Yet in spite of the Canadian trumpeter’s introversion, he forged a towering reputation, and a far-reaching influence. His individual sound achieved the often sought but rarely realised state of being instantly recognisable. Family, friends and some other important musicians insisted his prowess on the horn and his composing compared with the greatest jazz artists.

One of those was Nick Smart, head of jazz at the Royal Academy of Music, who immediately after Wheeler’s death suggested on behalf of the Academy that he had been “a genius walking amongst us”. Now Smart, along with transatlantic collaborator Brian Shaw, has produced a formidably well-researched account of Wheeler’s life and times that goes some way to justifying such a large claim.

It has taken a decade, and is clearly a labour of love. The result is not revelatory, but if the story fleshed out here is largely familiar to jazz listeners who remember that gorgeous sound, it is certainly told in as much detail – 500 pages and over 2000 endnotes – as anyone could wish. Moreover, it goes beyond the limitations of individual musician biographies to enlarge on important parts of UK jazz history.

Wheeler came to this country in 1952 when he was just 22, a big leap for a shy kid from a troubled home in Canada. Before long he had his first gig, in the Gerard Street basement that would one day host the first incarnation of Ronnie Scott’s club, and met his wife to be, Doreen, who underpinned his career by taking care of all possible domestic business for the rest of his life.

The career progressed from dance bands to jazz bands to tours, and by the end of the 1950s to the leading band of the day, led by John Dankworth. Then came the reliably brilliant work with Wheeler’s own groups, often with the same core set of close collaborators, and increasing opportunities to compose for larger ensembles.

The authors’ account sheds interesting light on the musical life of the 1950s and 1960s. Making a living for London-based players was often a matter of studio sessions in the daytime, and jazz – if you were lucky – in the evenings. Both kinds of work gave rise to tight-knit groups of colleagues, and the book emphasises how this fed into writing, which Wheeler not only composed (in classic jazz fashion) for the qualities of specific players, but also to express “the way he feels about the people he is with”. Sessions for BBC radio were the best opportunity to try out much new writing, though the copying and rehearsing for those was done for love, not money.

As Wheeler was consolidating his personal style in the ‘60s, he got to know the work of Booker Little. The American’s way of straining at the confines of bebop encouraged Wheeler not to play like Little, but to believe that he must cultivate his own style. He still found this frustrating as often as fulfilling, and in pursuit of new possibilities Wheeler the dedicated composer also took up with the pioneers of free improvisation in London, in outfits like the Spontaneous Music Ensemble. The book emphasises the development of this particular jazz career – like most, perhaps – as an endeavour of sustaining a network of collaborators. The trumpeter’s network made him an important bridging point between free-playing and more conventionally-minded scenes, in the UK and, later, internationally.

The international work took a spectacular turn with membership of Anthony Braxton’s group, then with close friend and fellow Braxton alumnus Dave Holland in the bass player’s first great quintet. By now Wheeler, like Holland, was recording for ECM, and the book offers plenty of vignettes of what it was like to work with Manfred Eicher. Prize among them is the occasion when the trumpeter actually once lost his temper and put the phone down on Eicher, apparently leading the usually immovable producer to agree to record a big-band of Wheeler’s own choosing in London. That green-lit the sessions that produced Music for Large and Small Ensembles, often cited as perhaps Wheeler’s finest work.

There was work for other labels, and with other bands, most often – as with many UK players of the time – in Europe. Multiple collaborations with Holland, John Taylor, Norma Winstone, Evan Parker, Chris Laurence and more are chronicled exhaustively here, and there are details of a startling number of large-scale compositions for big ensembles, many of them destined for just one or at most a handful of outings. We learn about all the recordings and not just all the gigs, but sometimes every tune on a gig.

The book probably gets as near the heart of the music as writing can. There is some interesting professional evaluation of Wheeler’s trumpet sound: very strong, centred, and able to find the target area “where the tone takes on the fullest resonance possible for the least amount of work”. That gave him conspicuous stamina, unwaveringly exact pitch and unusually good projection. This does account for part of the experience of hearing him play. The timbre is always burnished, but not over-bright, incisive but never harsh. It’s a voice that commands the ear without apparent effort.

As Shaw and Smart put it, “Kenny never ‘blasted’ to the point where his tone became forced or unattractive. It was just that the core of the sound was so resonant and full of overtones that it seemed loud in a way that could fill a room.”

In this fashion, the book does all that a biography can do. If it aspires, perhaps, to do more, that leads to questions that may not be answerable through reading or writing. Why did someone compose and play the way they did? You might want to find out more about the player to understand the music better. But it is probably more in keeping with their art to turn that round: listen to more of the music, more closely, to better understand the player.

For Wheeler’s technical mastery was allied to other qualities that are harder to describe. The melodies in the compositions and the improvised lines typically had that emotional flavour most readily summed up as bittersweet. His writing and playing returned to this zone again and again. As he said, “beautiful sad melodies make me very happy”. His alternative formulation was also apt, describing his sweet spot as a blend of melancholy and chaos. The title of poet Peter Gizzi’s collection that won the T.S. Eliot prize last month also comes to mind: Fierce Elegies seems to fit quite a few Wheeler compositions. One might go further. At its most affecting, it is some of the best work ever in that area where music makes an existential statement: human life is essentially tragic, but we can choose to create and appreciate beauty. 

Wheeler’s final recording for ECM, Songs for Quintet, laid down with care when his health was in terminal decline and his playing often faltering, is a striking evocation of that spirit, but it is as strongly present in much of the work that went before. That, for me, is why Wheeler’s music is so appealing, and why it is worth reading this book, which will almost certainly allow you to track down a good deal more of it than you know.

The post ‘Song for Someone – The Musical Life of Kenny Wheeler’ first appeared on UK Jazz News.

He was the piper who caused a sensation at Glasgow Jazz Festival. But then, Martyn Bennett’s musicality drew attention wherever he played, whether that be busking on Sauchiehall Street, performing on Millennium Night on Edinburgh Castle esplanade, or at Cambridge Folk Festival.

