Billed as the Black Woodstock, Summer of Soul is actually far better than that description might suggest. In fact it’s a more well-constructed, more satisfying film than the baggy, rambling one Michael Wadleigh made about Woodstock – not least for placing the events in a powerful, though not overwhelming, social context.

Summer of Soul, directed by Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson, documents a series of free concerts that formed part of the 1969 Harlem Cultural Festival and were staged over six Sundays from June to August in Harlem’s Mount Morris Park (now Marcus Garvey Park). And by no means were the acts limited to soul. The list of artists is mouthwatering, to say the least, with a strong jazz and gospel presence: Mahalia Jackson, the Edwin Hawkins Singers, the Staple Singers, Ben Branch, the Chambers Brothers, 19-year-old Stevie Wonder, Gladys Knight and the Pips, David Ruffin (formerly of The Temptations), The 5th Dimension, B.B. King, Sly and the Family Stone, Herbie Mann, Mongo Santamaria, Ray Barretto, Max Roach, Sonny Sharrock and Abbey Lincoln, Hugh Masekela and – unforgettably – Nina Simone. (The organisers apparently turned Jimi Hendrix down.)

Much has been made of the fact that despite the whole thing being professionally filmed, no broadcaster was interested in it at the time, so the footage went into storage for half a century. At this point, you may wish to return to the list of artists, rub your eyes and ask yourself, how could this be?

Between the performances but seamlessly woven into them are brief sequences about the black history of the sixties – the poverty, the Vietnam War, the assassinations of progressive political leaders, the rise of black consciousness. We learn that the Harlem Cultural Festival only came about at all thanks to the full-blooded support of New York’s white Mayor John Lindsay. There are emotional interviews, too, with those who were in the crowd, most of them just children at the time, as well as those artists who are still with us: notably Stevie Wonder, Gladys Knight, and Billy Davis Jr and Marilyn McCoo of The Fifth Dimension.

The technical quality – particularly the sound – is excellent, a miracle of restoration. Another striking feature is the breathtaking quality of the performances. The Woodstock artists come off looking sloppy and self-indulgent by contrast, with the obvious exception of Sly Stone’s outfit, who appeared at both events. The black artists featured here are simply more musically gifted and professional, more adept at singing and playing, and with plenty to say about how the races of the world should learn to live together. Sly and the Family Stone were the early adopters of a more inclusive culture that has only become mainstream in very recent years: keyboards and trumpet are played by women; drums and tenor saxophone by a pair of white guys. This snapshot of 1969 also marks a transition in black history between the older, formally attired, church-going black citizens of Harlem, and the younger, noisier, more outrageously colourful and politically engaged element.

But in general it’s all about peace and love there in Mount Morris Park. Until, that is, we come to Nina Simone. Coming on like a militant African queen, Simone is in no mood for compromise with whitey, reading the poem Are You Ready? by David Nelson of The Last Poets, asking the audience if they’re ready – ready to destroy property, even ready to kill. This was a foretaste of the violent suppression and defeat of black nationalism in the years that followed, and the reason why Black Lives Matter is a slogan that still needs to be uttered more than fifty years later.

The mood of the film, however, is upbeat and joyful, sometimes ecstatic, and it can be seen on the faces of those who thronged the park and all of those who appeared on stage. Thompson deserves our gratitude that these moments were not allowed to continue mouldering in a basement for another half-century.

Peter Jones is the author of This is Bop: Jon Hendricks and the Art of Vocal Jazz (Equinox Publishing, 2020)

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This quintet album is somewhat misleadingly billed as “The Final Session at Rudy Van Gelder’s”: in fact the studio is still operating under the ownership of Maureen Sickler who recorded and mixed the album. The phrase refers to the fact that this was the last of the many albums that Larry Willis recorded at the hallowed facility.

