Mostly music

Tommy Williams - extraordinary, yet almost unknown.........

2012-01-23T21:04:00.007Z

Tommy Williams

"I hated to follow bass solos after Tom joined the band, because he could put horn players to shame."

Benny Golson

A couple of years ago I bought the complete Art Farmer-Benny Golson Jazztet - the Mosaic set. Like all Mosaic sets these were beautifully re-mastered with pristine sound, the package was a collector’s delight too, with beautiful photographs taken from the sessions. I’d heard some of the first recordings before, with the very young McCoy Tyner on piano, and of course Benny’s writing was always special. I had the good fortune to do a couple of tours with Benny about 10 years ago and to play his music night after night was such a thrill. It was like a hard-bop greatest hits show, except that I was playing the pieces with the guy who actually wrote everything! “Along Came Betty’, ‘Stablemates’, ‘Whisper Not’, ‘Blues March’, ‘I Remember Clifford’ etc – I had to keep pinching myself...... But one thing I now regret is not knowing about the bassist in one of the later editions of the Jazztet – Tommy Williams, because I could have asked Benny about him.

Before getting the Jazztet collection I had never heard of Tommy Williams, and as I listened through all the music on the CDs I was startled to hear an amazing bass solo on ‘Hi-Fly’, and then another on ‘2 Degrees East, Three Degrees West’ - and there were more. In fact there were a lot of bass solos, much more than one would normally hear on a hard-bop recording. With the exception of Paul Chambers, who was a celebrated soloist and got more leeway in the soloing department than most other bassists (probably because of the amount of solos Miles gave him), there might be one or two bass solos on a typical hard-bop recording, at most. But here was solo after solo – and what solos!

I looked at the personnel on the sleeve of the CD, expecting to see a name I’d recognise, but - Tommy Williams? I’d never heard of him, and of course went immediately to the internet and found almost no information on him there. On the liner notes to the Jazztet recordings Benny mentioned what a great soloist Williams was, but also said that his wife had hated the jazz life and had put pressure on him to give up playing, which he eventually did. The jazz life of those days was really rough, and I can imagine it must have been very difficult for a spouse to deal with – the absences, unsociable hours, prevalence of substance abuse and the small money. So no doubt Williams’ wife had her reasons for getting him to quit, but if these recordings are anything to go by the Williams’ domestic harmony was bought at the price of depriving the world of someone who would undoubtedly have become one of the great bassists in jazz.

The solos are extraordinary – in fact in terms of negotiating swinging hard-bop changes on the bass, Chambers is the only other bassist I can think of who gets around the instrument as agilely as Williams (though George Duvivier on his day could hold his own in any company). His playing is maybe a little less legato than Chambers’, but he uses more expressive nuance on the bass than PC – glissandos, drop-offs, a great variety of attack – all are used in the service of constructing swinging and totally convincing solos. And the walking is not too shabby either! Check out the virile walking line on ‘Hi-Fly’ - very special.

Apparently Williams went on to play with Stan Getz, on some of his Bossa recordings (what a difference to what he was doing with Golson!), and I’ve found him on a recording well known to trombonists - Great Kai and JJ - which apart from Kai Winding and JJ Johnson, also features a stellar rhythm section containing Bill Evans with either Paul Chambers and Roy Haynes (‘Blues and the Abstract Truth’ rhythm section!) or with Tommy Williams and Art Taylor. No doubt he’s on a few more things too – but not many. Such a shame, what a talent........

Here are a few of the bass solos from the Farmer-Golson album – I would encourage you to get the full set of these recordings, there’s so much great writing and playing on them.

I’m sure Mrs Williams was happy to have her husband leave the jazz life. I’m equally sure we would have been happy had he stayed.........

Tommy Williams

'Hands', Concerto for Electric Guitar and Orchestra - Premiere and Video Diary

2012-01-07T07:01:00.013Z

Rick Peckham

Next week sees the culmination of a year’s work – the premiere of ’Hands’ my new concerto for electric guitar and orchestra which will be performed by the RTE National Symphony Orchestra with the great American guitarist Rick Peckham This will be the fifth piece I’ve written for symphony orchestra and the third concerto, (the other two were for violin and piano respectively), and hopefully I’m getting better at it!

I remember the first piece I wrote for the orchestra in 1994 and the incredibly gauche orchestration gaffes I made (what, string players need to have bowings written in!?) and how I sat up all night after the first rehearsal adding in hundreds of dynamic markings and slurs and bowings in an effort to a) not be as humiliated as I was the day before, and b) to get closer to what I was hearing in my head. I’ve never had any formal training in orchestral writing or composition and I’ve learned on the job, in the same way as I did in the jazz world. But discovering things by trial and error is often a deeper experience than having someone show you something – the act of discovery seems to deepen the experience, one is actively learning rather than passively receiving. Having said that I wouldn’t have minded receiving some basic orchestration lessons and being spared the agony of that first orchestral rehearsal!

