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Posts tagged ‘Tony Reeves’

Feb 17

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Dave Tomlin 1934-2024

I never met Dave Tomlin, or heard him play live, but the news of his death at the age of 90 rang a bell that echoed back to London in the late 1960s. A Tibetan prayer bell, probably: among other distinctions, Tomlin was the founder of the wonderfully named Giant Sun Trolley, a group who were one of the early attractions, along with Pink Floyd and the Soft Machine, at UFO, the legendary psychedelic club which opened in December 1966 in a Tottenham Court Road basement, where it ran weekly until July 1967.

Originally an army bugler, then a clarinetist with Bob Wallis’s Storyville Jazzmen during the Trad boom, Tomlin switched in the mid-’60s to soprano saxophone, the instrument on which he was featured in the Mike Taylor Quartet, a Coltrane-influenced group led by a strikingly adventurous but troubled British pianist. A recording of a January 1965 gig, with Tony Reeves on bass and Jon Hiseman on drums, emerged under the title Mandala four years ago, supplementing their official release, Pendulum, recorded in October of that year by Denis Preston in his Notting Hill studio.

Taylor’s mental problems, seemingly exacerbated by the prolonged use of LSD, would soon destroy his musical career. According to Ron Rubin, who took over from Reeves as the group’s bassist and played on Pendulum, he was so disturbed that at one point he threatened to kill Tomlin. In January 1969, after a period during which he had been seen busking on the streets with an Arabian clay drum, Taylor’s drowned body was found washed up on an Essex shore, the cause of his death, whether accident or suicide, unexplained.

Tomlin, by contrast, survived the mind-expanding journeys of the time. Glen Sweeney, a jazz drummer when he joined Giant Sun Trolley, met him at the London Free School in 1966 and said in an interview with the archivist Luca Ferrari that he “was known as an ace guy — he’d taken a lot of drugs and dropped out.” Sweeney became Tomlin’s first recruit to Giant Sun Trolley; they were sometimes joined by bassist Roger Bunn (later to become the original Roxy Music guitarist) and a trombonist named Dick Dadem. They split up when Tomlin decided to spend some time in Morocco in 1967, leaving behind no aural evidence of the band’s time together.

Sweeney switched to tablas and formed the Third Ear Band, who became a fixture at underground events. One track of their 1969 debut album for EMI’s Harvest label featured a guest appearance by Tomlin, playing violin on his own composition “Lark Rise”.

Thereafter music seemed to play a smaller role in Tomlin’s life. He was a poet, novelist and memoirist, and between 1976 and 1991 devoted much of his time to the Guild of Transcultural Studies, a community of artists from many disciplines who took informal occupation of London’s unoccupied Cambodian Embassy.

He died three months ago, but I didn’t know about it until one of his sons wrote a short obituary for the Guardian. His death removes another link with the particular Notting Hill microclimate of artistic and social optimism embodied by UFO, the Free School, Blackhill Enterprises, Joe Boyd’s Witchseason and IT. He never became a big name, and probably never wanted to be, but the sound of his soprano saxophone survives on those challenging, sometimes exhilarating Taylor quartet recordings as evidence of a man in his element.

* The Mike Taylor Quartet’s Mandala is a CD on the Jazz in Britain label. Pendulum, originally issued on Columbia, was reissued in 2007 on Sunbeam Records. The Third Ear Band’s three albums were reissued in 2021 in a box set of CDs titled Mosaics by Esoteric/Cherry Red. The photo of Tomlin is taken from Luca Ferrari’s archive: http://www.ghettoraga.blogspot.com

Mar 8

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The artwork of British jazz

Who could have imagined, as the music and those who made it were fighting for their existence, the three-figure sums that British jazz albums from the ’60s and ’70s would be fetching in a new century? To some, Richard Morton Jack’s Labyrinth: British Jazz on Record 1960-75, a large-format book containing threequarter-size reproductions of the front and back sleeves of 161 albums, plus another 140 at a smaller scale, will be a catalogue of longing and desire.

Look! Original copies (cond: VG) of Joe Harriott’s Abstract and David Mack’s 12-tone New Directions on Columbia, of Poetry and Jazz in Concert on Argo, of Mike Westbrook’s Celebration on Deram, of The People Band on Transatlantic, Bob Downes’s Open Music on Philips and Ric Colbeck’s The Sun Is Coming Up on Fontana! The first LPs by Howard Riley on the Opportunity label and Back Door on the Blakey imprint! The SME’s debut on Eyemark! Mike Taylor’s Pendulum! The only recording of the Chitinous Ensemble, directed by Paul Buckmaster! Guy Warren of Ghana! Lots of Michael Garrick, Graham Collier, Gordon Beck, Tony Oxley, Tubby Hayes, Stan Tracey, Keith Tippett, Alan Skidmore, Rendell & Carr, Ray Russell… all the way to the Nottingham Jazz Orchestra’s Festival Suite, released on Doug Dobell’s Swift label.

