This month, the 34 year-old double-bassist, composer and bandleader releases Effra (Ubuntu Music), his fourth jazz album as a leader. Effra is an homage to the vitality and companionship of the UK jazz scene; to his home and growing family life in south London’s Brixton; and to the long-time playing partners who have been members of his band since his prizewinning breakout a decade ago from the Royal Academy of Music’s postgrad jazz course. 

Back then, Mullov-Abbado was often commended for the multi-idiomatic sweep of his repertoire, the maturity of his knowledge, and the accessible audacity of his compositions and arrangements. When he won the Royal Academy’s prestigious Kenny Wheeler Jazz Prize in 2014, free-sax virtuoso Evan Parker (one of the award’s three judges) said of the qualities of the then 23-year-old’s writing and playing, along with his sense of overall form: “His range of musical reference points means that he can go anywhere from here.” 

Effra’s eight tracks radiantly illustrate all that, but typically for Mullov-Abbado, they do it with patience and craft, and a sense of confidence in how vividly his improvising partners will bring their potential to unpredictable new life. The clatter of the opening ‘Traintracker’ hints at the restless rattle of railway traffic, whilst unleashing a hard-boppish, soulful grooviness from the musicians, notably saxophonists Matthew Herd and Sam Rapley. ‘Bridge’ and ‘Rose’ are slow pieces of quite different character: the first is a quietly joyous ballad (uplifted further by a thrilling Herd alto-sax solo), and the second is a skeletally minimalist piano/bass melody, picked out over long horn harmonies, that erupts into an exhilarating whirl of collective three-horn improv over Scott Chapman‘s ferocious drumming toward the close. There’s a trad-jazzy jive to ‘The Effra Parade’, and a Jobim-celebrating Brazilian dance to ‘Canção De Sobriedade’ – but neither are quite what they seem, since the composer’s fondness for storylines that never quite resolve intriguingly shades both of them.

When we talk on the phone, Misha has his newly-arrived baby on his lap, so we begin with a little mutual reflection (his immediate, mine long-distant) on what those scarily wondrous early moments of parenthood feel like. As it turns out, the possibilities of parenting without such a happy outcome also had a bearing on the genesis of the new album. 

“There was a period in my life some years ago, after my first two albums in 2015 and 2017, of drifting away and not being as into jazz as I’d used to be, and generally feeling a bit lost,” Mullov-Abbado recalls. “I was living in two different parts of the country, which looking back was completely mad. I was half living in the middle of nowhere on Dartmoor – a really beautiful place, amazing to be so connected with nature there – but was also half living in London where most of my career was taking place. My partner at the time and I almost had a child, but then we were told it wouldn’t be able to survive post-birth. This was six and a half years ago – and we separated a year after that loss. Those years were difficult, but coming out of them I did have a bit of a reawakening and realised how much I love my life here in London playing music with amazing musicians, and being friends with amazing musicians.”

Mullov-Abbado began to compose and play again, and by 2020 had recorded a third album, Dream Circus, to follow his much acclaimed 2015 debut New Ansonia (on which his mother Viktoria and soon-to-be-wunderkind Jacob Collier play), and 2017’s Cross-Platform Interchange.

“Then, the pandemic happened,” Mullov-Abbado continues, “so we couldn’t tour, and I was a bit overwhelmed then, confused about what sort of things I wanted to focus on. But despite that, I was feeling so much happier doing what I love, living here in a really vibrant part of London. The pandemic made me all the more certain that this is where I want to be. Then I met my now wife, and two of the tracks on Effra, ‘Bridge’ and ‘Rose’ – her names are Bridget and Rosemary – are dedicated to her.”

I suggest that there’s a cinematic quality, an evocative sense of place, about several of these pieces, but that the narrative of those scenes sometimes feels eerily ambiguous, as if an imaginary protagonist never quite gets to where they thought they’d wind up. Mullov-Abbado confirms that he enjoys delaying resolutions, but the revealing conversation that ensues is also a salutary reminder to a music journalist that a skilled composer’s route to an evocative effect is about manipulating sound, not pictures or scenes in the mind. It’s also a reminder that, for all this band’s attractive allegiances to classic hard-bop, swing or fusion at times, Mullov-Abbado’s ‘points of reference’ – as Evan Parker observed – embrace music of many kinds.

 “‘Traintracker’ is the newest piece on the record,” Mullov-Abbado explains. “And for that, I really wanted to come up with something led by the bassline. I often write at the piano and it’s easy to get into the habit of just being led by chord symbols. Of course there’s nothing wrong with that, but I was feeling like writing something that came from the bass, and was a bit more soulful and groovy. But I wanted it to be a slow-burner too. Of course I’m inspired by jazz, but I’m inspired by a lot of music, and in this case the German classical/electronic composer Nils Frahm was an influence. Cyclical patterns, repetition, patient slow-building. ‘Rose’ also works like that on this album, and ‘Nanban’, the final track. On ‘Rose’ there’s a kind of musical trick creating the tension, where an E flat pedal – a repeating note – is played by pianist Liam Dunachie throughout, but never resolves in an E flat chord until the end.”

How about ‘The Effra Parade’, the track underlining the album’s title, I ask him. Surely it sounds like a street-parade, with its jivey New Orleans strut?

“That was a lockdown piece,” Mullov-Abbado announces with a laugh. “It’s named after a street near me, and it’s about going on your one walk of the day, trying to get as far from your home as you can, but you keep turning a corner and heading back to where you started. It was originally commissioned for a classical group, and I then adapted it for my band. The samba ‘Canção De Sobriedade’ is a lockdown piece too, but mainly an homage to all the Brazilian music I love, which I’m lucky to play a lot, and it’s particularly inspired by the Antonio Carlos Jobim song ‘No More Blues’, with the first half being in the minor and the second in the major. Mine is ‘Song of Sobriety’ or ‘No More Booze’, which meant taking more care about not getting carried away with drinking in that period of isolation. It’s very effective on live gigs!”

I’ve been hesitant till now to ask Misha Mullov-Abbado about his unique musical evolution, maybe because children of famous parents can have sensitivities about the tensions of going into similar lines of work. But this is no predictable family, and though Viktoria Mullova and Claudio Abbado separated in his infancy, Misha grew up with his mother Viktoria and with his eventual stepfather, the cellist Matthew Barley, and has made genre-bending music with both of them. 

“I’ve been surrounded by classical music my whole life,” Mullov-Abbado says. “I originally played the piano and the French horn, and I loved playing with orchestras, because it’s so interesting to learn how pieces are constructed by playing an instrument at the back. A lot of well-known and successful conductors played an instrument that’s at the back of an orchestra, like a bassoon or timpani, something that lets you see all of what’s going on.”

 Is that how you travelled all the way back to the bass, I ask him.

“I started to play the bass guitar as a teenager,” Mullov-Abbado says. “I just picked one up one day at my uncle’s house, and one of my sisters played guitar, so we started jamming and I was struck by the feeling of how satisfying it was to play single notes but at the bottom of everything. I also sang in school choirs and I was lucky enough to have one of those voices that started really high and broke very gradually, so I sort of went through all the parts and now have a very low voice, so I love singing at the bottom of harmony, as I would do as a bass player. Then there was a school jazz band that I joined and I just grew into a love for that music, and realised slowly that I love improvising. I suppose that was a response to the strict disciplines of playing classical music. I realised in my uni days [studying classical music at Cambridge] that I wanted to go down the jazz route properly, so I took up double bass, thinking it would be a little thing on the side. And then in that first year of the Royal Academy jazz course I actually realised I way prefer this instrument – maybe it’s the physicality and the size of the thing. I came to it quite late, about 21, but then I started listening to Ray Brown, Avishai Cohen, people like that. So I feel very at home improvising, and also being able to write music for improvisers. One of the things I love most about my band now is the ease and inventiveness with which the three horn players improvise all together. Composition is obviously central to Effra, but so is group improvisation, and the two are inseparable for me.”

Before we part, I ask Mullov-Abbado about a recent event that’s inevitably close to his heart, as it is to many people making progressive music and jazz in the UK today, because the subject was a unique combination of an enthusiast and an enabler. The death of Martin Hummel, the creator of Ubuntu Music (on which Effra appears) occurred in early January.

“I’m devastated by it,” Mullov-Abbado says. “Martin was someone who really went above and beyond. I’m so grateful to him because he showed me so much, and was so caring to me and my work. I feel like he really saw me, he really put the effort into listening to my music. When I sent him my album he wrote back the next day saying he’d already listened to it twice, and gave positive feedback about specific tracks. He leaves a huge hole, he was a kind of one-man show in many ways. All that love and care he had for the music he released, it’s really rare to find. There’s so much great contemporary music being made, and musicians depend on one-offs like Martin to make sure it gets heard.”

Misha Mullov-Abbado’s Effra is out on Ubuntu Music on 31 January. The band will play at King’s Place, York Way, N1 9AG, on 22 February 2025.

The post Misha Mullov-Abbado – new album ‘Effra’ first appeared on UK Jazz News.

Sansom has dusted off a vivacious score jostling with startling ideas that he originally wrote for a jazz lineup called Perfect Stranger when he was a 24 year-old B.Mus graduate from London’s King’s College. But, hamstrung in 1974 by lack of practice space for a big ensemble, and the considerable time these kaleidoscopic pieces took to rehearse, Sansom’s first attempts to record the work back then fizzled out, and the young composer consigned it to a drawer for the next five decades. 

This month it resurfaces, recreated by a formidably skilful jazz ensemble, nowadays thoroughly versed in 21st century genre-bending mixes and technically at ease with Sansom’s jump-cut transitions of rhythm, melodic motifs and harmony. ‘The music on this album is exactly half a century old at the time of release’, Sansom says, with modest pride. ‘It’s incredibly rewarding to finally bring it to life with such a talented group of musicians.’

The four movements of the album’s opener, ‘Life & Times (of a Perfect Stranger)’ follow a symphony-structure governed by The Golden Ratio, a formula that down the centuries has guided the geometry of Pythagoras and the practices of artists and artisans all the way from sculptors, architects and scientists to cosmetic surgeons and orthodontists. Across the four sections of ‘Life & Times’ the music embraces jazz-rock, classical sonata form, a waltz fizzing with jazz-improv outbursts, and a third part that unobtrusively splices three contrasting time signatures. 

Elsewhere on the set, rocking themes or hymnal reveries pass through abrupt tempo variations, sometimes ending up played in reverse or upside down; bass-guitar and rhythm-section hooks turn to fast waltzes; Beethoven’s late-quartet ‘Great Fugue’ embraces shuffle grooves, funk, reggae, and a flying Charlie Parkeresque sequence that also pays homage to Schoenberg’s 12-tone serial system on ‘Arnold’s Bebop’. But Chris Sansom isn’t seeking to dazzle his audiences by wily acts of musical sleight-of-hand. For the most part, Unfinished Business reveals how the most complex musical ideas can nowadays be reinvented both accurately and freely by improv-savvy performers, helping to give the most intricately composed shapes the openness and fluidity of songs.   

