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Jun 17

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The long “Good-Bye”

Good-ByeAccording to Martha Tilton, a featured singer with the Benny Goodman Orchestra in the late 1930s, Gordon Jenkins wrote “Good-Bye” — which became Goodman’s sign-off theme — after the death of his first wife in childbirth. No wonder Alec Wilder, in his magisterial survey American Popular Song, called it “as sad a song as I know”. It is also, Wilder noted, a thing of remarkable beauty. So beautiful, in fact, that I’ve taken to collecting versions of it, and there are many, since it is a song that appeals strongly to jazz musicians of a certain sensibility, not least for providing the illusion of being through-composed, rather than repeating its individual sections in the AABA manner of conventional standards.

Goodman recorded it for the Victor label in 1935; the label describes it as a Fox Trot, in this case a distinctly gentle and smoochy one (and here it is). Since there is no vocal refrain, nothing except its minor key alerts the listener to the heartbreak inherent in Jenkins’ composition. It’s just the thing for a nice slowish dance to finish a romantic evening at the Glen Island Casino or the Balboa Ballroom, the sort of places that incubated the Swing Era.

But I first heard it, as with many other great American popular songs, in a version recorded by Frank Sinatra, in this case on an LP called Frank Sinatra Sings for Only the Lonely, recorded in Hollywood in 1958. Arranged by Nelson Riddle, the album is the singer’s torch-song masterpiece, and “Good-Bye” is its most exalted moment. Riddle slows the song down almost to a standstill, applying his most sensitive orchestral touch, employing juxtapositions and combinations of cor anglais, cello, bassoon, various kinds of clarinet, tightly muted trumpets, French horns and muted strings as well as great sweeping ensemble flourishes to inspire his singer. Sinatra responds with a performance of concentrated sobriety that puts to perfect use the lessons in bel canto phrasing that he learnt from listening to the trombone playing of Tommy Dorsey and the violin of Jascha Heifetz. All those underwater lengths he swam in order to master his breath-control find their reward here. And, of course, we get the lyric, an essay in elegant despair, fully comprehended by the arranger: as Sinatra sings “So you take the high road, and I’ll take the low / It’s time that we parted, it’s much better so” for the second time, Riddle’s bassoons parp out a jaunty little even eighth-note pattern that underlines the sense of physical parting, the tone of the chosen instrument somehow leaving us in no doubt that the jauntiness is assumed and false. The melody carrying those particular lines, by the way, is as  finely shaped as any I can think of, especially in terms of the relationship of each individual note to its chord — the sort of thing that seldom bothers the little heads of today’s songwriters.

So much, as far as I’m concerned, for vocal versions of “Good-Bye” (I use the hyphen and the second capital letter because that’s how it appeared on the label of Goodman’s original recording, although it’s mostly now rendered as “Goodbye”). After Sinatra, whose version is a certainty for my desert-island selection, I have no interest in listening to those by Ella Fitzergerald or Diane Krall, the latter recorded a couple of years ago with Charlie Haden’s Quartet West. What Sinatra and Riddle did was definitive. Which nevertheless leaves the way open for instrumental treatments.

It’s a song whose modulations clearly appeal to pianists. Among the most interesting versions known to me are those by McCoy Tyner (on Reaching Fourth, his 1962 trio album with Henry Grimes and Roy Haynes), Paul Bley (with Jay Anderson and Adam Nussbaum on If We May, 1994), Keith Jarrett (on his duo album with Haden, Jasmine, recorded in 2007), Bobo Stenson (from the 2005 album Goodbye, with Anders Jormin and Paul Motian), and Bill Carrothers (on the Dave King Trio’s I’ll Be Ringing You, recorded last year, which I wrote about on this blog a couple of months ago). Tyner’s is in some ways the most unusual — he brings to his reading what the English pianist Alex Hawkins, in an email to me the other day, described as “beautifully luminous post-Tatum harmony”. Bley starts off at an even slower pace than Riddle and Sinatra, then takes the risk of doubling the tempo and introducing familiar blues phrases into his variations, and brings it off. Jarrett is Jarrett, in an intimate conversation with an old friend. Stenson is the pick of the bunch, for my money: wonderfully eloquent, lucid and absolutely cliche-free, highly attentive to the song’s ambiance as well as its structure. Carrothers and his partners come up with the most intriguing group-improvisation approach.

The brilliant French tenor saxophonist Barney Wilen loved the song so much that he recorded it at almost every opportunity. I have three of his versions: with a quintet on La Note Bleue (1987), in a duo with the pianist Alain Jean-Marie on Dream Time (1991) and on Double Action in another quintet with the guitarist Jimmy Gourlay (1999). They’re all good but the first has a special luminosity.

