On the left, stooped over an Apple laptop he prods from time to time, is Sam Gendel. His face is obscured by a big mop of hair and we can just about see the glinting keys of the MIDI saxophone hanging from his neck. This soundless instrument, made by Emeo (*), is a controller marketed as ‘the world’s first digital practice horn’.

By Gendel’s side is percussionist Philippe Melanson, playing a small Roland Handsonic percussion pad that incorporates a Theremin-like ‘D-Beam’ element for plucking sounds out of thin air.

Their first tune is made out of ponderous scales over tiny beats, with the sound of an oddly tuned piano. The tones morph into something more like a trumpet, accompanied by thunderous bass drum, and then we shift scene once more, with an elegant canon that unfolds over a strange undertow, like a ghostly ball game in a neighbouring sports hall. Gendel’s Emeo sax evokes a Renaissance recorder as the canon loops around its hypnotic, anachronistic sequence.

With their self-effacing visual presentation and jumble of leads and pedals, Gendel and Melanson look a bit like improvising musicians invited to accompany a cult film show. There’s a cinematic breadth to their set, with repeating eight-, four- and two-bar chord sequences, expansive, super-smooth textures and quixotic jump cuts. Suddenly, unexpectedly, they play the Yellow Magic Orchestra’s 1979 classic ‘Rydeen’, with Gendel soloing nimbly over its intoxicating electro-jazz-pop changes.

Melanson conjures up a double bass tone on his pad and we morph into a parallel jazz universe, with ride cymbal, walking bass and a boppish tune and chart for Gendel to blow across. A rapturous, prog-like anthem becomes a harmonic bed over which Gendel plays a flute-like sound that mutates into screaming electric guitarishness.

Gendel’s virtuosity surfaces between the bubbles of the electronic bouillabaisse cooked up by this virtuosic duo. Occasionally, there’s something more like a jam session that Melanson drives with an almost conventional drum part. There are pieces analogous to ballads, when Gendel improvises smoothly over koto-like chords. There are squeaks and bonks and nightmarish parallel chords (and a few audience walk-outs) and suddenly we’re back in YMO land with a leisurely reprise of ‘Rydeen’.

Gendel’s main concession to showmanship is to stand up occasionally, sometimes side-on to the audience, which means we can see his fingers fly around the Emeo. The eclectic, scattergun nature of his repertoire is unsurprising, given Gendel’s prolific output. With albums as different and diverting as Music for Saxofone & Bass Guitar (with Sam Wilkes), BlueBlue and his Nonesuch ‘standards’ album Satin Doll, there’s still a unifying, distinctive soundworld that makes Gendel such a fascinating auteur. I’d originally thought this was down to the oblique timbre of his sax-playing, but Tuesday’s gig showed he has a uniquely personal sound whatever the equipment to hand. That’s a lesson both electronic musicians and jazz players can learn from.

The post Sam Gendel at Milton Court first appeared on UK Jazz News.

The gorgeous black-and-white cinematography (Kent Persson) captures a time – between the death of Charlie Parker and the emergence of the ‘New Thing’ – when modern jazz (Monk, Miles, Mingus, Jazz Messengers, Rollins, etc.) was contemporaneous with James Dean movies, Elvis, Jailhouse Rock and 1940s standards re-vamped as pop.

The rehearsal scenes set in front of a proscenium arch stage (complete with painted rural backdrop) hint at the script’s origins in a play devised and toured by left-wing theatre ensemble Musikteatergruppen Oktober. Director Stellan Olsson opened out the production just enough to make an unforgettable cinematic experience, while retaining the intimacy of a small ensemble cast that acts and plays music with complete naturalness.

For a sequence in a rural hall, the fixed camera shows the band strike up in front of an empty floor that steadily fills up with dancing couples. At another venue, the camera slowly dollies back from a close view of the quintet while dancers move into view until they fill the frame, obscuring the musicians. A wedding is shot from the band’s point of view – we hear them but don’t see them until they take a break.

As with Jack Gelber’s The Connection, another play about jazz that was turned into a compelling black-and-white film (by director Shirley Clarke), the pleasure in Sven Klang’s Combo is in seeing the way the actors transition easily from talking to playing and singing and back again – their flawed personalities are conveyed as much by the way they play their instruments as their acting. The story quickly establishes the characters’ differing degrees of commitment to (and engagement with) music. 

