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Jun 29

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The bending of headlights

“We have a new very quiet album out,” Rickie Lee Jones said as she greeted a packed Jazz Café in London last night. I bought Pieces of Treasure, the album in question, a few weeks ago, played it three times, and filed it next to the rest of the evidence of her long and remarkable life in music. It was certainly nice to see her reunited with Russ Titelman, the co-producer of her unforgettable debut album back in 1979 and a careful curator of this new collection of standard songs, but it didn’t make a huge initial impression. Last night she brought it to life.

She’s travelling with a three-piece band: Ben Rosenblum on electric piano doubling accordion, Paul Nowinski on string bass and Vilray Bolles on electric guitar. For the first half of the 75-minute set she just sang a selection of standards, starting with a pin-drop “The Second Time Around”, which she recorded on Pop Pop in 1991, and continuing with “Just in Time”, “One for My Baby” and “September Song”, which are on the new one, then “Up a Lazy River” from 2000’s It’s Like This, “Hi-lili, Hi-lo” from Pop Pop (with the accordionist not just exquisitely replicating but actually improving on Dino Saluzzi’s bandoneon part on the original recording), and “Nature Boy” from the new one.

It didn’t take long to appreciate not just how well she was singing but how beautifully her musicians were creating a matrix for the way she was so thoroughly inhabiting the songs. You might have heard “September Song” a million times, interpreted by some of the greatest singers in the history of popular music, but by bringing herself so close to the song, by eliminating the distance between song and singer, she made you think, as if for the first time, about what it meant.

Later on she did the same with another song worn threadbare by repetition. “There will be other lips that I may kiss / How could they thrill me like yours used to do? / Oh, I may dream a million dreams / But how will they come true? / For there will never be another you.” It was as though she’d just written it.

The groove changed with Steely Dan’s “Show Biz Kids”, which she recorded on It’s Like This. The slinky funk-lite keyboard riff summoned a whole universe of laid-back rock and roll hipness, and the audience enjoyed singing along: “Show business kids makin’ movies of themselves / You know they don’t give a fuck about anybody else.” (And how prophetic was that, written by Walter Becker and Donald Fagen 50 years ago?) She did her father’s song, the lullaby-ballad “The Moon is Made of Gold”, and her own much loved “Weasel and the White Boys Cool”, and finished by returning to the new album for “On the Sunny Side of the Street”, a song her dad taught her in the summer of 1963 (“a big year for me” — she would have been eight years old, and he also taught her “My Funny Valentine” and “Bye Bye Blackbird”). She left to an ovation, on a wave of profound affection.

But earlier, after about an hour, when she had strapped on a guitar, there had been “The Last Chance Texaco”. Those two gentle chords, instantly recognisable, then: “A long stretch of headlights / Bends into I-9…” It’s a movie. It’s a poem. It’s a confessional. It’s a communion. It’s the song that defines her. The one that most fully draws us into her world. “(It) wasn’t like anything I’d ever written,” she remembered in her wonderful 2021 autobiography. “It wasn’t like anything I’d ever heard.” As she sang it, once again the space between then and now collapsed. And when the sound of the car on the highway faded to silence, I might not have been alone in discovering that my cheeks were suddenly damp.

* The photo of Rickie Lee Jones at the Jazz Café is by me. Pieces of Treasure is on BMG/Modern. Her autobiography, Last Chance Texaco, is published in paperback by Grove Press. Thanks to Allan Chase (see Comments) for identifying the musicians.

Jun 26

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Peter Brötzmann 1941-2023

I’m listening to Catching Ghosts, a beautiful recording of Peter Brötzmann’s set at the 2022 Berlin jazz festival, in whch he was joined by the Moroccan guembri player Majid Bekkas and the American drummer Hamid Drake. Brötzmann died last week in Wuppertal, his hometown, aged 82; the cause was chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, from which he’d suffered for some time, exacerbated by the arrival of Covid-19. His final public appearances were earlier this year at Café Oto in London.

A formidable figure. Brötzmann was famous for the volume (in every sense) of his saxophone playing: not just the prodigious decibel level but the volume of notes and the volume of energy, urgency and passion that poured out of his alto and tenor saxophones, his clarinet and bass clarinet, and his Hungarian tarogato in countless live appearances and scores of recordings. He lived as hard as he blew, and there’s pathos in the thought that the ferocity of his playing over the course of 60-odd years may have contributed to his fatal illness.

