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Posts tagged ‘Trey Gunn’

May 26

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Passion / Compassion

Back in the early 1970s, Santana were my favourite live band. I saw the original line-up — more or less as heard at Woodstock — at the Albert Hall in 1970 and twice the following year, at Hammersmith Odeon and the Olympia in Paris. They were thrilling, and surrounded by a sense of excitement; before the show in Paris, I remember Mick Jagger and Bianca Pérez-Mora Macias sweeping through the backstage bar, a week ahead of their wedding.

Then the music changed, and they became even better. Carlos Santana and Michael Shrieve had been listening to John Coltrane and Elvin Jones and to Miles Davis’s Sketches of Spain and Bitches Brew. Santana’s fourth album, Caravanserai, brimmed over with the effect of those influences, starting with an unaccompanied solo by the saxophonist Hadley Caliman and culminating in the ecstatic nine-minute “Every Step of the Way”, a Shrieve composition. Clive Davis, the president of their record company, called it “career suicide”. At the Wembley Empire Pool in November 1972, just after the album’s release, an expanded line-up rose to a different level, musically and spiritually.

After Wembley they went off to play some concerts in Europe before returning towards the end of the month for dates in Manchester, Newcastle and Bournemouth. On Thursday, November 23 they had a day off in London, and, being American, arranged a small Thanksgiving Day dinner in the private room of a restaurant on Davies Street in Mayfair. I’d raved about Caravanserai in the Melody Maker, so they were kind enough to invite me to join them for what turned out to be a very pleasant evening.

While they were in London I interviewed Shrieve, who talked eloquently and passionately about the changes they’d made in the music, and about the jazz influences inspiring them. He spoke of his admiration for Elvin, Roy Haynes, Philly Joe Jones and Tony Williams and of studying their playing with his friend Lennie White, who had just joined Chick Corea’s Return to Forever. And he said something that struck me when I read the piece again the other day: “What’s so beautiful about the band, apart from the popularity which we know we’re fortunate to have and which we’re grateful for, is that right now it’s the perfect situation to be open. Specially at our age, because we realise that there’s still a lot of time.” Fifty years later, it’s clear the time hasn’t been wasted.

I loved Shrieve’s playing from the start, the way he meshed perfectly with the percussionists José “Chepito” Areas, Mike Carabello, Armando Peraza, Coke Escovedo and James Mingo Lewis. Since then I’ve followed his career mostly from a distance, although we reconnected when I was at Island Records in the mid-70s and he and Steve Winwood were part of Stomu Yamash’ta’s Go project, and then when the label signed Automatic Man, a rock band he was in with the singer/keyboards player Bayeté (Todd Cochran) and the guitarist Pat Thrall, and whose 1976 single “My Pearl” sounds today like a presentiment of Prince. Of his solo albums, I’ve always loved Stiletto, released in 1989 on RCA’s Novus imprint, in which he and a band including the trumpeter Mark Isham and the guitarists David Torn and Andy Summers created a very fine version of Gil Evans’s “Las Vegas Tango”.

If you have a copy of Lotus, the live triple album recorded in Osaka during the Caravanserai tour, you’ll know the 10-minute drum solo called “Kyoto” that shows what a superlative drummer he had already become, at the age of 23. It has none of the bombast of his rock contemporaries and much of the fluency of his jazz heroes. It’s music.

His new album, recorded over a period of years, is called Drums of Compassion — a reference to the hugely popular album titled Drums of Passion recorded in 1959 by the great Nigerian drummer Michael Babatunde Olatunji, who died at his home in Northern California 2003, aged 75, but whose voice is the one you hear first and again from time to time on an album that has been long in the making. Shrieve says that the title is also an acknowledgement of the Dalai Lama’s call for a Time of Compassion.

Of course, percussion instruments play an important role in this music. But the whole thing, although its 39 minutes are sub-divided into nine pieces, some with different composers, is like a lush, constantly shifting sound painting in which other instruments — guitar, saxophone, oud, electronic keyboards — emerge with utterances that seem less like solos than simply part of the fabric.