Another saxophonist who got something out of Jenkins’ tune was Cannonball Adderley, who recorded it in 1961 on an album called Know What I Mean? with Bill Evans, two years after they had been members of Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue sextet. Not the most obvious of partners, they manage to find the common ground between the altoist’s ebullience and the pianist’s cerebrality. Actually, Evans is the more ebullient of the two here, laying strings of single-note lines at double and triple tempo over the imperturbable MJQ rhythm team of Percy Heath and Connie Kay. The closing chorus is especially lovely.

The interpretations that would have shocked Jenkins most profoundly are probably the two recorded by Jimmy Giuffre’s trio in 1961, the first on the LP Thesis and the second at a concert in Bremen, at a time when the clarinettist was making his own highly original investigation of free and free-ish improvisation in close partnership with Paul Bley and Steve Swallow. The application of their evolving principles to a standard ballad makes for a stimulating experience on both occasions, with Swallow on particularly fine form on the double bass, making one regret for the umpteenth time his decision to abandon the acoustic instrument. Quite probably Giuffre, being a clarinet-player, had first heard the tune in Goodman’s version. He and Bley returned to it in 1975, on an album called Quiet Song, this time with the guitarist Bill Connors rounding out the trio and Bley making slightly strange noises on an electronic keyboard.

Following more directly in Goodman’s footsteps, there have also been further versions by larger ensembles. Chet Baker recorded it successfully in 1953 as part of a septet session arranged by Jack Montrose: the alto, tenor and baritone saxes of Herb Geller, Montrose himself and Bob Gordon provide an attractive chorale behind Baker, who enunciates the melody with evident respect before producing a pleasant and completely appropriate solo (the track is currently to be found on the CD titled Grey December). Maynard Ferguson, a trumpeter at the other end of the scale in terms of technique and taste, recorded Don Sebesky’s arrangement on his album Maynard ’61, at which time the Canadian-born bandleader was approaching the height of his fame. If it’s not particularly subtle, then it’s by no means grotesque, thanks not least to a gorgeous tenor solo from the always underrated Joe Farrell. Much better is the version recorded on an album called Live in Japan ’96 by Alexander von Schlippenbach’s Berlin Contemporary Jazz Orchestra, arranged by Willem Breuker and with a stirring solo by another often overlooked tenorist, Gerd Dudek.

To finish with, a recording suffused with as much sadness as Martha Tilton’s account of the song’s origin: the one made by the great Chicago tenor saxophonist Gene Ammons, the son of the celebrated boogie-woogie pianist Albert Ammons, in March 1974. This was the final tune recorded on the last day of sessions held over three consecutive days for Prestige Records in New York, meaning it was the last piece of music the big-toned tenorist ever recorded (shortly afterwards his cancer was diagnosed and he died four months later, aged 49). Although he had no way of knowing it, this really was his goodbye, and he fills the track’s four and a half minutes with a brusque tenderness that brings another shade of emotion to a song which tends to draw the best out of those who approach it in the proper spirit.

Jun 16

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Darkness on the edge of London

BruceBruce Springsteen took everyone by surprise with the announcement, about an hour into last night’s Wembley concert, that he and the E Street Band were going to stop answering requests and instead play Darkness on the Edge of Town, his great LP from 1978, in its entirety, from start to finish. This, after all, was a stop on the Wrecking Ball tour, promoting his latest album; it’s two and a half years since the documentary recounting the making of Darkness was released, with a great deal of attendant publicity. But what a fabulous decision it turned out to be.

The group of musicians on stage,  nowadays numbering about 17, was stripped back to something closer to the original E Street line-up as they set off into “Badlands”, hardly drawing a breath until the last chord of the title song died away three-quarters of an hour later. They gave the 10 songs a performance of unbroken seriousness and intensity, with several emotional peaks. For me, those came with a brutal “Adam Raised a Cain”, the shiver-inducing slalom through “Candy’s Room”, the finest reading of “Racing in the Streets” I’ve ever heard him give, and a majestic conclusion with “Darkness” itself.

For most artists, those 45 minutes would be enough to justify taking the audience’s money. Springsteen, however, gave us another two and a half hours of fun, games, and tears. I wished Curtis Mayfield had been alive to hear “People Get Ready” appended to the set-opening “Land of Hope and Dreams” as a coda and benediction; he would have been proud and delighted to hear his great anthem put to such fine use. The communal singing of the first verse of “Hungry Heart” and various bits of “Dancing in the Dark” reminded me for the umpteenth time that Springsteen is happy to give everyone in the audience a chance to share the experience of being the lead singer with the E Street Band. “Twist and Shout” came in a cowbell-paced version that would have pleased Bert Berns, the song’s co-writer and the master of bringing Latin accents to uptown pop-R&B, and might have come off a 1966 Bang Records 45. And to finish off, after the band had left the stage for the last time, their leader returned, alone with an acoustic guitar and a harmonica harness, to do that other trick of his: bestowing upon you the illusion that he’s chosen one of the night’s song just for you, personally. On this occasion it was a lovely unadorned version of “Thunder Road”, the first song he played on his London debut — his first concert outside the United States, in fact — back in 1975.