I first set eyes on him in November 1969, when I took time off from covering the Berlin Jazztage to visit what most people referred to as the anti-festival: the second annual Total Music Meeting, held in the Litfass, a café in Charlottenburg. It was the brainchild of the New Artists Guild, a group of young German musicians who objected to the way the line-up of official festival (whose stars that year were Duke Ellington, Miles Davis, Stan Kenton, Sarah Vaughan and Lionel Hampton) was failing to include exponents of the new European free jazz.

I remember hearing the pianist Alex von Schlippenbach there for the first time, and the tenorist Rüdiger Carl. Brötzman was leading a band including three British musicians — Evan Parker, Paul Rutherford and Derek Bailey — along with the German bassist Buschi Niebergall, the Dutch drummer Han Bennink and the Belgian keyboards player Fred van Hove. Without disavowing its influences, this was becoming a truly European idiom.

Several of these musicians had been involved in the recording of Machine Gun, the octet album released the previous year on Brötzmann’s own label. Taking its cue from John Coltrane’s Ascension and Albert Ayler’s Bells, but raising the collective intensity to unprecedented levels, Machine Gun acted as a manifesto. Today it retains, like Jimi Hendrix’s Woodstock version of “The Star Spangled Banner”, its ability to shock and amaze in real time while also carrying the mind back to the conflicts and social turbulence of the time and place in which it was made.

“We saw our task as building a different foundation for music,” Brötzmann told Reinhard Köchl of Zeit Online early this month, in his last interview. Out of that second Total Music Meeting in 1969 came a label called FMP (Free Music Production), the brainchild of Brötzmann and the producer Jost Gebers. Starting a few months later with Manfred Schoof’s European Echoes, FMP went on to release more than 200 albums on vinyl and/or CD — including, in 1971, the first of several reissues of Machine Gun.

It was also the home of several albums by one of my favourite Brötzmann groups, a quartet with the trumpeter Toshinori Kondo, the bassist William Parker and Hamid Drake on drums. Die Like a Dog was the name of their first album, subtitled “Fragments of Music, Life and Death of Albert Ayler”, and it became the name of the band. My favourite of the quartet’s albums is a 1999 session recorded in Berlin and released under the title Aoyama Crows. In an interview included with that album, Brötzmann reflected on mortality. “We’ll just play until we drop,” he said. “It’s not because we’re heroes. We have to. There isn’t much else for us to do but to carry on playing.”

He was not necessarily the easiest person to deal with, even for someone who admired him greatly. When Tyshawn Sorey agreed to be my artist in residence at Jazzfest Berlin in 2017, we discussed possible projects. I suggested that a duo with Brötzmann might be a good idea. Tyshawn was immediately enthusiastic. I made the approach, only to receive a message from Brötzmann saying that he had no intention of being part of “a circus”. That was a pity; it could have been a colossal meeting. Perhaps it was me. Anyway, I’m glad my successor, Nadin Deventer, had better luck in 2022.

By that time the onset of physical limitations may have shorn Brötzmann’s playing of some of the Sturm und Drang elements that characterised his prime years. But exposed to a clearer view in Catching Ghosts is a kind of lyricism which entwines beautifully around Majid Bekkas’s traditional Gnawa chants and the sprung rhythms set up by the guembri (a three-stringed bass lute) and the drums. Brötzmann gave us late work worthy of his long and extraordinary career.

* The photograph of Peter Brötzmann is by Anna Niedermeier. Catching Ghosts is out now on the ACT label.

Jun 20

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Nick Drake: The Life

You had to wonder, looking around the October Gallery in London last night, what Nick Drake would have made of the gathering arranged to mark the publication of Richard Morton Jack’s account of his short life. As his sister, the actress Gabrielle Drake, remarked in her elegantly moving speech, he might have taken it as a vindication of his own belief in his talent.

