Well, I do like it, and it’s for two reasons. Firstly, the sense of musical generosity amongst his band members, who provide the perfect accompaniment for a kind of leisurely unfolding of the leader’s ideas. But secondly, it’s Allen himself who seems to be pushing his bandmates, ensuring things never get too comfortable. For someone who spent 35 years with Sun Ra, perhaps the nature of comfort is not that of the typical centenarian.

Marshall Allen has been a veritable trooper for decades. And that comes over in his sound, a mature kaleidoscope of tones ranging between flute-like serenity and spluttering outbursts: like another great altoist, Henry Threadgill, the palette seems to deepen with age. Notes emerge rather than being produced, as if emanating from the gut more than the diaphragm, every tone seems, on closer listening, to have within it a world of overtones. The band sound here is luxurious, almost like a giant sonic duvet of acoustic grooves, strings, tasteful touches of delay and dub-like drum sounds, and some futuristic sounding lead synth. Having searched the credits and, with a bit of extra research on YouTube, I realise those synth sounds actually come from the Steiner EVI, a wind instrument often used by Michael Brecker (to very different effect). In Marshall Allen’s hands, gestures jump out at us like a black mamba in a mindfulness class. Indeed, it’s these playful interjections that give the music that extra depth and unpredictability.

“Prologue” opens with Allen’s beautifully recorded kora playing which, gradually overwhelmed by electronics, moves into the Ellington-esque “African Sunset”, where the EVI almost hovers above the music as well as being in it. Neneh Cherry guests on “New Dawn”, a drifting ballad that frames her unmistakable voice beautifully against Allen’s moving interjections. Cherry here has touches of Abbey Lincoln and Christine Tobin to my ears, but also has that timbre that identifies her like a fingerprint. “Are You Ready?” again references Ellington in its blues shuffle, with Allen sounding like Paul Gonsalves caught in a time warp between the past and the future, slipping and sliding. “Sonny’s Dance” opens with solo alto: Allen seems to evade the rules of pitch, like Ornette, Lockjaw Davies and others before him – it’s my favourite moment of the record. Textures are freer and looser here, pulse ebbs and flows. In “Boma” the band lays it down, with the main soloists allowing their leader to poke through with wild pirouettes. Again, it seems that he prefers occasional pointed commentary to extended solos, and at 100 I might feel the same. Still, each note he plays grabs the ear. “Angels And Demons At Play” revisits a classic of the Sun Ra days, drums and bass sitting on a beat while Allen and trumpeter Cecil Brooks allow a gentle exchange to unfold, with dub effects adding to the sense of the “cosmic” that Sun Ra embodied.

After my first listen of “New Dawn”, I went back and listened to Marshall Allen on Paul Bley’s album “Barrage” from 1964, the only other recording I know away from the Arkestra. And yes it’s different, but it’s not that different. It’s not sixty years different. Allen continues to be a real musical force, sounding as irascible and unpredictable as ever, and while this relatively accessible setting will gain him a lot of new fans, which can only be a good thing, the avant garde aspects of his sound are just as prominent here. If anything, set against a more modern production with solid grooves, Allen implores us all the more not to get comfortable…you never know what’s coming. Maybe it’s the embracing of that one idea that has kept Marshall Allen so youthful for so long: the living of life might just be what prolongs it.

Musicians:
Marshall Allen – Kora, Steiner EVI, Alto Sax
Knoel Scott – Baritone Sax, Congas, Drums
Cecil Brooks – Trumpet
Michael Ray – Trumpet
Bruce Edwards – Guitar
Jamaaladeen Tacuma – Bass
Richard Hill – Bass
Timothy Ragsdale – Bass
Owen Brown Jr – 1st Violin
Akiko Arendt – 1st Violin
Cristina Ardelean Montelongo – 1st Violin
Derek Washington – 2nd Violin
Elias Feldmann – 2nd Violin
Dimitra Karageorgopoulou – 2nd Violin
Michael Ireland – Viola
Vasileios Vasileiadis – Viola
Joseph Richard Carvell – Bass
Ilektra-Despoina Stevi – Cello
Jorik Bergman – Flute
George Gray – Drums
Jan Lankisch – Percussion

Special Guest:
Neneh Cherry – Voice

RELEASE DATE 14 February 2025

The post Marshall Allen – ‘New Dawn’ first appeared on UK Jazz News.

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Paul Chambers’ blues, “The Whims Of Chambers”, for example, opens Art Pepper’s “Gettin’ Together”. Wynton Kelly, Paul Chambers and Jimmy Cobb would certainly have approached this session as “business as usual”, but that is what makes it great. Another day, another masterpiece. The way the bass line suddenly descends in the head, the change of feel for the solo, Pepper’s alternations between blues soaked calm and frenetic, almost half finished, double time outbursts. These are all sounds and moves we know“Bijou The Poodle” is a quirkier theme, but again, once the solos begin, we are back in an eternal present, not falling back on the particulars of atmosphere but how each player deals with time passing quaver by quaver, gesture by gesture. Martin Williams, in his original liner notes from 1960, notes that Pepper furnishes “Softly As In A Morning Sunrise” with melodic lines “superior to those he began with”. Perhaps that’s a stretch, and the tune should surely be credited as the impetus for such lines, but certainly it gives an impression of what musicians were striving for. Melody was everything, with rhythm the unspoken and ubiquitous guiding light. On “Getting’ Together”, he plays tenor, and whilst we hear the occasional ghost of Lester Young here and there, he is completely himself. Nothing clarifies the paradox of an innovator in the tradition more than this track. To hear these processes at work again is better than to simply know them from past recordings, and the now much discussed ritual of putting a record on the turntable and lowering the needle seems to clear the air around us in preparation to receive and absorb. If that sounds a bit religious, well, it’s certainly the closest I’ve come to it.