I have couple of criticisms. While the idea of replacing the sadly departed Clarence Clemons with a five-piece horn section is a good one (and Jake Clemons, Clarence’s nephew, does a lively job of filling the hole left by his uncle’s sound and personality), there are now too many musicians on stage: the sound is often too full, too massive, with Max Weinberg’s technically flawless big-band drumming filling too many holes, and the ensemble loses the precious sense of mobility and flexibility that was its hallmark (and which was immaculately reconstituted on the Darkness songs). On this night, too, from my pretty good seat, the sound was affected by a strong echo reflecting back from the stadium’s upper tiers, by a frequent indefinable booming sound in the lower frequencies, and by an occasional lack of muscle in the midriff.

That’s small stuff, however, when compared with the pleasures of an evening spent in the company of a man whose humanity and generosity of spirit continue to make his every concert a unique experience.

Jun 12

7 Comments

Notes on Modernism

Ben Sherman 2The archetypal Mod was male, sixteen years old, rode a scooter, swallowed pep pills by the hundred, was obsessed by cool and dug it. He was also one hundred per cent hung up on himself, on his clothes, hair and image; he thought of women as a completely inferior race. In every way, he was a miserable narcissistic little runt.

Richard Weight uses those words by Nik Cohn, from a 1989 essay, as an epigraph to the final chapter of his book Mod: A Very British Style, just published by Bodley Head. There could hardly be a more authoritative source: Cohn was in London when it all happened, he became a close friend of Pete Townshend, and his books Awopbopaloobam Alopbamboom and I Am Still the Greatest Says Johnny Angelo were arguably the first really credible works of literature to come from the pen of an author whose background was in writing about post-war pop music, long before Nick Tosches, Peter Guralnick, Stanley Booth or Greil Marcus could be found between hard covers. I’ve always loved his stuff. But in this case I disagree with almost every word.

Mod has passed into socio-cultural history as a set of codes, mostly to do with appearance and attitude: the scooters, the purple hearts, the mohair suits, the parkas, the roundel T-shirt, the blocked stare, the fights with rockers in Margate and Brighton. That was one dimension of the Mod world, for sure, and you’ll find it immortalised and exploited in any of the thirty-odd Ben Sherman stores currently doing business around the world, not to mention in the persons of such celebrated revivalists as Paul Weller and Brad Wiggins. But in reality that wasn’t more than a part of the story; it just happened to be the part that appealed to the media and won space for itself in the magazines, the tabloid newspapers and the TV news.

If I tried to tell you that from my perspective, living through it and feeling strongly as though I were a part of it, Mod had nothing to do with scooters or misogyny, and not much to do with pills, you probably wouldn’t want to believe me. You might be like the newspaper editor in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, who tells his companion: “This is the West. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.” And I might respond by telling you about a conversation I had a few years ago with a man who figured in a book I’d written. Rather foolishly, I asked him if he’d read it. “No, Richard,” he said. “I haven’t. I don’t need to. I was there.”

Mod was certainly Sabre knitwear, boots from Raoul, hard-edged graphic design, trying to imitate Alain Delon’s haircut and perfecting the right kind of nonchalant dance, based on little more than the almost imperceptible oscillation of the right knee. But it was also L’Etranger and Kind of Blue. There was more to Mod than a class-based movement: it was much subtler and more various. And it was not, from where I was standing, remotely misogynistic; quite the opposite, since girls shared the obsessions on an equal footing.

Richard Weight’s book examines the era in question but also goes much further. It is an investigation into the various movements that dominated British youth style over the last 60 years, taking in glam, punk, new romanticism and Britpop as well as the Mod revival. To Weight, the attitudes that gave rise to Mod provide the connective tissue, and this is a work of social anthropology as much as a history of style. It may be merely a reflection of my limited outlook that I’d have preferred an authorial focus more clearly based on the promise of the book’s title, in other words concentrating on a period that began for me in 1962 — the first Chelsea boots — and ended in 1967, when the ominous tinkle of Tibetan prayer bells was heard in the land.

Since this blog is supposed to be about music, and since music was the most potent of all the factors that united the people who thought of themselves as Mods, here’s a list of 20 club records that, while not necessarily being my absolute favourites, summon the mood and the spirit of the era as I remember it. They are in no order.