Leader Sven Klang (Anders Granström) is a narcissistic bully with a superficially avuncular attitude towards his much younger bandmates. Ever-smiling, confident and mediocre, his sexual exploitation of Gunnel (Eva Remaeus), the teenage singer he ‘discovered’, drives the plot. Drummer Kennet (Henric Holmberg), who seems to ‘get’ jazz, has the long face and comic timing of a young Stan Laurel; pianist Rolf (Jan Lindell) has natural ability, but is a born lightweight; he likes playing music, he says, but he likes playing tennis, too.

The central character is saxophonist Lasse (Christer Boustedt), a genuinely gifted musician who has used his national service time in an army band to perfect his technique. Lasse’s hard-won but almost otherworldly ability to play genuine jazz inspires, scares and challenges the band members in different ways. His presence throws into sharp relief the difference between playing music because you must, and for any other reason. At the core of Sven Klang’s Combo is the time-honoured clash between life and art, and the sacrifices necessary to even consider becoming a serious artist, yet there’s also a simple, more universal story about being young and attempting to deal with the grown-up world.

The film’s coda, set in the 1970s, shows four of the quintet looking back at their time in the combo. In his introduction for the London Jazz Festival screening, curator and filmmaker Ehsan Khoshbakht spoke of the way jazz musicians see themselves reflected in the film’s characters, and compared the Swedish movie favourably to Hollywood biopics such as Young Man with a Horn and Clint Eastwood’s Bird, in which we have to suspend our disbelief that an A-list actor (Kirk Douglas, Forrest Whittaker) can play when their facial muscles prove they are miming to an off-screen recording of a real musician.

For me, the achievement of Sven Klang’s Combo is that actor / musician Boustedt is completely believable as the conflicted, charismatic and talented Lasse. The way he unpacks his alto, the conscientious way he performs and occasionally transcends the Combo’s hackneyed repertoire, the studied seriousness of an approach that makes it hard for him to conform and accept things as they are. A musical highlight is his unaccompanied cadenza at the end of ‘Over The Rainbow’; the others’ reactions create a nicely comic moment, yet it’s deeply touching. Lasse is not On The Road’s Dean Moriarty or Steely Dan’s ‘Deacon Blues’, but a more subtle kind of rebel, with a natural nonconformity that’s rooted in craft, self-discipline and an understanding of jazz that his fellow musicians will never have or even desire. For Lasse, that’s both his triumph and his tragedy. 

The post ‘Sven Klang’s Combo / Sven Klangs kvintett’ (1976) at Barbican Cinema 2 first appeared on UK Jazz News.

Focus continues to cast its spell on listeners and performers alike. Performed in the second half of a concert by Nu Civilisation Orchestra (for ‘Woven Rhythms’) with soloist Nubya Garcia on tenor sax, the score created an atmosphere and soundworld all its own, from the stirring ‘I’m Late, I’m Late’ to the mellifluous closer, ‘A Summer Afternoon’.

Garcia was required to improvise above, around and within a through-composed score written specially for Getz, and she met the challenge with style. There’s an attractive toughness to Garcia’s sound, with a minimalist approach that occasionally recalls the late Wayne Shorter (who, like Getz, was always keen to collaborate with all manner of sounds and traditions).

The Nu Civilisation Orchestra is a spin-off from Tomorrow’s Warriors, the musical ‘family’ founded by Gary Crosby and Janine Irons that has played such a dynamic role in the lives of countless British musicians, composers and bands – including Shabaka Hutchings, Empirical, Ezra Collective and Garcia herself.

Composer Eddie Sauter (1914-81) was a near contemporary of Gil Evans, who worked for the leading big bands of the 1940s and in the 1950s wrote literate, witty charts for the adventurous Sauter-Finegan Orchestra he founded with fellow arranger-composer Bill Finegan (1917-2008).

Sauter conceived of Focus as ‘seven different fairytales’ and drew upon myriad techniques of 20th-century string writing to imbue his score with the intensity of jazz and the energy and intimacy of superior string quartet writing. There are debts to Bartók and Stravinsky and echoes of Bernard Herrmann.

In ‘Night Rider’, riffy, pulsating string lines ensure an inspiring hybrid. Its insistent major chords, scratchy strumming and high-pitched pizzicatos give this movement a manic energy, at moments more like a freeform duet with Garcia’s sax. The other pieces in Focus are ‘Her’, ‘Pan’, the standard-like ‘I Remember When’ and ‘Once Upon A Time’, in which strings and sax dance around each other with the sprightly drama of a ballet score.