‘In 2019, I went to a gig at the Karamel club in Wood Green, where two fine jazz musicians, the saxophonist Chris Biscoe and trombonist Paul Nieman were both playing,’ Chris Sansom recalls when we speak on the phone about the seeds of this remarkable recreation. ‘Both of them had played on our original attempt to record this music, and it was great to catch up with them at the bar. Paul said to me “it would be good fun to have another go at that old project of yours”, and I began to think that it really could be. So the idea of redoing this music began to feel possible’. 

   Chris Sansom has taken a roundabout route to get back to where this project started. From the 1970s onwards, his life inside and outside music first took in work as an expert notation copyist for artists including Yehudi Menuhin, then as a promising contemporary-classical composer of works for string quartets, brass bands, chamber orchestras, even idiosyncratic visions of his own including a 60-solo-strings ensemble joined by keys, harp and percussion. A Sansom Trumpet Concerto was premiered in 1978 with the Grimethorpe Colliery Band under legendary brass-playing classical conductor Elgar Howarth, an invaluable early champion of the young composer’s work. In 1986, Sansom’s Invisible Cities featured the eminent Swedish trumpeter Håkan Hardenberger, with his compatriot Christian Lindberg on trombone, in performances with The Hague’s Residentie Orchestra and with the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra. 

But Sansom’s compositional creativity didn’t altogether cover life’s practicalities, and he developed a long-running parallel career at the helm of his own web-design business, while life’s music-making pleasures in the 21st century offered him diversions including playing electric bass in guitarist/singer Chris Ramsing’s now 14 year-old and pithily idiosyncratic trio PsychoYogi. But by 2019, retired from web-designing and with his 70s beckoning, those conversations with the original Perfect Stranger sidemen were growing increasingly alluring. 

 ‘First of all I approached Chris Biscoe, because he’d been so important to the original band, and also because he’s such a nice bloke,’ Sansom says. ‘I asked him if he’d like to do it again, and he said that some of the time signatures in it would give him the heebie-jeebies nowadays! But he was so helpful, he gave me a great long list of players to invite. I should think probably half the people in the original band were on it. So in that situation, you ask one, and if they can’t do it they’ll suggest someone else, and one person leads to another’.

 I ask Sansom how much of the original score has stayed the same, or if the passing years had tempted him to revise it?

 ‘Since we did it before, bits and bobs have evolved,’ the composer says. ‘On the last part of “Life and Times” after the drum solo you get this sort of anthem, hymn-like thing, which I only had a rough sketch of the first time around, so I arranged it more extensively for this recording. And somewhere near “Arnold’s Bebop”, in “Ludwig’s Van” there’s a section of reggae. I didn’t know anything about reggae in 1974. It had been a sort of pompous, overblown march-type thing then, which didn’t work very well, so I recast that as a reggae part. “Lugubrious Boots” has evolved in that middle section where the band goes berserk, because I was absolutely tickled to death by what the players were doing with it’.

This sounds like an embrace of collective improvisation, I suggest to the seasoned composer.   ‘Well, I’d intended that section to be just a slow crumbling of the structure, before it gets back to the slow groove it had at the beginning,’ Sansom acknowledges. ‘It’s a rhythm-section feature really. But when Alcyona Mick on keys and the guitarist Eddy White and the others start really going for it in the open section, they were doing wonderful things of their own. It reminded me of someone who was doing that in Perfect Stranger 50 years ago – the late Pete Jacobsen, a blind jazz pianist with an incredible technique and memory. He once memorised a section I’d written in 7¾ over 4, then instantly transposed it up a semitone in his head because the piano we were using then was flat! Pete was unique, but some of what he could do has become the norm, particularly for conservatoire-trained young players now.’

 Sansom sounds like a pretty animated septuagenarian on the phone, and energised afresh by the revival of a project that had contained the seeds of so much of a lifetime of musical ideas. From the way he talks about it, it doesn’t sound as if he’s thinking of Unfinished Business as his route to winding down.

‘I definitely want to continue with Perfect Stranger,’ Sansom emphasises. ‘I’m working up more repertoire for the band, not all of it mine this time, and I already have some tentative thoughts for a next album. I’ve been working on some transcription-cum-arrangements including a piece of Frank Zappa’s called “Sinister Footwear 2”, which is full of tuplets and going to be murderous to play. And a piece that we already do and will be doing on this tour, Charles Mingus’ “Children’s Hour of Dream”, from the enormous Epitaph suite that was discovered after his death. It’s a weird piece, and it’ll be the least jazz of all the things we do, absolutely fully notated, even the drum parts. But it stood out from everything else in Epitaph for me – not because it was the best music, but because it was so strange’

    Catching the qualities of strangeness always sounds like a high priority for Chris Sansom. Maybe, far from wrapping a long-postponed story up, Unfinished Business is more like a challenge to his inquisitive nature to explore new possibilities, with new collaborators. ‘Making this recording with these players made me feel that I’ve sometimes over-composed,’ Sansom reflects. ‘For the future, I think I should give them their head more. Some of the younger deps that we’ve used lately are very recent conservatoire graduates and it’s astonishing what they can do. They just pick up my insane charts and play them. Back when I was a student, I was interested in mixing jazz and rock methods with classical ideas. Right now seems a great time to be doing that.’  

Musicians:

Chris Sansom (composer/conductor/fretless bass), Adam Bishop, Mick Foster (saxes/woodwinds), Shanti Jayasinha (trumpet/flugel), Tom Green (trombone), Alcyona Mick (keyboards), Rob Millett (percussion), Eddy White (guitars), Paul Michael (bass guitar) and Jonas Golland (drums).

UK tour gigs:

Progress Theatre, Reading, October 25
Karamel, London, N22, November 1
Royal Hotel, Southend, November 6
Puppet Theatre, Norwich, November 30.

The post Chris Sansom /Perfect Stranger first appeared on UK Jazz News.

Elaine Delmar says she recently unearthed a poster advertising  the UK tour that she played support to in 1962 with American saxophonist Julian ‘Cannonball’ Adderley. Delmar isn’t overly sentimental about the past, but at 85, this consummately skilful, versatile and much-admired British vocalist and former actor is understandably reflecting a little more on the landmarks of a remarkable career – and touring in the early ’60s with a sax superstar from the iconic Kind of Blue Miles Davis recording was a very big deal. She sounds today as open and infectiously light-hearted as ever she has been, as she tells the story of her first new album in many years – Speak Low, a selection of classic song  titles arranged by her favourite piano partners across five decades, and played by her current live band, which will launch and tour the music from this month to New Year. 

 ‘It’s getting on for 20 years since I put out a couple of albums devoted to Cole Porter and George Gershwin, and of course I’ve often performed those wonderful songs on gigs and still do,’ Delmar says. ‘But in January 2023 I had booked a studio to record some things I’d been thinking about – including a lovely arrangement of “Speak Low” that the late great pianist John Taylor did for me, a version of “Tea For Two” that I’d never done before, and Fred Hersch’s “Stars” with words by Norma Winstone, which I was thrilled by when I heard it on her and Fred’s Songs and Lullabies album. But once it was all recorded and I had to think about putting it out, I thought to myself “I don’t know how to do this anymore”. Everything’s changed nowadays about how you get music out to the public. But then I was recommended to talk to Martin Hummel of Ubuntu, and he immediately said he wanted to do it. He was lovely, very positive, and I thought “well, I don’t know if I’ll ever do another one, so here goes”. 

Humphrey Lyttelton once told his Radio 2 listeners that Delmar’s interpretations of standard songs ‘truly defines the word class’ – Speak Low’s dozen tracks gleam with confirmations of that. The opening “Stars” unfolds in Delmar’s hushed whisper, and gently builds with her surefooted ascents of the melody’s wide range and wistful long tones as the original does, with pianist Barry Green and bassist Simon Thorpe coaxing her at the song’s every turn, while respecting its invitations to silence and space on the way. 

“It Might As Well Be Spring” (a tribute to now-retired former Delmar pianist Brian Dee) draws a suitably springy bounce from Green and guitar legend Jim Mullen, while “Don’t Sleep In The Subway” is one of several tracks on the set on which a hauntingly harmonised arrangement by Delmar’s 1970s piano soulmate Pat Smythe catches the moods of a woman navigating a couple’s restive waters between love, blinding pride, and fond hope. Smythe’s subtle imagination is also apparent on an exquisite setting for “Send In The Clowns”, the entranced, Latin-rippling “I Won’t Last A Day Without You”, and the closing “Yours Sincerely”, which spotlights Delmar’s skill and experience at making every sound and its lyrical meaning count. The late Bob Cornford’s slow-paced reimagining of “Tea for Two” and Delmar’s pacing gives that classic a sensual and wistful feel that’s rarely imparted to it, Andy Panayi makes a guest appearance on flute to do full justice to John Taylor’s version of “Speak Low”, and a hypnotically fragile “Close Your Eyes” captures the mutual empathy of the singer and long-time bassist Simon Thorpe (who also produced Speak Low) in a delicate duet. 

Elaine Delmar makes light of the sensitivity, timing, and expressive range from a resonant rasp to dreamily floating upper tones that she brings to these much-travelled songs. She had grown used to holding the attention of audiences before she was out of her teens – on the road as a lead singer and cabaret partner with her famous bandleader and trumpeter dad Leslie ‘Jiver’ Hutchinson.  Her natural musicality, receptiveness and onstage ease marked her out as a very rare gem in 1950s Britain – a young black rising star of both jazz vocals and cabaret – by the time her father tragically died in a road crash in 1959.

  ‘I was lucky with the opportunities I had,’ Delmar reflects. ‘As a kid, I did eleven years of classical piano training, all the grades, and I was quite talented I think, but lazy. There was a bus stop outside our house and I used to like opening my window and regaling the queue with Chopin nocturnes, I felt proud of myself doing that. There’s many things that people assume I know about music which I don’t know’ (‘and it’s getting a bit late now to learn them!’ she adds with her trademark hoot of laughter) ‘but the piano was good preparation, especially for harmony. From the age of 16, I was also doing a jokey father-and-daughter cabaret act with my dad in the northern working men’s clubs, and around then I started piano lessons with his pianist Colin Beaton, who taught me the Great American Songbook really.’ 

When her father died, his booking agent Vic Lewis encouraged Elaine to develop a solo singing career. It was a tough apprenticeship, but the newcomer was up for the challenge. 

‘I regularly travelled alone to those working men’s club gigs, just me on trains with my luggage, and all the music parts, Delmar says. ‘You’d get up to Scunthorpe or Redcar or West Hartlepool or somewhere, go to your digs, go the venue and rehearse the local band, and often you’d stay up there for a week. It was often very lonely. You might spend hours in the cinema in the day, anywhere to while away the time. Then you’d get the milk train back to London in the small hours at the weekend, by which time I couldn’t wait to get home. As a woman travelling alone at night, I was always prepared for trouble! But it was a good work ethic, it sorted you out, and it stood us all in good stead for a musician’s life’. 