In music, (by necessity rather than desire), I’ve always been an autodidact and have had to figure out different ways to get to where I wanted to go in terms of musical knowledge, technique etc. In the case of orchestral music, courtesy of my father who raised us all in an environment of great music, I am very familiar with the classical tradition and how an orchestra should sound, but I had no idea how to achieve those sounds. So I read some orchestration books, including the wonderful ’Orchestral Technique’, by Gordon Jacob, a crash course in orchestration in less than 100 pages recommended to me by Noel Kelehan, a great Irish jazz pianist and arranger, in response to my cry for help upon receiving my first orchestral commission and realising that if I was to keep the money I’d actually have to write some orchestral music...... I also checked out some orchestral scores, studying them closely while listening to the recordings, and making notes in a little book in which I would reference things that particularly caught my ear, and note the place they occurred in the score so that I could access this information later.

Over the years my orchestral writing has become more confident and competent and I don’t worry so much about orchestration any more, but relish the opportunity to work with that Rolls Royce of the musical world - the symphony orchestra. On setting out to write this new piece I decided to keep a series of video diaries of the process and make them available to anyone who might be interested.

Here is the first episode in which I describe my way of working and my plans (and hopes) for the piece

My first step of the actual writing of the piece took place in March last at the beautiful Tyrone Guthrie Centre, an artist’s retreat in Ireland where I was able to work for a week, undisturbed by everyday life. As you can see from this episode of the video diary, I met with both success and difficulties...........

One skill I've never aquired is conducting, and even if I had, I don’t think I would have got it to the level of being able to conduct a symphony orchestra. And of course the conductor is such a vital part of the interpretation of a symphonic piece and speaking as a composer, a conductor can make or break you when it comes to having your orchestral piece performed. With my pieces, rhythm and feel are vitally important, and getting 90 musicians to play together with a particular rhythmic feel, or even cohesiveness, are among the hardest things to achieve with an orchestra. To have any chance, you definitely need the right guy on the conductor’s podium.

So I was lucky to have the wonderful Scott Stroman to conduct the piece. Scott is adept in both jazz and classical idioms and is vastly experienced as both a conductor and composer. I know Scott very well too, so I was able to look forward to the performance of the piece without the necessity of that first meeting with an unknown conductor where you find out if the he (or she) ‘gets’ what you’re trying to do. In June I was working with Scott in London and took the opportunity to meet him and have a chat about the piece.

Later in the same month, I did an interview with the Contemporary Music Centre in Dublin and talked in a more general way about composition. You can see the interview here

In August I was in Boston and met the soloist Rick Peckham at his home, and we talked pedals and general guitaristic stuff.

As the final interview in the series, I met some of the orchestral players who would be playing the piece. Oftentimes in classical composition, the orchestra is seen by the composers as some kind of impersonal machine whose job it is to reproduce what the composer hears, but of course an orchestra is comprised of individuals too and it makes sense to talk to them about what they like or don’t like when playing new music. We had a really great chat and I hope we can do it again soon.

The piece itself comes in at around 20 minutes, is in three movements, and has an improvised cadenza that will connect the first and second movements, as well as some spaces for improvisation for the guitar in the first movement. I know Rick's been experimenting with different sounds for the piece, so I'm really looking forward to hear what he comes up with.

We have two performances of it next week - an incredible luxury - a kind of workshop/preview on Tuesday (17th) at lunchtime at the National Concert Hall in Dublin and the official world premiere on the following Friday as part of the full symphony concert, alongside music by John Adams and Shostakovitch - no pressure then!

Here's the final segment of the video diary - I hope some of you who are in Dublin can make it to one of the performances

Thanks and Happy New Year!

2011-12-31T11:32:00.005Z

Another year - hard to believe but there it is. I note from my statistics that I wrote 27 blog posts this year, and that four of those make it into the top 10 of most-read posts since the blog started. It was an interesting blogging year on a personal level, though not always pleasant. I had my first taste of an internet troll, and saw what it can mean to put your head above the parapet regarding jazz politics. Jazz blogs in general experienced some serious firestorms in the past year, and I must say this kind of back and forth abuse by people who are supposed to be discussing important things is something I have no time for. It cheapens everything, gets nobody anywhere and only serves to demean the arguments and demeans the people whose means of debate consists of abusing anyone foolish enough to take a contrary opinion.