The concert’s first half featured new commissions: Ricochet by Peter Edwards and Chemy by Oleta Haffner. Both showed the inspiration of Focus while transcending its influence, with quite different approaches to rhythm. Chemy (conducted by Haffner) opened up several solo slots: a kind of concerto for improvising string orchestra. Both pieces benefited from the drumming of Romarna Campbell, whose quiet, sure touch and attractive timbres meshed well with strings and harp.

Campbell came into her own in Focus’s ‘I’m Late, I’m Late’, the only movement to use a full jazz kit (improvised on the original by Roy Haynes), and which includes two thrilling passages with just sax and drums. Alina Bzhezhinska’s harp was a sparky asset throughout and Scott Stroman, standing in at the last minute for Peter Edwards, was a genial and energetic conductor for Ricochet and Focus. The sound mix in the RFH was exemplary – we could hear every note.

After rapturous applause at the close of Focus, the orchestra reprised ‘Night Rider’ as an encore. Sauter once said: ‘I wanted this music to have soul; to have an element of truth in it, not just a display … I wanted to write pieces that had continuity of thought and shape.’ The term ‘Third Stream’ remains woefully imprecise when so much good work lies on a continuum between precise writing and unbridled improvisation, but the Nu Civilisation Orchestra’s championing of Focus – alongside fresh, younger voices – shows programmers, funding bodies, musicians, composers and audiences how much can be done within the generous spirit of jazz and its neighbours.

The post Nu Civilisation Orchestra with Nubya Garcia – ‘Focus’ at the Royal Festival Hall first appeared on UK Jazz News.

‘He was among the first writers to convincingly incorporate rock elements into orchestral jazz, and shared with one of his major influences, Gil Evans, the ability to organically integrate carefully arranged and scored frameworks with the most ‘outside’ improvisations.’ Colin Larkin, The Encyclopedia of Popular Music.

I first met at a jazz summer school; I was an aspiring teenage composer, he was a guest teacher. Much later, while I was working as a record producer, I produced Big Music (1988), which at the time was the first Gibbs big band album for 13 years.

1. “Family Joy, Oh Boy!” from Michael Gibbs, Michael Gibbs (Deram, 1970)

The opening track from Gibbs’s debut album, this was a mighty blast of complex compositional happiness to celebrate the arrival of Mike’s first child, Nikki. The busy tune was earlier recorded (as ‘A Family Joy’) on the album Country Roads & Other Places (1969) by fellow Berklee alumnus Gary Burton, a great champion of Gibbs’s music. However Gibbs’s bravura big band arrangement takes ‘Family Joy’ to another emotional pitch that inspires extraordinary performances from Chris Spedding, Kenny Wheeler, Alan Skidmore … in fact every musician on the recording.

2. Sweet Rain from Stephane Grappelli and Gary Burton, Paris Encounter (Atlantic, 1972)

This tune is possibly the closest thing to a standard that Gibbs has written. First championed by Burton, it is also the title track of a 1967 Creed Taylor-produced quartet album by Stan Getz. Heart-rendingly beautiful, ‘Sweet Rain’ is yet another example of the widescreen nature of Gibbs’ melodic imagination. The intricate melodic line has such nuance that it implies a bigger sound, a broader canvas, even when played by a small group. Grappelli negotiates its non-standard chord sequence with warmth and sensitivity. Burton has said that during the first decade of his career, ‘pretty much every record I made included at least one or two Gibbs songs’.

3. And On the Third Day from Cuong Vu 4-Tet, Ballet: the Music of Michael Gibbs (Rare Noise, 2017)

This recording from 2017 demonstrates that Gibbs’s music is equally at home within the bloodlines of 21^st-century jazz, from the opening ‘indie’ guitar strum to the pulsing push and pull of the most compelling, Messiaen-influenced chord sequence in Christendom. My friend and mentor Neil Ardley (a close friend of Gibbs from their 1960s New Jazz Orchestra days) loved this piece, but disliked the religious connotations of the title (inspired by Messiaen’s suite L’ascension). I agreed with Neil on many things, but not this – ‘And On the Third Day’ is a slow, spiritual treasure that could convert atheists and true believers alike to Gibbs’s numinous music. Think of it as an Easter treat.