Bennett had a natural aptitude for music, a talent that was guided by expert tuition. Yet the music that is his legacy was compiled largely on a computer. The last of his five albums, Grit, was the triumph of a man who had smashed his instruments in a fit of frustration at no longer being able to play to his own exacting standards. He became “the singer”, painstakingly bringing together sounds and songs sampled from the tradition he grew up in, and fusing them with the dance beats he had fallen in love with while a student.

His life was short. He died aged thirty-three in January 2005, and the last years of his life were marked by extensive chemotherapy, radiotherapy, a bone marrow transplant and a splenectomy. Yet he persevered with music, revising, editing, adding to and perfecting his final work (although he never felt he’d achieved perfection).

Gary West is a piper himself: he presented the specialist piping programme, Pipeline, for BBC Radio Scotland for two decades, and is well placed to tell Bennett’s story. He knew Bennett, and in writing this very readable account, he must have had to hold material in reserve because everyone who met Martyn Bennett has a story.

Bennett was born in Newfoundland, but at age five came to live in the Highlands, in Kingussie, with his mother Margaret after her marriage to Welsh geologist Ian Knight ended. Perhaps because Margaret Bennett is such a valued presence in Scotland as a folklorist and singer, Bennett’s father has often seemed to be a shadowy figure until now. West has ensured that he is very much part of his son’s story and shows that the music gene came from both sides of the family.

Attending folk festivals with his mother, the young Martyn was exposed to the singers and characters who fed into his own grasp of the tradition, and when he gravitated to the pipes – via the practice chanter that he apparently mastered in record time – he became quite the junior phenomenon.

Bennett won a place at Broughton High School’s specialist music unit in Edinburgh by auditioning on the pipes. This led to classical training in violin, piano and composition. He might have become an international soloist on violin – he ‘depped’ with the exacting Edinburgh Quartet on several occasions – but classical music wasn’t in his blood. The pipes, traditional songs and club beats were.

And so began an adventure that involved a classic television commercial for Drambuie, with Bennett playing an extraordinary fluent reel on the smallpipes as Robert Hardy’s butler delivers a specially flown in bottle of the liqueur – then drops it. It also included some heroically chaotic international touring, a frenetic session in Paris during the 1998 World Cup that saw Sean Connery and Ewan McGregor cavorting onstage, and a duo with drummer Tom Bancroft that showcased Bennett’s improvisational capabilities. There is also the appreciation that Peter Gabriel and his record label, Real World, showed for Bennett’s work, and the praise from Hamish Henderson, the father of Scotland’s folk revival, that gives the book its title.

Gary West marshals all this – and more – with considerable skill, alongside informed assessments of Bennett’s recordings. There is much about Bennett’s later years that is tragic, but Bennett himself was quite the mischievous sprite, full of humour, and what shines through above all is his determination to present the music he heard in his imagination to the very best standards.

These days, the music Bennett created through his combination of alchemy, musical brilliance and computer technology is largely presented by the Grit Orchestra, an eighty-strong ensemble of traditional, classical and jazz musicians. They fill large auditoriums, including Glasgow’s 13,000 capacity Hydro, with music whose details are still revealing themselves, possibly even to violinist Greg Lawson, the man who has orchestrated and conducts this ambitious celebration of Bennett’s work. Lawson actually predicted that he would orchestrate Bennett’s blend of tradition and electronica, and told this to Bennett himself. He delights in sharing Bennett’s poker-faced response: “Are ye, now?”

The post ‘Brave New Music – The Martyn Bennett Story’ first appeared on UK Jazz News.

Politeness meant I did not demur, but I should have. Appreciating music, except for a few infant savants, is learned, and learning more can surely deepen that appreciation. As with any other art, denying that cuts you off from pleasure you might enjoy.

Pianist and academic Bob Gluck wants to helps us learn more about Pat Metheny’s work and methods. When Gluck began playing many of the celebrated guitarist and bandleader’s compositions, he was drawn into investigating how they worked, and then analysed the writing and playing on a large sample of his recordings, as well as scores provided by the man himself. Along with a biographical sketch and some new interview reflections from Metheny and key bandmates, this makes short book a solid addition to the already extensive literature on an artist hugely popular in the jazz world and far beyond.

Gluck lays out a range of aspects of the music, in chapters distinguished by extremely detailed discussion of items from the vast Metheny oeuvre. His key idea, as the subtitle indicates, is music as a kind of story-telling. It’s a familiar notion, and one his subject has frequently alluded to. That can happen in a single solo, or an entire album-length composition, and there are examples of both. Metheny, as Gluck notes, uses story as “a metaphor for the dynamic unfolding of a musical work rather than a plotline”. The author, though, mainly has a different sense in mind, where the music conjures an actual story in the mind of an individual listener, perhaps prompted by some association of the title or other words that accompany a composition.

That approach is elaborated in the last chapter on “listening interpretively”, where he relates what comes to mind while attending to two long pieces, America Undefined and Is This America? (Katrina 2005).

Before then come chapters looking at motivic improvisation, on the sounds Metheny has conjured from his guitar and its various electronically enhanced derivatives, on the internal workings of the long-lived Pat Metheny Group, and on Metheny’s use of wordless vocals. The exposition here often gets pretty technical, and although Gluck begins with the hope the book can be a “listeners’ guide”, the musical analysis is often at a level more helpful for the professional reader. There are many points of interest for the lay listener, but it isn’t always clear how these investigations relate to the overall project of the book. Rather, Gluck seems to try a range of different approaches to getting under the surface of the music, to see what appears, then move on. All are illuminating in their way, though, even if they don’t necessarily fit together. There are plenty of interesting comments from Metheny himself, and colleagues such as Steve Rodby and Antonio Sánchez. And Gluck makes good use of older interviews. He includes this well-known remark from Pat on melody, which I’ve always thought especially revealing: “For me sound and the expression of sound is always about melody. To me melody appears in many different ways. Every conversation, every experience of walking down the street, every experience of hearing an aeroplane take off, trash cans falling down a flight of stairs, I perceive all of it as melody. This has become more and more acute as time has gone by. You can find melody any place that you look for it.”

