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Posts tagged ‘Karsten Vogel’

Mar 31

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Alto voices: Art Pepper & Karsten Vogel

1.

Alto is just such a hard instrument; there are so few people that play it really well. I feel it’s the best one, too, now. At first I didn’t feel that way — I wanted to be a tenor player. It took a long time for me to feel that alto was the mnst expressive of the saxophones.

That’s Art Pepper, talking to Les Tomkins in an interview for Crescendo magazine in 1979. And it’s certainly true that when he got his first alto at the age of 12, Pepper found his voice, one that continues to beguile listeners today, four decades after his death in 1982, aged 56. Something about the horn’s register and the weight of its sound helped him to expose his emotions.

Pepper was 34 years old and had already lived several lifetimes when he travelled from Los Angeles to Vancouver in September 1959 to fulfil a 10-night engagement at a club called the Cellar, where American jazz musicians were regularly featured. The format was a familiar one in those days: a visiting soloist with a local rhythm section, using a repertoire built from Broadway tunes, jazz standards and perhaps one or two originals from the guest. Pepper had first appeared there in 1957, when he was in a bad way; he was in better condition for this return engagement, as we can hear in a new four-CD box set called Everything Happens to Me, comprising previously unheard recordings made on a mono tape machine

He was a player of special qualities. In the liner notes to a Pepper album (Gettin’ Together, 1960), the critic Martin Williams wrote that he would use the example of Pepper’s improvisations to persuade a square friend that jazz musicians can create melodies better than the ones they started with. Listen to “What’s New” here, or the two versions of “Over the Rainbow”, or particularly the title track of the set, see what Williams meant, as Pepper switches between broad spontaneous melodies and triple-time flurries that deserve to be slowed down, transcribed and studied.

The people who went to hear him at the Cellar in the summer of 1959 were very fortunate. They caught him at his best, with sympathetic accompanists. The pianist Chris Gage, the bassist Tony Clitheroe and the drummer George Ursan may never have established wider reputations, but they knew enough to provide thoughtful and sensitive support, whether on the ballads or the jazz pieces like “Allen’s Alley”, “Yardbird Suite” and Pepper’s own “Brown Gold”.

The sound is not studio-quality, but it’s exactly as you would have expectecd it to be in a club in 1959. The vibe is preserved through introductions and false starts, as when Pepper calls a halt after a few bars of “I Surrender Dear” and apologises to the audience: “As you know we’ve never rehearsed or anything, so if we should goof at any time, please bear with us. It’s just one of those things. We’ll get it, we’ll get it.” One or two tunes are incomplete and have to be faded. But none of that matters. This is how it was.

* Art Pepper’s Everything Happen to Me: 1959 — Live at the Cellar is released on the Omnivore label: http://www.omnivorerecordings.com The photo of Pepper is by Ray Avery.

2.

My life in music is based on the saxophone. In the busy years with Burnin Red Ivanhoe and Secret Oyster most of my time was taken by composing, arranging, holding the bands together, logistics and trying to get the economical side to function for the bands (which in fact never did). My alto saxophone – the reason for the whole thing – came third. And I regret that a lot. With a few exceptions I don’t like to hear the recordings with my soloing from these days. In the past like 35 years I have tried to compensate for that and somehow I have succeeded. I’m still working on that project.

And that’s Karsten Vogel, the Danish alto saxophonist and composer, talking in 2024 to the Slovenian writer Klemens Breznikar in an interview for the online magazine It’s Psychedelic Baby!. Vogel was in the process of recording a quartet album that has just been released under the title Late Night Ballads. It seems very fair to suggest, on this evidence, that he’s made up all of that lost time, and then some.

I’ve always had a special fondness for Karsten’s playing, whether with his regular bands or alongside John Tchicai in Cadentia Nova Danica, solo in an art gallery in London, in a duo in cave by the sea on the Faroe Islands, or with the Indian violinist L. Subramaniam. But I think I like him best in the basic “alto with rhythm accompaniment” format, heard on the album called My Old Flame in 2009 and now on Late Night Ballads.

The two altoists to whom he’s perhaps closest in terms of the emotional climate of his playing are Tchicai, with whom he played in Copenhagen in the late ’60s, and Lee Konitz in his latter years. He has a light sound, favouring the instrument’s upper register, with phrasing that — like Art Pepper’s — is agile without drawing attention to itself. Like both of those, he can summon a kind of pathos without descending into sentimentality.