Of course, the listener needs to bury their head in this stuff to fully extract the sparkle from the noise. We are often sold the surface of things, as if music came packed with the low level background chatter of an artisan coffee house clientele. AI generated playlists of AI generated music have proven that most humans are happy with a robot’s memories of the internet arranged and rearranged into collages bereft of structural integrity or any kind of heart, something perhaps to cover up those awkward silences of sixty milliseconds or more over a hotel breakfast. Spare us.

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For Pepper, it seems that improvising was simply the best way to be alive, to breathe through the horn rather than straight out into the air. On “Intensity”, he plays standards, some moderately “lesser-heard”. “Too Close For Comfort” (a tune he would have known from playing in Mel Tormé’s band) seems paradoxically to be continually extending itself further out, finally coming to a stop after forty bars and leaving the improviser with a particularly unwieldly structure. He makes it sound easy of course, because for Pepper it was easier than not doing it. This recent crop of Contemporary Records reissues have exposed me to a lot of Frank Butler’s drumming, and here he splits the difference between a comfy bed of swing and crackling snare dialogues with the soloists. Dolo Coker was someone I’d never heard, and he plays in an almost old fashioned bebop style here, perfectly complemented by bassist Jimmy Bond, and everything sits perfectly. There’s a reason this format has become so ingrained in jazz education: musically, it has open arms, welcoming all periods and styles. There’s a roomier sound on this record, which somehow adds to the feeling of loneliness that seems to accompany Pepper’s horn wherever he goes. “Come Rain Or Shine” sounds like they’re all feeling their way through its twists and turns, the altoist one minute locking in, the next floating free. As if to remind us he does that out of choice, not necessity, “Long Ago and Far Away” sees Pepper swinging hard with a soft edge. The casual delivery of such marvels makes this music transcendent yet perhaps consigns it to some kind of category designed by non-musicians marked “mainstream”.

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Sonny Rollins’s “Way Out West”, however, seems to usher in something different. Rollins has some of the spirituality of his contemporary John Coltrane and, while this is another example of a casual recording session, there’s a new intention, a determination to share the process of improvisation with an audience. Again, although the liner notes concentrate on historical background mixed with commentary on the leader’s style, Rollins himself is happier to talk about himself. “…I’m trying for new things all the time. I’m changing, even from night to night on the job…” he says, giving us a taste of what was going on behind the scenes. Anyone who’s read “The Notebooks Of Sonny Rollins” will know how closely he observed everything about his own playing, both in practice and performance. For Sonny Rollins it’s a kind of ritual, a meditation.

I remember listening to ”Way Out West” at my friend’s house when I was about 12. His dad said Rollins was the greatest living improviser. I don’t know what qualified him to say that, but this record has a strange resonance for me, a singular sound that pulls me back in the way that ABBA or music from my primary school maypole dancing class might. Where Pepper’s albums feel like constant subtle variations on a theme, Rollins feels like he’s making milestones, planting flags. A Rollins album always feels like a statement.

The famous opening drum lope of “I’m An Old Cowhand” was interrupted, in my friend’s lounge around 1980, by a sound that I would never hear from anyone else. Not a tenor player, not even a saxophone: it was a fully formed creature somehow, an entity. It was Sonny Rollins, playing a melody that was once a light and frivolous tune, and now, in his hands, became something granite, imposing, yet playful. Rollins juggled with rocks and made it look easy. He sounds arrogant almost, assured, humorous…human. On the strength of his sound here, I would love to have had a pint with him. Ray Brown and Shelly Manne are heroic, playing through the night to bring this immovable classic of jazz’s “golden age” to fruition. The hole where the piano player might have been makes this one of my favourite trio records of all time, the more to hear Ray Brown’s audacious lines and Shelley Manne’s obstinate cymbal beat. I’m not sure what I can say about this record except it seems like the kind of album that someone might like who doesn’t like any other jazz record. It’s a thing of itself, standing alone even amongst Rollins’s own discography, and yet the making of it was no different to Pepper’s albums. A chance encounter, people in the same place at the same time, even, if in the case of “Way Out West” the meeting had to take place through the night.

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It’s nice to have these recordings on vinyl. I can read the notes without a microscope. There are no alternate takes, enabling us to experience the music as it was intended. And we can pick them up in our fingers, each album containing 180 grammes of tangible, analogue real-ness, and feel something of the weight, now lovingly restored, of their history.

Release dates for the vinyl were 6 December 2024 (Rollins) ad 13 Dec 2024 (Pepper)

The post Art Pepper – ‘Getting’ Together’ and ‘Intensity’. Sonny Rollins- ‘Way Out West’ first appeared on UK Jazz News.

Hank Roberts is another instantly recognisable voice from that scene, a singular “wail” shot through with a demon groove. He shares with Berne a deep understanding of music that flirts with tonality without being right inside it – many will know him from Bill Frisell’s game changing quartet with Kermit Driscoll and Joey Baron, but his own albums are full of heavy detail and playful whimsy in equal amounts.

Accordionist Aurora Nealand was someone new to me, but a bit of online searching revealed that she’s a veritable celebrity of New Orleans repertoire and can sing it like it’s easy. How she ended up in this band is a question left delectably unanswered, hanging in the air like the thick clouds of sound that begin this second set at The Vortex.