It’s a classy piece of work, imbued with the warm, dry acoustic that Van Gelder was so famous for. In style, too, it exudes the very essence of the studio in its late Fifties/early Sixties heyday. Among the eight tracks are two standards: the title track and Bobby Troup’s mournful ballad The Meaning of the Blues. The opener Today’s Nights is a classic mid-tempo swinger by alto saxophonist Joe Ford, who shares the head with trumpeter Jeremy Pelt. It’s followed by a bebop version of Willis’s own Heavy Blue, which appeared in its original form in 1976 as a funk tune on the Blood, Sweat and Tears album More Than Ever. Back to the future: here, it sounds like something Freddie Hubbard might have recorded in the late Fifties. Two more tracks are the work of the rhythm section alone: first, bassist Santi DeBriano’s lovely ballad Anna, here featuring Blake Meister on bass, along with Victor Lewis on drums; second, Let’s Play, a gentle latin tune by Willis himself. He plays the title track solo, a plangent, serene take on the Styne/Cahn ballad, a lovely way to close the album.

It would be easy to dismiss all this as a little more than a nostalgia fest for a retro style of jazz, but it’s way better than that. I Fall in Love Too Easily is a mature, deeply satisfying collection, a fitting end to the career of a man who deserves a bigger reputation.

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Not on the evidence of this gig. The evening began with the first tune Gordon played at the Young Jazz Musician final – Kenny Garrett’s lovely waltz Haynes Here. Within the sedate confines of television, it was a classy trio rendition that instantly stamped him as a major talent, steeped in the traditions he began exploring after hearing Oscar Peterson for the first time. Here, in a club setting with a quartet, the tune became something else altogether.

Alex Hitchcock on tenor (“my favourite sax player in the whole world”, as Gordon described him) added a dimension of cool thrills that extended the song’s range in fascinating directions. In fact, the whole band contributed to the excitement – including transplanted New Yorker Will Sach on bass and drummer Will Cleasby (these two also have a trio with Will Barry on piano known, inevitably, as The Three Willies). Sach constantly yelled his appreciation to the others, while at the end of the tune Cleasby let rip with a thunderous solo that just about demolished the kit.

Again following the sequence of Deschanel Gordon’s BBC performance, they continued with Gordon’s own medium-swing blues Awaiting. The creative process was clear for all to see as he began his solo, at first tentatively probing the keys for inspiration, soon finding a pattern and a groove that he liked, and then really digging in. When it was Sach’s turn, however, a familiar problem became evident: audience noise. At Ronnie Scott’s, even the rustling of a napkin is considered an outrage. Here at the Six, a more relaxed, bohemian atmosphere reigns, and extraordinary efforts go into supporting the musicians and the jazz community as a whole. So it’s a shame when people turn up who have no interest in music, regarding it merely as background to their own conversation, and ignore all requests for quiet. I don’t know what the answer is. Security staff? A system of red and yellow cards?

Luckily none of this threw the band off their stride as they continued with Ahmad Jamal’s arrangement of Music Music Music (during which Hitchcock laid out), quickly followed by I Know a Place and Enchantments. Another Gordon original, Find the Way, had a funky feel to it, and this time the band revealed its command of sophisticated dynamics, building them up and breaking them down throughout the tune. After the break came another highlight, a trio version of Let’s Fall in Love, again with Ahmad Jamal as the inspiration.

During the evening someone muttered that it’s hard to know what decade we’re in when it comes to Deschanel Gordon. Is he cutting edge or is he simply offering his own brilliant take on familiar styles? An unfair question, of course. He’s still exploring – trying to find a way, to coin a phrase. Having said that, for all his beautiful phrasing and harmonic sense, ballads aren’t really on the menu – yet. For now, the band is at its most satisfying when the spirit of Jamal takes over, and they flex their collective groove muscle.

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The Luft/Duni project is a hybrid of European folk music and jazz, including a number of their own compositions. A small cabal in the audience greeted every mention of Albania or Kosovo with a ragged cheer. Duni’s own Albanian heritage came to the fore with traditional songs like Kur Më Del Në Derë (When You Appear at the Door), an arabic-influenced number about being so smitten by your beloved that you cut yourself while trying to cut an apple. At least part of this song is in 7/4 time, and from the strong contralto of the previous tune, Duni’s voice was suddenly soaring impossibly high. Attempting to sing like this would leave any normal person lying on the floor, gasping and flapping like a stranded fish. But her accuracy and breath control are extraordinary.