Karsten is 83 now, so there’s a temptation for a critic to interpret this new album as “late work” (like the live albums of Konitz with Brad Mehldau and Charlie Haden released by Blue Note). But the seeming fragility of his sound is not a consequence of the ageing process: it’s something he’s always had, and it’s certainly nothing to do with weakness. He is also a master of phrasing, manipulating notes into weightless clusters, with the gift of making the unpredictable sound inevitable.

As the album’s title suggests, the mood is relaxed and contemplative, the tempos ranging from slow-medium to medium-slow but never feeling passive. It’s a little bit noirish, although that impression may be just caused by the fact that the opening track is David Raksin’s title song from Otto Preminger’s Laura. The other chosen standards include “I Remember You”, “You Go to My Head” and “Don’t Explain”, and Dave Brubeck’s “In Your Own Sweet Way”, with one original, “Open 24 Hrs”, cut from the same cloth. Throughout, the leader receives fine support from Mads Søndergaard on piano, Peter Hansen on double bass and Klaus Menzer on drums.

I sometimes think of the alto saxophone as the poet’s instrument. Here, as Vogel loops and soars above the contours of “Laura” or “You Go to My Head”, transcending but not quite detaching himself from the source material, is persuasive evidence.

* Karsten Vogel’s Late Night Ballads is on the Storyville label: http://www.storyvillerecords.com

May 12

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Karsten Vogel in London

Karsten Vogel Soho 1Karsten Vogel made his London debut at the Wigmore Hall in 1968, alongside John Tchicai in Cadentia Nova Danica, one of the outstanding European bands of the ’60s jazz avant-garde. A little over a year later he was back as a member of Burnin Red Ivanhoe, the Danish jazz-rock band who played the Lyceum, the Speakeasy, the Marquee and other joints, and recorded their second album for John Peel’s Dandelion label. (Last year I wrote here about their reunion album.)

He was back in London this week on a rather unusual assignment, invited to play solo alto saxophone at the private view organised by a Danish gallery in a pop-up space on Greek Street in Soho. In a funky room — bare brick walls and open fireplaces, open ceiling beams, artfully minimalist lighting — and surrounded by the work of eight artists, he performed for 10 minutes or so, using a backing tape of almost subliminal sparseness.

There aren’t many alto saxophonists to whom I’d rather be listening. Kirsten has always tempered the raw passion of the music of his youth with a delicate lyricism that occasionally — and certainly in his short set on Wednesday evening — turns into a very touching fragility. He has a lovely tone — slender, fibrous and very human — and a shallow vibrato: a highly distinctive combination. If you listen to one of his improvisations and just concentrate on the shaping of his phrases, it can be a good reminder of how inventive and unpredictable a great jazz musician can be.

An audience of art lovers gathered for the show, which was mounted by Gold-Smidt Assembly and called Sølv. They seemed to find it very enjoyable — in turn, I liked the wall-hung ceramic honeycombs of Stine Jespersen and a 6ft block of South Wales coal carved into an enigmatically plain rectangular shape by Tom Price — but it would, of course, be great to hear Karsten playing at a music venue in London again.

Meanwhile he has a new album, Cry!,  on the Storyville label: a collaboration with the pianist Per Aage Brandt, his friend and compatriot, a poet and linguist who has lived for many years in France. In 1962 Brandt made a radio broadcast in Copenhagen with Albert Ayler, and the following year he became a member of Karsten’s quartet, which lasted until 1966, when the saxophonist joined Cadentia Nova Danica and Brandt went off to the Sorbonne to study semiotics.

Last October they reunited in a studio in Villeneuve-sur-Yonne, where Brandt has made his home. Each of them brought one other musician: the bassist Flavio Perrella was summoned by the pianist, while the drummer Klaus Menzer came with Vogel. For five days they did nothing but play, the pianist and the saxophonist providing a set of challenging  but very appealing compositions and the four musicians coalescing into a a quartet that sounds like a genuine group.

The music is fresh and constantly surprising, with driving bop-influenced tunes and some gorgeous ballad-playing, and a slightly old-fashioned recording quality that suits it perfectly (what I mean is, you get a sense of room they’re in and the space between the musicians). To put it crudely, if Cecil Taylor had kept making progress on a straighter trajectory after his first handful of recordings, this is where his band might have ended up half a century later — which is no bad place to be.