1 Bobby Parker: “Watch Your Step” 2 John Lee Hooker: “Boom Boom” 3 Earl Van Dyke: “All For You” 4 Rex Garvin and the Mighty Cravers: “Sock It to ‘Em, J.B.” 5 Billy Preston: “Billy’s Bag” 6 The Drifters: “At the Club” 7 The Hit Pack: “Never Say No to Your Baby” 8 Solomon Burke: “Everybody Needs Somebody to Love” 9 Jimmy Hughes: “Goodbye My Love” 10 Jr Walker and the All Stars: “Road Runner” 11 The Astors: “Candy” 12 Jackie Ross: “Selfish One” 13 Marvin Gaye: “Take This Heart of Mine” 14 Jimmy McGriff: “The Last Minute” 15 James Brown: “Night Train” 16 Martha & the Vandellas: “In My Lonely Room” 17 Roy Head: “Treat Her Right” 18 Soul Sisters: “I Can’t Stand It” 19 Stevie Wonder: “Love A Go-Go” 20 Doris Troy: “Whatcha Gonna Do About It”.

* The Ben Sherman shirt pictured above, vintage 1966, belongs to the author.

Jun 10

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Reading music: jazz + prose

IMG_0922doneI’ve always had a soft spot for jazz and poetry: Jack Kerouac with Zoot Sims, Kenneth Patchen with the Chamber Jazz Sextet, Langston Hughes with Charles Mingus, Christopher Logue with Tony Kinsey, LeRoi Jones with the New York Art Quartet. It must be the beatnik in me, or the hopeless optimist, because not much of it has outlived its time. But here’s something new: jazz and prose. Or, to be more precise, jazz both with and without prose, at the same time. The Moss Project’s What Do You See When You Close Your Eyes?, just released on the Babel label, consists of five pieces of music written by the London-based guitarist Moss Freed and a sixth by his colleague Ruth Goller, recorded by his group, and then given to half a dozen writers to produce short stories or poems inspired by what they’ve heard. A handsome hardback book contains the CD and the printed words (which can also be heard, read by the authors, on a download from the artist’s website).

The writers who responded to Freed’s invitation are Naomi Alderman, Colum McCann, James Miller, Lawrence Norfolk,  Joe Dunthorne and Hanan al-Shaykh. The musicians, apart from Freed, are the members of his quartet (pictured above) — Ruth Goller on bass guitar and double bass, the drummer Marek Dorcik and the singer and violinist Alice Zawadzki — plus a guest, the near-ubiquitous Shabaka Hutchings, on tenor saxophone and bass clarinet. The six pieces are bookended by an brief instrumental prelude and a song for voices and instruments with words and music by Freed.

On a purely musical level, the CD gets better as it goes along: after a somewhat self-conscious beginning with “The Bubble”, the first full-length piece, and the gentle pastorale of “Anniversary”, to which Goller’s double bass makes an outstanding contribution, the blood starts flowing and the playing seems to loosen up. (This may have nothing to do with reality, in the sense of bearing a relationship to the order in which the pieces were recorded, but it happens to be this listener’s experience.) The fourth and sixth pieces, the intricate title track and an adventurous slow invention called “The Angel”, on which Freed explores various instrumental effects, are the picks for me. These are carefully constructed compositions that sound entirely contemporary while generally avoiding the tricksiness — usually expressed as a perversely wilful angularity — that can afflict the current generation of young, conservatory-trained jazz musicians (Freed studied at Edinburgh and Berklee). The blend of the leader’s guitar and Zawadzki’s violin is an extremely happy one, subtly enhanced by the addition of bass clarinet on “Caravans”, while Goller and Dorcik keep the music’s sinews taut (their handling of irregular metres on “What Do You See…” is as calm and frictionless as their switching between time to no-time in “Postscript: Lose Ourselves”).

And the written words? Freed suggests they can be read at the same time as the music is playing, or before, or after, or just listened to in the writers’ recitations (find them at http://www.mossfreed.com). I can’t honestly say that reading them greatly affected my response to the music, but I enjoyed McCann’s meditation on a woman’s visit to an old church (“Anniversary”), which really does fit with its music, and Norfolk’s miniature account of two characters on a slightly tense road trip (“Caravans”). A worthwhile experiment, attractively presented.

* The photograph above is by Barbara Bartz. Left to right: Ruth Goller, Marek Dorcik, Moss Freed and Alice Zawadzki.

Jun 7

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Down the Manne-Hole

Shelly ManneWhat I carried away in my head from the only time I saw Shelly Manne in person, at Ronnie Scott’s in the summer of 1970, was the sound of his ride cymbal. It was as close to perfection as you could get, the ideal balance of the dry ping produced by the stick’s tip and a discreet spread of sound that carried the momentum from one stroke to the next. It’s hard to find a cymbal like that, and I remember it as the best of its kind I’ve ever heard.

Very likely it was the same cymbal that he had been playing just under 10 years earlier on an album called Shelly Manne and His Men Play ‘Checkmate’, which I picked up second-hand the other day. I’d never heard it before, although the quintet with which he recorded it has gradually become one of my favourite small modern jazz groups of the era, quite the equal of Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers or the Horace Silver Quintet, who set the standard for post-bop combos.