As Luft pointed out, you can’t play in a jazz club without including at least one standard, and theirs was I’m a Fool to Want You. It was a gorgeous, minimalist treatment, with a lot of “bowed” guitar produced by simply manipulating the volume control.

But it was the odd one out. The duo’s recent sojourn in Egypt imparted a distinctly North African timbre to the set, as in the famous Lamma Bada Yatathanna, a traditional tune apparently composed in Andalusia around 600AD. (It appeared on Duni’s 2018 solo album Partir.) There was also a song from Kosovo – Mora Testina – and a sad, ancient Albanian number titled N’at Zaman about being unable to wed your heart’s desire. Also from Albania came Vogel – this one, according to Duni, “about a Lolita who drives men crazy by giving them Turkish delight.” And there were also songs from Italy, Portugal and France.

Nor was our own country forgotten. Having performed so much music set in lovely parts of the Mediterranean, Luft once decided to prove to Duni that the English seaside is just as beautiful. The two set off on a day-trip to Brighton, only to find that the weather was dull, the sea was brown, and there was “quite a lot of construction work going on”. But they got a song out of it. Always considerate of the feelings of others, Duni wrote Brighton in French so that no English people would understand the words. By contrast, when they found themselves in Sunderland, another coastal city, it was hot and sunny. The eponymous song therefore emphasises the “sun”. It’s not on the album, but Sunderland maintains the link with ships, and they made the jewel of the north-east sound beautiful and exotic.

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UKJN: How did you meet Claire Martin, and why did you choose her to produce Always and Forever?

Jenny Green: I remember first seeing Claire with Gareth Williams in a club in Brighton. At the time I was singing in dinner dance bands along the south coast, being based in Brighton myself. She was singing Black Coffee and I was taken by her smoky voice. Later on I enrolled on one of her singing workshops.

Claire was an obvious choice when doing the album as she has an amazing background from pop to jazz and I knew she’d bring out the best in me.

UKJN: How did her input as producer affect your performance as a singer?

JG: Claire has a lot of recording experience – something I aspire to learn. She gave me the confidence to relax and enjoy the process and I think this helped to deliver the vocals. She also sang backing vocals along with Winston Clifford on a couple of the arrangements!.

UKJN: Your choice of songs is mercifully free of the obvious standards. Some of these I’ve never heard before. Where did you come across Do Wrong Shoes, Early to Bed, Blue Prelude, The Touch of Your Lips and Painted from Memory?

JG: Yes this was important for me. Claire came up with the idea of Donald Fagen’s Do Wrong Shoes and Richard Rodney Bennett’s Early to Bed, which was great as I wanted a couple of fun songs on the album. Blue Prelude was a song in my repertoire written by Gordon Jenkins. I loved the version by Peggy Lee and George Shearing and I think we’ve kept close to the original .

UKJN: You’ve used two pianists. What differences did you find between the playing of Adrian York and Rob Barron? Did that affect which songs each one played?

JG: Ah yes two great pianists both bringing their own uniqueness. Adrian is my resident pianist at the jazz club I run in East Grinstead . I wanted Adrian on the album for the more poppy arrangements and he has done a brilliant arrangement of Don’t Sleep in the Subway with a cool solo.

UKJN: Why include trombone rather than the (more common) sax or trumpet?

JG: Why not? I love trombone and Chris Traves, who mixed and mastered the album, suggested it as he is a trombone player, so I was delighted.

UKJN: Has preparing foryour radio show every week opened your ears to a wider range of jazz?

JG: Most definitely – in particular instrumental jazz and some of the new and emerging artists. For instance, new to me is the saxophonist Alex Bone. Whatever it is, if I like it I’ll play it. I get sent a lot of albums to listen to, with a view of featuring them on the show.

UKJN: Your jazz club is now back at the Chequer Mead Theatre in East Grinstead. How has it been opening the club up again?

JG: Wonderful, and I can’t wait. I have lovely loyal supporters that come every month and along with our new followers, the club is getting bigger. Everyone at Chequer Mead has been very supportive and they have coped with the Covid restrictions brilliantly. Next month, on 1 July, will be my album launch and fingers crossed we will be at full capacity.