Among those present last night were many who had spoken to the author about their encounters with Drake. Among those I knew were Simon Crocker, Chris Blackwell and Jerry Gilbert. Crocker played drums at Marlborough in a band in which Drake played saxophone and later travelled with him on expeditions to Aix and Saint-Tropez; their final encounter, a few months before Drake’s death, is recounted in the book. Blackwell, the founder of Island Records, had liked Drake’s demos — and Drake himself — when he heard them at the end of Nick’s first term at Cambridge in 1967; a year later he signed him to the label at the behest of Joe Boyd, who became his producer. Gilbert, my colleague at the Melody Maker for a few months in 1970, secured the only real interview Drake ever gave, published in Sounds later that year**.

And, of course, there was Gabrielle, to whom the extraordinary way her younger brother’s posthumous reputation and record sales eventually took off must have been the source of such complex emotions: joy that he had finally been recognised, regret that he could not see and be part of it, all filtered through the memory of the mixed happiness and pain that marked his 26 years.

As she writes in the book’s foreword, this is not an authorised biography in the sense that the author’s approach or his final manuscript were formally approved by Nick’s estate or his surviving family. But Richard Morton Jack was given such generous access to all relevant sources and material, and has treated this opaque, enigmatic life with such care and skill, and with such a calm, understated ability to evoke time and place, that his 550-page volume can be considered definitive — a dangerous word when it comes to biography, or indeed any non-fiction work, but in this case almost certainly justified.

* Richard Morton Jack’s Nick Drake: The Life is published by John Murray.

** Not quite the only one, as it turns out: during his research for the book, Richard Morton Jack unearthed a 1970 interview given to a writer from, amazingly, Jackie, a magazine for teenage girls.

Jun 14

4 Comments

Old and New Dreams

I may have said this before, but jazz tributes and reunions don’t do much for me. I’d rather hear the music moving on, using its past as the basis for further development. There are exceptions, including the welcome rediscoveries and reinterpretations of Herbie Nichols’ compositions by various musicians, Ryan Truesdell’s meticulous reconstruction of Gil Evans’s lesser known pieces, Alan Skidmore’s lifelong homage to John Coltrane and — of course — Old and New Dreams, four players who convened in 1976 to continue the work they’d done as members of Ornette Coleman’s acoustic quartets.

The trumpeter Don Cherry, the tenor saxophonist Dewey Redman, the bassist Charlie Haden and the drummer Ed Blackwell made three albums together, all for European companies. The first was for Italy’s Black Saint label. The second and third were for ECM, and the first of those will shortly reappear as part of the German company’s vinyl series under the general rubric ‘Luminessence’, along with Gary Burton’s New Quartet. (The first two albums in the series were Kenny Wheeler’s Gnu High and Nana Vasconcelos’s Saudades.)

In the case of Old and New Dreams, it’s good to have the album’s cover, designed by Barbara Wojirsch around the photograph by Herbert Wenn, back in 12-inch form: the calm austerity of the image and the controlled informality of the hand lettering are echt ECM. So is the sound, engineered by Jan Erik Kongshaug at Oslo’s Talent Studio under the supervision of Manfred Eicher, a combination that produced some of the label’s finest recordings throughout the 1970s.

The album begins with a 12-minute version of “Lonely Woman”, the classic ballad Coleman first recorded in Los Angeles in 1959 for The Shape of Jazz to Come, to which it also provided the lead-off track. Cherry and Haden were present for that momentous session (Billy Higgins was the drummer), and their historic connection to the song contributes to the extraordinary richness of this interpretation. If the original was a five-minute miniature in which every note could be committed to memory, here the framework is stretched to incorporate new perspectives. If I could only keep half a dozen tracks from the five decades of ECM, this would be one of them.

The remainder of the album maintains the standard: another Coleman tune (the previously unknown bounce-tempo “Open or Close”) plus Blackwell’s African-flavoured “Togo”, Cherry’s lyrical desert-blues “Guinea”, Redman’s musette feature “Orbit of La-Ba”, and Haden’s eco-anthem “Song of the Whales”, the bassist using his bow to create the sound of the endangered marine leviathans as an introduction to his gorgeous descending theme, which manages to be simultaneously mournful and uplifting.

All four of these musicians are gone now, as are Ornette and Higgins. But the unique music they made lives on, not least in this priceless reincarnation and the epic “Lonely Woman” it contains.

