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Posts tagged ‘Cassie Kinoshi’

May 10

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The sound of London

It’s been exciting to watch the blossoming of a new young UK jazz scene in recent years, and now it’s possible to welcome a historical survey of its emergence. André Marmot’s Unapologetic Expression, published this month, is an insider’s explanation of why and how it happened, by whom and to whom. This is history almost in real time, with the con trails still visible in the sky

Marmot is a musician who has worked for the last few years as agent, promoter and label owner. Perhaps that makes him an unusual person to write such a work. But it also gives him access to the people on the scene, justifying the subtitle: “The Inside Story of the UK Jazz Explosion”. More important, he can really write. Not in a fancy way, but with a clarity of thought and a simple elegance of expression that make it a pleasure to turn from page to page.

It’s a story of the music’s evolution in London; there are a few mentions of Soweto Kinch and GoGo Penguin, but none of Xhosa Cole or Nat Birchall. And its focus excludes the parallel world of free improvisation, the descendants of the SME and AMM. But at least we know where we are, and where the author is coming from.

The narrative takes in United Vibrations, Steez, Brainchild, Total Refreshment Centre, Steam Down, Brownswood and We Out Here, Jazz Re:freshed, Church of Sound, Tomorrow’s Warriors and more. The soundtrack might be Moses Boyd’s “Rye Lane Shuffle” and Yussef Kamaal’s Black Faces. One of the key events might be the appearance of Boyd, Shabaka Hutchings and Theon Cross at South by Southwest in Austin, Texas in 2017, when it became obvious that this scene could gain traction with listeners beyond Peckham and Dalston.

It’s quite a political book, in the sense that Marmot is not afraid to spend time criticising the effect of government policy on the arts and on young jazz musicians in particular, and propounding his belief (impeccable in my eyes) that jazz is essentially a black music in which others are welcome to take part. He puts his arguments concisely and chooses his supporting voices well.

For this is, in large part, an oral history. And whatever the perspective he’s examining — there are chapters called “Jazz Ownership and Appropriation”, “Jazz and Postcolonial London” and “New Industry Models and the End of Musical Tribalism” — he allows the musicians themselves to have their unmediated say. It’s no surprise that people like Sheila Maurice-Grey, Dave Okumu, Poppy Ajudha, Jason Yarde and Emma-Jean Thackray turn out to have interesting opinions.

If those chapter headings make the book sound academic, it isn’t. It’s anything but. It’s as full of life and energy, as sparky and challenging, as the music itself. It might even convert some of those who look with scepticism on audiences — some of whose members perhaps don’t know Lester Young from Coleman Hawkins and may never have heard “West End Blues” or “Parker’s Mood” — dancing and cheering as these musicians play for people who look, think and live like themselves.

But in order to exalt the new, it’s not necessary to denigrate the past, and there are some passages here that may annoy jazz fans of former generations. It’s easy to pour scorn on views expressed in earlier times, which is what Marmot does here with, for example, an autobiography from 1998 in which John Dankworth — who did much to popularise the music in Britain in the past-war decades — claimed that jazz “since its beginnings… [has been] an instrument of goodwill and peaceful and gradual change rather than anything really revolutionary.” I tend towards Marmot’s view rather than Dankworth’s, but I’d caution him that the passage of time can distort as well as clarify.

In between sessions of reading his book, I was listening to two new British jazz albums. The first is the latest from Empirical, who receive only a single slighting mention for their “dressed-up-for-the-wedding, jazz-cliché” look, which he compares unfavourably with the dressed-down, funky-Peckham vibe of Binker Golding and Moses Boyd on the cover of their 2015 debut album. I think it’s a ridiculous criticism, as irrelevant as dissing the MJQ for wearing tuxedos, and — like the Dankworth swipe — unworthy of what is otherwise a valuable piece of work.

Empirical’s Wonder Is the Beginning features the basic quartet with guests Jason Rebello on piano and Alex Hitchock on tenor saxophone. Most of the knotty but engaging tunes are written by Tom Farmer, the bassist, with one apiece from Nat Facey, the alto saxophonist, and Lewis Wright, the vibes player. Anyone who has ever enjoyed their work will find plenty to digest here, in a well established groove that enters the room occupied by Andrew Hill, Bobby Hutcherson and Eric Dolphy in their Blue Note period and pushes the walls out slightly. The addition of the guests enriches the range of tone and gesture without disturbing the group’s fine balance.