UKJN: What are your hopes for the rest of 2021 music-wise?

JG: I’m hoping all my gigs will resume. Some were in the diary before the pandemic. And it would be lovely to do a couple of jazz festivals with the band on the album – the songs need to be heard. I’m looking forward to all our guests booked for the coming year and I’m also thinking of running a jazz festival at Chequer Mead for spring next year. I can’t wait to see what’s around the corner

Peter Jones is a jazz singer and author.

Jenny Green’s Jazz Mix-Up radio show on 107 Meridian FM goes out every Tuesday from 6pm to 8pm. Her new album Always and Forever is released on 6th June.

East Grinstead Jazz Club reopens tonight Thursday 3 June with The Genius of Duke Ellington, featuring guests Sarah Moule and Simon Wallace.

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Blades has written or co-written about half of the tunes on this new album, which at a rough calculation seems to be his 38th as leader. His intention in making it was to show that a salsa orchestra is also capable of playing swing: the album is a mixture of styles, from salsa to… well, swing, the latter represented by three well-worn standard Pennies from Heaven, The Way You Look Tonight and Watch What Happens. The reason it sounds so lush is that arrangers Roberto Delgado and Tom Kubis know what they’re doing, and in a couple of cases (Paula C – video below – and The Way You Look Tonight) the orchestra is augmented by the Venezuela Strings Recording Ensemble. Such is Blades’ celebrity in the Spanish-speaking world that he can call upon literally dozens of top players: no fewer than seven piano players are credited among the legions of musicians on the album.

When he sings in English, Blades’s voice has that razor’s edge Sinatra-like timbre that’s a perfect fit for material of this sort, as well as effortless jazz phrasing, although unlike Sinatra, at 72 he still possesses an excellent set of pipes. From a Spanish-speaking perspective, the same no doubt applies in spades to his rendition of the salsa tunes. There isn’t much blending of the salsa material and the swing numbers: the tracks are either one or the other. Ya No Me Duele, for example, is a straight swing tune sung in Spanish, while Do I Hear Four is a swing instrumental.

Salswing! has such an integrated sound that it’s difficult, not to mention invidious, to pick out individual players. But what a joy to listen to percussionists of the calibre of Ademir Berrocal, Raúl Rivera and Carlos Pérez Bidó on salsa numbers like Mambo Gil.

Peter Jones is a singer, composer, author and journalist who has written biographies of Mark Murphy and Jon Hendricks.

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There’s not much about jazz (Spitzer is a Beethoven expert from Liverpool University), but The Musical Human is crammed with all kinds of facts relating to music. Did you know, for instance, that “animals intensely dislike human music”? Or that “sound travels five times faster through water than through air”? Or that bagpipes were originally a middle eastern instrument, and not taken up by the Scots until the 11th century? There are so many facts and so many theories in The Musical Human, it fair makes your head spin.

This is frustrating, as a reader, because Spitzer has a lot of interesting ideas: one that I wish he had developed further is that performing music and dance “symbolises and enacts the harmony of society” as a whole. In other words, the true value of music is its ability to bind people together, to celebrate and participate in the myths we hold in common. Many African cultures assume that everyone is musical, because everyone takes part in singing, dancing and drumming. “The natural state of human music is to sing or play together”, as Spitzer puts it. He contrasts this with what he sees as “the fate of music across the world, especially in the West… a decay from participation to passive listening.” In other words, as soon as you invent the idea of a musician, you are creating an elite and excluding everyone else. Traditionally, music was handed down to future generations orally. Not any more. So what went wrong? Well, music got written down, that’s what, so now you need specialist training to be able to sing and play. These days Western music is handed down in scores – lines and symbols on sheets of paper. It bothers him that Western music history is really a history of these scores, not of people. “The natural site for music was in the body; suddenly music was enshrined on the page, like a fairy-tale princess whisked out of her cradle and imprisoned in a picture.” The jazz singer Jon Hendricks made a similar point when he pointed out that the great operatic arias of Verdi were taken from the folk songs of Neapolitan fishermen, none of whom could read a note of music.