 Delmar was already broadening her repertoire as an accomplished theatre actor, having taken the role of ‘The Necessity Girl’ in a Sam Wanamaker production of Finian’s Rainbow in Liverpool, and in the ’60s she moved on to performing in Richard Rodgers’ No Strings and in the next decade to the hit shows Cowardy Custard and the Harlem Renaissance musical Bubbling Brown Sugar. She recalls her toughest theatrical choice was performing in a National Theatre production of David Hare’s intense and polemical 1980s play A Map of the World, with Diana Quick and Bill Nighy in the cast. 

 ‘I chickened out of that the first time I was asked,’ Delmar chuckles, ‘but then I saw somebody else doing the part and I thought “maybe I can do that”. I had three weeks rehearsal with David Hare directing… and it was wonderful. Very hard work, but it really sharpened my sense of how other people on stage with you are absolutely depending on your timing, and awareness of everybody’s cues. We did it for 18 months, and it was a fantastic learning experience.’

 I mention to Elaine that it’s been said she seems comfortable in any environment – whether it’s a jazz club, or a theatre, or a concert hall, or a church, she always seems to find a rapport with her audience. 

 ‘I think more than anything that comes from my cabaret days,’ she says. ‘You find yourself on a stage, maybe when you’re young there’s a lot of noise from the audience, but you learn little tricks as you develop, and you start to get control of it. Initially it was difficult, now I go on stage and the noise stops, you know how to be in charge. And you learn that sometimes less is more. I love working with big bands, but on Speak Low it’s mostly just Barry’s piano, Simon’s bass and Jim guitar – and sometimes just one of them, with me in a duo. That reduced  line-up was an accident and my fault, I forgot to confirm the date with our great drummer Bobby Worth – but different settings bring different things to the music, and fortunately it worked out well in this case. It’ll be another story on the tour!’.

Before we part, I take a clumsily roundabout route toward  asking Elaine Delmar discreetly whether she ever considers performing more fashionable or contemporary choices than these admittedly indestructible classics of the standards repertoire. She greets the query with her signature hoot of disarming laughter. 

 ‘You’re being very careful with that one! But with any song, it’s the story that I want to hear. The way Lena Horne or Sarah Vaughan told those stories, I suppose, that’s what influenced me when I was young. I often do hear something unfamiliar nowadays and wonder if I could do something with it, and there’s a lot of wonderful stuff out there now. But Taylor Swift? I don’t think she’d be quite right for me! I’ve heard Adele songs where I’ve thought “hmmm that’s quite tricky and interesting” but I know it wouldn’t suit me to try and sing them. I can’t really get around rhythmically complicated new melodies so well, and it’s harder to remember new lyrics. But these are some of my favourite songs, and I’ve finally got around to recording them. Of course my voice has changed and will change with time. But nothing gives me more pleasure than to look forward to performing this music, and with my favourite musicians!’

Elaine Delmar’s Speak Low is released on Ubuntu Music. She plays Scarborough Jazz Festival (September 27), Berkhamsted Civic Centre (October 12), Ship Theatre Sevenoaks (October 27), and Pizza Express Jazz Club, London, (October 29)

The post Elaine Delmar – new album ‘Speak Low’ and touring first appeared on UK Jazz News.

Sir Karl, who is also Patron of the Festival, has, together with bassist and composer Laurence Cottle, (whose All-Star Big Band will perform) revisited the old scores and transcribed those that were lost – returning to jazz for the first time in fifty years with some old, some adapted, some revised and some new orchestrations. He will also introduce the concerts.

In that exhilarating decade for jazz, rock, folk and blues between the mid-1960s and ’70s, Miles Davis, Joe Zawinul, Carla Bley, Charles Lloyd, Hermeto Pascoal and many others around the world were making music that bypassed generic differences. 

  Some of those unfamiliar fusions didn’t work for everyone. There were fans for whom the prospect of bass guitars, synthesisers, and r&b riffs ever being absorbed into the coolly swinging sounds of classic jazz could seem all but sacrilegious. But for many more, the changes were confirmation that a new jazz for a new generation had arrived. 

    In the UK, that surge launched crossovers of bebop, psychedelia, blues, and r&b, emerging in the music of Soft Machine, Nucleus, the Keith Tippett Group, and jazz-leaning rock bands like Yes, King Crimson, and Brand X. And within that circle at the time, an increasingly sought-after young composer of inviting yet cannily improv-spurring themes was emerging, by the name of Karl Jenkins. 

    Now, half a century later, a landmark concert featuring large-scale versions of pieces that Jenkins – then a jazz pianist and reeds-player – wrote for Soft Machine and Nucleus, and for influential bandleader Graham Collier’s groups, opens the tenth Swansea International Jazz Festival. Welsh bass-guitar legend Laurence Cottle‘s formidable big band plays nine originals from Jenkins’ jazz years, rearranged jointly by Cottle and the man himself. Jenkins has called the concert ‘Back, Down Another Road’, a reference to a landmark Graham Collier album made during his time with that band. 

    The composer, now a sprightly 80 – and better known these days as Sir Karl Jenkins, much-lauded creator of a raft of internationally bestselling symphonic and choral music over the past three decades – will introduce the concert, and the word on the wires is that he’s quite likely to sit in on piano too. 

    The whole show is a celebratory double-header for Jenkins, and for the Welsh jazz scene on which he found some of his earliest musical inspirations. As well as being the composer’s 80th year, 2024 is also a 75th birthday landmark for the Swansea Jazz Club, which has been presenting local and international stars from Stan Tracey and Ronnie Scott to Ben Webster and Woody Herman’s big band in various boltholes since 1949. And in an encouraging uptick for the Festival’s profile, new managers Swansea Council have established a larger venue at the city’s Festival Pavilion, and envisage including its Dylan Thomas theatre in future jazz events. 

   Though Karl Jenkins’ crowded day-job as a much-lauded composer has rarely touched on jazz since the early 1980s, he has never lost his love for it. But a remarkable career since those days has taken him into very different worlds. He has composed milliion-selling choral albums mixing European and global sources, symphonies, a harp concerto (‘Tros y Garreg’, performed at the coronation of Charles III), award-winning themes for the advertising industry, and his Kosovo-inspired ‘The Armed Man: A Mass for Peace’ has been performed worldwide close to 3000  times since its creation in 1999. 

   But though the world has latterly come to know this prolific and genially unassuming artist by his official designation (following the 2015 knighthood awarded for services to composition and to the unity of separated genres), Jenkins’ jazz years in a world of small clubs and backroom bars are still vivid to him as precious memories, and formative experiences in his diverse musical life. 

    So when we hook up on Zoom at the end of May, we begin on what turns out to be a distant mutual recollection – a Nucleus gig at the Fishmonger’s Arms in north London’s Wood Green in the spring of 1970, when the headlong virtuosity of guesting bass guitarist Jack Bruce brought the packed house down, but the freshness of the new band’s ‘Elastic Rock’ repertoire shone through nonetheless. The stealthy footfall of Jenkins’ title theme, with its austere horn hook shadowed and driven by dark Fender Rhodes and guitar fills, and the tenderness of his film-noirish ballad ‘Lullaby for a Lonely Child’ (originally written for Graham Collier) were both highlights of that still-cherished debut album, and are now recast for the Cottle big band’s Swansea show. 

     ‘Nucleus hadn’t long been formed when “Elastic Rock” was recorded,’ Jenkins recalls. ‘But it had already changed a lot from the first meetings we’d had. It was a cooperative band originally, before it became Ian Carr’s Nucleus. The drummer John Marshall, and the bassist Jeff Clyne – who was by then playing bass guitar as well as double bass – and guitarist Chris Spedding, they were all getting into a feeling that was different from jazz swing. But a lot of excellent players didn’t really like the mixture of swing time and rock time. Ray Warleigh, a very good saxophonist, was involved in the original meetings, but he hated that rhythmic mix, so he left before the final line-up was formed.’

     Reflecting on that event and others, we recall that the beginnings of fusion was sometimes a divisive issue among jazz fans as well as among performers. I remembered someone at the Fishmongers’ Arms gig telling me ‘you can’t call this jazz’. Friends could even fall out over it.

     ‘Bit like Brexit,’ Jenkins chuckles. ‘It did get quite heated for a while. But so many bands were becoming popular with more electric sounds and rock rhythms, Miles released ‘Bitches Brew’ and John McLaughlin formed his Mahavishnu Orchestra, Nucleus and Soft Machine and many others were getting noticed over here, so pretty soon people stopped worrying about what time the music was in.’ 

     As befits a living composer still in his active prime and with a huge following, Karl Jenkins unsurprisingly has a crowded schedule for his 80th birthday year. He filled the Royal Albert Hall in March to conduct selections from his orchestral and choral pieces, including from the million-selling ‘Adiemus’, and a full rendition of the cinematically thunderous and linguistically eclectic ‘The Armed Man’. In July he conducts the German premiere of his 2022 choral work ‘One World’, and in August on the BBC Proms, his new saxophone concerto, ‘Stravaganza’ is performed by rising young Cumbrian sax star Jess Gillam, whose quirky personal journey on the instrument inspired the piece.  

   Yet amid all that, Jenkins’ return to his jazz past is a big priority with him this year, and for reasons that go way back in his personal as well as his musical life.

   ‘Well, I’ve been president of Swansea Jazz Festival for a while,’ Jenkins explains. ‘I got to know Laurence Cottle pretty well, and his brother Dave, who runs the Swansea Jazz Club really, as well as being house pianist for visiting musicians there. So we got to thinking about my 80th birthday and connection with the festival, and came up with the idea of some new arrangements for tunes I’d written for Graham Collier, Nucleus and Soft Machine, with Laurie’s big band playing them. So there are nine pieces, including some music for a BBC broadcast I did in 1971 for Jazz Club, for a line-up which was Nucleus-plus, with extra saxophones, piano, and vibes. It was a three-movement piece called “Penumbra”, part of which I adapted  for a piece called “Fanfare” on “Soft Machine 6”.

     After all this time, was Jenkins tempted to change any of these old classics for their big-band renaissance?

     ‘I felt because they were popular pieces in their day, as it were, I didn’t really want to change them much,’ Jenkins says. ‘I ran them past Laurie and Dave, and I arranged most of the early stuff, and Lawrie did the rest. I’m very happy with it, the band sounded amazing at the rehearsal we had in Wales recently, so I’m really looking forward to the gig.’

    I ponder how that almost overnight the jazz apprenticeship of his twenties turned into his status today as one of the most performed living composers on the planet. Jenkins takes up the story. 