* Old and New Dreams is out in a vinyl edition on the ECM label on June 23. I don’t know who took the photo of the quartet — Charlie Haden, Don Cherry, Ed Blackwell and Dewey Redman — playing together; if anyone has that information, please tell me and I’ll provide a credit.

Jun 6

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Astrud (& Gil)

By the time Astrud Gilberto got to sing with Gil Evans, the great arranger had slowed his pace of working. Eventually he would take as long to compose eight bars as some writers took to complete a symphony, but in 1965 he was still able to write 11 arrangements to order for the singer who had shot to unexpected, almost accidental fame with “The Girl from Ipanema” alongside Stan Getz the previous year.

Those 11 pieces, however, amounted to less than 25 minutes of music — enough for one side of a 12-inch LP. Creed Taylor, supervising the album for Verve Records, knew all about Gil’s working habits, having produced two of his classics, Out of the Cool in 1961 and Individualism in 1964. Probably in desperation, he hired the reliable Al Cohn to arrange two more songs which padded the album out to a total of 32 minutes: 15 minutes on one side, 17 on the other, barely respectable.

But you don’t weight the value of Evans’s music with a set of scales, and there were sublime moments on the album, titled Look to the Rainbow and released in 1966. The opening track, “Berimbau”, featured Dom Um Romao — later to join Weather Report — on the eponymous single-string percussion instrument. “Once Upon a Summertime” is a gorgeous ballad that Evans had arranged for Miles Davis on the Quiet Nights album three years earlier (another LP that had to be bulked out, this time with a six-minute quintet track). “A Felicidade” has Evans finding subtle colours to accompany Tom Jobim’s song: listen to the opening unisons and momentary dissonances in the writing for brass and woodwind, and wonder at the combinations. And “I Will Wait For You” is the diaphanous highlight: Evans in excelsis, featuring one of those moments in which he prepared the ground with exquisite care for an incoming improviser, in this case the trumpeter Johnny Coles, one of his favourite soloists.

Astrud wasn’t a great singer, or even a good one in a technical sense; what she had was a presence that transferred itself to tape, apparent to everyone who heard “The Girl from Ipanema” for the first time in 1964, cherishing its evocation of a certain sun-splashed insouciance that suited the times.

When I heard the news today of her death at the age of 83, I thought immediately of my friend George Taylor, who died a couple of years ago. It was George who bought “The Girl from Ipanema” and The Astrud Gilberto Album when they were brand-new, for us to listen to with our girlfriends on warm summer evenings.

* You can get an expanded CD of Look to the Rainbow on Amazon for practically nothing these days. If anyone knows who took the lovely portrait above, I’d be grateful for the information.

May 31

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The moment of Joy

After a great deal of activity on the British jazz scene of the early 1970s, things were starting to go quiet by the time a quintet called Joy came along. The generation centred on Mike Westbrook, Graham Collier, Keith Tippett, Howard Riley, the Spontaneous Music Ensemble and the Blue Notes had flared brightly before settling down for the longer haul. Around the corner in the next decade would be the media attention given to the new wave of Courtney Pine, Andy Sheppard, Loose Tubes and the Jazz Warriors. Caught in the middle, Joy appeared at a time when the spotlight was pointed elsewhere.

Joy had nothing to do with fashions in jazz. They were untouched by fusion, for instance. They played acoustic music, keeping the flame alive without turning it into the sort of purist mission proclaimed by the Marsalis brothers a few years later. Perhaps they were also among the last young jazz musicians to take the stage wearing what they’d put on when they got up that morning. There was no image, no marketing campaign.

I remember being convinced even before the group came together in 1976 that two of their members in particular, the drummer Keith Bailey and the alto saxophonist Chris Francis, both born in 1948, were destined to become stars. I’d heard Bailey when he followed Ginger Baker and Jon Hiseman into Graham Bond’s band, and felt immediately that he was something special: he had a quality — a lithe swing combined with all the power he needed — that I found again the first time I heard Moses Boyd, 40 years later. The extravagantly talented Francis combined bebop chops with Mike Osborne’s emotionality (filtering Jackie McLean’s sweet sourness) and Dudu Pukwana’s cry. Both spoke their chosen language as if they’d been born to it.