So far so good. There’s also a lot in here about where music came from in the first place. Curiously, our ape cousins don’t have the physical equipment to sing or talk; instead their communication is via physical gestures, so we didn’t inherit music from them. Insects make sounds to communicate, but you can’t call them songs; we say that birds sing, but the sound is very limited and never changes, so it isn’t song in the human sense; whales, on the other hand, do sing, because their songs change and evolve over time.

It’s when we get closer to human beings that the quest for the origins of music becomes a trifle desperate. Spitzer’s problem is that there’s no actual evidence, so instead he relies on a welter of speculation. For example, we know that our ape-like ancestors made hand axes by chipping stones; therefore the repetitive stone-bashing rhythm “might have evolved into music” as a kind of game. Hmmm. What he is reluctant to acknowledge is that all we have left from pre-history is rocks and a few bone flutes; everything else crumbled into dust long ago. OK, what about the Neanderthals? Did they have music? Yes, he assures us, “all told, Neanderthal communication was musical.” But how on earth does he know? Well, they went hunting, and after a good hunt, they must surely have gathered for a knees-up. “The celebratory ritual dance, which would have followed the butchering and consumption of the meat… might have contained memories of earlier dances. Was this the beginning of musical memory and tradition?” Well, maybe, maybe not.

Sometimes he comes out with blanket statements, particularly in areas he appears unfamiliar with:

“Blues, jazz and rock in North America lack the rhythmic complexity we think of as central to African music because North American plantations drew most of their slaves from Islamic West Africa.”

“Jazz improvisation is indebted to the tradition of Islamic vocal improvisation in North Africa.”

“The music of South America is rich in polymetres and marimbas because most of their slaves originated south of West Africa.”

In short, “it doesn’t mean anything if it doesn’t swing, said Duke Ellington.”

Er, I’m not sure Duke put it quite like that. But no matter. How about rock and roll? “Pop and rock… happened because bored teenagers messed about with guitars in their bedrooms.” Really? Take that, Louis Jordan! Back in your box, Ike Turner!

OK, it’s all too easy to find fault in a book that casts its net this wide. There are some genuinely startling and convincing insights in The Musical Human which, by the way, is extremely well researched. Spitzer clearly has principles: he maintains a solid defence of indigenous music, and takes pot shots at the whole idea of “world music”, because he sees it as a form of colonialism. Apparently the term originated as a marketing ploy hatched by music executives in a London pub in the summer of 1987: “world music” is a term to help businessmen sell music that doesn’t fit into established genres. It bothers Spitzer that peoples from developing countries, such as Pygmies, are getting ripped off because they probably aren’t getting paid for their contributions to “world music”. He also points out that what we think of as “Western” classical music is currently in the process of migrating eastwards: “Southeast Asia has become the heartland of Western music. As classical music sinks in the West, its lifeboats are China, Japan and Korea.”

I do have a problem with the way the book is written. Spitzer tries to cover everything, but he can’t possibly do justice to it all, and ends up flitting from topic to topic like a butterfly. He is also over-fond of words like archaeoacoustician, magnetoencephalography, pareidolia and syntactocentric, but he doesn’t always explain what they mean. And the book is full of statements like this: “Tonality exhibits analogous self-similarity.”

Right at the end, after hundreds of pages of intellectualism, he calls music “the most emotional of the arts”. Now that’s a very interesting idea, but he doesn’t develop it. Maybe we’ll have to wait for that book to be written. In the meantime, if you want to read a serious recent history of music, I recommend Ted Gioia’s Music – A Subversive History (Basic Books, 2019).

Peter Jones is the author of This is Hip: the Life of Mark Murphy (Equinox, 2018) and This is Bop: Jon Hendricks and the Art of Vocal Jazz (Equinox 2020).

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1. Señor Blues (‘That’s How I Love The Blues!’, USA, 1963)

After unsuccessful stints with Decca and Capital, Mark Murphy found a more comfortable home at the jazz specialist label Riverside Records. This is a Horace Silver tune with an undulating 12/8 Afro-Cuban beat, and it became a staple of Mark’s live performances. He delivers an intimate, confidential vocal, underpinned by doubled bass and piano ostinato, with an all-brass instrumental line-up. There’s a pleasing lightness of touch here, and Al Cohn’s arrangements are particularly sensitive to the quality of Mark’s voice.