At first the weight of it is almost overwhelming, the accordion sounding huge in this intimate space, but looking back it was all about the long, slow build. Roberts seems unperturbed by the wall of frequencies that seemed almost to drown him out, but the way he stays where he is and emerges in his own time is an object lesson in musical patience. Berne is, to me, the inventor of a whole language that scratches at tonality without quite puncturing its surface, seemingly able to twist a line out of its impending resolution without it feeling gratuitous. Nealand has immense power at her fingertips, walls of bellowing bass and shifting chords, but also listens for the tenderness of quiet moments, often using her voice so lightly that it seems to blend with the air itself.

This gig is all about blend. Slowly shifting harmonies veer between lush and bracing, cataclysmic clusters dissolve to reveal gentle grooves. At times, with Berne pushing the horn into its highest register, the intensity feels close to breaking the room apart, but quieter spaces soon open up with Roberts’s uniquely sighing sounds and Nealand’s vocal mutations. Extended technique and stretched registers have always played a big part in improvised music, but there’s something different about the patience with which they are employed here. Sounds that jump out, almost as if by chance, are allowed to stay incongruous. Nothing is rushed, nothing is forced. Where the music is challenging, it never rips through into pure noise, and where it’s tender, it always stops short of sentimentality. Some of my favourite moments seemed to ask the question “how much longer can they sit on this?”, particularly in the longer sustain passages, which could start off like Morton Feldman and end up closer to Albert Ayler.

There’s a kind of doggedness about the way things move, as there is with Berne’s career, a willingness to do what feels honest and wait for the rest of us to catch up. Berne and Roberts are instantly recognisable, their sounds moulded over years of mutual association and wide-ranging experimentation. Nealand, in this somewhat intimidating company, is both fearless and precise, a catalyst of tonality around which Berne’s lines take on a new context somehow (fans of his duos with Bill Frisell will find a lot to love here). Subsequently, it feels like there’s a warmth to the sonic palette, the uncharacteristic and unavoidable presence of old fashioned “chords” casting the downtown aesthetic in a new light.

This is free improvisation played, it seems to me, by composers. There’s an eye on the long form whilst, at the same time, fascinating and compelling interactions happen in the moment. Just not every moment: this band bides its time, seems to wait until the tension becomes almost unbearable before moving into new areas. It’s an immersive and cumulative experience, where somehow things make more sense the longer they hang around.

At the opening of the gig, Berne said “…the Vortex is one of my favourite places to play in the world…and I’ve played almost nowhere…” This kind of self-deprecating wit should earn him a UK passport in my eyes, but at the same time it doesn’t fool me. With this band, he must be wondering why it isn’t playing everywhere.

The post “Oceans And…” – Tim Berne, Hank Roberts, Aurora Nealand first appeared on UK Jazz News.

For me, music must be about detail. Listening to Coleman Hawkins, Stan Getz and Wayne Shorter in a single day, who couldn’t be struck by how their sounds are so precisely sculpted, with each player’s notes and rhythms emerging directly from that first impulse. So it is here: but in Webber’s case, I feel that the examination is of an almost microscopic level of detail. Rather than sitting on sequences, her pieces seem to creep out into the world in all directions, a series of crystalline formations that seem to multiply and divide. Familiar things come and go, there is no shortage of chords and riffs, but they are swept up in an altogether different system than that of traditional tonality. “Five Eateries (In New England)”, (with its reference to Charles Ives’ “Three Places”) travels through a bewitching range of textures and moods, as if reaching out to us…Mitchell’s lines dip and turn like white water rapids, Hollenbeck’s five sided groove slipping from rock grandeur to scalpel-led precision. Above all this, Anna Webber’s tenor is often warm and friendly, cello-ish, and yet there’s a feeling that clarity is her real objective, to articulate some kind of truth in sound. The sound of air, the clunking of pads and machinery, is all captured faithfully, part of the sound.

This truth can be unflinching in its intent: “g equals GM over r squared” is a solo for Matt Mitchell, a series of slow, ritualistic bass notes around which higher clusters appear, only to be cut off abruptly, almost unkindly…perhaps the process ran its course? “miiire” follows, another piece featuring irregular repetitions of single notes and strange and premature endings. There’s a kind of scientific consistency to the music, certain timbral and motivic ideas recur across pieces, as if the group is a kind of three-headed jeweller looking over gemstones, noting the unique and singular sparkle of each one whilst noting their structural similarities.

“8va” might just be what it says it is, an exploration of the way a saxophone raises a note by an octave. Like anything in art, if you care to look closely, there’s a whole world of contrasts and similarities to explore. (Listen to how Hollenbeck, for example, subtly cuts off his snare sound against the deep boom of his bass drum on “Ch9tter”, making that relationship the subject of his improvisation). 

Music can undoubtedly take on the big themes, politically and socially, but it can also investigate some of the minutiae of things that seem invisible to us because we cannot make the time to look and to listen. 

Make the time. There is a whole world of sound, full of feeling nestled in the cracks of this austere and beautiful music.

The post Anna Webber – ‘simpletrio2000’ first appeared on UK Jazz News.

Lester Koening, in his learned notes (people don’t often mention “the stultifying effects of cadential formulas” these days) spends a long time talking about Ornette Coleman. It’s understandable: Coleman grew up in Fort Worth, Texas, and studied music alongside Prince Lasha, the flautist and composer who leads this session. Sonny Simmons, the Louisiana-born altoist featured here, has absorbed plenty of Ornette’s sound and approach, but was inspired first by Bird. Everything I have read about this recording talks first about Ornette’s approach, then ushers in Lasha’s music as if giving it permission to exist. I braced myself for some kind of pastiche.