4. Mopsus from The Michael Gibbs Orchestra, Big Music (Venture, 1988; ACT, 1996)

At the risk of being self-serving, I have included this slow, swaggering, reggae-influenced track from Big Music, the Gibbs album I produced in the late 1980s. ‘Mopsus’ features the alternately bubbling and steaming young rhythm section Bob Moses assembled from his Boston students and friends, including electronic drummer Billy Martin (later in Medeski Martin & Wood) and bassist Kai Eckhardt. There’s more than a hint of swampy New Orleans roots, but Bill Frisell drags it back to the future with a tangled layer of guitar electronics. Since I’m writing this at the close of ‘International Trombone Week’ (hashtag #spitvalve), please note the ultra-low trombones, and a fabulous one-take ’bone solo by the great Dave Bargeron, who finished the session while a NYC taxicab waited downstairs to take him to his next gig.

5. Trio Walk from Century / Close My Eyes original soundtracks (Mute, 1994)

Most of Gibbs’s score for the 1991 movie Close My Eyes is a rhapsodic and cliché-free suite for a contemporary studio ensemble with fine soloists. ‘Trio Walk’ is just one of many affecting cues, a measured composition for strings that adds elements of humanity and forgiveness as passions spiral out of control and reason in Stephen Poliakoff’s intense cinematic drama.

6. “Ida Lupino” from Michael Gibbs and the NDR Bigband, In My View (Cuneiform, 2015)

Gibbs has built up an admirable creative relationship with the NDR band and its individual soloists. Over many broadcasts and albums, they have succeeded in getting deep into the lithosphere of planet Gibbs. For ‘Ida Lupino’, Gibbs’s arrangement of Carla Bley’s tribute to the south London-born actor / director, the ensemble takes on a brooding luminosity that evokes Ellingtonian jazz history, film noir and existential angst with the sweeping confidence of a European road movie. Lupino was beautiful, intelligent and multi-faceted – just like this track.

7. Country Roads from Michael Gibbs, Just Ahead (Polydor, 1972, BGO, 2005)

‘Country Roads’, composed by Steve Swallow and Gary Burton, is another example of the way Gibbs, in the tradition of Gil Evans, Mingus and Ellington, can make someone else’s tune his own. This performance, from the massively expensive live recordings the band made at Ronnie Scott’s, is bluesy, dirty and utterly Gibbsy (to use Gordon Beck’s adjective).

8. “Moonlight Serenade” from Michael Gibbs, Nonsequence (Provocateur, 2001)

Gibbs’s affection for Glenn Miller, a fellow trombone-playing bandleader, surfaced in this gorgeously emotional version of a much-loved wartime classic. The effortless use of very low brass – as with the tuba in ‘Family Joy’ or the growling trombones in ‘Mopsus’ – distinguishes Gibbs in a not very crowded field of superlative jazz composers. And he is never afraid to go … really … slow.

9. “The Shepherd of Breton” from Michael Gibbs with Joachim Kühn, Europeana – Jazzphony No. 1 (ACT, 1995)

Like a feverish jazz piano concerto, this spectacular arrangement of a Breton folk tune kicks off with percussive prepared piano and takes flight with Richard Galliano’s fleet-fingered accordion, scored interjections by friends from the NDR Bigband and a wonderful solo by Kühn. It’s amazing what Gibbs can do with a pedal point bass and a handful of descending chords.

(no YouTube – album available here)

10. “River Man” from Here’s a Song For You by Michael Gibbs with Norma Winstone (Fuzzy Moon, 2011)

The Nick Drake repertoire has for decades provided rich material for jazz musicians, from Brad Mehldau to Lizz Wright, and Gibbs, who was part of the late 1960s cultural scene the song evokes (writing studio charts for many characters from that time), adds majesty and grace to Winstone’s affecting interpretation. (Reviewed here)

Mike Gibbs discography

Michael Gibbs (1970)

Tanglewood 63 (1971)

Just Ahead (1972)

In The Public Interest (1974)

Seven Songs For Quartet And Chamber Orchestra (1974)

The Only Chrome Waterfall Orchestra (1975)

Housekeeping OST (1987)

Big Music (1988)

Iron & Silk OST (1991)

Hard-Boiled OST (1993)

Being Human OST (1993)

By The Way (1993)

Close My Eyes / Century OST (1994)

Europeana (1995)

Nonsequence (2001)

Here’s a Song for You (2011)

Back in the Days (2012)

Mike Gibbs + Twelve Play Gil Evans (2013)

In My View (2015)

Play a Bill Frisell Set List (2015)

Revisiting Tanglewood 63: The Early Years (2021)

The post 10 Tracks I Can’t Do Without: Mike Gibbs first appeared on UK Jazz News.