Richard Morton Jack gives a brief commentary on each album, with quotes from reviews, and there’s an introduction by Tony Reeves, probably most famous as the bass player with Jon Hiseman’s Colosseum, who describes how he, a Lewisham schoolboy, found his way into the scene as a player and a producer, with Neil Ardley’s New Jazz Orchestra, whose Western Reunion and Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe are featured, and others.

What a time it was — although, as I said, it was always a struggle for those trying to make a living in jazz clubs up and down the country, despite the efforts of intrepid A&R men/producers like Denis Preston, Terry Brown, Peter Eden and Giorgio Gomelsky to persuade Decca, EMI, Philips, Pye, Polydor and CBS to record this adventurous music.

Labyrinth finds a different and very enjoyable way of telling the story, exploiting the artwork and the information contained within 12 x 12 album jackets, back in the days of helpful sleeve notes. And if I had the choice of all these albums, but could keep only one? It would probably be the Blue Notes’ Very Urgent, their first recording after landing in the UK from South Africa. Produced by Joe Boyd at Sound Techniques and issued on Polydor under Chris McGregor’s name, it’s as exhilarating today as it was back in 1968, and its long-term influence is still to be felt, even in the work of young musicians then unborn.

* Richard Morton Jack’s Labyrinth: British Jazz on Record 1960-75 is published by Lansdowne Books (£60)

Apr 14

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A Mike Taylor discovery

When the English jazz pianist and composer Mike Taylor walked into the sea and died in 1969, aged 30, he left behind two albums — Pendulum, by his quartet, and the self-explanatory Trio, recorded in 1966 and ’67 respectively — as a memorial to a talent silenced by the kind of problems experienced by too many creative souls in that era.

Taylor’s gifts and instincts put him somewhere in the line of pianists running from Thelonious Monk through Herbie Nichols and Elmo Hope to the young Cecil Taylor. His playing had a similar sense of a private language being put on public display. There could be a hint of obsession in the way he jabbed at his phrases, testing their resistance before turning them to catch the light from a different angle, but there was nothing forbidding about his music.

His story, from bright promise to unexplained death, was told in a feature in Jazzwise magazine by Duncan Heining in 2007 and at greater length in a useful biography by the Italian writer Luca Ferrari, published six years ago. Taylor remains much mourned both by first-hand witnesses to his short career and by those who know him only from those two albums, produced by Denis Preston for EMI’s Columbia label and now collectors’ items.

A third Mike Taylor album, then, is quite a significant discovery. Mandala consists of a live session by Taylor’s regular quartet — with Dave Tomlin on soprano saxophone, Tony Reeves on double bass and Jon Hiseman on drums — at the Studio Club, Westcliff-on-Sea in January 1965. It was Hiseman who recorded the gig on a reel-to-reel machine and filed the tape away in his archive. On August 29 that year the same group would support the Ornette Coleman Trio in an historic concert at the Fairfield Halls, Croydon; the following May they would assemble at the Lansdowne Studios in Holland Park to record Pendulum.

Mandala contains one jazz standard and four of Taylor’s compositions, making 38 minutes of high-octane music in which the musicians display an obvious reverence for the John Coltrane Quartet of the early ’60s while conveying the impression that, given time and scope, they will find a way to move beyond the template towards the expression of their own character. It can be heard emerging in the hectic exuberance of “Night in Tunisia” — more linear and less dense than the version of the Gillespie favourite captured on Pendulum — and Taylor’s “Folk Dance #1” (a 6/8 tune with unexpected modulations), and in the interesting rhythm section figurations behind Tomlin on “Half Blue”.

Tomlin is the main soloist, confidently feeling his way towards a Trane-like level of incantation while keeping a few more emotional buttons done up. Reeves is slightly under-recorded, as was often the case on amateur recordings from the period, but he can be heard to work well with Hiseman, who is a rewardingly active presence throughout, providing an incessant but constantly stimulating commentary reminiscent to me of Charli Persip. Together they create a powerful momentum.

If there is a regret, it is that Taylor chose to take only two relatively short solos on this occasion, on “Son of Red Blues”, the agile opener, and “Night in Tunisia”. Both are typically intriguing, if somewhat subdued. There might have been a third solo: the title track, which closes the album (and was left untitled until the album’s compilers borrowed one from a painting by the pianist), fades to silence just as Tomlin closes his long, intense solo and Reeves appears to be bridging into what might have been a piano improvisation. Maybe the tape ran out. But Taylor’s accompaniments are so consistently interesting that this is a minor reservation: the point here is the music of a fine group, captured in full and free flight.

* Mandala is available as a download and a limited edition CD from the Jazz in Britain label: http://www.jazzinbritain.org. A vinyl release is forthcoming. Luca Ferrari’s Out of Nowhere: The Uniquely Elusive Jazz of Mike Taylor is published by Gonzo Multimedia.