Cassie Kinoshi belongs firmly in the generation promoted by Marmot, and is among those providing the author with interesting opinions on his chosen topics. Her latest album finds an 11-piece version of her group Seed operating in partnership with the London Contemporary Orchestra and the turntablist NikNak on a 22-minute, six-part suite called Gratitude (from which the album takes its title), recorded at the Purcell Room in March 2023, and in a 10-piece formation performing a five-minute piece called “Smoke in the Sun” at Total Refreshment Centre in 2021.

This isn’t a long album, then, but it gets a lot of substance into its half-hour duration, thanks to Kinoshi’s fast-developing gift for deploying the instrumental resources at her command. Her music is astringent in its sound and strong in its movements. The strings and woodwind, for instance, carry as much weight as the brass, reeds and rhythm: there’s no danger of anything sounding effete or chamber music-y here. The double bass of Rio Kai and the drums of Patrick Gabriel-Boyle provide both line-ups with a loose-limbed swing.

There is plenty of space in the music, and a great deal of variety. When she clears a space for a soloist, she does it very adroitly: the guitarist Shirley Tetteh, the trumpeters Jack Banjo Courtney and Joseph Oti-Akenteng, and eventually herself, with an improvisation that really soars, leading the sixth and final movement to a dramatic but graceful conclusion. Nothing sounds pasted-in or anything less than organic.

Both these albums, and André Marmot’s book, tell a very encouraging story about the condition of British jazz: not just about the skill and originality of its practitioners, but about their continuing ability to find, expand and stay close to their audience.

* André Marmot’s Unapologetic Expression is published by Faber & Faber. Empirical’s Wonder Is the Beginning is on Whirlwind Records. Gratitude by Cassie Kinoshi’s Seed with NikNak and the London Contemporary Orchestra is on International Anthem.

Nov 22

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The sound of London 2020

Guitarist Shirley Tetteh at Church of Sound during the EFG London Jazz Festival

Half an hour into BBC4’s special Jazz 625 programme on Saturday night, the journalist Emma Warren remarked that everybody in London’s new jazz scene has their own role to play. You might be making your contribution as a musician, or taking the money on the door. Or, she suggested, your role might be as the first person on the dance floor that night, leading the way for the rest of the audience to join in. That sense of collective commitment was strong throughout the programme.

Timed to coincide with the 2020 London Jazz Festival, the 90-minute show featured many of the most prominent names of the current scene: the drummer Moses Boyd and his band Exodus, the tenor saxophonist Nubya Garcia’s quartet, the trumpeter Sheila Maurice-Grey’s irresistible Kokoroko, the singer Poppy Ajudah with a searing Black Lives Matter song, the powerful Ezra Collective, the drummer Sarathy Korwar, the clarinetist Shabaka Hutchings with Sons of Kemet, the tuba-player Theon Cross with the rapper Consensus, and others. There were interludes exploring the work of Gary Crosby’s Tomorrow’s Warriors project in mentoring so many of the new generation, and a shift up to Manchester reflected the contributions of the trumpeter Matthew Halsall and the saxophonist Nat Birchall.

Boyd co-hosted the show with Jamz Supernova, and something he said was also striking. Every young black jazz musician, he remarked, knows what it feels like to play to a room full of middle-aged white people. And that’s fine, he added. But sometimes you want to play to people like yourself. A sequence of clips from Steam Down in Deptford, the Fox & Firkin pub in Lewisham, Total Refreshment Centre in Hackney Downs and other London venues in pre-pandemic times showed what he meant.

This music restores a sense of jazz’s old physicality. While strong on a belief in the tradition, it blends in elements of the music absorbed by younger players: hip-hop and its offshoots, reggae, Afro-beat. In that way, too, it recalls jazz’s origins as a musical broth, a bouillabaisse, a gumbo, embracing influences rather than distilling the flavour out of them.

It believes in rhythm and it believes in warmth. Communication is the priority, but without compromise. Lessons from the more abstract directions of contemporary jazz are deployed as extra tools. There are rough edges and signs of what some older listeners might see as naivety. But to watch and listen to the development of these musicians, to hear them stretching their limbs and discovering their own potential, is a thing of wonder and infinite pleasure.

In Saturday’s show the various groups were playing without an audience and in a socially distanced format. The same was true of the livestreams of the festival gigs I was able to watch. What really impressed me was that a movement nourished by the spontaneity and feedback of an intimate live setting proved able to flourish in a completely different environment. If they were being set a test, they passed it en bloc, with distinction.

