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Posts tagged ‘Byron Wallen’

Nov 17

Mulatu Astatke says goodbye

A month shy of his 82nd birthday, Mulatu Astatke brought his farewell tour to a close with two sold-out dates at the start of the EFG London Jazz Festival this week. I went to the first of them, at the Royal Festival Hall, to celebrate the work of the man generally credited with the creation of “Ethio-jazz”.

It takes more than one person to create a genre, but Astatke, who left Ethiopia as a teenager in the late 1950s to study vibraphone, his main instrument, and composition at Trinity College in London and Berklee College in Boston, was certainly a catalyst. He began making records in the US in the 1960s before returning to Ethiopia, where conditions changed after the takeover by a military junta in 1975, restricted Addis Ababa’s lively creative scene. He already had a large hipster following when the use of his music in Jim Jarmusch’s Broken Flowers in 2005 expanded his audience considerably.

On Sunday night he began the concert with Steps Ahead, his seven-piece European band, including such familiar figures as the trumpeter Byron Wallen, the pianist Alexander Hawkins and the double bassist John Edwards. The first half of the 90-minute set featured some of the compositions revived for a recently released album, Mulatu Plays Mulatu, including “Yekermo Sew”, with strong echoes of Horace Silver, and “The Way to Nice”, which plays a game with the James Bond riff. This music sounds like early-’60s hard bop filtered through Ethiopian modes and intonation, infusing it with as distinctive a flavour as the Skatellites and the Blue Notes imparted to similar material in Jamaica and South Africa respectively.

I was struck by the use of Danny Keane’s cello, sometimes strummed like a rhythm instrument, at other times interjecting short percussive phrases with a dry tone, and often combining to powerful effect with Edwards’ bass. It was intriguing to hear Edwards, Hawkins and the saxophonist James Arben delivering solos using the language of free jazz in the context of this mostly riff-based music, and receiving ovations for their efforts. While Astatke was spinning out his mellifluous extended vibes solos over the deep groove provided by the kit drummer, Jon Scott, and the percussionist, Richard Olatunde Baker, on something like “Netsanet”, I felt perfectly contented.

For the second half of the set, the band was joined by two dancers, a man and a woman, and two more musicians, playing the masengo, a single-stringed bowed lute, and the krar, a six-stringed lute. This was more of a folkloric experience, inviting the sort of mass participation that can seem awkward in a modern western concert hall. But it would be wrong to suggest that it was not greatly enjoyed, or that Astatke was not given the warmest and most rousing of valedictory salutes.

* Mulatu Plays Mulatu is out now on the Strut label.

Sep 28

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Remembering John Stevens

I’d been working at the Melody Maker only a few weeks in the autumn of 1969 when the drummer John Stevens and the saxophonist Trevor Watts arrived to see me, unannounced, at the paper’s offices in Fleet Street. They’d sensed the presence of a writer sympathetic to their music and they’d brought me a copy of the Spontaneous Music Ensemble’s new album, recorded for Giorgio Gomelsky’s Marmalade label. I already knew about them, of course, and over the years I saw John play on many occasions and in many different musical environments. His death from a heart attack in 1994, at the age of 54, deprived the London scene of a musician who, his own great gifts aside, had devoted much of his life to encouraging others to express their creativity.

“John didn’t just change my life — he saved it,” the singer Maggie Nichols said at the Café Oto last night, while introducing an evening of hitherto unseen films featuring Stevens in a variety of contexts. They had been put together by the music and label owner Mark Wastell from a cache of videos owned by John’s widow, Anne, and his children, Ritchie and Louise. There is, as Wastell remarked, so little filmed evidence of John’s life and work available to be seen that anything is to be treasured — and these films brought him back to life in full strength.

Four films were shown. I was able to see the first three, each half an hour long. The first, filmed at the Third Eye Centre in Glasgow in 1976 on a single hand-held camera in black and white, captured a date on a tour by the trio of Stevens, Danny Thompson on bass and John Tchicai on soprano and alto saxophones. This was the bearded, roaring John Stevens with the bearded, roaring Danny Thompson — together in another incarnation as John Martyn’s accompanists — giving Tchicai the most enthusiastic and empathetic encouragement.