Shrieve can put together a multi-faceted track (“The Call of Michael Olantunji”) including himself, Jack DeJohnette, Airto Moreira and Zakir Hussain on various percussion instruments without making it sound for a second like an old-fashioned drum battle or a display of egos and techniques, even when Shrieve’s orchestral tom-toms come to the fore. The percussionists’ work is blended into the overall picture, here creating an armature for Olantunji’s voice and Trey Gunn’s guitar.

Shrieve can make the space for one performer alone on the eponymous “The Euphoric Pandeiro of Airto Moreira” (chanting and Brazilian percussion) and “Zakir Hussain” (tablas). He shares another track, the sultry, drifting “Oracle”, in a duet with another Brazilian, the electronic musician Amon Tobin. The ambience swirls and drifts without relaxing its subtle grip.

A steamy tone poem titled “On the Path to the Healing Waters” features the tenor saxophone of Skerik (Eric Walton), a Seattle-based musician who has played with Wayne Horvitz and Charlie Hunter, and who here plays a Wayne Shorter-ish less-is-more role. And I’m particularly happy to lose myself inside “The Breath of Human Kindness”, five minutes of one-chord jam in which the oud of Tarik Banzi makes its single eloquent appearance, a voice from ancient Al-Andalus amid the glistening keyboards of Pete Lockett and Michael Stegner, paced by Farko Dosumov’s stealthy bass guitar riff.

There’s a rare combination of majesty and humility at work in this music, something that speaks of the deep and lasting impact of Coltrane’s influence on Shrieve’s instincts and decisions. More than half a century after Caravanserai, this is an album for listeners who followed Shrieve and Santana on that journey into a wider world, one where frontiers and prejudices dissolve.

* Michael Shrieve’s Drums of Compassion is out now on the 7D Media label and available via Bandcamp: https://michaelshrieve7d.bandcamp.com/album/drums-of-compassion

Dec 13

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In the court of Robert Fripp

The basement of the Palace Café in the Fulham Palace Road was where the first version of King Crimson got it together, as we used to say, and where Robert Fripp auditioned and rehearsed the subsequent editions of the band. One Sunday in late August 1970 Fripp invited me to meet him there. He knew that I’d been a drummer, but also that I hadn’t held a pair of sticks for several years. “Come and have a play,” he said.

There was a kit set up in the basement, along with an array of amps and keyboards. And so for an hour or so we just played, improvising freely, Fripp on electric piano as well as guitar. We’d had a number of interesting conversations about music during the preceding months but I don’t remember any advance discussion about what we were going to do that day. We just played. At the end he took a reel of tape off the Revox, put it in a carton and handed it to me. I’ve still got it, although I’ve never listened to it. I really don’t want to know whether I’d get a pleasant surprise or, more probably, a dose of humiliating reality.

We never spoke about it, and I never got behind a kit again. But Fripp is not a man who often does things without forethought, and all I can imagine is that he wanted to see how it felt to play freely without having to measure himself against someone who really knew what they were doing.

I thought about that day for the first time in years when the percussionist Jamie Muir turned up as one of the interviewees in Toby Amies’s In the Court of the Crimson King, a film portrait of the band, seen through its present incarnation and the views of some of its former members. Muir joined King Crimson a couple of years after my little session with Fripp, becoming the fifth member of the line-up that included David Cross on violin and keyboards, John Wetton on bass guitar and vocals, and Bill Bruford on drums.

Muir was added as a kind of wild card. I’d seen him and interviewed him when he was in a band called Boris, in which he played a strange variety of percussion devices and did things like burst blood capsules in his mouth. Later he was with Derek Bailey and Evan Parker in the Music Improvisation Company. Highly skilled, and capable of playing perfectly conventionally, at this time he was a kind of performance artist whose presence in King Crimson was intended to shake his colleagues out of their strait-laced musicianly habits. He and Bruford got on surprisingly well; according to Muir, it was Fripp who, having invited him into the band, eventually tired of an approach that clearly failed to match his (Fripp’s) own love of order and preparation. He was invited him to leave after less than a year, having played on Lark’s Tongues in Aspic. He went off to a Buddhist monastery and is now a painter.