In 1959, when the group included the trumpeter Joe Gordon, the tenor saxophonist Richie Kamuca, the pianist Victor Feldman and the bassist Monty Budwig, they were recorded over three nights at the Blackhawk club in San Francisco, leading to a series of five albums on the Contemporary label, Manne’s home for 20 years. Now out of copyright in Europe, they’re all available on a four-CD box released by the American Jazz Classics label, and they stand up very well to a direct comparison with the two LPs recorded by the Miles Davis Quintet at the same venue a year and a half later.

Manne’s group visited Europe in 1960, with Russ Freeman replacing Feldman (there’s a recording of their concert at Manchester’s Free Trade Hall, called West Coast Jazz In England, on the Solar label), and by the time they made another live recording at a West Coast venue, this time at Shelly’s own Los Angeles club, the Manne-Hole, in March 1961, the line-up had undergone further changes. Gordon and Budwig were replaced by Conte Candoli and Chuck Berghofer, with absolutely no diminution of quality. In October of that year the reshaped group went into Contemporary’s little studio on Melrose Place in West Hollywood to record several themes written for a TV detective series by Johnny Williams, a pianist and composer who later became famous (and, presumably, very rich) from his soundtracks to Jaws, Star Wars and Harry Potter.

I have no idea whether or not the series was any good. Set in a San Francisco private detective agency, it ran for two years and 70 episodes, and its guest stars included Charles Laughton, Angie Dickinson, Lee Marvin, Cyd Charisse and the torch singer Julie London. As far as I know, it was never shown in the UK. But Williams composed a series of carefully shaped pieces that provided Manne’s Men with the perfect material on which to exercise their brand of thoughtful, swinging, beautifully turned post-bop.

For me, the star — apart from Manne’s ride cymbal, of course — is Kamuca, who rose to a mild form of prominence in the 1950s as one of a large group of white tenorists heavily under the spell of Lester Young (others included Stan Getz, Zoot Sims and Warne Marsh). He began his career with the big bands of Stan Kenton and Woody Herman, and if you listen to the quartet and octet sides he recorded for the Mode and Hi-Fi Jazz labels in 1956 and ’57 (available on a Fresh Sounds CD called Tenor Ahead), pretty much all you hear is a diligent but unexceptional Young disciple. During his time with Manne’s group, however, he showed himself to have matured into an improviser of exceptional character and poise.

Every note he plays on the Checkmate set is worth hearing. The obvious comparison is with Hank Mobley, a sideman in the Davis group at the Blackhawk, once described as “the middleweight champion of the tenor saxophone”. Showing a similar tone and fluency, but with fewer bluesy inflections in his playing than Mobley, Kamuca reveals himself to be a credible contender for the title. But the tenor-player he makes me think of, more surprisingly, is Wayne Shorter: his approach is more conventional, but there’s something similar about his gorgeous, lightly grained tone and the way he flights his unpredictably shaped but invariably graceful phrases with an airy quality perfectly suited to the sumptuous, clean-lined drive provided by Manne and Berghofer. To compound the pleasure, the quality of the recording made by Howard Holzer, one of Contemporary’s house engineers, has a warmth and a transparency to beat even the great Rudy Van Gelder at his own game, even though the studio also doubled as the label’s packing and mailing room.

Having made his name in California, Kamuca moved to New York for a while in the 1960s and then returned to Los Angeles, where he worked in the studios. He made a handful of albums for the Concord label but his star never burnt as brightly as it had done with Manne, and he died of cancer in 1977, aged 46. The beauty of jazz is that it allows a player of quiet originality to make a lasting mark, and Kamuca, once he had found his own voice, became just such a figure. If you like this kind of modern jazz, then these records by Shelly Manne’s Men, and Checkmate in particular, are as good as it gets.

* The painting of Shelly Manne is from the cover of Checkmate, signed illegibly and uncredited on the CD version reissued in 2002 as part of Fantasy’s Original Jazz Classics series. According to Geoff Winston (see Comments), the credits on the original Contemporary LP jacket reveal the artist to have been one George Deel.

Jun 5

8 Comments

Disco: the weight of the groove

So disco’s back, apparently by courtesy of Daft Punk, although that may have been last week and it could be all over by now. But I have to say I’ve never felt I needed the permission of the fashion police to listen to the extended mix of Evelyn “Champagne” King’s “Shame” any time I wanted over the past 30-odd years. (You don’t know it? Go there now! And join me in a prayer to be reincarnated as one of those guitarists!)

While looking for something or other to do with disco on the internet yesterday I came across an old thread containing contributions from Bobby Eli, the great session guitarist who was a member of MFSB — the Philadelphia International house band — and played on records by the O’Jays, Billy Paul, the Spinners, the Stylistics and countless others.

Here’s what Eli (posting as phillysoulman) had to say a couple of years ago in defence of disco: “People had some understandable issues with disco. But it wasn’t all the same. A lot of it was R&B with a four-on-the-floor. Songs like that put a LOT of musicians to work, and also paid for a LOT of studio time.”