The opening track, “Congo Call”, could not be further from what I expected: a one chord vamp, made extraordinary by two basses in octaves and the bracing combination of Lasha and Simmons. Its asymmetrical melody reflects Ornette’s rejection of standard forms, but the Gnawa-like throb of the bass and drums comes closer to Coleman’s cohort Don Cherry in its immersive approach. Prince Lasha’s lines have a gentle, blossoming lilt in contrast to the cut of Simmons’s alto, with “Bojangles” and “Lost Generation”, both trios with Simmons, bassist Gary Peacock and drummer Gene Stone, showing how he took Bird’s language and stirred a little Dolphy and Ornette into it. The end result is that he wears his influences on his sleeve but, in places like the lengthy solo introduction to “The Lost Generation”, he sounds like no one else.

Throughout, the compositions (attributed to both the leaders, but with no further details supplied) do indeed have one connection to Ornette, and its one that is often overlooked: the catchiness of the themes. Some, like “Ghost Of The Past” have a Joe Harriot-like simplicity that is almost laugh-out-loud funny (as well as what sounds to me like an uncredited bass clarinet in the head arrangement), and “Green And Gold” has a charming lope that is offset by the presence of two basses, giving it the sense of textured counterpoint found in so much African music. “Juanita” has a similar charm in its simplicity and features a theme that seems to gradually chip away at itself until it finds its final note.

It’s a strange record historically: Lasha gets top billing, but its Simmons who gets most of the solo space, including those two trio tracks to himself. Bassist Mark Proctor and drummer Gene Stone didn’t quite go on to make the mark that Gary Peacock did (and you can hear Peacock bursting out of the texture throughout this album). But the rhythm section is incredibly effective throughout, the slight chugginess of Stone’s drumming and the solidity of Proctor’s basslines enabling the others to duck and dive without the wheels coming off.

Perhaps that’s the main connection with Ornette: the idea that music doesn’t come from virtuosity but relationships, from specific combinations of people. If you get that right, the ideas will come. And this record is full of them.

LINK: Buy The Cry from Presto Music

The post Prince Lasha Quintet featuring Sonny Simmons – ‘The Cry’, rec. 1962 first appeared on UK Jazz News.

Having seen this duo’s YouTube videos and deciding not to read this album’s press release on first listen, putting this record on was a big surprise. Those early videos were stripped back, piano and tap with some left-hand bass and, like most projects emerging in the pandemic, may have had as much a therapeutic as artistic impetus behind them. Playing was never more an activity than it was then. There’s a homely, informal feel to them, which makes the musicianship all the more vivid somehow. Perhaps we can never go back to that moment: and perhaps that’s why, for this recording, there’s a massive change of artistic intention.

For starters, it’s a great cover. Mimi Haddon’s outfits with their outsize hands and feet remind me a bit of Claes Oldenburg’s Soft Drum Set in the way that you can almost hear what’s suggested in their surreal squishiness, as if those big hands and feet are too cumbersome to do anything too flashy. And then there’s the setting: Pete Lim’s lavishly equipped studio provided a similarly extravagant sonic experience, an “analogue bubblebath” (to borrow Aphex Twin’s title) of orchestral electronica. What’s interesting is how the direction of the album both gives in to the temptations of such a huge soundworld, yet maintains a clear path artistically.

Larry Goldings says on the press release that he “…wanted people to hear what Melinda does.” It’s an important distinction: listening as opposed to watching. Dance presents itself as a very visual medium, but in Melinda Sullivan’s case she has the melodic and rhythmic brain of a drummer. In other words, it is music, and taking away the spectacle gives her melodies space to move. Focusing on that enables Goldings to spreads a wide sonic blanket without getting in the way. Likewise, Sullivan’s modified instrumentation is referred to as “socks, sand and sneakers”, which must have felt a bit like Bob Dylan going electric, feet wise. Everyone’s in a slightly weird place.

The music is a fascinating mix: Goldings cites Zawinul as an influence (how can you avoid him?) and the opening track “Bloom” starts in that sonic territory but in the first few seconds some outlandish modulation bends the line out of shape, and we know we’re in for something else. There’s a soft palette of comfy analogue goodness here, and Sullivan’s “brushwork” blends easily, yet the intricacy of her rhythmic patterns are to the fore as Goldings nonchalantly sends notes soaring into space against the varying backdrop. The addition of Karl McComas-Reichl on bass, Daphne Chen on violin and viola, CJ Camerieri on trumpet and flugelhorn and Sam Gendel on saxophone means that, along with some flashes of acoustic piano, our ears are taken “out of the desk” here and there. It’s a smart move. On tunes like “Mother Time”, the piano forms the backbone, with Goldings getting his trademark tasty, expertly prepared dissonance in around the bleeps and bloops as Sullivan spins tabla-like variations. Instrumental parts wind gently around the tap, which runs (no pun intended) throughout, and the odd tasty dissonance dropped in takes this track closer to a jazz sensibility. Elsewhere, “Loose Caboose” and “Ma Belle” get a little crazier, confrontational even, like two cats in a bag. Both tracks are around a minute long, like short immersions in an icy lake. I think they’re some of my favourite moments.

“Do You Like” starts with Steve Gadd playing a rhythm on a cardboard box, from which a surprising lilting groove emerges, and chords blossoming out in modulating petals like a more listener-friendly “Giant Steps”. The vocal overlays (courtesy of Golding’s daughter Anna) and the harmonies here remind me of Norma Winstone and John Taylor, and it’s those little touches of jazz running through this album that gives it such a distinctive sound. I also like the idea that drummers everywhere will be asking Gadd about which kind of box he was using…maybe a “Gadd Signature Cheerios Edition” will be out soon.