The other members of the band were the draft-dodging American trumpeter Jim Dvorak, the South African bassist Ernest Mothle and the very fine London-born pianist Frank Roberts, the youngest of the five. All except Mothle contributed compositions to the self-titled album they made in 1976 for Cadillac Records, founded by the late John Jack and now celebrating its 50th anniversary. What turned out to be Joy’s only release is among the albums reissued to celebrate the label’s golden jubilee, restored and remastered for CD and digital release with the addition of unedited and unreleased tracks.

As Bailey says in the sleeve notes, Joy played straight-ahead modern jazz, stepping aside from the adventures in freedom in which others were engaged. Imagine a young Horace Silver Quintet, with an infusion of the Blue Notes’ irresistible townships flavour and touches of modal jazz as refined by Herbie Hancock: you could have plonked them down anywhere in the world, from New York to Tokyo, and they would impressed the most sophisticated of modern jazz audiences.

After Joy disbanded, Francis spent some years as a photographer; he now lives in Surrey, where he plays and teaches. Bailey moved to the US in 1980, briefly studied drums with Andrew Cyrille and composition with Morton Feldman, and is based in Santa Fe; he stopped playing regular drums in 1986, in order to concentrate on solo percussion recitals. Frank Roberts remained active on the London scene for many years and is now based in Aarhus, Denmark. Jim Dvorak, having appeared with the Dedication Orchestra and Keith Tippett’s Mujician, continues to play and work in London. Ernest Mothle, whose strength and inventiveness made him the fulcrum of the quintet, appeared with his old friends Hugh Masekela and Jonas Gwanga at Nelson Mandela’s 70th birthday concert at Wembley in 1988 before returning to South Africa, where he died in Pretoria from diabetes-related conditions in 2011.

As young musicians together, for an all too brief span of time in the 1970s, they had something special going. Their album is a pungent and vivid reminder of its time, but more than deserves its place in the present.

* The photograph of Joy is by the late Jak Kilby. Left to right: Jim Dvorak, Ernest Mothle, Frank Roberts, Keith Bailey and Chris Francis. The album is out now on the Cadillac label: cadillacrecords77.com

May 26

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Paul Simon in the waiting room

It’ll be interesting to see how much Paul Simon’s Seven Psalms means to anyone below a certain age, by which I mean the time when the buffers marking the end of the line start to become dimly visible. Simon, now 81, has clearly been reflecting on his own mortality and this new 33-minute strand of seven songs, edited together without breaks, offers his provisional conclusions.

Simon has no privileged knowledge to impart. No one does. Of all the countless billions of people born since homo sapiens emerged in Africa 300,000 years ago, not one has had a credible answer to the question: what happens after we die? Faith-based answers must be respected, but are just that: based on faith, not fact. Otherwise all we can do, all of us, is wait and wonder.

So for someone of my generation it’s interesting to see certain artists we grew up alongside choosing to address the matter, feeling they’re on the brink of finding out for themselves. When David Bowie and Leonard Cohen gave us Black Star and You Want It Darker, they appeared to know that these would be their last words, shared with the public just before they stepped out of this life.

Seven Psalms is Simon’s meditation on what he calls “the great migration”, and of course he can’t avoid the spiritual dimension. The opening sound is that of Harry Partch’s cloud-chamber bowls, a microtone apart, setting up a mood of both meditation and uncertainty before Simon’s distinctive acoustic guitar begins the first song, “The Lord”. It’s an incantation: “The Lord is my engineer / The Lord is the earth I ride on… The Lord is a meal for the poorest / A welcome door to the stranger… The Covid virus is the Lord / The Lord is the ocean rising / The Lord is a terrible swift sword… The Lord is my personal joke / My reflection in the window…”

The song reappears, in briefer form, between the third and fourth and the sixth and seventh songs, as the expression of a man who has no more idea than you or me of what the Lord might be, or if there is one at all, but feels the need to explore the subject and his own vacillation between scepticism and the urge to believe in a higher power, particularly as time gets more pressing.