Gluck quite rightly emphasises Metheny’s strength as a melodist, although the author doesn’t really pick up on this more expansive notion of melody. Rather, he is interested in the additional elements that enhance it. That’s a focus that results in occasional remarks of the sort that almost anyone who tries to write about music can be reduced to such as: “Melody alone, however, cannot sustain an extended work like ‘Imaginary Day’. A blend of rich and varied instrumental colors and attentive management of changing overall densities and dynamic levels are among the musical elements that add nuance to melody, harmony and rhythm, thus holding the interest of listeners across a lengthy work”. Pause on that, and find it fails to add to one’s understanding in two ways. It’s a statement of the obvious. And it applies to every worthwhile composer and arranger you can think of.

When he returns to musical unfolding as a key to narrative in his final chapter, Gluck takes the two pieces under discussion to be representations, in some imaginatively conceived sense, of aspects of American history. That didn’t work particularly for me. Nor, he concedes is there any special reason to think it should. He simply wants to demonstrate, I think, that the music has the capacity to prompt a narrative response if you let it, rather than suggest any such response is the “right” one.

All of which leaves an impression that Gluck has circled round the great problem of musical communication – why do we respond as we do to these abstract, non-representational sounds? – without solving it. That would be too much to expect, of course: it remains the mystery at the heart of music-making.

More personally, the book didn’t quite succeed in its other ambition. Gluck certainly induced me to listen to a slew of recordings I hadn’t attended to properly before. Alas, even with his generous commentaries, the main effect was to reinforce my existing bias. I love Pat the melodist, and Pat the improviser, especially when he is working with his peers in jazz – Gary Burton; Jaco Pastorius and Bob Moses; Roy Haynes and Dave Holland; Larry Grenadier and Bill Stewart; Ornette Coleman or Charlie Haden. But the sound world of the Pat Metheny Group, with its portentious orchestral synth backdrops and wordless vocals, is not somewhere I care to dwell. My personal reaction is stuck where it sat in the 1980s: the more of his preferred orchestral effects Metheny tries to achieve, the less appealing the music becomes. I’m glad to have been prompted to reconsider this by Gluck’s thoughtful exposition of how this side of his work is achieved. But it turns out I may be closer to agreeing with my visitor than I first thought.

The post ‘Pat Metheny – Stories beyond Words’ first appeared on UK Jazz News.

Congo Square and the bordellos of Storyville are frequently and superficially depicted as the places where jazz emerged; the Big Easy, writ large, is the city where a perceived ‘superior’ European classical music tradition (with its reliance on brass and stringed instrumentation and arrangements) becomes alloyed with the ‘native energy and rhythms’ of African musicians.

In less than 500 pages, however, Ben Barson compellingly retells the creation story of jazz, revealing a music which is inextricably bound up with the mass mobilisation of freed people during the Reconstruction era immediately following the end of the American Civil War.

Barson, a protégé of saxophonist Fred Ho, is a baritone saxophonist, recording artist and political activist, who received his PhD from the University of Pittsburgh, studying at the feet of the trailblazing jazz pianist and academic Geri Allen.

Currently an assistant professor at Bucknell University, Barson presents a thorough-going analysis of the ways in which the Haitian revolution became a powerful impetus for cultural and socio-political change in New Orleans, Louisiana, and an influence on the development of jazz.

Barson draws attention to the fact that Black musicians through their brass bands and musical performances were integral in resisting the oppressive forces of southern plantocracies, forming broad coalitions with local churches, trade unions and other civic groups and ultimately creating the basis of what he terms a ‘Brassroots Democracy’.

‘Maroon ecologies’ describe the communities and environments created by escaped enslaved Africans, known as Maroons, who fled plantations and settled in remote areas across the Americas. These communities were often located in generally inaccessible and inhospitable swamps, mountains and dense forests, providing natural defences against recapture, and where they could improvise a new, democratic political culture.

By the ‘Jazz Commons’ – and key to an understanding of the book – the author builds upon the important concept of the ‘Common Wind’ introduced by Julius Scott in his opus The Common Wind: Afro-American Currents in the Age of the Haitian Revolution, regarding an informal channel of information shared among African diasporic communities working in ships and on docks and ports in the US and Caribbean islands around the time of the Haitian Revolution. 

It should be remembered that Toussaint L’Ouverture, the former slave and astute military strategist, led a successful revolt in Saint-Domingue (now known as Haiti) in 1791. Haiti went on to win its independence from France in 1803, establishing the first ever republic in the New World created by former slaves.

However, the immediate ensuing years of that nation’s independence were marked by serious economic challenges; thousands of Haitians, including former slaves and other free people of colour were forced to flee the new republic with 90 percent of the refugees ending up in New Orleans. Historians suggest that by 1810, nearly 10,000 migrants arrived in the Crescent City, drawn by the city’s linguistic and cultural affinities to their own creole culture.

Barson foregrounds the work of the Martiniquan scholar, Edouard Glissant, in his examination of creolisation in the historical context of Haitian and African-American societies in Louisiana.

However, given his consideration of the broader cultural influence of the Caribbean islands, Barson may have missed an opportunity to include the work of creolisation theorists such as the Barbadian poet/historian, Edward ‘Kamau’ Braithwaite.

Importantly, though, Barson underscores the gendered nature of music-making in New Orleans with his chapter on Mamie Desdunes in the Neo Plantation: Legacies of Black Feminism among Storyville’s Blues People. He refers to the music of Mamie Desdunes, the sister of multi-instrumentalist Daniel Desdunes, who was herself an accomplished singer and pianist combining Haitian rhythms and storytelling traditions with the Blues in the late 1800s. Her work denounced the patriarchal sex industry she toiled in – the Storyville Red Light district.

The chapter concerning Dockworker activism and New Orleans Jazz provides a penetrating study of the ways in which musicians such as Jelly Roll Morton, Louis Armstrong, Willie Parker, Pops Foster and others, who spent a ‘significant part of their early lives loading and unloading cotton , tobacco, coal, and other commodities onto ships in the port of New Orleans’, helping the Big Easy to become one of the leading centres of capitalism in the American South. The chapter yields important insights into the role of New Orleans musicians and the Black Longshoremen’s Protective Union Benevolent Association in the early 20^th Century.