Every track here has something unique in its sound, yet nostalgia occasionally peaks through. I even found myself thinking of Bob James at one point, of a “smooth jazz” era where notes were carefully chosen to artfully create a comfortable listen. I think that’s as worthy a task as anything else in music. But there’s more going on here I think. Larry Goldings is a great presence on social media, as humourist and educator, general musical advisor and short filmmaker. And there’s something about the sound of this album that reminds me of YouTubers with their thousands of pounds worth of keyboards and pedals, running a couple of chords through it all, zoning out in reverbs and delays, glitches and smears. For me, there’s a nod to that world (and a brief look at Golding’s selection of keyboards in the press release will have some salivating uncontrollably), but it’s a sly one…I can imagine his poker face as his hands dart across a plethora of keys and flashing lights. Humour never works in music unless it’s backed up with artistry, and that’s the impression this recording left me with. By the time we reach “Dyad”, the closing track, it’s all rhythm, and it feels like a return to the source and the inspiration of this quirky and often beautiful album.

Big Foot is released on 28 August

LINK: Colorfield Records website
Big Foot at Bandcamp

The post Melinda Sullivan & Larry Goldings – ‘Big Foot’ first appeared on UK Jazz News.

It’s hard to believe now, given their current omnipotence, but synthesisers used to get a bad press. One of my first loves in music, after Beethoven and Scott Joplin, was “Queen”. Perhaps due to the intricacy and richness of Brian May’s guitar, albums would often proclaim “No Synthesisers!” on the back of the sleeve. Well, they later went back on that of course, but it stuck with me, as an aspiring twelve year old pianist. Synths were essentially a short cut for one handed pianists. And I, of course, went back on that…but there’s a fear, as there is with A.I, that what you gain in convenience you make up for in a kind of flatness of character. And like AI, some of them aim to please through what has already happened, guzzling on the past achievements of others. Many of the factory sounds on keyboards now allude to a particular period, often a particular song, with YouTube an endless source of instruction videos on how to emulate Gary Numan’s lead sound on “Cars” or the tacky bells of a DX7 electric piano.

In some ways electronics proposes a diametrically opposed approach to that of jazz: a potentially endless array of sounds, all of which are in some way already made, contrasts with the idea of “finding your own sound”. I have fond memories of seeing both Pat Thomas and Steve Beresford with tables full of small sound making devices, some of which would be used once before being summarily discarded, others forming more of a central role. They both seemed to me to be finding a personal route through the detritus of a sonic life and making it beautiful. Because often, the first thing to do is to build your instrument, to design the parameters around which you create tension and release. Of course, you can simply play the thing, and musicians like Chick Corea and Jan Hammer did that very successfully…but I’ve decided to leave them out here, because the keys are still the important thing. Special mention goes to Keith Jarrett, who has the rare distinction of being dismissive of what I like most about him: his role in Miles Davis’s bands, the vox organ and the distorted Rhodes in fluctuating layers of grunge. The musicians I have chosen here all seem to me to be curious about the sound, to be actively going into it in the way Sonny Rollins does with the tenor, or Bill Evans bringing out a melody line just brighter than the chords below. It’s the detail that’s interesting, the willingness to enter into a dialogue with technology where you accept its limitations and are open to its infinities. And how you stop it all simply spinning out of control.

1. Herbie Hancock: “Chameleon” from “Headhunters”

It seems an obvious choice, and it’s my first simply because of how unpianistic Herbie’s synth sounds here, sitting over a starkly funky vamp. In that space, Hancock sounds vaguely like he’s trying out all the knobs and buttons as he goes, and there’s a wonderful and slightly comical sense throughout that he doesn’t know what he’s doing. Evoking the multiphonics of Pharoah Sanders, a panicked flock of electric geese and a broken laser gun in equal measure, it feels like he could go on forever, cranking phrases into the cracks between pitches and squeezing the tail end of phrases into duck farts. It’s this wayward exploration that makes the slick jazz expertise of the following Rhodes solo (itself a thing of rare beauty) feel such a relief.

2. Joe Zawinul: “In a Silent Way” from “8:30”: Weather Report

I tried for a long time to understand how two people could wrestle this kind of beauty out of the air. Wayne Shorter’s acerbic soprano is perfectly cloaked in orchestral colour here, Zawinul matching his every move instinctively, the intro winding beautifully into the theme, here with all the chords that Miles made him remove for his own album of the same name. The whole thing is so short, but there’s a world of heartache in its brevity. My introduction both to Wayne Shorter, and to this tune started with this album, and so I have a bespoke level of disdain reserved for anyone who tells me that later Weather Report “isn’t as good as the early stuff”. Music to put on in the aftermath of a failed relationship, or at least it was when I was a teenager. (I had plenty of opportunities to experience that particular reverie).

3. Joe Zawinul: “Zeebop” from “di.a.lects”

Zawinul’s music from the eighties all has this sense of a mythical land about it, a kind of undiscovered folk music. He claims that African music was not a direct influence on him, but it’s hard not to hear this a kind of digitised The way he chose to articulate the complex patterns and the big band sonorities through the medium of electronics is never better illustrated than here, where a furious cymbal beat drives everything headlong. He somehow finds warmth in the cold edged sounds, giant chords that sound like a blend of horns and steel pans, bass and drums locked in manic interplay, and around this Zawinul spins an inexhaustible collection of riffs and melodies. This is music that is unapologetically happy, dazzlingly bright, ferocious and brilliantly constructed. He would later expand this sound in his “Syndicate”, a band whose virtuosity caused musicians to gawp at in disbelief. But for me there’s something special about the synthetic quality of this record. Zawinul’s world is his and his alone.