In the gentle “Love Is Like a Braid”, the shadows of a judgment to come are creeping across the sunlit lawns of childhood innocence: “I lived a life of pleasant sorrows / Until the real deal came / Broke me like a twig in a winter gale / Called me by my name.” Country-blues fingerpicking and the quacking of a bass harmonica carry “My Professional Opinion”, his sardonic take on a world of divided opinions and no common ground: “I heard two cows in a conversation / One called the other one a name / In my professional opinion / All cows in the country must bear the blame.”

“Your Forgiveness” is a lovely song about wonder and doubt, its quasi-medieval tone enhanced by the use of the chalumeau, a precursor of the clarinet, and the theorbo, a 14-string lute used in Baroque music, plus viola and cello. “Trail of Volcanoes” refers briefly to the arc of his own career before coming to a bleak conclusion: “The pity is / The damage that’s done / Leaves so little time / For amends.”

“The Sacred Harp”, some of it sung in duet with his wife, Edie Brickell, is a fable about picking up a pair of hitch-hikers who seem to be on a different journey altogether. The closing “Wait” begins with a thought we might all share one day: “Wait / I’m not ready / I’m just packing my gear / Wait / My hand’s steady / My mind is still clear.”

I have no idea on how near Simon is to the “dreamless transition” in which he wants to believe. But here he shows, as he always has, that he can treat the weightiest of subjects with the lightest and deftest of touches.

* Paul Simon’s Seven Psalms is out now on Owl Records. Here is the official trailer. The photograph is an early publicity shot, taken by Murray Neitlich (thanks to Patrick Hineley for the attribution — see comments).

May 20

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Abel Selaocoe & BBC Singers

At one point during last night’s concert with the BBC Singers at Milton Court, the cellist Abel Selaocoe appeared to attach something to his instrument’s bridge that enabled him to make it sound alternately like a kora and a kalimba, and sometimes like a combination of the two. At another juncture he turned it sideways, tapping its back with one hand and its shoulder with the other, creating a groove that swung the whole 25-voice choir. He slapped it, sawed at it, and waved it at the audience, but he also did things that Rostropovich, Casals or du Pré would have recognised and applauded.

He sang a great deal, too, delivering songs in, I think, Sesotho, Zulu and Xhosa in a variety of voices that ranged from a form of guttural sub-bass throat-singing to a silvery whisper via a gentle tenor croon suited to lullabies. And he danced a little, while getting the choir and then the audience to clap and sing along.

Born 31 years ago in a Johannesburg township, Selaocoe — whose name is pronounced Sa-LAU-chay — has made his way via Manchester’s Royal Northern College of Music to the concert platforms of the world, collaborating en route with the likes of Famoudou Don Moye, the great percussionist with the Art Ensemble of Chicago, the saxophonist Tim Garland and the kora player Seckou Keita. As a gifted improviser, it may be that, with the American cellist Tomeka Reid, he is capable of building on the legacy bequeathed to the instrument by the late Abdul Wadud. Last night showed that Selaocoe intends to bring not only his instrumental gift but his own music to the audiences he will meet as his fame grows.

The concert combined his pieces, collectively titled “Music of African Twilight”, with a selection of 11 (of 15) movements from Sergey Rachmaninov’s “All Night Vigil (Vespers)”, a piece for unaccompanied choir written and first performed in Moscow in 1915, during the early stages of the First World War, and here delivered under the baton of Sofi Jeannin, the BBC Singers’ chief conductor. I went along expecting Selaocoe to be contributing interludes between the choral pieces, but that was not the case. The two alternating elements were given equal time and weight throughout.

Rachmaninov’s take on the Russian Orthodox liturgy was sublime, but so was Selaocoe’s evocation of another world, his writing for the choir a full-bodied support to his own singing and playing. On the candelit Milton Court stage, one moment we were under the dome of a cathedral, the next under open African skies. The concert was in no sense an attempt at a fusion of two cultures. It wasn’t even the sort of juxtaposition of two idioms intended to provoke new thoughts, new possibilities. It just was, and when the candles were finally dimmed and the light faded, that seemed enough.

* The concert was recorded by the BBC and will be broadcast on Radio 3 on Tuesday 23 May at 7.30pm, available for 30 days thereafter on BBC Sounds. Abel Selaocoe’s debut album, Where Is Home (Hae Ke Kae), is out now on Warner Classics.