Originally intended to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the founding of the band in 1969, Amies’s film — first screened in cinemas and now available as a DVD — is on the one hand a kind of real-life Spinal Tap and on the other an acute portrayal of Fripp’s effect on the musicians with whom he has worked. Quite early on, Fripp tells Amies that he was “heartbroken” when the drummer Mike Giles and the saxophonist Ian McDonald became the first musicians to defect from the band, only months after their appearance on the bill of the Rolling Stones’ free concert in Hyde Park, the release of their debut album and a US tour had made them the sensation of the year.

“He’s always been good at recruiting people — he knows he can’t do it on his own,” Giles says, the implicit suggestion being that doing it on his own would be the preferred option, were it possible. But here’s what Fripp now recalls of the rupture in December 1969: “I offered to leave King Crimson if Ian and Mike would continue. It was more important to me that the band continued than that I continued with the band.”

Of the original gang, we also hear from McDonald, interviewed before his death earlier this year, and Pete Sinfield, their lyricist. Adrian Belew, a vital foil for Fripp in the various editions of the band between 1981 and 2013, is clearly puzzled over why they’re not still working together, and says of their partnership: “I don’t know where you’d ever get this again. Robert has a way of creating a situation in which music is going to occur that you couldn’t otherwise do.”

Others are more ambivalent. Trey Gunn, a guitarist with King Crimson from 1994 to 2003, describes being in the band as “a little bit like having a low-grade infection — you’re not really sick, but you don’t feel well, either.” Jakko Jakszyk, the guitarist and singer who came into the line-up in 2010 after several years in a tribute band which featured almost all of the original line-up, sums up what many members must have felt: “You’re irreplaceable. Just like the next bloke.”

All this sounds very unsympathetic. But Bruford, with the perspective of a man who retired from playing in 2009 to study for a PhD, has a perceptive take: “Change is part of what the whole band is about. Change is essential. Otherwise you turn into the Moody Blues, for heaven’s sake.”

Fripp is given his say (and endorsed the final edit of the film), and the impression he leaves is of a complex, thoughtful and unyielding man who has found his own way through life, music, and the music business. Not mentioned here is his long struggle to obtain justice from those who formerly held the rights to the fruits of his labour, resulting in his freedom on recent years to release fastidiously compiled and remastered box sets of the band’s early output (a 26-disc summary of their complete recordings from 1969, for instance). But he does talk briefly about his discovery in the 1970s of the teachings of J. G. Bennett, a follower of Sufism and G. I. Gurdjieff, and his involvement in the Society for Continuous Education, which further Bennett’s work.

The gleanings can be found in a hefty new book, The Guitar Circle, a 560-page hardback full of aphorisms and Zen riddles in which Fripp draws from almost four decades of work with his own League of Crafty Guitarists to produce a kind of operating manual for art and life, a typical aspect of which is perhaps best summed up in something he says during the film: “If you have an unpleasant nature and dislike people, that is no barrier to work.” His sense of humour — to which the term wry does not do justice — can be glimpsed here.

Throughout the film, the present band — three drummers, two guitarists, keyboards, returnee Mel Collins on saxophones and flute and long-standing bassist Tony Levin — is heard in concert and rehearsal often enough to give a clear idea of what they do nowadays with the familiar Crimson repertoire, revelling in negotiating its knotty contours and in their own exploitation of the available hardware and technology, to the delight of their legion of loyal fans. The extras in the box set of the film include footage of a rehearsal take of “Sailor’s Tale”, a song from the 1971 album Islands, containing a particularly brilliant version of the guitar solo in which Fripp breaks free of his familiar approach and produces a piece of music of staggering audacity and eternal value, a visionary moment and a justification in itself for King Crimson’s long and often tortuous existence.

* The film In the Court of the Crimson King: King Crimson at 50 is available as a two-disc Blu-Ray/DVD set or as an eight-disc box set including six audio CDs: http://www.dgmlive.com. Robert Fripp’s The Guitar Circle is published by Panegyric/DGM: http://www.guitarcraft.com