The second film, shot at a club in Stavanger by Norwegian TV in 1991, was a far more polished affair in every way. The music produced by this trio, completed by the American bassist Kent Carter and the Norwegian altoist Frøde Gjersted, was just as impassioned, running through different modes of collective improvisation: time, no time, and the sort of pointillism that recalled John’s famous “click pieces”, when the SME or workshop groups were instructed to use the shortest possible sounds to create their improvisations. This film included a joint interview with the three musicians, during which Carter memorably summarised his philosophy of constant renewal: “If the audience can recognise what we’re doing, it’s already been done.”

A year later, in 1991, Channel 4 filmed John’s new quartet, with the saxophonist Ed Jones, the trumpeter Byron Wallen and the bassist Gary Crosby, performing a Stevens composition dedicated to the then recently deceased Dudu Pukwana, called “Dudu’s Gone”. Not a lament but a celebration, recalling Ornette Coleman’s bounciest medium-tempo tunes, it showcased John’s beautiful time playing, with its strong echoes of Max Roach’s drive and Billy Higgins’s float. The unedited takes we were shown included an interview in which John was asked what it took to play free music. “It’s a freedom that demands high discipline and high articulation,” he replied.

Regrettably, I wasn’t able to stay to see the final episode of the evening, a 70-minute film of John playing and talking with Derek Bailey at Jazz Rumours in London in 1992, released in an edited form on video cassette by the Incus label in 1996. But I left with some more of Maggie Nichols’s words in my head, about the experience of being introduced by John to the practice of free improvisation back in the late ’60s: “It was like walking off a cliff — terrifying and ecstatic at the same time.”

Sep 30

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Remembering Bobby Hutcherson

orphy-robinsonOrphy Robinson must have known he’d had a great idea when he put together an octet to celebrate the music of the late Bobby Hutcherson at the church of St James the Great in Hackney on Thursday night. But I don’t think he can have expected the large crowd who turned up to respond in quite the way they did.

Fans of contemporary jazz generally listen to their music with a silent attentiveness, occasionally applauding a solo but mostly reserving their signs of approval until the end of a piece. That wasn’t the case on Thursday. The unusual fervour of the music was matched by the response of the listeners, who shouted approval and encouragement during solos in a manner associated with the tenor battles of the 1940s.

Somehow, on this occasion, the musicians had accessed a different spirit. To me, it was the spirit of gospel music: the wave of emotion that can lift you to another level of feeling, in which inhibitions are broken down. Doubly appropriate, given the venue and the fact that the organisers were the promoters of a series known as Church of Sound.

Putting together the evening’s repertoire, Orphy mixed Hutcherson’s own compositions with those from other writers that the great vibraphonist recorded during his long career. I was only able to stay for the first of the two sets, so I missed the versions of Eric Dolphy’s “Gazzelloni” and “Hat and Beard” from the classic Out to Lunch. But I loved the arrangements devised for Eddie Marshall’s boppish “Knucklebean”, James Leary’s “So Far, So Good” and Hutcherson’s oft-recorded “Little B’s Poem” and the rousing “8/4 Beat”.

The line-up was a dream. Byron Wallen (trumpet), Roland Sutherland (flute), Tony Kofi (alto), Nubya Garcia (tenor), the leader on marimba and electric vibraphone, Robert Mitchell (piano), Dudley Philips (double bass) and Moses Boyd (drums) set up in the middle of the church, facing each other, surrounded by their listeners. As with the monthly Jazz in the Round series at the Cockpit Theatre, it made this seem the best possible physical format for jazz.

Kofi came close to blowing the doors off the place every time he took a solo. Orphy unleashed dazzling cross-hatched patterns of melody that skittered around the vaulted ceiling. Mitchell played one lengthy solo — on “8/4 Beat”, I think — of such ferocious emotional intensity that it threatened to melt his small electronic keyboard. And in an immaculate rhythm section, it was a special treat to hear Boyd playing straight time with such a lovely feel for swing, blending the alert crispness of Tony Williams with the beatific serenity of Billy Higgins.

The sound wasn’t perfect, but it didn’t matter a bit. Sometimes, for whatever reason, music goes beyond all the things that make it up and finds its way into a fourth dimension. This was one of those times.