2. Why and How (‘Midnight Mood’, Germany, 1968)

A soul-jazz rare groove number beloved of Gilles Peterson, who turned it into a dance floor smash in the 1980s. It was actually recorded in Köln in 1967 with members of the Kenny Clarke-Francy Boland Big Band, including Ronnie Scott, Jimmy Deuchar, Sahib Shihab and Jimmy Woode. Mark was living in London at the time. The groovy backbeat – yes, with cowbell! – plus the great horn backings speak of the Swinging Sixties, and no one was more swinging than Mark. He’s in devastatingly fine voice, playing the kind of material he loved and knew well. He used to say his true voice didn’t emerge until he was 40, i.e. at around the time he returned to the US. But that voice is already here.

3. I’m Glad There is You (‘Bridging a Gap’, USA, 1973)

By the time he returned to the States after a decade in Europe, Mark’s musical outlook had broadened to encompass pop, rock, folk and latin styles. Even with jazz standards like I’m Glad There is You, he would take bold liberties in his arrangements. On the long verse intro to this partially reharmonized version of Jimmy Dorsey’s tune, he is backed only by Sam Brown’s reverberating guitar. The rest of the band comes in halfway through the verse, with ominously gurgling organ, and a passionate vocal from Mark. The tune fades out slowly, with a dark, Phrygian mode guitar solo over ghostly midnight chords. Is it jazz? Is it rock? In his sleeve notes Down Beat editor Dan Morgenstern ties himself up in knots over this sterile and much-asked pointless question. Who cares? It’s wonderful.

4. Naima (‘Mark Murphy Sings’, USA, 1975)

Mark Murphy’s career was strewn with banana skins. One of them was the terrible album covers, the worst of which was ‘Mark Murphy Sings’, depicting a Marigold rubber glove in an abstract landscape. It effectively disguises one of the greatest jazz vocal albums in history. Naima is a spine-chiller, with spooky organ and blaring horns, but the killer is David Sanborn’s alto saxophone, piping like an ancient ram’s horn. Mark wrote the lyrics, and his voice captures something timeless and incantatory about Coltrane’s original, which sounds almost tame compared to this.

5. Farmer’s Market (‘Stolen Moments’, USA, 1978)

Art Farmer wrote the tune and Annie Ross wrote the bonkers vocalese lyrics, but Mark Murphy was the one who really nailed it, rendering Ross’s tongue-twisters effortlessly despite the suicidal tempo. The studio recording isn’t available on YouTube any more, but this TV rendition from 1981 with Bill Mays on piano should be enough to scare the pants off any singer thinking of trying it. It took me three months to learn, and it still scares me.

6. Since I Fell For You – ‘The Dream’, Austria, recorded 1983, released 1995)

I love to sing this terrific Buddy Johnson r&b ballad. Mark’s version was recorded with the Dutch Metropol Orkest, with whom he worked regularly on the radio during his frequent trips to Europe over a period of 24 years. Arranger Rob Pronk gives it a soft, romantic treatment. Mark always went to the trouble of restoring forgotten verses to songs, and this one is a cracker, delaying the start of the tune proper until it finally hits its 12/8 stride. The piano tinkles on a bed of strings, and Mark repeats the sad lines “For those who give love, and never get love…” on the fade.

7. Living Room (‘Living Room’, USA, 1986)

One of the hippest things Mark ever recorded, Living Room is a sleek, finger-snappin’ Abbey Lincoln/Max Roach tune that shows how great Mark was at simply riding the beat and inserting little syncopations of his own. The track features David Braham’s organ and fills from Gerry Niewood’s tenor, with cool solos from each, enlivened by Larry Killian’s congas. Mark produced the album along with Braham, who plays the bass part too, and the legendary Grady Tate is on drums. It was another duff album sleeve, featuring a slightly out of focus photo taken by Mark’s partner Eddie. Someone also thought it was a great idea to release it on green translucent vinyl.