    ‘I grew up in a little village outside Swansea, and my father was a church organist and music teacher, so he taught me piano, and I was schooled classically early on,’ he says. ‘But in my early teens, I heard some senior boys at my grammar school playing an LP on the music room record player, and it was Oscar Peterson, going like the clappers. I was hooked from then, read books on jazz, listened to Miles and Art Blakey, and by the time I went to Cardiff University on a music degree I was in love with it. And I didn’t much like what passed for modern classical music at that time, serialism, dissonance and all that. There are dissonances in jazz of course, but there’s almost always rhythm too, and tonality.’ 

    The journey shifted from Cardiff to London’s Royal Academy of Music – by which time Jenkins had caught the attention of British jazz luminaries including Ian Carr and Graham Collier in 1966 at the first Barry Jazz Summer School in south Wales, connections that would soon bring him into the London ensembles of both bandleaders. The rest of his next few years in the 1970s became part of jazz history, but what then triggered the shift toward a life devoting to composing, starting in world of advertising, and moving on to the world’s grandest concert halls? 

   ”I guess after a while I had thought back in those jazz days that there were better improvisers than me around,’ Jenkins reflects. ‘I’ve always loved jazz, and I still listen to it a lot, but I really love writing music too – so I’ve ended up doing what I’m doing now, by one means or another. I did what I did, you know. There was no intention of dumbing classical music down or anything, I just worked with my classical upbringing and understanding of harmony and counterpoint and all that stuff, and my love of melody has always come first. I always refer to myself as a musical tourist. After quite a few happy accidents, that’s the way it’s ended up. But I like to think that what I do is memorable in its way, and perhaps will have longevity. It’s certainly been quite a journey.’

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‘Back, Down Another Road: The Jazz Music of Sir Karl Jenkins’ is at 8.30pm, Friday 14 June, on the Swansea International Jazz Festival. The event runs until Sunday, 16 June , with highlights including the Adrian Cox Quartet’s tribute to Sidney Bechet and other New Orleans stars, Denny Ilett’s Hendrix-celebrating Electric Lady Big Band, and Moscow Drug Club’s visits to Tom Waits, gypsy jazz, and more.

LINK: Swansea International Jazz Festival website

The post Karl Jenkins at 80 – ‘Back, Down Another Road first appeared on UK Jazz News.

If you’re lucky enough to develop an instinctive understanding with musical partners that evolves over time, then that’s something special,’ Richard Fairhurst says. The award-winning British pianist is musing on the rich jazz tradition of the classic piano trio, to which he’s been a significant contributor for years, and never more so than with this month’s release ‘Inside Out’, made with long-time friends and colleagues Dave Whitford on bass, and Tim Giles on drums. 

He’s well aware that, as he says: ‘piano trios have been a common format in jazz for decades. There seem to be as many around today as there were half a century ago, and nobody starting one wants to sound like anyone else if it’s possible. But there’s so much space for interplay in a small improvising ensemble, so many different directions for the music to go, that there are plenty of ways to find your own path. The three of us in this trio feel the same way about music, it’s about the band connection, the space and feeling the moment.’

Fairhurst was a mid-teens starter on piano but his precocious arrival on the jazz stage came only five years later – when he recorded an acclaimed debut album in 1995 at only 19 with Iain Ballamy on saxes, and made it to the final of the Montreux Jazz Festival’s prestigious Solo Piano competition a year later. He became a Steinway artist in 1998, won a BBC Jazz Award in 2004 for his sextet compositions on ‘Standing Tall’, played the Proms in 2009 with adventurous trumpeter Tom Arthurs, and released his first trio album – ‘Triptych’ – in 2010. Sublime piano duos followed in the next decade, with his teacher, mentor and friend, the late great John Taylor – but though Fairhurst’s diverse adventures have embraced idiosyncratic postbop (with a few Django Bates and Iain Ballamy nuances early on), original composition for small and large ensembles, and an improvisational eloquence running from free-improv to high-energy avant-swing, a couple of midlife twists of fate brought him back to the trio and its openness to spontaneous rapport. 

‘I was diagnosed with epilepsy around 2016, completely out of the blue,’ Fairhurst reveals. ‘It’s been totally under control with medication for six or seven years now, but that year was very strange, and I ended up in hospital for a bit. Epilepsy is difficult, because you’re not aware when you have a seizure, and when you come round you can be completely dazed for several hours before everything comes back into focus. It’s much harder for the people around you, and luckily it didn’t affect anything to do with being able to play the piano. But the whole experience made me reflect on music, on everything, and all I could think of wanting to do was to get out there and play again.’

Recovering by 2018, Fairhurst moved fast to assemble the ideal live band he had imagined, with bassist Dave Whitford and drummer Tim Giles. ‘I grew up listening to jazz with Tim, and we played together when he was 13 and I was 18, with Iain Ballamy at Ronnie Scott’s. There’s such a trust there with him after 32 years, I’m immediately comfortable playing with him and vice versa. So from 2018, the three of us went out playing some John Taylor tunes, some Carla Bley, a few standards, pieces of mine. It felt good, so I booked a gig at the Vortex and felt I should get some new music together for it. It wasn’t a mixture I would normally play, but it sparked immediately with us and the audience, and felt great. A really nice, cohesive feeling, and Dave and Tim are a great rhythm section. So we did that gig and I remember coming away from it on a real high. From there I booked as many gigs as I could, and we managed to do quite a few – until Covid arrived!’

That second hiatus in Richard Fairhurst’s performing life brought with it more time for reflection, practice, and composition – but uppermost in his mind was how quickly he and his partners could get back to capturing on disk the vivacity the trio had been radiating before the pandemic’s drawbridge closed. On earlier recordings, the pianist had figured out a tracklist close to the release’s final outcome, but the ingredients this group had come to mix whenever they got together – the leader’s originals, pieces by Carla Bley, and free improvisations – presented Fairhurst with some editing challenges after they had finally got to play for two days at north London’s Livingston Studios in late 2022.

‘Our music had evolved so fast in that short period between the band’s formation and the pandemic,’ Fairhurst says. ‘By the time of the lockdown, I couldn’t wait to make an album to show where we were at with the music. When we did get to the studio, we recorded far more music than we needed, we had a session at the end of each day where we recorded a number of improvised pieces – ten different pieces in all. It took a long time for me to structure the tracklist for the album afterwards, finding ways to fit the improvised pieces in alongside the composed material so the album felt totally cohesive. I made endless lists, cutting things out, putting things back in, and in the end the album was quite different from what I’d set out to make – but in a good way!’

The composer eventually settled on five of his own originals, two rhythmically zigzagging, improv-inviting pieces by Carla Bley – ‘Vashkar’ and ‘King Korn’, both recorded in the early 1960s by her first husband, pioneering piano original Paul Bley. Grouped between four interludes of group improv like ‘Eclipse’, with its delicate treble trickles nudged by Whitford’s bass figures, the title track with its under-the-lid strings sounds and soft piano-woodwork percussion, and ‘Sunset’ with its bell chimes, bass prods, and sparing keyboard whispers come composed pieces that highlighted Fairhurst’s idiomatic adaptability. 

The opening ‘Ash Catcher’ roams slowly toward swing through surges of melody against cymbal swishes and quiet drum tattoos, ‘Uplift’ has a free-rhythmic building and receding sway before a Bill Evans-like medium groove picks up, and the quick, wriggling figures against drum patterns that introduce ‘Figments’ give way to a snappy funk groove. ‘Flyby’ is hustling Ornettish avant-swing, while the awed and tranquil ‘Open Book’ is a reminder that Fairhurst last recorded this haunting reverie as a duo with John Taylor, shortly before that modest piano genius’s sudden death in 2015. It’s an eclectic repertoire as it is, but Fairhurst stretched it considerably further – particularly rhythmically – by including the then twentysomething Carla Bley’s early calling-cards, ‘Vashkar’ and ‘King Korn’. 

In our phone interview, Fairhurst and I discover that we both first got to hear those tantalising tunes – though we must have heard them 20 years apart – by admiring their presence on extraordinary 1960s Paul Bley albums like ‘Footloose’ (a classic session that Keith Jarrett said he had listened to thousands of times), and ‘Turning Point’. 

‘Carla’s writing is quirky and unusual, her pieces go in unexpected directions, they allow a lot of room for different improvising routes,’ Fairhurst says. ‘The melody of “Vashkar” is beautiful, yet so simple, sitting fairly abstractly in its time signature. Paul Bley plays the melody of “King Korn” quite deconstructed, and out of time, so I thought I’d play it in time which sounded cool. Carla wrote it using standard-song rhythm changes for the solo section, but we play that in an open way without chord changes, which for me works best with that tune. These pieces can be approached in many different ways within the trio and are always shifting around.’

The jazz piano trio was basically a bigger band’s rhythm section on a few nights off until the bebop era of the 1940s – but though there were influential examples led by Bud Powell, Thelonious Monk, and Ahmad Jamal in the postwar world, it was what Miles Davis described as the ‘quiet fire’ of Bill Evans from the late 1950s on that spurred a seismic change still being felt today. With shortlived bass virtuoso Scott La Faro and world-musical drummer Paul Motian, Evans took the art of in-the-moment collective improvisation to a new level. 

‘That’s how today’s piano trio sound has grown,’ Fairhurst says. ‘From Bill Evans and Paul Bley in the ’60s and onwards, to Keith Jarrett, and Brad Mehldau – with all the development of left-hand countermelody Mehldau initiated – they’ve all contributed so much to making the trio sound evolve. For my part, of course I would include JT (John Taylor) in that list, who’s always in my head – such an amazing human being too, so generous, funny and so easy to get on with, and whose ideas always have a footprint on my work, particularly in terms of harmony. And from the number of young players emerging now, the process is obviously still going on. When I pick my charts up, and go and meet Tim and Dave to play – musicians that I love and I’m friends with – we always enjoy getting together and having a good time making this music happen. In terms of the trio tradition, I’m certain it’s always going to be around.’

Richard Fairhurst’s ‘Inside Out’ is released by Ubuntu Music on 14 June. The trio tours the UK from June 8, with an album launch at London’s Vortex Jazz Club on June 11. 

The post Richard Fairhurst – new album ‘Inside Out’ first appeared on UK Jazz News.

In June 1999, a performance at the Pizza Express Jazz Club by the English reeds player Tim Garland would not only highlight an innovative fusion of jazz and Celtic folk music rare in those days, but also a transformative career change emerging on that weekend for the virtuosic 32 year-old. The gig was the second night of two bookings for Lammas – Garland’s 1990s sextet joining Scottish reels, Robert Burns poetry, jazz, Spanish folk songs and much more – but a last-minute call from jazz superstar Chick Corea, asking Garland to join his new acoustic road-band, obliged him to miss the first show and curtail his presence on the second. 