May 17

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Empiricism

I can still hear the roar that greeted the end of the performance by Empirical at the 2017 JazzFest Berlin, the reaction of an audience of around 1,000 people who instinctively recognised and responded to the skill, seriousness of purpose and inherent gift for drama emanating from a group of four British musicians of whom they previously knew little or nothing.

Last night I heard that roar again. Empirical were celebrating their 15 years together with a special performance in the very different and more intimate surroundings of the Vortex in Dalston, playing to another capacity crowd — this one already familiar with their history and their qualities.

Even as their appearances together have grown less frequent, the alto saxophonist Nathaniel Facey, the vibraphonist Lewis Wright, the bassist Tom Farmer and the drummer Shaney Forbes (above) have remained an adornment to the British scene. In their case, longevity has never equalled staleness. They are predictable only in the consistency of their high standards.

The co-operative nature of the band extends to sharing the provision of the repertoire. Each of the four contributes compositions that create a collective personality with roots in the music made by a select group of artists on the Blue Note label in the mid-’60s, a time when Bobby Hutcherson, Andrew Hill, Eric Dolphy, Joe Chambers and others were forging something that applied the instincts of the avant-garde to the virtuosity of post-bop jazz. It was a special thing, a very demanding kind of music, but Empirical go far beyond trying to recreate it. Avoiding fashionable gestures, their music gains its freshness from its inherent quality, while the sense of drama ensures its grip on an audience.

I heard one set last night, which began with Facey’s serpentine “Stay the Course”, featuring a characteristically incendiary solo from Wright. Forbes’s “Like Lambs” was typical of the extended, multi-themed compositions in which they negotiate changes of trajectory with marvellous fluency, including a sizzling alto solo and climaxing with a drum improvisation that could quite reasonably be described as symphonic.

Dolphy’s hustling “Gazzelloni” introduced a guest, the tenor saxophonist Julian Siegel, an early colleague, influence and inspiration. After Farmer had introduced “Ursa” with a beautiful solo, Siegel switched to bass clarinet for “A Bitter End for a Tender Giant”, Facey’s lament for Dolphy, recreating the astringent blends with the bowed bass and the alto from the original version on the group’s second album, Out ‘n’ In, recorded in 2009.

However much longer they choose to continue their work together, Empirical deserve to be thought of as one of the greatest small groups in the entire history of British modern jazz, up there with the Joe Harriott Quintet, the Tubby Hayes Quartet of Mexican Green and whoever else you care to name. In their case, the secret is in balancing the music’s formidable intellectual knottiness with a priceless ability to use it to communicate emotion.

* Empirical’s recordings, including their most recent EP, Like Lambs, are on their Bandcamp page: http://www.empiricalmusic.bandcamp.com. The photograph of Shaney Forbes in Berlin in 2017 is by Camille Blake.

May 12

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Trio x 3

Ahmad Jamal may have left us recently, but the jazz piano trio — the format to which he gave so much — refuses to die. Although the spurt of intense activity that gave birth to such inventive genre-benders as E.S.T., the Necks, the Bad Plus, the trios of Vijay Iyer and Brad Mehldau, Plaistow, Phronesis and others in the years either side of the beginning of this century may have abated, three new albums demonstrate that a meeting of piano, bass and drums retains every bit of its potential for creativity and diversity.

The Swedish pianist Bobo Stenson recorded his first trio album for the producer Manfred Eicher in 1971. Sphere, made in partnership with the bassist Anders Jormin and the drummer Jon Fält, is his ninth for Eicher’s label, continuing a process of refinement that has seen his music become more meditative in cadence and transparent in texture as the years go by.

In the past, Stenson’s albums have included jazz compositions such as Ornette Coleman’s “War Orphans” and Tony Williams’s “There Comes a Time”, standard ballads like Gordon Jenkins’s “Goodbye” and George Gershwin’s “My Man’s Gone Now”, Latin pieces from Astor Piazzolla and Silvio Rodríguez and classical works by Berg, Purcell and Ives. The repertoire on Sphere is focused almost entirely on Europe: two pieces by Jormin, one by the Danish composer Per Norgard, two by Sven-Erik Bäck, a Swedish composer who specialised in sacred music, one by the Norwegian pianist Alfred Janson, Sibelius’s “Valsette” and the geographical outlier, a contribution by the Korean composer Jung-Hee Woo.