Karsten switches to tenor saxophone for the final track, a duo version of “My Funny Valentine” chosen by Brandt as a homage to Ayler, with whom he used to play Richard Rodgers’ standard. The saxophone playing reminds the listener of Ayler’s idiosyncratic way with a ballad but also manages to be pure Vogel: a perfect way to close a deeply satisfying album which deserves wider international exposure than it will probably get.

* Gold-Smidt Assembly’s Sølv is open to the public this weekend (May 13-15) at 49 Greek Street, W1 — but without music, alas.

Aug 12

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The return of Burnin Red Ivanhoe

Burnin Red IvanhoeWhen I saw them playing with their Danish compatriot John Tchicai at the Berlin Jazz Festival in November 1969, Burnin Red Ivanhoe impressed me as the first significant contribution made to rock by a band from continental Europe. This was before Focus, Shocking Blue and Golden Earring from Holland, before the flood of German bands that included Amon Düül II, Can, Kraftwerk, Neu! and Tangerine Dream, before Wigwam from Finland, before PFM from Italy.

Basically, Burnin Red Ivanhoe had a rock rhythm section (guitarist Ole Fick, bassist Jess Stæhr and drummer Bo Thrige Andersen) and jazz horns: Kim Menzer on trombone, flute and harmonica and Karsten Vogel on alto and soprano saxophones. There was a bit of Uncle Meat-era Zappa in there, a bit of Soft Machine, maybe a bit of Who and Floyd. I was particularly taken by the eloquent, heartfelt playing of Vogel, who had also been a member of Tchicai’s Cadentia Nova Danica. Rather fashionably, they had just released a double album, titled M 144, which showcased their various dimensions: riffy rock, free blowing, the occasional burst of Scandi-whimsy.

I wrote about them a couple of times in the Melody Maker (in the days when the sub-editors were not above inventing headlines that made play with phrases such as Great Danes and Viking Invasion). John Peel played them on his programme and gave them a deal for a new album on his Dandelion label, which he co-produced (under his favourite pseudonym, Eddie Lee Beppeaux) with Tony Reeves, Colosseum’s bass guitarist, at CBS Studios in London. They toured a few times, and recorded another album in Copenhagen, called W.W.W., but eventually they disappeared from general sight.

Over the years I kept in occasional touch with Karsten. He’d give me recordings that showed his remarkable range: with his own fusion band, Secret Oyster (Straight to the Krankenhaus, CBS, 1976); on a nice solo album called Birds of Beauty (CBS, 1976), in a duo with the great Carnatic violinist Dr L Subramaniam (Meetings, Calibrated Records, 2007); playing tunes associated with Charlie Parker on a lovely quartet album called My Old Flame (Calibrated, 2010). There’s also an extraordinary album recorded with two singers, Hanne Siboni and Skye Løfvander, in Copenhagen’s vast disused underground water cisterns: Stained Glass Music (Oyster Songs, 2004) is a fascinating study in the sensitive exploration of a cathedral-like natural echo.

But the point of this post is the arrival of a new Burnin Red Ivanhoe album. Released by Sony in Denmark in artwork echoing the cover of M 144, with stencilled lettering on a plain background, the new one is called BRI and features two original members, Vogel and Menzer, with the latter’s son, Klaus, on drums, Assi Roar on bass, Aske Jacoby on guitar and Lone Selmer on voice and keyboards.

Quite often these late-life revivals don’t work. But this band — and Vogel, the chief composer, in particular — seems to have as much to say as it did 45 years ago, perhaps more. And the musicians certainly have better resources with which to say it. The mix of idioms sounds richer and much more assured as they switch from the whispered recitative and soprano/harmonica conversation over the irresistible descending sequence of “Natlig Rejse” to the folkish bluegrass strum of “Det Er Det”, the brittle power chords of “Tiden Om Tiden”, the gorgeous jangly pop of “Alting Var Bedre”, the gliding, glistening beauty of “Cafe Blåhat”, and the insistent “Mind the Gap”, whose lyric juxtaposes lines from Baudelaire and Poe with an announcement familiar to users of the London Underground (“Stand clear of the closing doors…”).

For old times’ sake, there’s also an absolute killer remake of “M 144”, with great alto from Vogel over a driving groove. But this album isn’t about the recreation of past glories. It’s about creation in real time, by real musicians who’ve made excellent use of the intervening years. What a shame Peel isn’t around to hear how good they’ve become.

* Photograph of Lone Selmer and Karsten Vogel by Mette Kramer Kristensen.