Someone else on the thread chose to inform him that the soul and disco records coming out of Philly at the time tended to be characterised, in harmonic terms, by the use of the “phrygian dominant scale”. Eli’s response deserves to be preserved for posterity (and this is how he laid it out, like blank verse):

We never discussed scales.

We just played what we felt.

It’s all about the groove.

We were not technical cats.

We just vibed together and instinctively knew each other’s next move.

Scales are for weighing shit, but our grooves had their own weight.

Jun 4

7 Comments

Something in the Air

Apres MaiIt wasn’t really a surprise that so many British film critics greeted Olivier Assayas’s Something in the Air with such a grudging response on its release last month (among the honourable exceptions, inevitably, was the Observer‘s Philip French). The film’s French title, Apres mai, is a reference to the disturbances of May 1968, and on this side of the Channel there is always a tendency to sneer at the youthful idealism that lay behind les evenements. Some form of cultural and/or generational jealousy at work there, I imagine.

Please take it from me that this is no two-star film, as some seemed to think. It may not be a five-star classic, either, but the director succeeds completely in achieving his aim of portraying the uncertainties of a group of young French people who were leaving school and starting a college education two or three years after the historic events in question, hoping to emulate their predecessors but discovering that the world had changed — and not in the way that such soixante-huitards as Daniel Cohn-Bendit or Jean-Jacques Lebel might have hoped.

As far as this blog is concerned, however, the point is that Assayas makes the soundtrack an integral part of his film, and he gets that right, too. For his party and bedsitter scenes (see the still above) he uses the kind of music that would have been heard at UFO or the Round House in that era: the early Soft Machine, Nick Drake, the Incredible String Band, Dr Strangely Strange, Amazing Blondel, Captain Beefheart (“Abba Zabba” from Safe as Milk) and Tangerine Dream. There is a very amusing scene in which the young protagonist flicks through his album collection: Blind Faith, Electric Ladyland etc. The Soft Machine’s “Why Are We Sleeping” makes a particularly powerful contribution to the evolving drama, and Kevin Ayers’ “Decadence” forms a resonant coda. (The song from which the film’s English title is borrowed, Thunderclap Newman’s “Something in the Air”, doesn’t feature.)

I’m afraid, however, that in terms of sheer enduring quality one piece of music blows the rest of the soundtrack into the weeds, and it comes from almost a decade earlier: the freshness, clarity and authority of Booker T and the MGs’ “Green Onions” make this simple riff-based 12-bar-blues sound as though it was recorded last week rather than in 1962. If you were being cynical, or perhaps a British movie critic, you might argue that the post-psychedelic “progressive” music of the late Sixties and early Seventies mirrored the fumbling evanescence of the political ideas and movements to which it supplied the accompaniment. But I’m not the one to trample on all that idealism, social or musical. See the film, anyway; thanks to those discouraging reviews, it probably won’t be around much longer.

Jun 2

28 Comments

Some guys (don’t) have all the luck

Jess Roden 2No one could understand why Jess Roden didn’t make it, why a man with so fine and distinctive a voice never managed to ascend to the level of fame enjoyed by other British blue-eyed soul singers of the 1960s and 70s. He had the sound and the looks, he wrote some fine songs, for a while he led a terrific little band, and he had fans in the music press and the backing of one of the most perceptive men in the record industry. What he didn’t have, perhaps, was the musical equivalent of what Graham Greene described as “the splinter of ice in the heart of a writer”: a knowledge of when to allow enthusiasm to take second place to the ambition that propelled many of his contemporaries and friends to the top.

I was reminded of that last week when we had tea together in a London hotel just across the road from the BBC’s Broadcasting House. We had met only once in almost 40 years — at Jim Capaldi’s funeral in 2005 — but it was like encountering a friend you’d seen the day before. Jess is one of the nicest men you could hope to meet. Which may, of course, have been part of the problem.

He had just been interviewed by Robert Elms for Radio London, and as we said goodbye he was off to have a chat with Bob Harris on Radio 2. This is the first time he has been visible in the music world since leaving it in the early 1980s, after concluding that it was time to stop bashing his head against a glass ceiling and look for something else to do (a little more on that subject later). The interviews had been arranged to promote a limited-edition six-CD set titled Hidden Masters: The Jess Roden Anthology, pieced together with remarkable care and attention over a period of several years by Neil Storey, a former colleague at Island Records, the label with which Jess spent the majority of his career. Consisting of 94 tracks, about half of them previously unreleased, compiled from the original multitracks or master copies and restored where necessary, the set takes us from his early days with Alan Bown through Bronco and the Butts Band to his solo career in the mid-70s and up to the later work with such short-lived projects as the Rivits and Seven Windows.