Still buzzing from the unexpected Corea experience after the Lammas show that night, Garland described to The Guardian a phenomenon he considered “a very American thing”, quite different from the pastoral and lyrically reflective music he often played with his group. But in admiring the American jazz impetus “to completely steam into any situation with everything you have”, he also observed a related but subtly different characteristic. “I tend to play off my environment,” Garland said, “and look for that danger and sparkle whatever the situation is.”

In the quarter-century since, Garland’s skill and receptiveness, as both a composer and an improviser, have been spurred by a restless curiosity to cross musical boundaries in search of the unexpected. In 2004, his solo bass clarinet improvisations, alone with the sights and sounds of the North Sea in St Mary’s Lighthouse on Tyneside, turned into a collection of atmospheric new compositions – first for the new band the Lighthouse Trio (including fast-rising young piano virtuoso Gwilym Simcock), and then for a crossover version with the Northern Sinfonia orchestra that became the album If the Sea Replied. In 2009, Garland won a Grammy award for his symphonic arrangements on Chick Corea’s album The New Crystal Silence, worked extensively in ensembles with Corea, American pianist Geoff Keezer and vibraphonist Joe Locke, and then released the much-acclaimed Songs to the North Sky in 2014. 

A seamless interweaving of Nordic saxophone ambiance and soulful freebop dynamism, folded within orchestral textures glimpsing Michael Tippett, Bartók and Vaughan Williams, the set felt at the time like a pinnacle in the multi-talented Garland’s career. But now, in the Lighthouse Trio’s 20th anniversary year, the journey finds another peak with Ubuntu Records’ release of Moment of Departure, an even more ambitious Garland project that has been three years in the making.

The set is a double-album, joining variously rocking, postboppish, dreamy, and rhythmically startling global-jazzy Garland pieces performed by the Lighthouse Trio (the composer plus Simcock and percussionist Asaf Sirkis). One piece features British-Bahraini trumpeter/composer Yazz Ahmed, a melodically audacious performer with a warm sound, occasionally reminiscent of Kenny Wheeler. The title track, ‘Moment of Departure’, is spun from improvisations by the trio plus the strings of the Britten Sinfonia, and the same combination performs the spirited Vivaldi homage ‘Approaching Winter’, for which the orchestra’s much-celebrated and improv-savvy leader Thomas Gould joins the soloists on violin. The similarly-orchestrated five-part suite ‘The Forever Seed’ – in essence a violin concerto with improvised interludes – is Garland’s first large-scale piece where a conductor’s baton replaces a saxophone.

“I’ve made a few albums using quite large ensembles, so I do feel more confident about that now, that’s for sure,” Garland says, when we catch up on the phone for UKJN. ‘This is probably the closest in format to Songs of the North Sky, but the birth of the Lighthouse Trio was 20 years ago, when I went into that lighthouse and recorded myself improvising, then wrote for the orchestra afterwards. I felt then that I really wanted to be joined by others, who could be my partners in crime from the improvisers’ side. That was the birth of the group. So I suppose this album is like saying ‘ok, let’s see what we’ve done in the last 20 years!’.”

The crowded personal schedules of all three band members have made Lighthouse get-togethers infrequent, but the advances they’ve all made separately have been spectacular. I suggest to Garland that they sound as intuitively integrated on Moment of Departure as they have all along, and that their individual advances in technique and the richness of their references seems to have brought them closer together rather than the opposite. We also consider similarities between this venture and Songs to the North Sky, in the ways that the freedoms of small-band improvisation and a classical orchestra’s need for order and structure can successfully be intertwined. So is the composer really unfolding one story, with If the Sea Replied, Songs to the North Sky and Moment of Departure separate chapters in it?

 “I guess it is all one story really, even if parts might appear quite disparate,” Garland says. “Maybe I wanted it all to be considered as a greater unity, even though I didn’t even know it – perhaps it’s just my kind of Libra personality. As a jazz musician, of course I’m very deeply into a spontaneous area; I could listen to Asaf and Gwilym improvise all day, they’re endlessly inventive at it. But then I find myself thinking, ‘what could I do from the other extreme?’ OK, I could maybe write a very tight arrangement for a whole orchestra, and then discover how the improvisers react to that, if we can be broad enough to be free within the greater unity of a music that’s both composed and improvised.”

“Listening back to this album now, I do think we’ve gone further with that than ever,” he continues. “I’ve never written such a big piece as ‘The Forever Seed’ with no saxophone on it, so it falls outside the jazz-oriented politics of music that has a saxophoney sound. Yet Thom Gould’s violin is both spontaneous and faithful to the score. He’s amazing. There was a place where I’d written a fiendish cadenza for him, which he got increasingly perfect as the takes went on, but I chose one of the early ones when he was getting used to it – I’m not after perfection, I’m after that raw as-if-it’s-the-first-time quality, and Thom understands that. The jazz composer leaves artful holes, and you know certain soloists will do some of their most exciting stuff in the gaps you leave for them.”

Moment of Departure was conceived as a single album, but the reconvening of the Lighthouse Trio changed all that. Garland still sounds both amused and incredulous as he recalls the events last autumn that made a single disc an impossibility. 

“About five minutes in, when we started rehearsing the trio again after several years off, I thought ‘my goodness, it sounds like we’ve just come off tour!’ And at that moment I realised, ‘uh-oh, this is going to have to be a double album.’ Gwilym and Asaf just bring so much to the table, so they’re the primary influences in terms of who I play with. I really wanted to express that in the title track, where we all freely improvised, recorded it, and then I wrote the strings parts retrospectively. Gwilym filmed it too, so you can see that process happening. We also did separate solo improvisations, which I joined digitally, and was surprised to discover how much like a simultaneous performance it sounded. And when I clothed all that with arrangements for the string orchestra, I found that even I couldn’t really tell where composition tails off into something completely different.”

Moment of Departure confirms how expressively Garland has honed and developed the rare art of situating the uninhibited spontaneity of world-class jazz and unorthodox-classical musicians, amid beautifully designed orchestral tapestries. But he’s at pains to make it clear that real-time improvisation can never be faked, or transcribed to sound as if it was happening there and then. 

“When you hear something truly improvised, there’s a particular vitality about it – a never-to-be-repeated in-the-moment magic,” Tim Garland says with some fervour. “Of course, great classical players can relive the magic of a wonderful concerto and keep bringing it to fresh life, but for me there’s nothing like that complete in-the-moment sense you get from improvisers. But in a funny way, of course, I suppose what I’ve gone on to do with the piece ‘Moment of Departure’ and others in the past, is to create something which by definition can never be performed!”

As this summer and autumn’s 20th anniversary Lighthouse tour approaches, Garland has found that its mix of a dozen trio gigs, three full orchestra concerts, and two quartet performances including Gould or Ahmed (Gould will take on the latter’s haunting trumpet part on the rapturous ‘Sub Vita’, but on electric violin and electronics), will mean significant rejigs of the music as played on the album. But that won’t bother the composer. His open-mindedness and long experience have consolidated his confidence in his craftsmanship, and a jazz musician’s expectation that every performance of the same pieces has a right to be different will do the rest. 

As we wind up, Garland reflects on the title of Moment of Departure, with its emphasis on pivotal triggers in life that can launch revelatory journeys. Many of those moments, in his working life as an improviser and a composer, have begun with his partners in the Lighthouse Trio, however irregular their meetings. 

“I suppose one aspect of the title is to throw into relief the things we do as a group, some of which are pastoral and ballad-like, and some that really show how much some improvisers love pushing themselves to the edge,” Garland says. “I’m always amazed by how extraordinary Gwilym and Asaf are at doing that. They raise themselves to that level so easily that I sometimes feel like the third person there, and I think ‘OK, I’m getting my arse kicked severely every time I walk through the door, and they’re just waiting for me to join in.’ But that’s just great for me. I’m always thinking, well, what am I going to learn today?”

The post Tim Garland – new album ‘Moment of Departure’ first appeared on UK Jazz News.

When Jim Rattigan and I last talked for LJN in December 2020 (link below), the former classical French horn player and Royal Philharmonic Orchestra member was launching the sixth album he’d made since he swapped a classical career for jazz at the turn of the millennium. 

Entitled simply When (expressed with characteristic Rattigan quirkiness as a statement, not a question), that set brought together this versatile artist’s inimitable horn sound, a classical string quartet and an A-list jazz rhythm section on ten of his genre-fluid original pieces. 

As we reconvene this month (a welcome appointment since Rattigan is the most affably eloquent of interviewees) to catch up on his latest release, he turns out this time to have headed in the opposite direction – into more private, delicate and personal conversations with just three other jazz soloists, on a trio of very different albums gathered into a single box set. 

The new 3-CD collection, Duos, features the leader’s caressing and pliable horn sound in exchanges with the acclaimed and multi-talented former Phronesis pianist Ivo Neame, with composer/pianist, Thelonious Monk devotee and long-time Rattigan soul-mate Hans Koller, and subtle postbop guitarist Nick Costley-White. 

Since Rattigan’s original plan had been for a single-disc duo improvisation on jazz’s standard songs – that mix of downbeat poetry, wry humour and street wisdom that came to be known as the Great American Songbook – the project has considerably outgrown its first intentions. But happenstance got a grip on the plans, as it so often does – beginning when the composer met Ivo Neame, an occasional dep for pianist Nikki Iles on piano on the tour following the launch of When.

 ‘I’ve always written my own music, I’ve done it on the piano for years, way back into the time I was primarily a classical musician,’ Rattigan says, ‘and most of the material on my own albums has been pieces I’ve composed. But I love standard songs too, it’s just not always that easy to find a situation to explore them in contemporary music.’

 In Ivo Neame, however – despite a work schedule that might well have put the gifted pianist out of bounds – Rattigan found a willing partner. 

‘I entered the jazz world relatively late because I had a classical career first,’ Rattigan says, by way of background. ‘And I’ve found that for people of my sort of age now, or maybe in their 40s or younger, if you just ask them if they’d like to have a play for fun, it’s rare they’ll say yes, because they did all that casual playing when they were 20. You can say “fancy a play?” and they’ll probably say “ok yeah, when’s the gig?”. 

‘So it’s quite rare for someone with a reputation like Ivo’s to agree, but I asked him after he’d done one or two gigs on the When tour, and he said “yes”, so we did some duos at his place, where he has a recording studio. The first thing we played was Bill Evans’ “Very Early”, a beautiful tune that felt great straight away. That’s a good feeling in a duo because you have to have a complete affinity with each other. There’s nowhere to hide in that situation. 

‘Then I went back a couple of weeks later, and we batted some other tunes about – ‘Chelsea Bridge’, which I’ve always loved, and ‘Infant Eyes’, which sounds great on the French horn. Ivo had great rearrangements of both of those, though his versions were quite challenging for French horn. So we were on our way.’

