Skip to content

Posts tagged ‘René Urtreger’

Sep 28

12 Comments

Miles à l’Olympia

Miles Davis arrived in Paris on the morning of November 30, 1957 for a tour booked by a local promoter, Marcel Romano. He was met at the airport by the singer and actress Juliette Gréco, whose lover he had become during his first visit to France, in 1949, and by the young film director Louis Malle, who wanted him to provide music for the soundtrack to his film Ascenseur pour l’échafaud.

That same night the tour began at the historic Olympia music hall on the Boulevard des Capucines, with Miles at the head of a band completed by the 20-year-old Franco-American tenor saxophone prodigy Barney Wilen, the great American drummer Kenny Clarke, and two excellent French musicians, the pianist René Urtreger and the bassist Pierre Michelot. They performed, as Urtreger told his biographer, Agnès Desarthe, “sans répétition” — without rehearsal.

The soundtrack was recorded on December 4, with the same quintet; it was a turning point in Miles’s music, representing a move away from the standard ballads-and-blues repertoire towards pieces of indeterminate length based on minimal harmonic information rather than closed-loop chord sequences, played live in fragments as Davis watched the film being projected on to a screen in the studio.

Meanwhile, however, the material was more conventional when the band played at the Olympia and at another concert in Amsterdam’s Concertgebouw a few days later, followed by a return to Paris for three weeks at the Club Saint-Germain, apparently arranged when Romano failed to secure the concert bookings across Europe for which he had been hoping. After a concert in Brussels on December 20, Miles flew back to New York, where he began putting together the sextet that would record Milestones early in the new year.

The Amsterdam concert was recorded for radio broadcast, and has been bootlegged several times, most recently on a CD on the Lone Hill label, with lamentably anachronistic packaging and a rather brittle, toppy sound. No complete recording of the Olympia concert was known to exist until, after Romano’s death, his nephew and heir found a set of reel-to-reel tapes among his possessions. He sold them to Jordi Pujol, the Barcelona-based specialist in historical reissues, who commissioned the audio engineer Marc Doutrepont to restore and master them. Doutrepont has achieved a sound as good as the best live recordings of the time: true, clear, warm and perfectly balanced.

Davis and Clarke were old friends and colleagues, and the trumpeter had played with Urtreger and Michelot during his second trip to Europe with the Birdland All Stars, 12 months earlier. Wilen was new to him, but the whole band sounds at ease from the start of their first appearance as a unit. They play a dozen pieces: “Solar”, “Four”, “What’s New”, “No Moe”, “Lady Bird”, “Tune Up”, “I’ll Remember April”, “Bags’ Groove”, “‘Round Midnight”, “Now’s the Time”, “Walkin'” and “The Theme”.

The American writer and musician Mike Zwerin, a steel baron’s son who had played trombone with Davis’s nonet at the Royal Roost in 1948 (aged 18!), was in the audience at the Olympia. Much later Zwerin wrote that the concert had begun with “Walkin'” and that — “in an entrance worthy of Nijinsky” — Miles appeared on stage only midway through that opening tune, to wild applause. No sign of any such thing here.

Miles’s tone and attack were at their most exquisite at this time, between the sessions for Miles Ahead and Milestones, the alertness of his mind ensuring that the poignancy of his sound never became self-indulgent. His solo on “Four” is the sort of thing, like his improvisations on the studio versions of “Milestones” and “So What”, that could be transcribed and studied for the details of its nuanced perfection. He takes “What’s New” as a solo ballad feature, producing elegant variations that can be listened to over and over again.

Wilen, precociously poised and inventive, gets Tadd Dameron’s “Lady Bird”, “I’ll Remember April” and a bouncy “Now’s the Time” to himself with the rhythm section. They are respectively the fifth, seventh and tenth tracks on the album, making me wonder if this is the same order as the actual set list. Would Miles have left the stage and returned so often? Given that he had only stepped off a transatlantic flight a few hours earlier, perhaps so.