I first saw Jess at the Beachcomber Club in Nottingham. The year was, I think, 1966. He was the singer with the Alan Bown Set, having joined them after serving an apprenticeship with the Raiders and the Shakedown Sound, two bands in his native Kidderminster in the West Midlands. The Alan Bown Set were a soul band with horns and a Hammond organ, and I remember being particularly struck that night by the young singer’s convincing delivery of the Impressions’s “I Need You”, which happened to be one of my favourite Curtis Mayfield songs.

Soul music was falling out of fashion, however, and by the start of the next decade Jess had been signed to Island by Chris Blackwell and was singing with Bronco, a four-piece band consisting of hometown mates who were listening to the new country-influenced sounds coming from across the Atlantic. Bronco never had the right producer to focus their sound, or the right song to get them on the radio, but the eight tracks included in this box demonstrate their worth.

Then came the solo albums, starting in 1973, at just about exactly the same time that Robert Palmer, who had replaced him in Alan Bown’s line-up, left Vinegar Joe — another Island band — and embarked on his own solo career with the label. High hopes surrounded both of them (they were adored inside the company, where everyone from the van driver to the managing director loved their music), and they were given similar facilities: unlimited studio time in London, New Orleans, New York, Nassau or (in Robert’s case) Los Angeles with the best musicians and arrangers available. Both men, for example, recorded in New Orleans with the Meters and Allen Toussaint.

If there was a difference, apart from just over a year in age, it was that Robert really wanted to be a star. Jess wanted people to hear his music, of course, but he wasn’t the sort to really push himself or to finesse his own career. It didn’t stop him making a quantity of music that, as well as being fondly remembered, sounds terrific today. Lend an ear to an epic song recorded for his first solo album, originally called “I’m On Your Side” and now released, in a slightly different version, under the title “For Granted”: I’ve been a regular listener to the groove created by Mick Weaver’s clavinet and Richard Bailey’s crackling drums for 40 years, and it hasn’t worn out its welcome. Or the driving “Reason to Change”, cut with Toussaint and his boys and included in that debut LP. Or the elegant version of Tim Hardin’s “Misty Roses” cut in New York in 1977 for the album titled The Player Not The Game, arranged by Leon Pendarvis and produced by Joel Dorn.

There are surprises all over these CDs, some of them unearthed from unlabelled tape boxes that had lain undisturbed in obscure vaults for decades. But the heart of the anthology comes in the many tracks recorded, in clubs and concert halls as well as in the studio, by the Jess Roden Band, a seven-piece outfit (eight-piece when Billy Livesey guested on keyboards) which was in operation from 1974 to 1976 and could play that funky music as well as any white boys in the UK at the time, even the marvellous Kokomo. Steve Webb, one of the JRB’s two guitarists, and John Cartwright, the bass player, were both useful songwriters, and original compositions were mixed with occasional covers of things like Robert Parker’s “Get Ta Steppin'”, Randy Newman’s “You Can Leave Your Hat On”, Eddie Floyd’s “Raise Your Hand” and the Temptations’ “I Can’t Get Next to You”, all of which are included on Hidden Masters. They were a much loved live attraction, as can be heard here in recordings from Birmingham Town Hall, Leicester University, the Lyceum and the Marquee.

Robert Palmer had hits — “Johnny and Mary”, “Some Guys Have All the Luck”, and so on — but Jess didn’t; he was living in New York and struggling to complete another album when Blackwell finally pulled the plug. There was no rancour on either side. The decision to begin the process of changing his profession led Jess to evening classes in graphic design and a new career which he pursued successfully in West London until his recent retirement and move to the country. Today there are no signs of regret that, despite all those favourable signs, the highest hopes remained unfulfilled. He can look back at the music he made with affection and pride, and so, now, can we.

* The photograph is from the cover of Hidden Masters: The Jess Roden Anthology (www.hiddenmasters.net). The photographer is unknown. An extensive survey of Jess’s career can be found at http://www.jessroden.com.

May 29

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Looking at Monk

SchlippenbachThe phenomenon of piano players committing themselves to a study of Thelonious Monk’s compositions is neither new nor unusual; it probably started with Monk’s friend Bud Powell, who cut a wonderful version of “Off Minor” during his historic trio session for the Roost label in 1947 and recorded an album called A Portrait of Thelonious in Paris in 1961. Perhaps no one, however, has got so deeply under the skin of Monk’s music as the German pianist Alexander von Schlippenbach, who appeared at the Cafe Oto in London last night as part of an all-star free jazz quartet with the saxophonist Evan Parker, the bassist John Edwards and the drummer Eddie Prevost.

Eight years ago Schlippenbach released a three-CD set on the Intakt label called Monk’s Casino, in which he and four other musicians (including the remarkable bass clarinetist Rudi Mahall) performed all 70 of Monk’s known compositions, arranged as a sort of giant medley and recorded in three one-hour sets at the A-Trane club in Berlin, the pianist’s home town. It was, I think, one of the great achievements of modern music, a phenomenally detailed and multi-faceted exploration of a seemingly inexhaustible resource. There don’t seem to be such things as canonical works in jazz any more, but if there were, this would deserve to stand high among them.