Barson’s broad historical sweep encompasses the integration of ecological and artistic concerns and a critical analysis of the way enslavers, the enslaved and the recently freed used and abused land within the context of the plantation model – giving way to a limited commune movement in Louisiana. In the chapter titled, Sowing Freedom: Abolitionist Agroecology in Afro-Louisiana, Barson draws on the story of a music instructor who is paid in yams.

Barson’s La Frontera Sonica chapter and its account of the Tio family who relocate from Louisiana to Veracruz, Mexico, is helpful in understanding the story behind what Jelly Roll Morton referred to as the ‘Spanish Tinge’ in his music – the influence of the habanera and tresillo rhythms of the Cuban Contradanza.

Well illustrated with a generous amount of archival photos and sheet music, ‘Brassroots Democracy’ provides a deeply engaging and fine-grained analysis of the early beginnings of jazz, revealing a music birthed in the crucible of resistance, which in the end offers a triumphant contribution to global culture.

The post Ben Barson – ‘Brassroots Democracy – Maroon Ecologies and the Jazz Commons’ first appeared on UK Jazz News.

So jazz journalism, such as it is, is mainly a part-time thing, a freelance thing, or a mostly unpaid thing – on blogs or local radio stations, or their more recent incarnations: substack newsletters and podcasts.

Happily, though, in the home of jazz, there are somehow enough people writing about it to keep the US Jazz Journalists Association going, with a membership of 200 or so for its 40-year existence. And this is their book.

Well, not all of them, though it does feel a bit like it. This large and somewhat haphazard collection has contributions from 90 writers and photographers. Writers answered a call to send in up to three favourite pieces, and one from each is presented here (we are not told if anyone didn’t make the cut, but with 67 articles I’m guessing the reviewers decided to be inclusive).

The result can properly be called an omnibus or, less politely, a miscellany. The pieces chosen were loosely organised into categories after selection, and are interspersed with some excellent black and white photos, mostly conventional musician portraits.

The book begins well, in a section headed Legends, with strong pieces by Ted Panken, writing behind the scenes of Sonny Rollins’ Carnegie Hall reunion with Roy Haynes in 2007, and Michael Jackson, interviewing Keith Jarrett at home for Downbeat some years after the pianist’s stroke. After that, the interest begins to flag a little. None of the other 65 pieces are actually bad. But plenty are, well, inconsequential. There are reviews of gigs and liner notes here, book extracts and reflections on venues, reappraisals of historical figures and encomia to new players. The coverage is wide, but it’s not exactly an overview of 21st century jazz. Your favourite player probably isn’t here. And if you’re not already committed to the music, I’m not sure this would entice you.

That feeling stays with this reviewer after doing my duty and reading all the pieces here, 600-odd pages worth, in order. More sensible people won’t do that, and for those who browse there are plenty of worthwhile things to dip into. Some, like Nate Chinen’s 2010 examination of Sun Ra’s career and later influence, Art Lange on Albert Ayler, or Ashley Kahn’s investigation of new jazz émigrés in Europe, are from expected names. There are plenty more from writers less well known.

Still, the collection as a whole lacks real sparkle. Is that a comment on the writers? Only partly. True, I don’t believe there’s anyone writing about jazz today who writes as well as, say, critics like Robert Hughes (art), Clive James (almost anything) or Martin Williams (back to jazz). But most of the writing here is fine – only a handful of pieces triggered my old sub-editor’s pencil twitch. However, criticism isn’t what jazz journalism is about, on the whole. Nor, to go by these pieces, is it usually about analysis or investigation. The default mode is promotional: not PR but usually something close to it. Jazz journalists are proselytisers, first and foremost.

This gives me a problem. I too like to accentuate the positive, as does this website. I hardly ever agree to review any music here that I don’t already know I like. Life is too short, and there’s far too much on offer, to dwell on stuff that seems poor, or even merely average. Other kinds of jazz are always available. There’s a permanent profusion of unheard music and it’s easy to decide just to highlight things people might otherwise miss that one is sure deserve their attention.

Yet reading a succession of pieces that are fuelled by pure enthusiasm grows wearing surprisingly quickly. Unless the writing is startlingly good, it’s hard not to just note inwardly, “here’s another good thing I could check out but probably won’t get round to’, and move on. Writers, I fear, know this, and respond by laying the praise on thicker. Many musicians here are visionary. All, it feels, were inspired by awesomely talented elders, worked hard, and achieved astounding levels of skill that allow them to deliver near-transcendental work.

And I’m sure they really are all doing great things. But exaggerating the virtues, when all you are really saying is either, “this is pretty good, of its kind”, or “if you like this kind of thing, then here’s something you’ll like”, risks falling into a journalistic rut.

I don’t have a solution to that problem, and as a listener avid for pointers to new music I wish more power to all in the JJA. But I’ll be keeping my e-copy of this book not just for the couple of dozen pieces of enduring interest, but also for some reminders of a writing register to avoid – unless, of course, something really is a work of genius.

The post ‘The Jazz Omnibus – 21st-Century Photos and Writings by Members of the Jazz Journalists Association’ first appeared on UK Jazz News.

Some of those in the vanguard never enjoyed that recognition, usually due to untimely death. Eric Dolphy, whose liquid flute, alto saxophone cry, or unprecedentedly agile bass clarinet adorned many key early ‘60s ensembles, is a prime example. In a music marked by many sad departures, Dolphy’s still stands out. He made his first recording as leader in 1960, and died just four years later, at 36, a few weeks after moving to Paris to cultivate his career in Europe.

Nonetheless, as Jonathon Grasse’s biography reaffirms, Dolphy was a pivotal figure at a time when jazz was exploring new musical territories at a pace probably unmatched before or since. Raised in Los Angeles, he was musically omnivorous from the start, studied assiduously, and played wherever he could. By the time he arrived in New York in 1959, after a spell playing chamber jazz with Chico Hamilton, he was formidably skilled and ready to interact with the larger scene there in its full breadth.

And interact he did. There were important stints with John Coltrane and Charles Mingus’s groups, landmark recordings with Oliver Nelson (Blues and the Abstract Truth), Coleman (Free Jazz), Andrew Hill (Point of Departure), Booker Little (Out Front), and George Russell (Ezz-thetics), and intense involvement with Gunther Schuller’s experimental third stream ensembles, trying to recombine elements from jazz and classical music.