4. Wayne Horvitz: “Dinner At Eight” from “This New Generation”.

Something strange started to happen to me in the late eighties: I started to listen to music that wasn’t what most people would think of as jazz. Wayne Horvitz, a well-known member of the so-called “Downtown Scene” in New York was, along with Bill Frisell, John Zorn, Tim Berne and others, stepping away from the constraints of fusion and the post-Marsalis landscape to craft a series of albums drawing on a wider palette of music. I can’t put my finger on what I like about this record, except that it just seems to sit in a place all its own. Above the drum machine polyrhythms, a reverb soaked line evokes something from a William Burroughs fever dream in Tangiers: and then suddenly it fades away, a mood that has no beginning and no end. FM synth sounds can seem cold to some people (especially given the current fad for a return to analogue) but they never have to me…I was raised in that digital waved world, with Duran Duran and Madonna alongside Ellington and Monk.

5. Wayne Horvitz: “The Front” from “Miracle Mile”

Horvitz is one of my favourite composers in all of music and, like his wife Robin Holcomb (another favourite), he effortlessly cuts across melodic and harmonic territories to produce a kind of angular Americana. Here, the sample of a young child’s voice, mixed in with God knows what, forms the backdrop of an elegantly constructed tune that could be a folk song if it weren’t so strange. The chords move against both, producing a wrenching dissonance that is rescued by the sheer ingenuity of the logic that underpins it. There’s an arpeggiator in the mix too, which in its ability to run up and down the notes of a chord automatically is surely the ultimate underminer of jazz-based virtuosity. This music manages to be both clever and sonically outlandish, with a truly lyrical melody thrown in. Then there’s the Elliot Sharp guitar solo, which sounds like it must have been very loud but is here mixed in to the texture in such a way that it feels like a fly buzzing through a room full of sculptures. And a proper ending! Take note jazz people.

6. Paul Bley: “Gentle Man” from “Synth Thesis”

My introduction to Paul Bley was haphazard in terms of the proper chronology, governed by what I found in record shops. This was one if the first albums I listened to, and it’s something of an exception. Having eschewed synthesisers in the seventies after his experience with Annette Peacock, someone must have convinced him to try one out in 1994. I don’t think he ever went back a third time. Against the richness of his piano chords, this synth sounds almost rude in its lack of nuance. But something happens. True to cantankerous form, he refuses to budge, and we are forced to accept this sound that he’s ended up with, which is like an airy flute, a mellow lead and a milk bottle hit with a chopstick all rolled into one. To me it always sounds like he just got the first preset he found and went with it. But between these two sounds, the Rolls Royce of the piano and the Fisher Price of the keyboard, there’s a strange Monk-ish magic that starts to emerge despite the digital chill in the air.

7. Paul Bley and Annette Peacock: “Touching” from “Improvisie”

Another one off, a recording that sounds like nothing else. This is partly due to the incredibly dynamic sound of Annette Peacock’s voice, here at her expressionistic peak. She also wrote tunes for Bley, and this one, once it arrives, is like a love song in a haunted house, heart wrenching and slightly terrifying. Her unflinching emotion is matched by incredible projection and power. Han Bennik on drums is a brilliant character too, able to both blend and cut with the Radiophonic-esque sounds. In places the music steers closer to Varèse’s “Poème Eléctronique” than jazz, in others there’s a clear song-based inspiration. With the sheer range of sounds and overlapping instrumentation, it’s not always easy to know who’s doing what here, but like Horvitz, it seems they are inventing a whole way of feeling music as they go.

8. Richard Teitlebaum: “Blues” from “Homage To Charles Parker”

A bluesy phrase, a held note, a simple, harmonium-like chord…OK, yes, it’s a blues, but not that kind. George Lewis’s piece seems to take different elements of the form and character of the blues, the chords becoming a series of drones as Douglas Ewart’s bass clarinet darts in and out. These elements are slowly rotated like a gemstone in a jeweller’s hand. There’s a feeling, later, that the idea of repeated chords is becoming important. If that sounds a little dry, well, possibly it is…. certainly the studio sound is lacking air somehow, but that only serves to enhance the slow and patient unfolding of whatever architecture is holding this strange performance together. In places it reminds me of early minimalist pieces like Steve Reich’s “Four Organs”, where textures overlap at a snail’s pace. Gradually more and more of the group start to improvise, but at around twelve minutes Teitelbaum’s sustain starts to draw everyone in and we end up back where we were. Richard Teitelbaum’s contribution here is sparing and succinct, always blending with his surroundings. You hear him listening, and that in itself feels like a kind of texture…it’s the blues under a microscope, where things get so big you almost lose your sense of their shape.

9 Thomas Lehn: “Synths: Live In Barcelona”

I must admit I’m new to Lehn’s music, and this is something I recently discovered. When I listen to this, and watch it too, it has a quality of someone taking apart and reassembling some strange giant mechanism, or perhaps inspecting a large animal that may or not be alive. He prods it, sometimes patiently pursuing some imaginary train of thought, other times seemingly taken aback by the creature’s snarling response. (This latter scenario is becoming familiar to me, a feeling of both momentary terror and amusing glee). There is a sense that the performer is not in control always, nor should they be, but that they are guided by what “comes up” in the machine. Because space has such a large role to play here, there’s a surprising amount of light and shade, sounds that seem at times to be on the verge of total collapse, at others hovering on the edge of silence. Throughout, his demeanour veers between the virtuosic leaps of an athlete and the calm stasis of a predator whose prey is in its sights.