At this time, Rattigan was still imagining a single album of standards. But the curiosity and originality of both players took their encounters somewhere else. Neame introduced a dreamy, unhurriedly time-changing original tune called ‘Passing Point’, a reverie mixing poignant long tones and episodes of scurrying figures which Rattigan considered tailor-made for his instrument. 

‘But at this point I thought, hang on a minute, this is turning into an Ivo Neame album’, Rattigan announces, with his periodically hilarious Tommy Cooper-like guffaw. ‘Well, no, I didn’t really, but we were clearly going somewhere different, which was leading to our own material. I had some sketches of pieces I’d worked out for an all-day event at the Bear Club in Luton, where musicians had been invited to show the audiences how compositions emerge from sketches to finished pieces – so I showed some of those to Ivo, who’s very quick at reading anything you put in front of him, and getting inside unfamiliar music. I brought out a piece of mine called “A Hero’s Path”, which was inspired by Richard Strauss, and “Reverie”, which is a piece by the Russian composer Alexander Glazunov, which I’d played many times as a classical horn player, and it’s a lovely tune. I’d always thought it would make a great jazz standard.’

 At this point, in January 2022, Neame’s home studio allowed the pair plenty of time to shape and rework what became a seven-part tracklist, but one that finally included only two tunes – Billy Strayhorn’s ‘Chelsea Bridge’ and Wayne Shorter’s ‘Infant Eyes’ – that could nowadays be regarded as ‘jazz standards’. 

‘So we had an album that had been great to do, but then I wasn’t quite sure what to do with it next, to be honest,’ Rattigan says. ‘How to promote it, how to get gigs for such an unusual duo – playing mostly new music, for piano and French horn. Promoters and audiences go “French horn, what’s that?”.

Those concerns parked the project for a while, but Rattigan had a connection that offered another route to the standards theme. On some gigs in 2019 with the former Graham Collier saxophonist/composer Pete Hurt’s big band, he met young guitarist Nick Costley-White, an accomplished contemporary bandleader with deep roots in the classic jazz tradition. Listening at close range to the guitarist’s warm chordwork and subtle interplay with soloists, suggested a duo sound to  Rattigan that struck a particularly familiar chord.

 ‘It’s always been in the back of my mind, and particularly over the past ten years or so,’ Rattigan observes, ‘that I’ve been a great admirer of the work of Jim Hall’s guitar with Bob Brookmeyer’s valve trombone, particularly on a fantastic 1979 album of theirs, Live At The North Sea Jazz Festival. Their interplay on it was really inspiring – though I wouldn’t compare the sound of the French horn and the valve trombone; they’re very different. 

‘But I could hear how something similar could be done with the French horn and Nick’s guitar. So after I’d played with Nick in Pete Hurt’s band, I went to a gig of his at the Vortex Club. He was in a quartet with the vibes player Jim Hart. It was great to hear him in that small setting, so afterwards, I rang him up and arranged to go to his Dalston flat for a play, and that’s how the second album of this set – I titled it “You Must Believe In Spring” – came about in October last year. Playing tunes with Nick just felt so nice. He’s got so many tunes in his repertoire, his own and other people’s, but he knew all the standards.’

Rattigan and Costley-White recorded 11 tunes for ‘You Must Believe In Spring’, from Antonio Carlos Jobim’s ‘Ligia’ to the bebop classic ‘Parker’s Mood’, to the Michel Legrand title track, Billy Strayhorn’s ‘Lush Life’, the ever-haunting ‘Body and Soul’ and more. This was when Rattigan mentioned these explorations to the Three Worlds Records label, which had released three of his earlier albums. It was yet another piece of happenstance that dropped the third piece of the jigsaw of Duos into place. 

‘I told them about another collaboration I’d love to do, with Hans Koller – a great pianist and composer, and a friend of mine for many years – that would be dedicated to Thelonious Monk’s music,’ Rattigan recalls, ‘and they immediately said, “why not make it a box set?” I don’t know exactly why the Monk idea came about at that time, but I think I did a Zoom interview during the lockdowns with these students from a college in New Jersey I’ve played at in the past. One of them, a big Monk fan, asked me what my favourite Monk tunes were, and apart from “Round Midnight” and “Ruby My Dear” I realised I didn’t know them well enough. And I thought, if I want to delve deeper into Monk, it’s got to be with Hans. He’s been listening to Monk since he was a kid.’

When Jim Rattigan was making the difficult shift from a distinguished classical career into a contemporary jazz world of pitfalls and unfamiliar challenges in the 1990s, the erudite and polymathic Hans Koller – developing fast as a big-band jazz composer at that time and a fan of Rattigan’s unique horn sound as a key ingredient – had often been his guide. Years of playing and talking music together have infused the sound they make as a partnership now, and Koller’s decades-long fascination with Monk’s wayward yet profoundly logical imagination has been an influence on Rattigan’s thinking for much of that time. ‘Thelonious Monk’, the third element of this quietly but richly diverse Duos box set, makes a fitting finale for it. Monk’s music sounds contemporary in any era, and on classics like ‘Trinkle Tinkle’, ‘Blue Monk’, ‘Pannonica’, and ‘Ruby My Dear’, Rattigan and Koller reiterate that truth in their own devotedly but idiosyncratically Monkish ways.  

 ‘Monk wrote melodies that last forever,’ Rattigan says. ‘They have classic progressions which the tunes work incredibly well with, but never quite in the way you thought they would. Hans says Monk’s music “throws curveballs”, and I think that’s a great description. He has also said, “It’s in the DNA of the French horn to throw curveballs”, and that’s true too, and it’s the reason why I try not to imitate the sound of another instrument but use the French horn for what its strengths are. It’s always up to the players to make the music work.’

Jim Rattigan’s Duos, featuring Ivo Neame, Nick Costley-White and Hans Koller, is released on Three Worlds Records in collaboration with ECN Music on 20 October, and launched at Pizza Express Jazz Club, Dean Street, London, on 9 October.

The post Jim Rattigan – new 3-CD box set ‘Duos’ first appeared on UK Jazz News.

Wilma Baan, the Netherlands-born jazz singer, is in the prime of a long, very diverse, and tirelessly active life as a singer, full-time medic, and parent. But the upbeat title of only her second album since her early vocal debuts on the North Sea Jazz Festival and other prestigious European venues in the early 1980s, reveals just how vivaciously she relishes the thrills of both the present moment and an ever-inspirational past.

Look at Me Now!, this month’s release in collaboration with ECN Music, refers to a 1940s Frank Sinatra/Tommy Dorsey hit song, but its message of startled delight also neatly catches the way this engaging and courageous woman feels about her late-career personal renaissance as a singer – and for that matter, the way she sounds on the phone when we talk about her love of the Great American Songbook, her life as a medic, the disorientating health setback that threatened to bring her jazz dream to a halt, and the backstory of this fine recording’s genesis.

On the face of it, Look At Me Now! is just another standards album – but that’s a depiction that comes nowhere near the personal charm, lyricism and insightful musicality you can hear from even a few moments of tuning into what Baan, producer Claire Martin, and a terrific ensemble led by the elegant and coolly experienced British pianist Graham Harvey came up with on a studio session in Hastings in November last year.

Baan has said of America’s classic Broadway and jazz songs that she regards them as jewels in a treasure-trove, which ‘is and always will be a source of inspiration to me. So many wonderful compositions, combined with lyrics that genuinely tell a story, each begging to be moulded into every thinkable arrangement.’ Her delight in the entrancing possibilities that America’s timelessly streetwise poetry releases is evident throughout this 12-track set, with Baan’s thoughtful and often sparkling interpretations further animated by Harvey’s sharp-eared and responsive trio (with Jeremy Brown on bass and Sebastiaan de Krom on drums), and by spirited guest appearances from guitarist Nigel Price, vibraphonist Nat Steele, flugelhornist James McMillan, and percussionist Tristan Banks.

The album’s title track goes back a long way – to 1941 and the Joe Bushkin/John DeVries song for a new kid on the block called Frank Sinatra, backed by Tommy Dorsey’s powerful orchestra. But where Sinatra’s account of first love’s transformative impact had an unbridled young man’s swagger to it, Baan’s version is more reserved, shaded by the passage of time and chance, but just as life-affirming in its way.

She savours the churning thought-processes of Michel Legrand’s iconic “The Windmills Of Your Mind” in a slow, crystal-clear delivery underpinned by Harvey’s quiet chording, cannily coasts over the walking grooves of “The Great City” (‘if you can get into the city, make sure you can walk back out’) and “Old Devil Moon” – and brings a parent’s tenderness to the Gene Lees lyric of Bill Evans’ “Waltz for Debby”, with vibraphonist Nat Steele supplying the breezy liberation of a fledgling leaving the nest in a buoyantly swinging solo. Among other highlights on this fine set are haunting interpretations of two percipient songs about accepting differentness – “Bein’ Green”, and “Born to be Blue”. For reasons that soon emerge in our telephone conversation, Wilma Baan has reasons of her own to understand what an unexpectedly different take on the everyday world can feel like.

‘I grew up being fed music,’ Baan says with a laugh. ‘An aunt told me that when I was born at home, there was a jazz song playing as I arrived – there was always music. My parents would have phases where it was just classical music – my dad used to be a classical cello player – and I was fed Bach and Brahms and whatever, but also every new jazz recording arriving in the country that my dad could lay his hands on. When I was old enough, he would take me to the record shop, where you could listen to the new releases on headphones in a booth. So that’s my musical makeup, I don’t know anything else.’

As a fascinated teenager, Baan picked up plenty of standard-song melodies that way, but her talent for gripping an audience with them fortuitously emerged through an early life-choice that had nothing to do with jazz. As a high-flying secondary-school student who excelled in languages, but with a crop of medics in her wider family, she initially considered studying to be a doctor, but – despite the encouragement of her schoolteachers – was scared of the mathematics and science it required. In the Netherlands at the time, a path into nursing was easier, and Baan took it.

‘We had a very old, traditional, and lovely hospital in my locality in Amsterdam,’ Baan recalls. ‘And they had these traditions where each group who were half a year behind the exam group – and therefore due to be the next ones – put on a cabaret for the exam students. You would do that show with friends, brothers, nephews, whatever, and we would form little jazz combos, and write our own lyrics on existing melodies. I knew some standard songs and bossa novas, and when I performed them people started saying to me, “maybe you should do this a bit more”. Now and again in a weekend, at parties and weddings with mates, it just started to snowball along. The Netherlands is a very small country, so as soon as you stick your head half a millimetre over what’s median, then people prick up their ears. I started singing a bit in clubs and on radio broadcasts in the early 1980s, and on the North Sea Jazz Festival too. But I became a nurse, so that became my main focus then.’

Did that life ever offer any insights into music’s place in our minds and hearts?