Grasse chronicles all this efficiently. He’s a Dolphy devotee as well as a composer and ethnomusicologist at California State University and combines engaging enthusiasm for the music with a rigorous approach to his sources. That doesn’t lead to especially evocative writing – Eric Thacker’s commentary on Dolphy in The Essential Modern Jazz Records remains perhaps the best piece about him on my shelves – but does yield a detailed and clear account of the life and work.

There’s not too much new to say about the life, brief as it was, but the book presents a an illuminatingly exhaustive study of the work. Here Grasse has the advantage over Thacker that the murky history of jazz archives means a good deal of recorded music only became available relatively recently. The original releases from sets captured when Dolphy joined Coltrane’s quintet at the Village Vanguard in 1961 focussed mainly on the tenor player’s work, for example. The complete sessions, finally heard on CD in 1997, are revelatory, letting us hear Coltrane in lengthy live encounters with a horn player whose creativity matched his own. Resonance Records’ restoration of Dolphy’s own complete 1963 New York studio sessions in 2019 is another key document.

Grasse deals carefully with this material, and indeed with every other relevant release, unofficial or official, obscure or well known. The amount that survives is impressive, given the brevity of the career – the Mingus sextet’s tour of Europe in 1964 seems to have been recorded in almost every city they played in, for instance. So is the diversity of Dolphy’s contributions. As well as being a genuine multi-instrumentalist, with distinctly virtuosic approaches to flute, saxophone and bass clarinet, he was intent on investigating new forms and styles. His vital contributions to Schuller’s projects, which I suspect no-one much listens to now, also feature prominently here.

All this remarkable music, detailed comprehensively but not uncritically, deepens regret that we will never hear what Dolphy might have played in the next thirty or forty years. And it invites reappraisal of what he did achieve.

Our view of the 1960s avant garde has moved beyond hostile contemporary reactions – which tell us more about the critic than the music. Grasse quotes a slew of savage dismissals of Dolphy’s playing (as well as some positive ones) from Downbeat, but it’s salutary to find the same kind of thing prompted by his sole visit to the UK.

The Coltrane quintet with Dolphy were mostly enthusiastically received on their European tour in 1961 – but not, it appears in Britain, where they met largely with incomprehension. The Melody Maker’s verdict that Coltrane and Dolphy were contributing “extraneous noise” is trumped by the doltish comment from Benny Green in Jazz Journal that “The twelve-minute flute solo of Dolphy’s at the Gaumont State, Kilburn, represented the low water mark of jazz in this country”. (*)

Such reactions could support the claim in Grasse’s title that Dolphy was a revolutionary, but I’m not sure that’s quite right. He was certainly an incandescent talent, and a vastly influential one. The influence is diffuse partly because he was such a brilliant multi-instrumentalist. The future of each of his instruments was marked by his presence, but differently – Gary Giddins’ suggestion that Oliver Lake expanded on the vocabulary Dolphy created on alto sax, James Newton extended Dolphy’s flute and David Murray his bass clarinet seems apposite.

But a revolutionary? Grasse’s skillful and painstaking assembly of Dolphy’s achievements may not convince that’s the best term. Dolphy had a vast curiosity which he harnessed to discover new sounds, and heard harmony differently from most of his peers. But he cultivated a seriously playful attitude to the constraints of conventional tonality, rather than discarding them. And he brought out the same in others. Freddy Hubbard is a bit of a fish out of water on Coleman’s Free Jazz, for example, but contributes some of his finest soloing to Dolphy’s classic Out to Lunch session a few years later.

That curiosity also made Dolphy an inspired contributor to other people’s sessions. Grasse suggests a few times that he spent time on sideman gigs when a more receptive audience might have seen him out leading his own groups. Maybe so but, as Ted Gioia says, he was in many ways the perfect sideman because his skill set was so exceptional. And hear him, on B-flat clarinet for once, work with Ron Carter’s cello on Mal Waldron’s soothingly atmospheric Warm Canto from the pianist’s 1961 The Quest, and I fancy you’ll not feel you are listening to a revolutionary.

It’s another facet of his work that makes this extraordinary musician, like all the most interesting ones, hard to categorise. If not a revolutionary, what was he? Other labels usually sound a bit of a cop-out. Ronald Atkins, in Dave Gelly’s Masters of Jazz Saxophone, leads with Dolphy in the chapter entitled “Post-bop individualists”: which is accurate, but sensibly non-committal. We may grant author, or publisher, the right to go for something more arresting in the title when they’ve done such a good job on the book. But I’m with Atkins: what really distinguishes Dolphy’s lasting contribution is that, whether leading or lighting up someone else’s ensemble, he was expressing a unique musical personality, one Grasse helps us appreciate more deeply.

(*)To hear what prompted this putdown, you can sample the 1961 quintet’s session in a TV studio in Baden-Baden shortly after their visit to the UK . Dolphy plays flute on My Favourite Things, very likely similar solo feature to that attracted Green’s ire – YOUTUBE.

The post Jonathon Grasse: ‘Jazz Revolutionary – The life and music of Eric Dolphy’ first appeared on UK Jazz News.

Yet the decades spanned by these old and new names also saw many players who kept jazz alive inside the country, but whose stories were never visible to the wider world. Darius and Catherine Brubeck’s book recovers that history in rich detail.

They are uniquely placed to write it because Darius took up an appointment at the University of of KwaZulu-Natal in Durban 40 years ago. By the time he left, two decades later, he and Catherine – who worked mostly unpaid – had launched the first jazz studies course in the country and nurtured its growth into an established university centre that was ripe for handing over to South African teachers in the by now fully-enfranchised republic.

Their dual narrative is carefully put together from their own recollections, archive materials, and interviews with surviving students, colleagues, friends and fellow activists. Together they underline what a remarkable project they carried off.

Catherine was clearly crucial to the whole enterprise of establishing a jazz education centre in a milieux where the boundaries between jazz as creative art and as agitation were largely dissolved. But the public presence of the university’s effort relied heavily on her partner’s commitment to the university as the star recruited from the USA, and his willingness to take advantage of his world famous name.