Beginning and ending with limpid versions of Norgard’s “You Shall Plant a Tree”, the trio slide through the nine tracks so fluidly that each becomes a part of the whole, a single mood smoothing out (but not degrading) the very different contours and emotions of Bäck’s “Communion Psalm”, the gentle entanglements of Janson’s “Ky and the Beautiful Madame Ky” and Woo’s “The Red Flower”, a springy waltz. The result is a very personal evolution of the impressionistic approach pioneered by Bill Evans, Scott LaFaro and Paul Motian, the jazz piano trio in its modern classical guise.

Alexander Hawkins is after something different with Carnival Celestial, in which he, the bassist Neil Charles and the drummer Stephen Davis confront the possibilities offered by combining the acoustic piano, string bass and drum kit with synthesisers, samplers and the kind of post-production techniques not often applied in this context. As Bill Shoemaker observes in his sleeve note, there is nothing self-consciously trendy about the way Hawkins approaches these possibilities. It’s easy to hear the unfamiliar sonorities — flutters, pings, shuffling and rustling sounds — as organic outgrowths of the natural sounds, and as another form of connective tissue.

On the hyperactive “Puzzle Canon” and the pensive “Unlimited Growth Increases the Divide”, you can hear the group au naturel, improvising astringent melodies built on reverse angles and sprung rhythms, taking its place in the lineage of piano trios Hawkins loves, including those of Herbie Nichols, Elmo Hope and Andrew Hill (with Monk always in the deep background). On “Canon Celestial”, by contrast, and on “If Nature Were a Bank, They Would Have Saved It Already” (my favourite title of the year, borrowed from a graffito spotted by the Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano) and “Echo Celestial”, the electronics and additional percussion are deployed as the sound-bed, the rhythms hinting at the broken beats of contemporary hip-hop. But there’s no dichotomy or divergence here. The plug-in stuff is used not to tart up but to add dimensions. This is new music.

It translates perfectly to live performance, too, as was demonstrated last night in front of an audience at the Vortex in London, the final night of the trio’s short European tour. The moments of peak emotion produced by this power trio were genuinely extraordinary, particularly in a piano solo towards the end of the first set in which the pianist took off on a flight of supercharged mambo variations. Hawkins also inserted brief samples of the voices of Sun Ra, Louis Moholo and Wayne Shorter to striking effect.

Tyshawn Sorey’s Continuing is something different again, seeming to exist both within and beyond any of the usual considerations. The drummer and his colleagues, the pianist Aaron Diehl and the bassist Matt Brewer, take four compositions — Wayne Shorter’s “Reincarnation Blues”, Ahmad Jamal’s “Seleritus”, Harold Mabern’s “In What Direction Are You Headed” and the standard “Angel Eyes” — as material for a meditation on the form itself.

Space is the dominant factor, along with trueness of sound. The notes breathe, the instruments breathe, even when the traffic is at its heaviest, as in the Mabern tune, where Sorey whacks out four-to-the-bar on his snare and Brewer elaborates a kind of Delta blues riff. In “Angel Eyes”, the musicians pursue their thoughts at a pace through which time almost comes to a standstill, forcing the close listener to adjust breathing, heartbeat, depth of focus; interestingly, even this classic ballad is seen through a transparent lens, the sound of the instruments free of the familiar gauze of studio reverb. It may be the compelling slow-motion anatomisation of a commercial song by a piano trio since Cecil Taylor’s “This Nearly Was Mine”.

All the conventional accoutrements of the jazz piano trio are present in Continuing, whose title could be (but probably isn’t) intended to reference its position in a tradition. But the brilliance of the musicians — their ability to burn away layers of sentiment, their willingness to give each other and themselves that extraordinary degree of space, and the adamantine power of their execution — gives it a meaning entirely its own.

* Bobo Stenson’s Sphere is on the ECM label. Alexander Hawkins’s Carnival Celestial is on Intakt Records. Both are out now. Tyshawn Sorey’s Continuing is released on June 24, on the Pi label.

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