Skip to content

Posts tagged ‘George Crowley’

May 8

1 Comment

Alex Hawkins at Cafe Oto

Alexander Hawkins played two nights at Cafe Oto this week with his new 11-piece band before spending two days recording the pieces they played, to which he gives the title Willow Music. If the set I heard on Tuesday is any guide, the resulting album will be worth considerable study.

The opening bars of the first piece the group played made me smile. For a minute I thought that I’d stepped back in time to the Royal Roost in 1948, and here was the Miles Davis Nonet — which became known as the Birth of the Cool band — playing a Gil Evans arrangement of a bebop standard. The feeling didn’t last because the music soon changed into something more identifiably itself, but it was oddly exhilarating while it lasted.

Davis’s nonet was constructed to reflect the range of the human voice, from the top end of the trumpet and the alto saxophone to the bottom of a tuba and a string bass. The Willow Music band achieves a similar spread, but even wider. Here were Alicia Gardener-Trejo on flute, bass flute and bass clarinet; Tom Challenger on flute and alto saxophone; Xhosa Cole on flute and tenor saxophone; George Crowley on flute, tenor saxophone and bass clarinet; Alex Ward on clarinet; Charlotte Keeffe on trumpet; Alex Paxton on trombone; Olivia Hughes on tuba; Neil Charles on bass and Stephen Davis on drums. With Hawkins himself on piano, of course.

With earlier projects, Hawkins has shown himself adept at handling larger ensembles; this one constantly engages the attention through the sheer variety of textures and timbres he draws from it. I was particularly beguiled by a piece that concentrated on the five woodwind players on flutes and clarinets, at first acappella; it reminded me of some of the West Coast recordings of the ’50s by people like Bob Cooper, Bud Shank and Jimmy Giuffre (themselves all inspired by the Birth of the Cool band), but again brought right up into contemporary practice.

It proved to be a perfect platform for soloists who integrate the vocabulary of free jazz into their improvisations. There were outstanding individual contributions, particularly from a rampaging Cole on tenor, the blustery Keeffe and the astonishingly agile Ward, but Challenger, Crowley, Paxton and Gardener-Trejo also made their mark, and there was outstanding work from Hughes, often in unison with Charles, and the infinitely subtle Davis. The composer mostly sat in front of the band, ready to cue and conduct these brand-new pieces when necessary, but he also made the space for some fine piano solos, particularly one on which he used various devices to alter the instrument’s sound, something in which he now specialises.

By the end of a set that lasted well over an hour, I was convinced that Hawkins has come up with something remarkable: a format that encourages him to make new discoveries.

He also has a new album on release, with a different line up. No Nation But Imagination features him on piano, synthesiser and sampler with Nicole Mitchell on flute, Rhodri Davis on harp, Hamid Drake on drums and Matthew Wright on turntables and live sampling. This is a very different sound: an intricately worked open-weave web of softer sounds, with a different balance of composition and arrangement, full of surprises and with a powerful undertow to remove any hint of passivity, and a wonderful gospel-inspired finale. It’s another stage in a remarkable career that is already taking its next step.

* No Nation But Imagination is out now on the Intakt label.

Sep 14

4 Comments

Olie Brice / JLG

Jean-Luc Godard once compared watching the great Hungarian football team of the 1950s to listening to free jazz. A few hours after the announcement of the great director’s death, it was possible to reflect on the meaning of his comparison during a performance at the Café Oto by the trio and octet of Olie Brice, launching the bassist’s new double album, Fire Hills.

Nowadays when we use the term free jazz we tend to mean music created from scratch, on the spot, with no prepared material. Back in the early ’60s, it tended to mean the use of composition to inspire improvisers to stretch the traditional boundaries, using the material as a launch-pad rather than a template while freeing soloists and accompanists to exchange roles. All that could be heard in the music made by Brice’s groups, both of them benefitting from his ability to use his role as a composer to guide rather than prescribe.

The first half featured the trio, completed by the tenor saxophonist Tom Challenger and the drummer Will Glaser, moving with great empathy through compositions dedicated to Johnny Dyani, Eric Dolphy and Andrew Hill. Linking two of the pieces, Glaser delivered a extraordinary solo that began with mallets rolling fast around his snare drum and two tom-toms, using the three pitches to produce something that had the quality of a song, before reversing one of the mallets to introduce a kind of counter-line. Drum solos are seldom poetic, but this was.

Between the two sets, the Oto sound system quietly played selections from the soundtracks of Godard’s movies, including Georges Delerue’s gorgeous orchestral compositions for Le Mépris: a nice touch on a day when a key figure of contemporary culture left the scene.

The six horns of Brice’s octet were assembled in a single line, but it soon became apparent that he would be using them as two units: a pair of trumpets (Kim Macari and Alex Bonney) and a baritone saxophone (Cath Roberts) to the left, an alto saxophone (Jason Yarde) and two tenors (George Crowley and Rachel Musson) to the right, with the drummer Johnny Hunter joining Brice in the rhythm section.

The short ensemble passages — sometimes just punctuations between the improvisations — had the kind of loose-woven, slightly ragged ebullience that could remind you of Mingus’s bands or Charlie Haden’s Liberation Music Orchestra, without borrowing moves from either. That made sense, since Mingus and Haden also figure strongly as inspirations for Brice’s own playing, in which virtuosity and passion are equally mixed.

The first two solos, by Macari and Musson, were the kind you want to wrap up and take home: on-the-nose power from the trumpet, beautifully controlled tonal distortion from the tenor. There were many duets, notably one between the soaring Yarde and the agile Bonney. One or two of the solos outstayed their momentum, but with this music that’s a risk worth taking. And what the evening showed was that Brice has his own way of applying organisation to music, shaping it in interesting ways without compromising the crucial spontaneity of expression and interaction.

* Olie Brice’s Fire Hills is on the West Hill label: https://westhill.bandcamp.com/album/fire-hills