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Posts tagged ‘Edwin Outwater’

Nov 25

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Outer and inner space

On the 243 bus ride to yesterday’s matinee show at Cafe Oto, I finished Samantha Harvey’s short novel Orbital, the winner of this year’s Booker Prize. Starting as a description of the lives of six astronauts aboard a space station, it finishes as a meditation on the world — the planet, the universe — and our place in it.

With that in my head, listening to Evan Parker, Matthew Wright and their four colleagues in this edition of Transatlantic Trance Map create their intricate musical conversations was like zooming in on the smallest level of earthly detail: an example of our human potential, in the face of cosmic irrelevance.

For two shortish sets of unbroken free improvisation, Parker (soprano saxophone) and Wright (turntables and live sampling devices) were joined by Hannah Marshall (cello), Pat Thomas (electronics), Robert Jarvis (trombone) and Alex Ward (clarinet). The music was calm, collective, and often very beautiful in its constant warp and weft. Maybe it was the occasional (very subtle and always appropriate) pings and hums from the electronics that reinforced the connection in my mind with Orbital: the whoosh of a closing airlock, the light clang of a piece of space junk against a titanium hull. But that was obviously just me.

Many years ago I went to interview Evan at his home in Twickenham. One thing I noticed was that his shelves of LPs had a particularly long stretch of orange and black spines: John Coltrane on the Impulse label, of course. Evan has never sounded like Coltrane, but his study of the great man was foundational to his own development and his interest remains deep. Yesterday, for example, he was keen to tell me about the extraordinary sound quality of the reissue of the 1962 Graz concert by Coltrane’s classic quartet on Werner Uehlinger’s ezz-thetics label. “You can hear the ping of Elvin’s ride cymbal,” he said.

So it was by an interesting coincidence that I went on from Dalston to another event on the last day of the EFG London Jazz Festival, a concert at the Queen Elizabeth Hall called Coltrane: Legacy for Orchestra. For this performance of arrangements by various hands of some of Coltrane’s compositions (“Impressions”, “Central Park West”, “Giant Steps”, “Naima” etc), and a few other pieces that he recorded (including “So What”, “Crepuscule with Nellie” and “Blue in Green” and a handful of standards, including “My Favourite Things”), the full BBC Concert Orchestra, conducted by Edwin Outwater, was joined by two horn soloists, the young American trumpeter Giveton Gelin and the experienced British saxophonist Denys Baptiste, and the trio of the pianist Nikki Yeoh, with Shane Forbes on drums and Ewan Hastie on bass.

Inevitably, I suppose, there were times when it felt as though Coltrane was being reduced to something close to light music; there was certainly no attempt to get to grips with the turbulence of the music he made in the last three years of his life in albums such as Interstellar Space. But there were moments of distinction, too. Baptiste tore into “Impressions”, while Gelin — a New York-based Bahamian in his mid-twenties — earned ovations for his poised reading of “My One and Only Love” and for a lovely coda to “In a Sentimental Mood”, mining the elegant post-bop tradition of Clifford Brown, Lee Morgan and Freddie Hubbard.

In terms of the response from a full house, it was a great success. But there was one moment when the music went deeper, closer to what Coltrane was really about, and it came in the arrangement of “Alabama” by Carlos Simon, a composer in residence at the John F. Kennedy Centre for the Performing Arts in Washington DC, and the principal begetter of this project.

“Alabama” is Coltrane’s most sacred song, a slow, heavy hymn to the memory of the four African American schoolgirls murdered by racists in the bombing of a church in Birmingham, Alabama on September 15, 1963. Simon chose to orchestrate it in the way Eric Dolphy and McCoy Tyner might have done, had it been written in time for inclusion in 1961 in Coltrane’s first Impulse album, Africa/Brass, on which Dolphy and Tyner made dramatic use of low brass.

Here, Simon added trombones and French horns, using tympani and a gran cassa to augment Shane Forbes’s mallets on his tom-toms, thus amplifying the effect of Elvin Jones’s original rolling thunder behind Baptiste’s emotionally weighted statements of the rubato theme. Like the tenorist’s extended but carefully shaped solo on the in-tempo passage, it honoured not only Coltrane’s memory but his intentions, and will be worthy of special attention when Radio 3 broadcasts the concert later this week.

* Transatlantic Trance Map’s album Marconi’s Drift is out now on the False Walls label (www.falsewalls.com), which is also about to release a four-CD box set of Evan Parker’s solo improvisations, titled The Heraclitean Two-Step, Etc. The live recording of Coltrane: Legacy for Orchestra will be broadcast on BBC Radio 3 between 19:30 and 21:45 on Thursday 28 November, thereafter available on BBC Sounds.