8. Ceora Lives (‘What a Way to Go’, USA, 1991)

Keyboardist Larry Fallon produced this version of the sweet and joyful 1965 Lee Morgan bossa. It has been slightly funked up, but otherwise stays faithful to the original, with some warm albeit slightly ersatz synthesised strings and Mark’s own lyrics. The deep reverb places it all in the middle distance, and this, together with two percussionists and a drummer, give it a Brazilian jungle-like vibe. Chris Parker, who a couple of years later played on Donald Fagen’s Kamakiriad, is on drums.

9. In the Land of Oo-Bla-Dee (‘Links’, USA, 2001)

A novelty song popularized by Dizzy Gillespie, In the Land of Oo-Bla-Dee is so mad, only Mark Murphy could pull it off convincingly as a vocal number. Pianist Mary Lou Williams wrote the brilliant angular melody around 1949, Milt Orent provided the nonsense lyrics, and in the context, Mark’s deranged scatting is spot-on. Allen Mezquida (alto saxophone) and Dave Ballou (trumpet) restore some sort of order with their solos.

10. Our Game (‘Once to Every Heart’, Germany, recorded 2002, released 2005)

I was listening to Jazz FM at home one evening in October 2015 when I heard that Mark had died. What a bummer, I thought: I never did get to hear him perform live. Then the station played this song, and I had to stop what I was doing and simply listen. It begins with a flamenco-like flourish (an Fmaj7 with a flatted 5th, or sharp 11th) and trumpeter/producer Till Brönner plays a full chorus before Mark begins to sing. From then until the coda, with its delicate, shimmering strings and faintly warbling flutes, it cast a spell that has never left me. The radio station continued to play the track over the week that followed. I’d loved the Mark Murphy tracks I’d heard previously – classics like Stolen Moments and Milestones – but now I was gripped by a desire to learn more about him. But there was no book – in fact, very little information at all – and not long afterwards I decided that if no one else was going to do it, I would just have to write the book myself.

(*) This is Hip: the Life of Mark Murphy by Peter Jones is published by Equinox.

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

Bass players may take issue with this, but the bass solo is often the place where a tune grinds to a temporary halt, and the energy is lost. On Tear it Down, however, Andy McKee’s bass solo is driven along smartly thanks to percussionist Jonathan Gomez, whose playing lifts the whole enterprise. Four on Six, one of Montgomery’s best-known tunes, started life as a mid tempo swing number. The title has been interpreted by some to refer to a 4/4 rhythm superimposed on a 6/8 rhythm. But you’d be hard-put to hear that going on in the tune. Others have speculated that Zoho ZM202103 it means four fingers playing six strings. However Wes famously used his thumb, and so the mystery remains. Riveros normally uses a pick, by the way, or sometimes a clawhammer style. Here, he turns the tune into a Cuban tumbao.

The fifth member of the combo on this album is drummer Mark Walker (not, in case you were wondering, the same Mark Walker as the current presenter of Jazz FM’s Dinner Jazz). Walker’s calm presence in the midst of rhythmic complexity is particularly evident on Wes’ Tune, on which (I am told) the beats on the intro are a mixture of afoxé and biao, while Riveros’s own Nelson’s Groove is based on a Columbian porro. Don’t say you haven’t been told.

The original version of West Coast Blues was, of course, a jazz waltz. Riveros turns it into a joropo, a rhythmic style from Venezuela and Columbia. The band plays like a well-oiled machine throughout the album, but most notably on its version of Jingles, which is the sound of five virtuosos at the top of their game. Wes’s composition was never for cissies in the first place, with a highly syncopated intro and then a punishing upswing workout. Riveros adds an intro on top of the original intro, Martignon throws in a quick montuno, and when they get to the blowing section, they show how well they can swing, with exhilarating solos from piano, guitar and drums/percussion. We catch our breath, or try to, with Riveros’s second composition Facing Wes, a piece written in multiple time signatures, with some suitably Montgomery-style octave soloing from Riveros. The album closes with a sweet contrast: the guitarist switches to a nylon-string instrument to play a one-chorus solo version of Leila from the 1960 album Montgomeryland, which Wes recorded with his brothers Buddy and Monk.

