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Posts tagged ‘Tony Reeves’

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.