Jul 16

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Northern Soul at the Albert Hall

The spirits of Tobi Legend, Tony Clarke, Sandi Sheldon, Eddie Holman, Bobby Paris, Judy Street, Shane Martin, Dana Valery and other heroes of Northern Soul inhabited the Royal Albert Hall last night. Goodness knows what they would have made of the sight and sound of 5,000 people acclaiming performances of their songs in the second concert of the 2023 BBC Proms season.

To recreate 30 Northern Soul favourites with the BBC Concert Orchestra in such formal surroundings seemed like an endeavour fraught with risk. In fact it was an unmitigated triumph, for which enormous credit goes to the co-curators, the writer and broadcaster Stuart Maconie and the arranger Joe Duddell, as well as the half-dozen singers recruited to attempt the task.

The evening started with the ebullient Brendan Reilly delivering the MVPs’ “Turning My Heartbeat Up” and Dobie Gray’s “Out on the Floor”, setting the mood while reassuring the audience that the performances would both idiomatically accurate and true to the music’s spirit. It ended two hours later with all six singers taking turns to lead the audience in a wonderful version of Frank Wilson’s “Do I Love You (Deed I Do)”, the song that most perfectly captures the pure exhilaration of Northern Soul.

But there are many more shades to this music, as we heard as Frida Touray elegantly interpreted Rita and the Tiaras’ sublime “Gone With the Wind Is My Love” and Little Anthony and the Imperials’ sophisticated “Better Use Your Head”, in Nick Shirm’s elastic delivery of Shane Martin’s “I Need You”, Bobby Paris’s “Night Owl” and Jimmy Beaumont’s “I Never Loved Her Anyway”, in Natalie Palmer’s lively reading of Dana Valery’s “You Don’t Know Where Your Interest Lies” and Judy Street’s “What Can I Do”, in Darrell Smith’s stylish version of Ray Pollard’s “The Drifter”, and in Vula Malinga’s superb account of Gladys Knight’s gospel-driven “No One Can Love You More”. Reilly had just the voice for both the Trammps’ “Hold Back the Night” and the Carstairs’ “It Really Hurts Me Girl”.

As each singer took their solo turn, the others provided beautifully judged backing vocals. Gradually the orchestra, conducted by Edwin Outwater, came into its own, with Duddell and Fiona Brice providing the meticulously detailed arrangements: the strings soared, the brass and reeds thickened the sound. The rhythm section — Andy Vinter (piano), Alasdair Malloy (vibes), Pete Callard (guitar), Steve Pearce (bass guitar), Mike Smith (drums), Steve Whibley and Julian Poole (percussion) — provided the unstoppable momentum. Vibraphone and baritone saxophone, the keys to so many Motown-influenced Northern Soul favourites, were present and correct, while the guitarist chopped chords on the backbeat as the idiom demanded. The whole sound was mixed and balanced perfectly. A couple of times the singers stepped aside, allowing the orchestra to perform two of the backing tracks — “Sliced Tomatoes” and a magnificent “Exus Trek” — that were such an important part of the scene.

Darrell Smith, perfectly turned out in a brown Tonik suit, supplied soaring drama that stole the show late on with the Four Seasons’ “The Night”, the Albert Hall’s lighting technicians bathing the ecstatic throng in something approaching a mirror-ball effect. Then came the famous trio of songs with which the DJs at Wigan Casino closed their all-nighters: Dean Parrish’s “I’m on My Way”, Jimmy Radcliffe’s “Long After Tonight Is All Over” and Tobi Legend’s “Time Will Pass You By”, which between them summon all the emotions its audience continues to draw from this music: optimism and determination, but also the layer of aching sadness beneath the euphoria. All the complicated feelings of youth, captured in these seemingly disposable but resolutely enduring songs.

Maconie’s introduction had drawn cheers for his mentions of Manchester’s Twisted Wheel, Blackpool Mecca, Wigan Casino, Stoke’s Golden Torch and Bolton’s Va Va Club. This was a communal rite, a meeting of the clans, the reunion of a family in an alien setting that turned out to be a home from home. It was something very precious. I can’t begin to tell you how much I enjoyed it.

* You can hear BBC Prom 2: Northern Soul on BBC Sounds for the next 29 days. You can see it on BBC2 on 26 August and hear it again on BBC Radio 6 Music on 9 September.