10 Matthew Bourne: “Somewhere I Have Never Travelled (For Coral Evans)” from “Moogmemory”

The first time I heard this, I remember marvelling at the sheer magnificence at the instrument’s sound, and Bourne makes you hear it by sticking simply to held notes and chords and the pulsing of the instrument’s arpeggiator, an endless sequence of gently throbbing colour that could be the underscore to a movie but is far better without visual distractions. There’s so much potential for sound shaping in synthesisers, so it’s refreshing to just hear an instrument do one of the things it does best. The balance between simplicity and surprise is beautifully handled, and every time the chord changes there’s somehow something new to hear in that sound. It’s almost like a homage to the instrument itself…as the chords die away, tiny variations suddenly become meaningful. I can imagine turning the power on, laying my hands on the keys and, hearing that warm heartbeat, thinking “yeah, that’s all I need” …

The post 10 Tracks I Can’t Do Without: Keyboard/Synth Recordings first appeared on UK Jazz News.

Here are Liam’s thoughts about the album:

Each to their own, as they say, but the way I think of jazz is a bit like the opening of David Lynch’s “Blue Velvet”, the green mown lawns eventually revealing the violence of nature, the scurrying beetles a mass of tiny movements keeping our pristine gardens alive. Jazz, and improvised music in general, runs on a certain level of violence, good-natured and knockabout, that fuels its affable and non-committal exterior.

Think of all the American sitcoms where the music between scenes is required to say nothing. Frasier’s “Smoked Salmon and Scrambled Eggs” is an intentionally well-healed satire on blues suffering, whilst Seinfeld, a ”show about nothing”, finds its perfect musical complement in some horrific slapped bass vacuity. These are both works of genius, both employing music simply because there must be something in the gaps, something that doesn’t imbue the action, or lack of it, with any connotation at all. The real and lasting value of jazz is dirty, unpredictable, tender and full of aggro and incident.

To enjoy it, you need to listen closer. Sticking with the nature motif, there often seems nothing as boring as a garden, but Lynch was right: it’s actually a huge theatre of conflict and activity. Manicured lawns and sculpted trees only hold their form at a distance. Pick off that tree bark, you’ll find swarming ants.

These four musicians are round the back of the house getting mud under their fingernails. Everything is moving. The tunes are all about what might come next, avoiding the kind of titles that might distract you into a story before it’s happened. Titles like “Bastard Gentlemen” and “Chinny Reckon” can mean something different every night, “Onwards And Upwards” describes what actually happens in the bassline and “Albie” is left unexplained, and all the better for it. Everyone here writes for the band, and the inevitable diversity of approaches pushes the weight of coherence on to the improvisations themselves. The tunes are built to be mercilessly kicked, inquisitively prodded, lovingly caressed and brutally dissected, with the advantage that no one gets hurt. Riley’s tenor bursts with life, his many and varied influences coalescing into a single captivating voice that feels strong without being overpowering. Rick’s piano work steps around all the usual jazz clichés, delving into unexplored cracks and crevices of the instrument with fleet fingered ease. As a rhythm section, Oli and Will make a pretty cantankerous team, seemingly barging their way out of their supposed roles as “timekeepers” with sharp elbows, but they also operate with a rare delicacy when it’s called for. I’ve been on the stand with both of them, and the range they can command from icy calm to full on rage jumps right out of the speakers here.

Like the characters portrayed in Lynch’s opening scene, we often like things smoothed out and respectable, but all the fun is in the dirt. If jazz is dead (and it’s had more than its share of media-fuelled obituaries and resurrections) then it’s this lacklustre sheen that has died, the vaguely pleasing chords that fill our awkward silences. The clickety click of insect noise remains, and we all know that come the nuclear holocaust, it’s the cockroaches that will survive.

(*) It is published here courtesy of Liam Noble and Rick Simpson.

The post ‘No One Gets Saved’ – new album from Bag of Bones first appeared on UK Jazz News.

There’s so much good stuff from this period, why buy another album from 1958? Well, with this particular recording, as with all of them, it’s all in the delving deeper where details suddenly become clear, floating to the surface like little fairies in a children’s book.

Take “Hip”, the opener…an 11 bar blues that feels entirely natural, as a blues used to do, finishing where the melody ends. Everyone wants a good time so they blow over twelve, Harold Land making a succession of elegant lines breathe in bop and breathe out blues. His double time makes me wonder how anyone could find it hard. Hawes comes in and now you really notice the bounce of Scott LaFaro and Butler, and how they both enjoy stretching it once in a while. Hawes always reminded me of Oscar Peterson in his immaculate touch and the sheer force of the striking of the notes, the skippy quavers, but he undulates the way his (and everybody’s) hero Charlie Parker did, like someone half talking, half mumbling, the lines rising from, and sinking back into, the silence. LaFaro solos as if it’s his date, like a horn, and his walking coming out of it has an incredible swagger, swooping and twanging. Frank Butler here is supremely supportive, making life comfortable for everyone, but on Bird’s “Crazeology” he has an answer for every phrase Land puts out, occasional aggro from below. Here Hawes is crisp and to the point, LaFaro leisurely in his precision. But the fours with Butler show how original the drummer was in the tuning of his kit, all warm and soft and swinging.

These are the details that start to emerge when so much about this music’s way of working has already been set in stone, and why its dissenters object to its lack of freedom and surprise. This music commits the cardinal sin of sounding good in the background, thereby convincing people they’ve heard it, they’ve taken everything in there is to take. You could say the same about The Colosseum in Rome if you’ve never been inside it.

Listen, for instance, to Frank Butler’s solo on “Numbers Game”, to LaFaro’s walking in the opening chorus of “For Real”, Land’s leisurely burn, cut through with the blues, on almost every track. And then there’s Hampton Hawes, a sound that’s scalpel-sharp, springing through lines like the keys are red hot. He’s not like Red Garland. He’s not like Ahmad Jamal or Horace Silver. He’s not like Bud Powell. But it’s all in there…at one point, he even plays something that Monk might have played. But it’s internalised, folk lore movements and feelings. You might as well accuse someone of plagiarism for lifting a cup of coffee with the same hand as their neighbour. But when you see her lift that cup, you know. In a world of people drinking coffee, she’s different…or different enough. A human might be defined by the mechanism of the lifting, a person by the manner of it. Harold Land’s frequent recourse to the blues makes me laugh throughout. To me, that’s him picking up his coffee cup and everyone thinking he’s going to spill it any minute. There are many such moments on this album, and that’s what makes me want to go back and hear it again.