‘Well, I included Bill Evans’ “Waltz for Debby” on the album, which was composed for his niece,’ Baan says. ‘And whenever I think of it, I see this little girl dancing joyfully around, and as a parent it speaks to me. At one point in my nursing life, I had duty in a neo-natal ward, there were all new-born babies there, and the idea was to give the mums some rest for part of the night. At some point, one would start crying and soon the rest would join in, and then it was pandemonium. So I would start singing a song, and – you might not believe it – there was silence. I think music reaches everybody, at any age, and they listened. Of course – ‘ Baan chuckles at the antithesis – ‘the moment I finished my song, everybody started bawling again, but that’s a different story’.

I ask Wilma Baan about the impromptu formation of the band on Look At Me Now!, and how it came to sound like an ensemble of old hands who have played together forever. She’s quick to point out that pianist Graham Harvey’s key role in her 2021 album So Nice (on that occasion with bassist Dave Chamberlain and drummer Josh Morrison, with a little artful input from trombonist and studio owner Chris Traves) and the wisdom of her vocal-star producer Claire Martin, were crucial building blocks in the shaping of this new adventure.

‘I don’t think I know anyone as understatedly creative and musical and subtle as Graham Harvey,’ Baan fervently observes. ‘Of course I’d heard him playing with Stacey Kent at Ronnie’s and elsewhere, and when I approached him at a gig at the Bull’s Head in Barnes, I was amazed that he agreed to play on So Nice. Claire was a background influence in that, of course. The bassist Jeremy Brown and drummer Sebstiaan de Krom – who’s a compatriot of mine – were available for this session too, Nat Steele is a great vibraphonist and I find the vibraphone absolutely beautiful, and – like Joe Pass – Nigel Price is an amazing player who entirely understands a guitarist’s relationship with a singer.

‘We recorded at James McMillan’s Quiet Money Studios in Hastings, so the whole experience could not have been at a nicer location and in a nicer atmosphere – and James is a fantastic trumpet and flugelhorn player too, so I was lucky enough to have the benefit of those skills on two of the tracks. When it came to choosing the songs, well, you choose the songs you love doing, but for an album you have to balance it of course. I’d be happy to do ballads only, but I don’t want people to fall asleep. I love the whole spectrum, swing, ballads, bossa nova, everything.’

Before we part, I venture to ask Wilma Baan about the intervention of fate that has profoundly affected her life in every area. In the early 1980s, with her nursing career at full stretch and singing jazz an enchanting sidebar to that life, Baan started being reminded by friends about a sonic dimension she hadn’t noticed she was beginning to miss. If they would remark on the sounds of birds singing, phones ringing, the clink of keys dropped on floors, she realised she was hearing less and less of the upper register.

Baan was diagnosed with sensorineural deafness, a deteriorating prognosis in the ’80s when analogue hearing aids were of little help for much more than conversation. Fellow musicians pointed out that her vocal pitching was suffering as her ears increasingly sent her brain unreliable information. So Baan’s singing life went on hold for more than a decade, until the arrival of digital hearing aids in 1996, and the glimpse of a way back to singing jazz. Nowadays, she can lead a full life, communicate in person and on the phone, and listen to music and accurately perform it, as new technology streams feedback-free incoming sound via Bluetooth.

‘I was so very, very insecure, when I tried to start singing live again, after digital hearing aids came in,’ Baan says fervently. ‘I tried a few gigs, and I kept asking people in the audience “how was that, was I in key?”. It was wonderful to discover they were working. It’s not always easy. Even now, if I’m drowned out by people talking or shouting in the audience, that’s when I almost panic because I know it’s the wrong situation for me. I need proper amplification, I need ideally two monitors in front of me – the technology has not yet evolved to the point where hearing aids can double as monitors but it will come – but it’s manageable. Of course there are restrictions to what I can do and what I’m prepared to do. But it’s so wonderful to be doing it again, this thing I’ve loved since my teens. There’s just so much beautiful music out there to perform, and always a different way, however long ago those songs were written. And if there isn’t, they’re beautiful enough by themselves to be repeated and repeated again.’

Wilma Baan’s Look At Me Now! is out on 28 July, released in collaboration with ECN Music.

She launches the album at London’s Pizza Express Jazz Club, Dean Street, on 31 July.

The post Wilma Baan – new album ‘Look at Me Now!’ first appeared on UK Jazz News.

The Birmingham-born, Welsh-raised and now London-based saxophonist has a new album on Ubuntu Music. Release date 21 April. Launch gig 18 April at Pizza Express Jazz Club.

When Charlie ‘Bird’ Parker’s genius first blazed across jazz’s night sky in the 1940s, it was a visitation that had a seismic impact on the era’s adventurous musicians and fans alike. The bebop revolution Parker set loose has since passed through countless changes down the decades, in the hands of many descendants and disciples, but the audacity and passion of his vision continues to mesmerise emerging jazz players all over the world. 

This month in the UK, the young Birmingham-born, Welsh-raised and now London-based saxophonist Fraser Smith confirms that the legacy vividly lives on, when he launches his nonchalantly confident and very hard-swinging debut album, “Tip Top!” But though he plays a tenor saxophone and not Bird’s favoured alto, and his heroes include such soulfully muscular Bird-inspired tenor-beboppers as Dexter Gordon, Ike Quebec, and Stanley Turrentine, Parker’s phrasing and timing unmistakeably guide Smith’s melodic sense and lie at the core of his playing. 

 Before the saxophonist and I talk on the phone for LJN, I find an old Parker-related memory is on my mind – of an interview I’d had with the late Ronnie Scott in 1985, in which the celebrated club-proprietor – a poll-winning tenor saxophonist himself – was recalling a Sunday afternoon in a Bloomsbury flat in 1947 when he had first encountered Charlie Parker’s searing sound. 

Scott and a group of jazz-playing friends – all in their restless 20s and bored with the commercial swing and dance-band scene on which they were making their livings – to some newly-imported American records. One turned out to be ‘Red Cross’, a hastily-composed tune written to fill out an incomplete recording session by the guitarist Tiny Grimes, and – like much bebop music of the period – it was a harmony-expanding recharge of a 1930s pop hit, ‘I Got Rhythm’. But the real attraction was the horn-player on the session – a 26 year-old Charlie Parker, flying over the stacked chords faster and more ingeniously than any saxophonist the young Brits had ever heard before. 

From that moment on, for Ronnie Scott and his jazz generation, Parker’s uninhibited harmonic conception and audacious updating of the blues became, as Scott would later put it, ‘the obvious way to play’. 

As it still seems to be, 76 years later in London, for Fraser Smith, who’s tirelessly finding new avenues in that inexhaustible resource. ‘I’m working on this pattern from a Charlie Parker tune called ‘Diverse’ at the moment – it’s one of his that perhaps isn’t so well-known,’ Smith tells me when we eventually hook up. ‘I’ve been playing it for about seven months now, just trying to get to the essence of it, and work it in to my playing and into different tunes more widely – but it still doesn’t feel like it’s done yet, you know. For the past eight years or so, I’ve spent hours and hours playing along with all those great records, trying to get into the details, and I’m constantly discovering new jazz that I didn’t know about from this era. Last week I found that Fats Navarro album, Nostalgia – I’d never heard it before. And so that’s another six months of listening, for all the influences that went into it.’  

You might never guess how focused and intense Smith’s meticulous studies are on a passing listen to the relaxed and freewheeling ‘Tip Top!’. His gruff tenor sound and punchy accents on the infectiously grooving opener ‘Might Not’ cruises with such eager aplomb over the laid-back drums groove of Steve Brown (a British bebop maestro since the 1990s) that an old-school jazzer might imagine this is an undiscovered American classic they missed 60 years ago, while the young club audiences dancing to the Smith quartet today might conversely hear it as just another seductive component of the kaleidoscope of contemporary music. 

The flying double-time bebop of ‘Iroquois’ (a nod to the classic bebop vehicle ‘Cherokee’, with Simon Read‘s thundering bass-walk powering it) is just as evocative, while the medium-swinging and ruggedly lyrical title track is infused with the enthusiasm these players express for a style conceived long before they were born. The only cover is ‘Prisoner of Love’ (a dreamy 1930s ballad reprised in the 1940s and ’60s by Perry Como and James Brown) delivered by Smith as a vaporous Ben Websteresque reverie; while the funky ‘Pip’ is a showcase for Smith’s harmonically serpentine yet always accessible melody-writing and Rob Barron’s piano-improv fluency. ‘Wardell’ is an elegantly affectionate tribute to Count Basie tenor star Wardell Gray, and the stop-time finale ‘Out Into The Daylight’ takes this fine album out on a classically garrulous phrase-swapping exchange with Brown’s vivacious drumming. 

Fraser Smith came relatively late to the saxophone, but was studying it formally in his mid-teens, after he moved with his father from Birmingham to Wales. His introduction to jazz, however, was his own choice – mostly acquired from the budget-priced jazz compilations at the local HMV store. He considers that an Ike Quebec album acquired that way became one of his biggest early influences. Smith studied jazz at the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama (with sophisticated bebop alto saxist Geoff Simkins as an influential teacher), and then from 2010 on the postgraduate course at Trinity Laban in London. 

‘Going to Trinity was a real shock,’ Smith recalls. ‘All the practice rooms there are facing out into this big courtyard, so you can hear everybody going for it, fantastic techniques, and when you first encounter it it’s a real gamechanger. They definitely weren’t messing around at Trinity, and it upped my game a lot. I was already in a band that had formed in Wales around 2008, with Joe Webb on Hammond organ – he’s a very sought-after pianist now – and Gethin Jones on drums, and we all moved up to London together and kept it going, playing a kind of Ike Quebec-inspired soul-jazz, until just before the pandemic, when different projects took us separate ways. From then on, I’ve found myself getting more and more into classic bebop and swing grooves – looking at the micro and the macro, sometimes on a single phrase for months, sometimes playing along with a song and really trying to get inside the feel of it.’

Fraser Smith unhesitatingly credits his partners on “Tip Top!” – pianist Rob Barron, bassist Simon Read, and drummer Steve Brown – with giving those meticulous pursuits such a vibrant charge of their own kinds of musicality.  

‘I’ve looked up to Rob and Steve for a long time,’ Smith unhesitatingly declares, ‘from before I moved to London. When we were in Cardiff we used to drive down to the Ronnie Scott’s jam on a Wednesday night, when the singer Mike Mwenso was running it – and they were crazy sessions, went on till four or five in the morning. I remember Mike telling people to stop dancing so erratically, because they were accidentally knocking people’s saxophones out of their mouths and stuff. We’d hear great players like Rob and Steve then, but I never imagined I’d work my way up to be able to their level, which is why it’s been such a treat to have them with me on this album. ‘

The young Scottish pianist Fraser Urquhart, a keen admirer of Smith’s work, has rightly written that while ‘he doesn’t reinvent the wheel and doesn’t want to’, he’s a jazz original in his own way, a young man of ‘passion, humour and will-to-live which you’ll hear on this recording’. But before we part, I ask Smith whether he envisages the soundworld he inhabits so wholeheartedly now will always be enough for him, or whether the plethora of sounds and influences that make up contemporary music of all kinds might offer their own kinds of temptations one day? 