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Tweets. Bird calls. That’s how this new release from Alessandro Meroli begins, with a track called Nightfall. Notturni is a concept album, one that needs to be played sequentially in order to achieve its full intended effect. Notturni are, of course, nocturnes – musical pieces that evoke the night, so naturally Meroli cites Chopin as an influence, although in truth it’s rock and jazz that come through most strongly. The first track, in which the birds are roosting, represents dusk, the last track, dawn. And in between are all the eerie, sepulchral but beautiful stages of the evening and the night.

We’re in the city, so the vibe is noir-ish, as Meroli indicates with a track titled Dedicated to Bernard Herrmann. He uses a mixture of Alberto Sansò’s electronica and real instruments to produce his intensely cinematic musical effects. The second track, Evening Lights, is reminiscent of The Blue Nile, especially in Nico Menci’s use of synth bass. Pad sounds are overlaid first by a drifting electric piano solo by Stefano De Bonis and then by Meroli’s angular but legato alto saxophone. On the spooky ballad Where Are You? he channels Stan Getz with more gorgeously moody alto. We could be sitting behind Robert de Niro in Taxi Driver. And sure enough, the next track In the Middle of the Darkness delineates a terrifying car journey, propelled by Ivano Zanotti’s John Bonham-like drums. There’s a fine command of dynamics on this album. At the End of the Night, for instance, begins its slow build with spy movie sounds from Alberto Capelli’s Guzheng (a Chinese zither), proceeds with echoed flutes, and climaxes with a lovely trumpet/tenor harmony from Maurizio Piancastelli and Michele Vignali.

The darkness begins to lift with Morning Star, Menci’s tinkling piano figure perfectly reflecting the gradually lightening sky, until joined by Meroli’s fresh-sounding flute. Dawn is greeted with Capelli’s mohan veena – an Indian instrument, a cross between a guitar and a sitar.

Impressionism and melody combine to make Notturni a deep and resonant piece of work, better than just about any film it might have been composed for.

The Invisible Session –  Echoes of Africa
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This album was recorded in Milan back in October 2019, and was finally released last month, a mere 15 years after the group’s eponymous debut collection on Schema. That one focused on Brazilian and other Latin beats, but this time The Invisible Session takes its inspiration from Africa. The project as a whole is the brainchild of vibraphonist Luciano Cantone, in collaboration with multi-instrumentalist Gianluca Petrella, who switches between trombone and various keyboards.

Echoes of Africa is a beautiful mélange of funk, psychedelia, and modal music, but all of it is powered by the insistent Afrobeat grooves of Ethiopian drummer and percussionist Abdissa “Mamba” Assefa. There’s also a rich, fruity horn section consisting of Petrella with his trombone, trumpeter Mirco Rubegni, and Giuseppe “Beppe” Scardino on baritone saxophone and flute.

The uptempo groover West Island features stabbing horn lines, bubbling retro synth solos, ensemble shouts and a trombone solo from Petrella. Ideas Can Make the World is a slower tune with moody horn riffs and keyboard-generated steel drums – one of several tracks reminiscent of the quieter musical interludes on old blaxploitation soundtracks by the likes of Isaac Hayes or Curtis Mayfield. In fact, the blaxploitation references – if you like that sort of thing – are among the guilty pleasures of listening to Echoes of Africa.

Cantone’s vibes add another level of cool. The slow, dreamy Hearing the Call also features the kora of Gambian musician Haruna “Jalimansa” Kuyateh, along with spoken-word contributions both here, and again on the gently insistent Mother Forgive Us, from the smoky voice of Benjamin “Bentality” Paavilainen. The pace picks up again with Pull the Handbreak [sic], punctuated with more funky horn riffs. Journey to the East is driven along by Riccardo Onori‘s reggae guitar, while People All Around there World Can Make It rather reminds me of great soul-funk acts like The Stylistics and The Temptations.

Cantone’s vibes shine again on Breathe the Rhythm, and on Entoto there’s a fine contribution from Riccardo Onori, sounding here like Hank Marvin on mescaline.

Echoes of Africa provides a 2am kind of atmosphere, perfect for the chill-out time at the end of a house party. Remember those?

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