Other joys include the trumpeter’s intense blues playing on “Bags’ Groove” and his relaxed exchanges with the immaculate Clarke on Sonny Rollins’s “No Moe”. A couple of fluffed phrases at the start of “Walkin'” are rare blemishes on a a release whose artistic value is the equal of its historical interest. If you love Miles, don’t miss this.

* The Miles Davis Quintet’s In Concert at the Olympia Paris 1957 is on Fresh Sound Records. The uncredited photo is from the booklet accompanying the album. If you want to know why the soundtrack to the Louis Malle movie — released in the UK as Lift to the Scaffold — was such a significant moment in Davis’s career, you might like to read the book after which this blog is named: The Blue Moment: Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue and the Remaking of Modern Music (Faber & Faber).

Jun 11

3 Comments

For art’s sake

Rene Urtreger 2The French pianist René Urtreger, who celebrates his 80th birthday next month, was a member of the Miles Davis Quintet that recorded the celebrated soundtrack to Louis Malle’s Lift to the Scaffold in 1957. He had become a frequent collaborator with Lester Young, Chet Baker, Sonny Rollins, Stan Getz and many others during an era when his native Paris provided American jazz musicians with a warm welcome. Until now, however, his only appearance in Britain had been in the 1970s, when he visited London in his rather different capacity as Sacha Distel’s musical director.

Last night he and the other members of his trio — the bassist Yves Torchinsky and the drummer Eric Dervieu — performed in a small downstairs ballroom at the Connaught Hotel in Mayfair. They were playing to celebrate the opening of a new show, at the Timothy Taylor Gallery in Carlos Place, next door to the hotel, by the abstract expressionist painter Sean Scully, who was born in Dublin and brought up in South London, and now lives in New York and Bavaria. The centrepiece of the exhibition is a work titled Kind of Red, inspired by Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue: a series of five large paintings, in oil on aluminium, conceived as a single unit (you can see them on the gallery’s website, here).

Given the nature of the work’s origin, and Scully’s love of music (as a teenager he ran a blues club over a pub in Bromley High Street, and later named one of his paintings after John Coltrane’s “Dakar”), Timothy Taylor wanted something special to provide an unusual end to the conventional sequence of a private view followed by a small dinner. It seemed right to call on someone with a connection to the inspiration behind the paintings. The way Miles went about recording the music for Lift to the Scaffold — in particular the paring away of harmonic material — exerted a profound influence, two years later, on the concept of Kind of Blue. And Urtreger is now the only surviving member of the group that recorded the soundtrack to Malle’s noir classic.

His story is a fascinating one, revealed in an extensive interview with Pascal Anquetil in last January’s issue of the French monthly Jazz Magazine/Jazzman. To me the most striking single detail was his account of how, having waited day after day as an 11-year-old at the Gare de l’Est for the return of his Polish-Jewish mother, deported by the Nazis, only to discover that she had perished in the gas chambers at Auschwitz, he responded a handful of years later to the discovery of bebop: a music without overt sentiment.

But not, of course, without feeling, as we discovered last night in his fluent, thoughtful versions of “Old Devil Moon”, “So What”, “The Duke” and a handful of bop themes. “I suffered during my youth from a shyness that led me to imagine that I wasn’t at the same level as my (musical) partners,” he told Anquetil. “Today, that’s over. I’ve reached an age at which I have nothing to prove, and everything to give.” Last night’s audience, in which gallerists and collectors were joined by Bryan Ferry (like Scully, a former art student in Newcastle) and several of the painter’s friends, including the former champion boxer Barry McGuigan and the poet Kelly Grovier, accepted the gift with warmth and gratitude.

* The photograph of René Urtreger was taking during the sound-check at the Connaught. His most recent solo piano album, Tentatives (Minium, 2006), is highly recommended, and there will be a new album by the trio this summer. The Kind of Red exhibition opens today, June 11, and is on show until July 12 at 15 Carlos Place, London W1. The catalogue is published by the Timothy Taylor Gallery.