Darius, the eldest child of Dave and Iola Brubeck, may be the best adjusted son of a legend you will ever come across. A musician first and foremost, he is almost relentlessly modest: “I never saw myself as an outstanding pianist. I know how to work with what I’ve got.” Lately, as UK audiences know, Darius in performance delivers classic tunes by his father, as well as his own compositions and pieces from South Africa. But musical prowess aside, he brought other outstanding qualities that served the political and cultural project of South African jazz. He and Cathy together evidently deployed a rare mix of diplomatic, administrative, organisational and entrepreneurial skills, along with a prodigious capacity for work, in service of a commitment to activism that was in line with Brubeck family values.

Different readers will take different things from this book. Your reviewer, as it happens, has launched new university courses in subjects new to institutions – possibly the only thing Darius Brubeck and I have in common – so I found it intriguing how much of the formal business, and the informal invention of ways of getting things done in a university in a colonised country, was familiar. But the context, of course, was radically different. This was a university in a period of political ferment, recruiting jazz students with few or no formal qualifications and usually no money, in a country where a campus concert or a night at a mixed race jazz club might proceed untroubled, but was equally likely to be broken up by police wielding whips, or worse. The round of politicking, committee work, fund-raising, finding places for students to live and getting them to abide by university routines, actual teaching, not to mention a continual pursuit of gigs as a showcase for the university and the course, never seemed to let up. Add overseas visits and eventually international tours for ensembles rooted in the university, and the workload must have been relentless.

All this in a place and time when a band booked for a gig could find it was suddenly down one player because a (white) musician had skipped the country to avoid service in South Africa’s National Defence force, or an application for a part-time teaching position might go:

Current or past employer: African National Congress
Type of Organisation: Liberation Movement
Position Held: Guerilla

But they held it all together against the odds, and many students, teachers, and students who became teachers, went on to flourishing careers in music and music education. All of them are remembered here, and much of the detail of gigs, venues, institutions, and personnel will mainly be of interest to readers in South Africa looking for a first-hand first draft of this history (the book was originally published in South Africa last year). There are also insights into players who gained fame internationally, like the rarely gifted Zim Ngqawana. His time as a student led to a deep and long-lasting friendship, albeit with reservations about his aspiration to become the guru of “Zimology”. Among his other attributes, Darius is a keen reader of character and, once read, his description of Zim in the 1990s learning to “turn on an air of aggrieved superiority just like Abdullah” (Ibrahim), whose band he had then joined, is unlikely to be forgotten.

Ibrahim is still with us, but Zim, like many of the others portrayed here, died prematurely. The book is a fitting memorial to all those the authors worked and lived with, and leaves one eager to hear the music that comes from this musically fascinating country in future.

The post Darius Brubeck and Catherine Brubeck: ‘Playing the Changes’ first appeared on UK Jazz News.

Fumi Tomita teaches jazz at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and was active as a bass player in the New York jazz scene for over fifteen years. His Early Jazz is a history of jazz from its nineteenth-century roots through to 1929, when the Swing Era began to emerge. It’s the first comprehensive history of early jazz since Gunther Schuller’s classic title from the 60s, and Tomita sees his book as in some ways an update of it. Unlike Schuller, Tomita fully embraces entertainment as well as art. Musicians covered include pioneering African American and white musicians but also entertainers or novelty performers, and American jazz musicians who introduced jazz on their travels round the world. Twenty songs are analyzed in depth, but – unlike with Schuller – no musical knowledge is required. The non-technical Listening Guide analysis includes such tracks as King Oliver’s Snake Rag, Frank Trumbauer’s Singin’ The Blues, and Lovie Austen’s Traveling Blues.

The book is an update of Schuller, the author says in an online interview, “in the sense that…the non-specialist could more easily digest the material.” Schuller’s book helped establish jazz as music worth studying, but Tomita wanted to draw on current research, such as Brian Harker’s work on Armstrong and his Hot Fives and Sevens. He avoids Schuller’s approach of using transcription, and presents early jazz as a combination of art and entertainment music: “that’s what jazz really is—sometimes it’s more art and other times it’s more entertainment and the jazz musician is capable of playing both.” He wanted to offer a corrective to jazz history in its traditional sense: “jazz history is not only male heavy, but also trumpet-saxophone-piano heavy!”

By email, Tomita explains that “Schuller was part of a group of writers who eventually succeeded in gaining respect for jazz – it’s now taught at colleges and universities and is represented in Washington, etc. Anything commercial might have threatened that agenda. Jazz was considered ‘low’ entertainment, so the thinking was to let the world know about the artistry of jazz improvisation (and composition). I think it is safe to talk about those things that were previously discarded.” He adds that, “I think those novelty sounds stayed in the music, as the idea of sounding like an individual player resonated very strongly from the bebop era – though musicians were now playing the instrument ‘properly’, no gaspipe clarinet or kazoo.”

Jazz developed out of the entertainment world of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Tomita argues – minstrelsy, circuses, carnivals and vaudeville: “There were no jazz clubs, it was just dance halls and you played for dancers…Relying on recordings only presents a skewed picture of the music.” He discusses the complex racial situation in New Orleans, arguing that white and black players learned from each other. “The most prominent white ethnic group in early jazz were Italians”, he explains. He describes the significant subgroup of Arbëreshë, descendants of Albanian refugees who came to Italy in the 15th century and who retained their language and religion, and also Afro-Italians.

The familiar names are discussed – Scott Joplin, Bessie Smith, Buddy Bolden, the ODJB, King Oliver, Jelly Roll Morton, James P Johnson, Armstrong, Ellington and others – but also many lesser known ones. For instance, Adrian Rollini is properly acknowledged as an unsung hero of early jazz. He used a baritone mouthpiece to improve the playability of his unwieldy bass saxophone, though he gradually discarded this instrument in favour of the vibraphone. The full range of Fats Waller’s achievement – including on his favourite instrument, the pipe organ – is explained. The Chicagoans are well-discussed. Frankie Trumbauer was one of the earliest saxophonists to dispense with the slap-tongue technique in favour of a legato one, Tomita explains.