‘Maybe to my detriment, I’m a bit of a purist now,’ Fraser Smith reflects. ‘I am interested in other musics, and I think other influences do come into my playing sometimes, but at the moment my listening is generally a strict bebop diet. It could be a phase, but it feels like a long one. I just love listening to that style, and playing with people who love it too. And I think the more you get into it, the more you learn about how to make those wonderful old sounds come alive again for a modern audience.’

Fraser Smith’s ‘Tip Top!’ is released on 21 April on Ubuntu Music (UBU119). Album launch is on 18 April at the Pizza Express Jazz Club, Dean Street, London

The post Fraser Smith Quartet – new album ‘Tip Top!’ (Ubuntu Music) first appeared on UK Jazz News.

After a quarter-century at the forefront of UK jazz and the wider music world too, the self-effacing Julian Siegel may still sometimes look as if he’s surprised to find himself a centre of attention – but the many milestones this resourceful and imaginative artist has passed in a career as a multi-reeds virtuoso, composer and bandleader since the turn of the millennium show exactly why heads turn his way whenever he unpacks a horn. 

Nottingham-born Siegel co-led the innovative and globetrotting fusion band Partisans with guitarist Phil Robson from 1997 to 2019, became a rare British leader of a star US rhythm section in a trio with Americans Greg Cohen and Joey Baron on bass and drums in 2007 – winning a prestigious BBC Jazz Award for Best Instrumentalist the same year – and has played saxes and bass clarinet for international ensembles from Hamburg’s NDR Big Band, to those of Hermeto Pascoal, Django Bates, Michael Gibbs, Nikki Iles, and many more. His ongoing small-band touring project is the experienced and empathic Julian Siegel Quartet, with pianist Liam Noble, bassist Oli Hayhurst, and drummer Gene Calderazzo.

But from February 7 to 12, this man for all jazz seasons takes the most ambitious and personal project of his career on the road – his own A-list 19-piece jazz orchestra, formed in 2017 to play and record expanded arrangements of his small-band repertoire, but principally the autobiographical suite Tales from the Jacquard. The piece takes its inspiration from the Siegel family’s history in the Midlands’ lacemaking trade, and the influence on the bandleader’s  life of music-loving parents who were devoted Count Basie and Gustav Mahler fans simultaneously, and plenty more besides.

“I grew up in Nottingham, where my parents were involved in the lace trade for over 50 years, and ran a lacemaking factory’, Siegel says, when we catch up on the phone to bring the Jacquard story up to date. “After work, at home, music would always be on the turntable, much of it jazz and classical. As a great music enthusiast, my dad used to say that when the lacemaking looms were running, he wanted to conduct them, they had such a groove to their sound. So when Geoff Wright of Derby Jazz came up with the original invitation in 2017, saying they’d like a big-ensemble piece, but ideally with an East Midlands theme, it made me think I’d try to do this project about the area’s lace industry, somehow.

“But I also thought I could draw on some of the music my parents loved, and which was all around our house in my childhood,” Siegel continues. “We went to concerts a lot when I was a kid, in the Midlands and in London, we constantly listened to music on record and on radio – Sundays especially, when the mornings were devoted to jazz and the afternoons to classical – and the record collection included much Basie and Ellington, vocalists Sarah Vaughan and Joe Williams, as well as Mahler, Beethoven, and Brahms. My parents were signed-up members of the Count Basie Society, they used to go and hear his band whenever it toured here. They loved the saxophone players in the Basie band, Eddie “Lockjaw” Davis particularly. And a huge big-band inspiration for me was the Mel Lewis Orchestra album 20 Years at the Village Vanguard, which I bought when I was about 18. Amazing arrangements by great musicians like Thad Jones, Bob Brookmeyer and Jim McNeely, fantastic playing from saxophonists Joe Lovano, Ralph Lalama, and Dick Oatts.” 

From all those vivid memories, and the very different ones of hearing the vast but dizzyingly-intricate lacemaking machinery in action in his childhood, Siegel found the fuse for his project. Traditional lacemaking looms were sophisticated pieces of 19th century Industrial Revolution technology, their ironclad muscle capable of delicately spinning mimicry of spiders’ webs in linen and silk, the mechanism’s unerring paths dictated by cylinder-mounted punch-cards encoded from a designer’s hand-drawn sketches. Those Jacquard cards, named after the devices that brought automation to lacemaking, were where Siegel began looking for musical clues.

“The cards were a way in, because I saw some at my dad’s factory,” Siegel remembers. “They were old technology by then, because he’d modernised the machines and the cards were no longer used. But I remember thinking they were fascinating objects. Then when the project was commissioned, I discovered the Cluny Lace factory in Derbyshire, which has kept the old technology and still uses the traditional methods, so I spent a very memorable couple of days there, and talked to the “Card Puncher” at the factory who still makes those cards, copying the old patterns and developing new ones. 

“So that was when I started work on the music. The cards reminded me of the punch-cards for player-pianos – where something similar automatically operates the keys. They use the forerunner of computer code – ones and zeroes – so I tried to understand the numbers in each column and what they were doing, and turn that into a musical code. The last section of “Tales from the Jacquard” begins with a rhythm the card suggested first, which in turn suggested a melody. After a while there were four or five ways I used to start off the sections in the suite. For this tour, I’ve written a new piece called “Twisthands” – the people operating the machine are called that in the trade – where I used the numbers from an unused card I had to create two melodies. One was diatonic – in a seven-note scale – the other was a chromatic version of the numbers in the card, using 12 pitches, with all the semitones. After playing with the melody for a while each melody implied chords and rhythms, the first one sounded like it was in 3/4, and the second chromatic one ended up as a ballad and then into a groove section. I can’t wait to hear what happens with it in rehearsal. I really enjoy writing for particular soloists in mind, it’s so exciting to hear them shape the music in their own ways.” 

Siegel had begun the “Tales from the Jacquard” suite with an archive recording of the swelling hum and vintage-train-like clank of the looms in motion, before Liam Noble’s barely-struck piano ruminations usher in dreamily pulsating orchestral harmonies followed by a driving call-and-response of luxurious riffing and nimble trumpet rejoinders from the NDR Big Band’s Claus Stötter. A playful repeating piano figure echoing the lacemaking looms’ chatter underpins Siegel’s soprano-sax exchanges with Tori Freestone’s sensuous flute lines, and those hypnotic machine-grooves also open the suite’s third part, with its gripping slow transition from dark, disquieting drama to classic big-band-riffy bebop. The suite, a selection of Siegel updates from earlier small-group pieces, and a sprightly cover of Cedar Walton’s “Fantasy in D” (with a thunderous tenor-sax battle between Siegel and Stan Sulzmann) rounded off a formidable recording debut for the orchestra, assembled from live shows on the 2017 tour. Stötter, Freestone, Sulzmann, and long-time Siegel drums sidekick Gene Calderazzo are among several front-rank sidepersons from those sessions, returning to the lineup for this month’s reunion. 

Julian Siegel muses on the early days of the orchestra in spring 2017. When the musicians first came together, he was sure something special was likely to happen, given the quality of the players, and the crucial presence of Julian Siegel Quartet lynchpins Liam Noble, bassist Oli Hayhurst, and Calderazzo, joining him at the core of the ensemble, alongside the ever in-demand guitarist Mike Outram. But the effect on that first rehearsal was something he hadn’t bargained for. 

“The first thing they played at the first rehearsal just blew me away,” he says, “even though I already knew what a great bunch of musicians they were, and long-time collaborators of mine in my groups and their own. And then when we got on the road, travelling with any good band, whether it’s a small or a large group, really reminds you how much a group of fantastic improvisers change the music each night.”

Siegel is unmistakeably thrilled to be taking an ambitious venture so close to his heart and his personal history on the road again. The pandemic’s shutdown of live performance immensely disheartened him – as a player, as a composer without players to try out his ideas on, and as a music-lover who relishes just being around the spaces where creative sounds are being made. But he doesn’t take the arrival of opportunities like this month’s tour for granted, or underestimate the challenges artists face to get their work in front of audiences in such tough economic times. He unhesitatingly credits the invaluable organisational help of Elaine Crouch in getting this tour together, and is grateful for the support of Arts Council England, Whirlwind Records, and the tireless dedication of the UK’s jazz promoters.

“But it’s very difficult to know where things are at right now,” he muses. “Every project that suddenly appears on the scene, if you’ve done it yourself you know what a long arc there would have been to getting it there. When all live music stopped in the pandemic…well, what a terrible time that was. And now it’s back, it’s just so fantastic to play to an audience again, to be able to go to a gig again. This music isn’t just about the sounds – it’s about the scene it’s part of, it’s about being around the places where it’s made, and the amazing people doing it. Of course we’re in a period where’s money’s tight and it’s hard to foresee the future – but I’m just excited that lots of interesting things are happening now, and this music never stops. Musicians have a need to keep creating it and putting it out. It’s always so inspiring to know that’s going on around you”. 

Before we part, we return to the ever-intriguing theme of inspirations – but this time not the examples of jazz giants of the past on lovingly-cherished vinyl albums, but the examples of the gifted composer/bandleaders Julian Siegel has worked with and learned from down the years. 

“When you’re a sideman in a great leader’s band, you’re trying to take care of the written parts – of course! – but you’re also trying to listen to the sound and feel of the whole music that’s happening around you and go with that, whether it’s in written or in improvised sections”, Siegel observes. “In Mike Gibbs’ band, for instance, he manages to open the thing up so much, and so much of the music is off the page. Same with Stan Sulzmann, and Hermeto Pascoal, Django Bates, Nikki Iles and Jason Yarde. They manage to get the music happening that isn’t written down. So that balance of writing and letting it happen is incredibly exciting.

‘When to stop writing and let the band play is definitely a consideration, whether it’s for large or small group. It’s nice to try to write things that act as launchpads for the soloists in the band and to create some different spaces. On “Tales from the Jacquard”  I wrote “into” and “out of” sections where I used the card in more defined ways – trying to have some fun with it and leave plenty of space for solos. So I’m very excited about this upcoming tour, really looking forward to seeing what happens when we get together again. With these musicians, I know it’s going to be different every night!’

The Julian Siegel Jazz Orchestra play “Tales from the Jacquard” and other pieces at Birmingham Symphony Hall (7 Feb), Turner Sims, Southampton (9 Feb), Sheffield Jazz, Crookes Social Club (10 Feb), Deda Studio Theatre, Derby (11 Feb), Ronnie Scott’s, London (12 Feb). This five-date tour has received support from Arts Council England.

Visit www.juliansiegel.com for more information on the tour and venue ticket links.

The post The Julian Siegel Jazz Orchestra – ‘Tales from the Jacquard’ first appeared on UK Jazz News.