It’s a sobering thought that, having been recorded in 1958, this record wasn’t released until 1961. Must have been too much good stuff around.

Hampton Hawes (piano), Harold Land (tenor sax), Scott LaFaro (bass), Frank Butler (drums)

Side A
Hip
Wrap Your Troubles in Dreams
Crazeology

Side B
Numbers Game
For Real
I Love You

Issue date 17 May 2024

The post Hampton Hawes – ‘For Real!’ first appeared on UK Jazz News.

Bobby Wellins always seemed to me, in a somewhat time-honoured tradition, to be a mass of contradictions. I’d heard the stories when we started playing together, and yet to me and the rest of the band he was an exemplary gent at all times. I’m not sure I ever knew him really, but when he played it felt like I did. It was as if he was sharing his thoughts and feelings on purely musical terms. Hearing that sound again takes me back to those times, and these recordings go further back, to 1978, to Bobby’s comeback after ten years off the scene. Those who know his work with Stan Tracey will be surprised to hear him in this setting but, like Dr Who, Bobby always seems to retain his identity, musically at least, wherever he found himself.

On these recordings with Pete Jacobsen, Adrian Kendon and Spike Wells he forms a kind of stoical centre to the whirlwind that was going on around him. This trio play with a kind of abandon you might find with Miles Davis’s rhythm section (Herbie, Ron and Tony), and the influence is clear especially in Spike Well’s dynamic layering of meters and colours. But there’s a kind of shambolic charm to it all too, a sense that it may all come tumbling down at any point, of whitening knuckles on the edge of some window ledge somewhere. It’s essentially irreverent and seems to me a particular characteristic of much British jazz of the time, where players like Tony Levin and Kenny Wheeler crossed between improvised and structured music with a carefree shrug of the shoulders.

One aspect of Bobby’s musical persona that is often forgotten is what a great writer he was. The catchiness of his themes suggests that in another life he might have penned a few hits for people that way inclined, but in many ways it’s the way these tunes are dissected, exploded and reassembled that makes them work. His grasp of just what is needed to carry a melody on “Jubilation” and “Dreams Are Free” suggest a kind of hybrid between post-Coltrane modality and folk-like directness, but in both cases the band eat their way out of these structures like kids tearing wrapping paper off presents.

I remember that feeling, of having to “come up” with something, to honour the freedom you were given by taking it by the scruff of the neck as it were. These tunes demand that something happen. In particular, Pete Jacobsen’s rapid-fire lines and linear harmonic shifts are an interesting foil for Bobby’s sense of slow unfolding. Like Miles Davis, there was always a sense for me that Bobby wanted the music to drift where it will, secure in the knowledge that he was able to come back in and focus the music again. By way of contrast, “What’s Happening” is a great example of Bobby’s ballad style, familiar to many from “Under Milk Wood”. Here though, it’s set in 10cc-esque lushness, and on “Spider” his sound wails out over another catchy, simple groove destined to be pulled into a fast tempo workout. With these tunes, there’s always something to come back to, “Love Dance” starting as a beautifully poised and slightly sinister dreamscape before slipping into a faster groove for a typically raging Jacobsen solo before returning to the opening theme, suggesting that love is a dance comprising many unexpected tempos. A lifetime of highs and lows seem to unfold in under six minutes.

Many of the previously unreleased tracks here are standards, and it’s here, in the territory of the “blowing tune”, that we see just what an individual talent he was. The tenor saxophone is such a huge part of jazz’s history, yet Wellins always manages to be himself on it. Shades of Stan Getz, Joe Henderson, Paul Gonsalves, Zoot Sims and, in the sheer cheek of his rhythmic fluidity, even Sonny Rollins continually flicker through his sound, but it’s him, always him. Listen to how he slips into “My Melancholy Baby” with a phrase that transforms the melody into a sloping confidential whisper, or how “Now’s The Time” is casually reconstructed to kick the theme off balance. On “Rhythm-A-Ning” the sheer purpose at that speed is mind boggling, and his entry on “In A Sentimental Mood” sounds like he’s playing it and writing it at the same time or discovering something hidden for centuries. It makes me want to go back to those tunes again.

He’s one of the rare musicians in the history of the music where the sound itself seems inseparable from the notes, the chords, the tune, the man. It’s been good to hear him again, to remember what transcendental music is possible on such well-trodden paths.

NOTE: Limited edition deluxe double compact disc, in an 8-panel digisleeve, including a 16 page booklet with sleeve notes written by Spike Wells plus Jazz Journal reviews of the original albums and a live performance. Comprises two albums that were previously only available on vinyl, in limited numbers for a limited time, expanded with bonus recordings by the same line-up. Only 500 copies available worldwide.

EVENT: Dreams Are Free: A Celebration of Bobby Wellins @ The Showroom, Chichester, PO19 6PE, Sat 6 April 2024

Part I Screening of biopic “Dreams Are Free” charting the rise, fall and redemption of this talented musician, composer and storyteller. Director: Gary Barber
Part II Live Jazz with members of Bobby’s last quartet: Spike Wells (drums), Mark Edwards (piano) and Steve Watts (bass) plus tenor saxophonist Mornington Lockett.

The post Bobby Wellins Quartet – ‘What Was Happening’ first appeared on UK Jazz News.