

Back in the world, his surreal encounter with Duke Ellington in 1971 — with the suggestion that he might have been momentarily lined up as the next Billy Strayhorn — is a Murakami short story in itself. His description of a gig with Cecil Taylor is both hilarious and enlightening: “I was completely befuddled. I was standing there wondering why what we were playing didn’t sound like the piece I remembered rehearsing.” Eventually he discovers, on the stand at Fat Tuesday’s, that “to play Cecil’s music, you had to get to a place where you could let the pieces reconfigure themselves as you went along. It was disconcerting in the moment, but the experience with Cecil impacted the way I came to think about my own bands. It’s important to keep your people a little bit off balance.”

The four pages on his grandfather, Luther Pierce, who often took him to the Maxwell Street market, explain something about Threadgill. Pierce worked in a steel mill but was also the family’s self-taught, trial-and-error electrician, cobbler, plumber, tailor, barber, carpenter, bedbug exterminator and medicine man. “He was resourceful — or reckless — to a degree I have never encountered in any other human being,” his grandson writes. “The most amazing thing about it was his nerve. I think he would have been capable of performing open-heart surgery on one of us had he considered it necessary. Whatever it took, he was ready to do it: nothing was out of bounds. And I suspect that a little of his spirit of radical experimentation rubbed off on me.”

His theory of intervallic harmony was developed for Zooid in the mid-’90s during a stay in Goa, reading about “maths and physics and astronomy and warfare, studying philosophical treatises, reading books about various musical systems.” It resembles George Russell’s Lydian chromatic concept or Ornette Coleman’s harmolodic theory in that it clearly takes a lot of preparation for his musicians to become conversant with the new language, and — although there are several pages of explanation — it’s impervious to casual comprehension. But you’ll probably know it when you hear it.

Simultaneously, while reading Ulysses, he came up with the idea of a 1/4 metre: “James Brown used to talk about getting back to the one. He’d cajole his band, talking about it, calling for it, demanding it — stretching things out to build anticipation. That’s funk in a nutshell: that tantalising expectation of the downbeat. Here it is — and here it is again. With Zooid, the question is almost the opposite: what if you never get off the one? Everything is always the one.”

I’ve quoted at length from the book simply in order to give an idea of the richness contained within its 385 pages. Let’s finish with a piece of typical Threadgill wisdom, fashioned by the tools of thought and experience: “If you look at a book on the history of Western classical music, there’s centuries of background you can read about. Black music in America is relatively young. It’s still just the beginning. And it’s too soon to get upset and start making grand declarations about what you like and don’t like in terms of the directions the music is taking. You don’t have to like it all. What you have to recognise is that it’s not the end of the line. In another hundred years, assuming we’re still here, imagine how much more artistic information will have accumulated from Black music. And it’s not going to be the twelve-bar blues from now until the end of time.”

* Easily Slip into Another World: A Life by Music by Henry Threadgill and Brent Hayes Edwards is published by Alfred A. Knopf. The Other One by the Henry Threadgill Ensemble is out now on the Pi label.

Jul 31

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Randy Meisner 1946-2023

The first time I noticed Randy Meisner’s name was when Rick Nelson released his first album with the Stone Canyon Band, recorded live at the Troubadour in LA in 1969 and released the following year. Meisner was the band’s bass guitarist and sang harmonies. Nelson was trying to update himself, shedding the “y” at the end of his first name and embracing the arrival of country rock in an attempt to put some distance between the teen idol of “Poor Little Fool” and his adult self. The Troubadour album included signposts for his desired new direction in the shape of his versions of three Bob Dylan songs, including a particularly creditable version of “I Shall Be Released”. It also had a lovely version of Eric Anderson’s “Violets of Dawn”, a song completely redolent of its era, with Meisner contributing fluid bass lines and high harmonies.

When Nelson was putting the band together, Meisner — who had just left Poco after a brief stay — brought in the lead guitarist, Allen Kemp, and the drummer, Pat Shanahan, from another of his earlier bands, the Poor. The veteran steel guitarist Tom Brumley, a former member of Buck Owens’ Buckaroos, completed the line-up. Meisner was no longer there by the time their second studio album, Rudy the Fifth, was released in late 1971, containing a song he’d co-written with Kemp. He’d become a founder member of the Eagles, with whom he stayed until 1978, not always happily. He died last week, aged 77, and the final years were not easy ones, as Adam Sweeting recounts in an obituary of him in the Guardian. If you’d asked Randy Meisner to identify his finest hour, I don’t imagine “Violets of Dawn” would have crossed his mind. But it still sounds sweet.

Jul 27

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RIP Sinéad O’Connor

Document handed out to journalists covering the Bob Dylan 30th anniversary concert at Madison Square Garden, New York City, on 16 October 1992.

Jul 23

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Climate change

On an unseasonably cold, rainy late-July evening in East London, the trio known as Decoy — Alexander Hawkins on Hammond organ, John Edwards on double bass and Steve Noble on drums — and their regular guest, the indefatigable 83-year-old American saxophonist Joe McPhee, provided all the warmth the audience at Cafe Oto could need, and more.

That’s hardly surprising. Almost a decade and a half since their debut, Decoy + McPhee are the ultimate 21st century iteration of the hallowed organ-and-tenor combo, which at its finest — in such meetings as those of Gene Ammons and Richard “Groove” Holmes, Stanley Turrentine and Jimmy Smith, or Sam Rivers and Larry Young — provided an entire central heating system in itself.

The set I caught last night, the last of their four nights in Dalston, began with Noble marking out a fast 6/8, moving straight ahead, encouraging Hawkins to let rip with a rousing improvisation. McPhee entered with a splintered honk before the tempo slowed to a bluesy lope. A dislocated shuffle followed, powered by Edwards’ thrumming, then a modal section (with a tune I’m sure I know but couldn’t place), a fast Latin passage with chattering percussion, and a quiet gospel-tinged fade to a most elegant closure.

That’s a swift précis of 45 minutes of music full of spontaneous creativity and contrast, in which the freedom of any individual was a given. All four were astonishingly inventive, intuitive in their responses, shaping the parts and the whole with complete assurance. I was struck by the sight of a young woman amid the throng, dancing in the semi-ecstatic way people used to dance to, say, the Third Ear Band at rock festivals 50 years ago. Not something you see at many jazz gigs these days, but a pretty good sign.

The occasional bursts of B3-powered intensity reminded me of the first edition of Tony Williams’s Lifetime, a thought that led me to muse on what the classic John Coltrane Quartet might have sounded like had McCoy Tyner suddenly gone missing and been replaced for one night only by Larry Young, Lifetime’s organist, with instructions to go for it. A bit like Decoy with Joe McPhee, maybe. Anyway, the roar and the prolonged ovation at the end of the set said it all.

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