I learned a lot from this book, which is succinct and well-written. For instance, Tomita convincingly compares Alberta Hunter and Bessie Smith, the latter having a “strongly African American character…from the church and blues…untouched by any white influence (p. 28). Buddy Bolden “was primarily an ear player, an approach that nurtured an interpretive manner of playing or reading music that spells improvisation” (p. 36). I didn’t realise that Ellington’s “Creole Love Call” is in fact King Oliver’s “Camp Meeting Blues” from 1923. And I had no idea that Paul Whiteman had nineteen orchestras working out of his office, that extended internationally with tours of Europe in 1923 and 1926. Tomita well describes Whiteman’s brand as “polite jazz” that had evolved from “crude” beginnings to become a “respectable” artform.

Tomita debunks the traditional history of scat – it had been practised by comedians for at least a decade before Armstrong dropped his sheet-music on “Heebie Jeebies”. Tomita stresses that Armstrong was an entertainer at heart, and never understood the acclaim given his Hot Five and Hot Seven recordings. The book is overall a very enjoyable read, and I hope that Tomita continues his Schuller-like progress – and indeed that, unlike his mentor, he eventually completes his history of jazz.

Publication date 2 August 2024
Buy / Pre-Order Early Jazz from Presto Music

The post Fumi Tomita – ‘Early Jazz: A Concise Introduction, from Its Beginnings through 1929’ first appeared on UK Jazz News.

His last concert was in 2012, but the memories linger on. Drury Lane in the 90s, along with Brecon, Bath and the Barbican, which became his latter day London home, were all stupendous. If Rollins is like this now, you thought, what was he like in his true pomp (although I’d argue that the pomp lasted for a good five decades of live performance, which was the art that Rollins excelled at above all else)? Never the creature of any one record label, Rollins’ recording career had inevitable ups and downs, but seen live, he was unimpeachably great. What, then, is he like as a writer, is the question raised by the publication of this relatively slim volume culled from voluminous journal entries, notes and drafts?

Well, it’s a puzzle. Rollins is a deep thinker, but not always a clear one and this is a book that is almost impossible to read chronologically, or perhaps even to read at all unless you are a saxophonist able to share the very recondite musicianly references relating to practice routines, embouchure and mouthpieces. A collection of apparently stand-alone aphorisms and recollected thoughts on a variety of subjects relating to his profession and interests, there are plenty of nuggets if you have the patience to look for them, but a lot of clinker too. If you keep at it, and dip in repeatedly to whatever takes your fancy, the effort does bring rewards.

Partly this must be the consequence of the way the book was written and put together. Arising out of a mighty archive which Rollins has left to New York Public Library and Harlem’s Schomburg Center, it comprises excerpts from Rollins’ collected journals, and entries originally intended for an uncompleted educational work on the saxophone. Rollins is a serious student of his instrument, of music and of philosophy, and everything he says testifies to an enquiring seeker’s and autodidact’s mind. He sets himself very high standard to live by and chides his own weaknesses and failings – repeated comments on overcoming an addiction to cigarettes may stand in for stronger stimulants too, although the volume is relatively silent on this subject. The emphasis on the sheer volume of work – the intense, monastic-like training in every aspect of mastering the saxophonist’s art – that went into making him the towering figure he became is also very moving.

The organisation of the material into four chronological sections by editor Sam Reese – a New Zealander who teaches at York St John University – helps to give at least some kind of shape to what can otherwise appear quite random entries, and it is the final section, ‘1970-2010: Legacy’ (surely too long a chronological marker?), where the very humble Rollins begins to give himself a little more slack, and to become more openly critical. “This government doesn’t give a damn about freedom for the people. It has nothing to do with freedom. It’s about power, it’s about money, it’s about racism and elitism and greed”, he writes, but what exact government he refers to isn’t clear. There’s also a wonderfully nostalgic list of favourite films, books and records, and a gently chiding letter to Michelle Obama thanking her for her hospitality at the White House and drawing her attention to the NEA’s dropping of its Jazz Masters programme. “For jazz music is not a fad”, he writes. “It has no beginning and it has no endings. I’m sure there are other expenditures which are important. But this is another important one.” In the end, as with his playing, it’s the indefatigable nature of Rollins’ search for meaning, for the right word, or the right note and musical phrase, and the warmth of his very human responses, that impresses. We shall not, one feels by the end, see his like again.

The post ‘The Notebooks of Sonny Rollins’ first appeared on UK Jazz News.

Searle’s personal encounters with jazz stretch back to the 1960s, and he has been writing about it for the Star for nigh on thirty years. His latest book collects short pieces, nearly all reviews of recordings or live shows, from the last decade or so. His combination of political commitment and aesthetic preference – which leans toward the freer varieties of jazz – produces a personal transect through the jazz landscape that features much of musical interest while raising a more general question.

That question, I suppose, is what does jazz stand for now? Smythe’s historical claim about its origins seems beyond dispute, but Searle is determinedly interested in what political inspiration the music can offer the contemporary listener. That depends on individual musicians, as well as audiences. His gentle probing of artists – he’s in the habit of talking to the players whose work he reviews – throws up a variety of possible answers.

There is music that is political in virtue of simply existing, as Smythe suggests. One might feel the same about the jazz played by South Africans in exile from Apartheid, for example. And there is new work that gets a Searle thumbs-up from explorers of Afro-Caribbean history who are explicitly political, like Wadada Leo Smith’s oratorio for Rosa Parks. When the words are not in the music, they can be offered alongside, as in Shabaka Hutchings’ scene-setting for Sons of Kemet’s My Queen is a Reptile, also quoted here: “your history is not pure, your empire is not whole, your conscience is not clean, your money was printed in blood…. Your Queen is not our Queen.”

Beyond that, perhaps the music has qualities that noted bassist Olie Brice celebrates, when he suggests in an interview with Searle that: “creating art contributes to making the world better, inspiring experiences that have not been mediated through capitalism and interacting in a way that challenges hierarchies, valuing art and some notion of truth, energy or spirit above money and readily packed culture. Engaging with this opens hearts and minds.”

That seems too general, though. As well say that worthwhile art is an act of radical optimism in the face of the human condition. Possibly true, but not much use as a clue to why an artwork is good or bad.