I thought of Monk’s Casino towards the end of the first of last night’s two enthralling sets, when Parker, Edwards and Prevost fell silent and the pianist spent several minutes creating what sounded to me, at least, like a miniature distillation of that three-hour epic. All of Monk seemed to be in those few minutes — and all of the player himself, too, because there is nothing imitative about Schlippenbach, who shines the light of a piercingly original intellect upon whatever material he happens to be investigating (a couple of years ago he released two fascinating albums of serial compositions for solo piano: Twelve-Tone Tales Vols 1 and 2, also on Intakt).

Schlippenbach was 75 last month. His recent releases include Blackheath, a performance with Prevost on the drummer’s own Matchless label, recorded at Blackheath Halls in South London in 2008 and consisting of a solo improvisation by each and a 25-minute duo invention called “Skipping With Monk”. His latest solo album is called Schlippenbach Plays Monk, in which his own brief interludes are slipped between new thoughts on eight of Thelonious’s tunes. Once again you can hear his principal characteristic: the warmth beneath an apparently austere surface. I listened to it on the way home, and I know I’ll be playing it often.

It was nice to meet him again during the interval, more than 40 years since I interviewed him for the Melody Maker during the annual Anti-Festival held at Berlin’s Quartier Latin club, an event set up in opposition to the formal Berliner Jazztage at the Philharmonic Hall (he was polite enough to pretend to remember me). In the mid-60s he had founded the Globe Unity Orchestra, the first multi-national ensemble devoted to the new jazz; now, like Parker and Prevost, who are also in or approaching their eighth decade, he is an elder statesman of a movement that, on a night like this, seems capable of infinite self-renewal.

* The photograph of Alexander von Schlippenbach is by Manfred Rinderspacher and is taken from the insert to Schlippenbach Plays Monk (Intakt CD 207). Parker, Edwards and Prevost are at the Cafe Oto again tonight (May 29), with the German trombonist Christof Thewes as their guest.

May 28

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A meeting of hearts and minds

Hawkins-MoholoIt’s almost half a century since Chris McGregor’s Blue Notes arrived in London: five refugees from apartheid South Africa whose impact on the UK jazz scene was so profound that the sound and spirit of their playing continue to echo in the music of succeeding generations. Four of them — the trumpeter Mongesi Feza, the altoist Dudu Pukwana, the pianist Chris McGregor and the bassist Johnny Dyani — are no longer with us. The sole survivor of the classic Blue Notes line-up is Louis Moholo-Moholo, their firestarting drummer, who is now 73 and living back in a very different Cape Town from the one he and his comrades left in 1964.

Louis returns to Britain every now and then, reminding us that he has lost nothing of the spark that ignited a thousand sessions in those early years. One of his current projects is an occasional duo with the young English pianist Alexander Hawkins, and if you have 70 minutes to spare, and you’re in the mood to concentrate, I advise you to click on this link. You’ll find a set played during the Gateshead Jazz Festival a few weeks ago which is a fine testament to the musical relationship developing between two musicians who are four decades apart in age but soul-mates on the stage.

In October 2011 they recorded an album, Keep Your Heart Straight, which has just been released on the Ogun label. It’s a record on which Hawkins reminds his listeners that the piano, too, is a percussion instrument. He and Moholo attack the music with a brusque desire to get to the heart of the matter, even when they’re playing romantic ballads like “If I Should Lose You” and “Prelude to a Kiss”, which both get a good pummelling. It’s an exceptional document.

The Gateshead set is very different in tone: more relaxed and expansive, the 50-minute opening medley beginning with the stately, hymn-like tune of Pule Pheto’s “Dikeledi Tsa Phelo” (which reappears at the very end of the concert) and containing the same two standards, treated more tenderly this time. The medley is succeeded by a heartfelt treatment of Dudu’s “B My Dear”, a staple of the Blue Notes’ repertoire: originally titled “Marie My Dear”, it appeared under that name on Very Urgent, their wonderful 1968 album, and is one of the loveliest ballads ever written by a jazz musician, blending a dollop of Ellingtonian lyricism with a dash of Monkish astringency.

Moholo is magnificently alert and responsive throughout (and occasionally droll), while Hawkins, who continues to impress in all sorts of contexts, shows his ability to play alongside the great drummer without falling for the obvious temptation to imitate the distinctive South African piano styles of McGregor and Abdullah Ibrahim. He can absorb the sounds and syntax of the past while forging a style that is on its way to becoming distinctly his own.

* The photograph of Louis Moholo-Moholo and Alexander Hawkins is from the inner jacket of Keep Your Heart Right, and was taken by Roberto Cifarelli.

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