The BBC4 programme is available now on iPlayer. Some of the livestreams from the festival are also free to watch, like the Charlie Parker centenary tribute from Church of Sound in Hackney, featuring Gary Crosby’s Groundation, with Nathaniel Facey on alto, Shirley Tetteh on guitar, Hamish Moore on bass and Moses Boyd on drums: a quicksilver set of Bird tunes and originals. Facey’s own quartet, completed by two of his fellow members of Empirical, the drummer Shaney Forbes and the bassist Tom Farmer, and the guitarist Dave Preston, were captured at the Green Note in Camden Town, letting air and light into knotty themes by the leader and the guitarist. And at Total Refreshment Centre the impressive young trumpeter/singer Emma-Jean Thackray led her quintet — Lyle Barton on keyboards, Matt Gedrych on bass guitar, Dougal Taylor on drums and Crispin Robinson on percussion — through a wholly absorbing, convincing and thoroughly contemporary investigation of the moods suggested by Bitches Brew 50 years ago.

Tickets were £12.50 to livestream Cassie Kinoshi’s SEED Ensemble and their guests performing an 80th birthday tribute to Pharoah Sanders at the Barbican, and that’s what it’ll cost you to catch up with it via the Barbican’s website. I can only urge everyone do make the investment, since Kinoshi presents an hour of music of the highest quality, carefully devised and packed with all the best qualities of the new London scene.

The core SEED line-up — Kinoshi (alto), Sheila Maurice-Grey and Jack Banjo-Courtney (trumpets), Joe Bristow (trombone), Hannah Mbuya (tuba), Chelsea Carmichael (tenor, flute), Shirley Tetteh (guitar), Rio Kai (bass) and Patrick Boyle (drums) — kicked off with the ever-hypnotic riff of “Upper and Lower Egypt” before being joined by the clarinet of Shabaka Hutchings (on a beautifully flighted “Astral Travelling”), the pianist Ashley Henry (a heartfelt “Greeting to Saud”), the percussionist Yahael Camara-Onono (“Elevation”) and the singer Richie Seivwright (“Love Is Everywhere”). The horn arrangements were perfect, the rhythm section subtle and skilful, each of the soloists offering something of substance.

“Catch you soon, when life is normal again,” Kinoshi told her invisible audience at the end of the set. But if it was sad not to be able to witness this music in person, to share the experience with the players and to make them feel the listeners’ response, it was wonderful to be able to hear it all, staged and played and recorded so beautifully in all the venues.

If you browse the festival’s website, you’ll find other fine performances available: the trumpeter Yazz Ahmed, the guitarist Hedvig Mollestad and the poet Moor Mother with Irreversible Entanglements are some of them. But maybe watch Jazz 625 first, all the way through. At a time when the streets of the city are drained of life, it’s a reminder of what’s waiting around the corner. If it doesn’t fill you with the kind of optimism that’s been in short supply for the past nine months, I’ll be very surprised.

Sep 16

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Cassie Kinoshi at the Roundhouse

Cassie Kinoshi 1

Since the SEED Ensemble’s Mercury Prize-nominated Driftglass is likely to be one of my albums of the year, I was keen to see Cassie Kinoshi, the group’s leader and composer, at the Roundhouse last night. This was a different kind of gig, arranged by Skin Deep, the race and culture magazine, in their Sonic Transmissions series. On these evenings, an individual musician is put under the spotlight in the venue’s small theatre: they perform live, they play selected recordings, and they are interviewed by Anu Henriques, the magazine’s founder. Shabaka Hutchings, Nubya Garcia and Moses Boyd have been previous subjects of a series clearly angled towards the new London-based jazz movement in which contemporary forms of racial and cultural diversity are brought to bear on the traditions.

Thoughtful, engaging and not afraid to express an opinion, Kinoshi was keen to acknowledge the vital role played by Gary Crosby’s Tomorrow’s Warriors in her career and those of her predecessors on the Sonic Transmissions stage. The TW workshops had not just been an education in jazz, she said, but an introduction to the idea of the music as the product of a community. The bands in which she currently plays — SEED Ensemble, the co-operative Nérija and Sheila Maurice-Grey’s Kokoroko — all provide evidence of that philosophy, which she summed up as “a sharing of minds”.

Born in 1993 to parents of Nigerian, Sierra Leonean and Caribbean origin, brought up in the less than funky surroundings of Welwyn Garden City and subsequently a graduate of the Trinity Laban Conservatoire, she is already strongly aware of the value of “representation”: the need to present herself as an example to young black females of achievement in a field that might once have seemed beyond their reach. She herself, she said, had had no such benefit early on.