Is there then a political space for jazz somewhere in between these positions of explicit agitation or deep, oblique inspiration? If so, it’s marked, for some, by a democratic quality about group improvisation that has more general salience. As Mike Westbrook, who also introduces the book, puts it to Searle, “A jazz performance, with its balance between individual freedom of expression and collective responsibility, is always in a sense political.”

Well, let’s hope so. There’s plenty of other comment here to help the reader come to their own view – whether, for instance political radicalism promotes good music or (less likely, I fear) good music can help instigate political change. And although Searle highlights the possibility of political engagement whenever he can, he does not insist on it. When Andrew McCormack’s response to a question about his aims is, “It’s enough for me to deal with the musical ideas”, he does not demur.

In the end, it’s a book from a devoted listener and as a listener Searle is pretty astute. Descriptions of the recordings I have check out, and there are plenty more I’ve not heard that are enticingly presented. You can get a good sense of Searle priorities from the fact that the vast majority of the live reviews are from shows at London’s Cafe Oto or its Dalston neighbour The Vortex. Other venues are visited, but it’s the UK and visiting players who feature at those two who dominate the selection. Mark Sanders, the brilliant, ubiquitous, free-playing percussionist, appears in these pages more than any other musician.

The coverage is broad, though. Publishers Jazz in Britain have managed to squeeze several hundred short pieces between two covers. It’s a book to dip in to rather than read through as the pieces in bulk become somewhat formulaic, but Searle’s enthusiasm is undiminished throughout. He only occasionally falls into critical cliche, though there is some repetition: and Searle has definitely used his lifetime quota of the words “palaver” and “troubadour”.

Like any decent jazz book in the age of streaming, it’s also an invitation to listen anew. Jazz in Britain are packaging the paperback with a couple of CDs of previously unheard archive recordings from people Searle is particularly devoted to – John Stevens, Chris McGregor’s groups, Trevor Watts, Keith Tippett – though these items mostly date from much earlier than the music in the book. (TRACK LISTING BELOW)

No matter, as the more recent stuff – and the publishers manage to include several pieces from earlier this year in this collection – is readily available online. None of the many individual pieces take more than two or three minutes to read, but any of them could lead the curious to hours of satisfying listening. So a final caution: don’t be tempted to adopt this as a bedside book, unless you are prepared for chronic sleep deprivation.

Jon Turney writes about jazz, and other things, from Bristol

TRACK LISTING FOR THE ALBUMS

CD1
John Stevens Septet – BBC Jazz Club, 20 December 1965
Kenny Wheeler – flugelhorn; Chris Pyne – trombone; Ray Warleigh – alto sax; Alan Skidmore – tenor sax; Mike Pyne – piano; Ron Mathewson – bass; John Stevens – drums.:

1. Number Three (Pyne) 7:20
2. Sixes And Sevens (Wheeler) 7:08

Chris McGregor Group – BBC Jazz Scene, 13 August 1967
Mongezi Feza – trumpet; Dudu Pukwana – alto saxophone; Ronnie Beer – tenor saxophone; Chris McGregor – piano; Dave Holland – bass; Laurence Allan – drums

3. Sabendye Baye (McGregor) 0:35

Chris McGregor Group – Ronnie Scott’s, London, 31 December 1967
Mongezi Feza – trumpet; Pat Higgs – trumpet; Mick Collins – trumpet; Malcolm Griffiths – trombone; Chris Pyne – trombone; Jimmy Phillips – soprano saxophone; Dudu Pukwana – alto saxophone; Mike Osborne – alto saxophone; Ronnie Beer – tenor saxophone – John Surman – baritone saxophone; Chris McGregor – piano; Dave Holland – bass; Alan Jackson – drums

4. New Year Carnival (McGregor) 10:39

Chris McGregor Sextet – BBC Radio 3, 25 September 1968
Mongezi Feza – trumpet; Dudu Pukwana – alto sax; Ronnie Beer – tenor sax; Chris McGregor – piano; Dave Holland – bass; Louis Moholo – drums

5. Sun Song (McGregor) 7:45

Brotherhood Of Breath – BBC Jazz In Britain, 2 November 1970
Harry Beckett – trumpet, flugelhorn; Mongezi Feza – bamboo flute; Mark Charig – cornet; Malcolm Griffiths, Nick Evans – trombones; Dudu Pukwana – alto sax; Mike Osborne – alto sax, clarinet; Alan Skidmore – tenor, soprano sax; Ronnie Beer – bamboo flute; Chris McGregor – ballaphon; Harry Miller – bass; Louis Moholo – drums

6. Night Poem (McGregor) 16:24

Splinters – BBC Jazz Workshop, 28 December 1972
Kenny Wheeler – trumpet, flugelhorn; Trevor Watts – alto sax; Tubby Hayes – tenor sax, flute; Stan Tracey – piano; Jeff Clyne – bass; John Stevens – drums

7. Six Piece Group Improvisation 23:31

CD2
Trevor Watts – Rock Against Racism Festival, The Pig in Paradise, Hastings, late 1980
Trevor Watts – alto sax; Simon Picard – tenor sax; Colin McKenzie – bass guitar; Liam Genockey – kit drums; Nana Tsiboe – talking drum

1. Saalfelden Encore (Watts) 18:21

Bruce Turner Quartet – Jazz Against Racism, The Garage, Sloane Square, London, 1980
Bruce Turner – clarinet & alto sax; Michael Garrick – electric piano; Dave Green – bass; Alan Jackson – drums

2. How About You? (Lane/Freed) 9:51
3. Too Marvellous For Words (Mercer/Whiting) 10:04

Mujician – Live at The Albert, Bristol, 12 September 1993
Paul Dunmall – tenor sax; Keith Tippett – piano; Paul Rogers – bass; Tony Levin – drums

4. Live At The Albert (23:06)

Trevor Watts / Mark Sanders duo, 17 October 2019
Trevor Watts – alto & soprano sax; Mark Sanders – drums

5. Around the Corner 17:19

The post Chris Searle – ‘Talking the Groove (Jazz Words from the Morning Star)’ first appeared on UK Jazz News.