She also spoke of how, when confronted by a predominantly white audience, she found herself compelled to emphasise the blackness of her music: an example of how she doesn’t want to make her listeners feel too comfortable. Her compositions might be inspired by literature and places, but also by the Grenfell Tower tragedy (Driftglass‘s “Wake”), the uncovering of the Windrush scandal, the divisions revealed by Brexit, and the need for young black women to resist the imposition of white standards of beauty.

For the live pieces she brought along a new sextet featuring two alto saxophones (herself and Tyrone Isaac-Stuart), vibes (David Mrakpor), guitar (Richie Aikman), bass guitar and synth bass (Isobella Burnham) and drums (Ayo Salawu). The music was loud and aggressive, inspired in part by Kinoshi’s fondness during her schooldays for metal and indie rock (she mentioned Pantera and Nirvana), but it also provided a platform for thoughtful solos by the expressive Aikman and Mrakpor, whose poise reminded me of Bobby Hutcherson. The two-alto front line is rare — I thought of Eric Dolphy with Ken McIntyre or Oliver Nelson — and the sweet-and-sour blend reflected Kinoshi’s admiration of Jackie McLean, Steve Lehman and Rudresh Mahanthapa.

She also played us a recording of a startling orchestral piece titled “If She Could Dance Naked under Palm Trees”, indicating the breadth of her resources and ambition. In the live set, however, the music — like so much of the new jazz emerging from south and east London — was rhythm-heavy, meant to make you move. Whatever others might think, this reunion of jazz and the body is a very good thing.

* Cassie Kinoshi’s SEED Ensemble will be at the Jazz Café on November 24 as part of the EFG London Jazz Festival. Driftglass is on the jazzre:freshed label. Nérija’s new album, Blume, is just out on the Domino label.

Mar 30

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Nérija at the Albert Hall

Nérija 1

So maybe this London jazz boom is for real, after all. There was another piece about it in the New York Times last week, in which Giovanni Russonello extolled the Sons of Kemet’s new album while correctly praising the vibrancy of the scene that incubated Shabaka Hutchings and his colleagues. Last night I heard a bit more evidence in the intimate surroundings of the Albert Hall’s Elgar Room, where the septet called Nérija pulled a big and enthusiastic crowd.

Nérija are Sheila Maurice-Grey (trumpet), Rosie Turton (trombone), Cassie Kinoshi (alto saxophone), Nubya Garcia (tenor saxophone), Shirley Tetteh (guitar), Rio Kai (double bass) and Lizy Exell (drums). Several of them are graduates of the invaluable Tomorrow’s Warriors programme run for young musicians by Gary Crosby and Janine Irons. Last year they released an EP — you can listen to and download it here — which showed off qualities that were illustrated in greater depth during two half-hour sets packed with substantial original compositions, some of them written collectively and each showing a different facet of their character.

Their grooves are made for dancing, their tunes and solos for listening. The four-horn front line makes a pleasingly warm, fat sound, but is used with flexibility, sometimes dividing up within the written sections: trumpet and trombone together, or alto and tenor, or other combinations, thus keeping the textures fresh and the densities surprising. The solos are strategically placed within each composition so that the listener never gets the feeling of hearing a routine in progress. Often a piece has an unexpected ending: an epigrammatic tag, a rhythm section coda, a sudden diminuendo.

As soloists, the horn players are still developing but already show self-confidence and imagination. The formidable Garcia is currently the best known of them, but Maurice-Grey and Turton played several solos that would be outstanding in any context, while Kinoshi — whose playing has a bit of the Blue Notes’ Dudu Pukwana and the Skatalites’ Lester Sterling in it — preached with particular fervour on a composition of her own.

I love how they mix West and South African and Jamaican influences with hard bop and modal jazz, hip-hop, and no doubt other ingredients. The place where they all meet — the prism through which everything passes — seems to be the guitar of Tetteh, who powers the grooves with a fast, staccato chordal approach closer to funk than jazz, as well driving Kai and Exell to spirited climaxes behind the soloists. Her own improvisations are episodic but often contain startling juxtapositions of chordal passages with rippling single-note figures. I hear echoes of all sorts of things metabolised in her playing: Ernest Ranglin, Gabor Szabo, Michael Hampton, Grant Green, and the guys who played guitar with King Sunny Adé. I think she’s finding her way towards something special.

Although Nérija’s approach has been carefully planned, the music never feels tricksy. There are music stands on stage, but they don’t get in the way of spontaneity and a compelling immediacy. There are rough edges, but in a Mingus-y sort of way, which can only be good. You feel that if they were ever completely smoothed away, the fun would stop. Which hardly seems imminent.