I was particularly sorry to see an appalling example of this type of ‘debate’ erupt on a respected musician’s blog and he (the respected musician) doing nothing to moderate what was going on. When comments to a blog include threats of physical violence between the protagonists the blog itself becomes pointless. We can get that kind of stuff in the comments to any Youtube video, we don’t need it in what should be an enlightening discussion of jazz and the problems and challenges it faces. Hopefully there will be less of that in 2012 and more discussion of the musicians and the music........

Rick Peckham

For myself, the next big thing on the horizon will be the premiere in January of ‘Hands”, my Concerto for Electric Guitar and Orchestra, which will be performed by the great guitarist Rick Peckham. I’ve been doing a series of video diaries about this in Youtube and I’ll post something about that very soon. I’ll also be posting my long-delayed interview with Steve Coleman on the subject of rhythm. It’s embarrassing how long it’s taken me to get this out there, but it was a huge interview and I kept falling off the horse in terms of the transcription of it. But it’s almost ready to go now and I’ll have it up very soon.

And doubtless there will be other things that will inspire me to put electronic pen to electronic paper, (European jazz is on my radar......), as the year progresses. But for now I would like to thank everyone who took the time to read the blog and a special thanks to those of you who commented - I appreciate it all.

Best wishes to everyone for 2012 – let’s hope it’s a good one for the music.

A Closed Book?

2011-12-23T03:55:00.003Z

Sitting here in Bangkok yesterday, having a coffee in a café, surrounded by schoolkids who were post-school giddy - laughing, joking, punching each other (the boys), giggling behind their hands in conclaves (the girls) and of course brandishing, looking at, talking into and flourishing their mobile phones. In short, a normal contemporary urban scene - except for one thing. There sitting at a table, on his own, was a kid.......... reading a book!

It was only when I saw this kid reading that I realised what a rare sight it is these days to see someone in a café reading. Not just kids - anyone. The mobile phone is the contemporary accompaniment-du-jour to a coffee break, popping a book in your bag to have with you for commuting, or coffee break purposes has gone the way of the fax machine. Upon sitting down in a café most people these days take their phone out of their bag or pocket, and start the prodding and poking. It's funny how subtly things can change around you and you don't even notice it.

The classical pianist Jeremy Denk has a very interesting post concerning another change in our habits - our greater love of the content delivery systems we use over the actual content itself. You can see it here

A Musical Week in Paris

2011-12-10T18:20:00.030Z

‘Paris! Paree! What pictures of gaiety those two cities conjure up..........’ As Spike Milligan said – and he was right, at least about the city conjuring many images. Paris is truly a great city and probably the city with the most stereotypes applied to it – but as is so often the case, there are kernels of truth in the Parisian stereotypes, it is a physically beautiful city, it has lots of art and culture in it, it is full of great food. I’ve always enjoyed being there and is probably the city I’ve visited the most over the years, both as a musician and also simply being a tourist. Recently I got an opportunity to spend a musical week there involving three different activities, teaching, rehearsing and performing – an opportunity I grabbed with both hands.

Sometimes things work out really well and this opportunity to visit Paris was one of those times – the great bassist and head of the jazz programme at the Paris Conservatoire Riccardo Del Fra contacted me and asked me to to come and teach at the Conservatoire for three days, and then shortly after that I got a call from the wonderful Sheila Pratshke, director of the Centre Culturel Irlandais asking me would I be interested in performing at the Jazzy Colors Festival in Paris towards the end of the same week. Taking advantage of being there for these two events, I managed to hook up a third, a long-discussed chance to try out some new music with three great French musicians – the altoist Stéphane Payen, the violinist Dominique Pifarély and the drummer Christophe Lavergne.

But first up was the three-day stint at the Conservatoire – I arrived on a Sunday and had a fantastic dinner courtesy of Riccardo at the Au Boeuf Couronné, one of the last restaurants remaining from the era when the area (which includes the Conservatoire) was the main meat market of Paris. Needless to say they specialise in meat, and equally needless to say they really know how to prepare and serve it. A wonderful meal with good company and a great, and very Parisian way to start the week.

And a fun three days with the students it was too. As one would expect from such a famous school, the playing level of the students is very high. I was working with students from both the BA and Masters programmes, and all of them were very good, all playing at an international professional level (at least technically), and a pleasure to work with. The nice thing about working with young musicians who play at this level is that you can really talk about interesting conceptual and aesthetic things instead of just technical issues. I was there principally to do my rhythm thing – talking about how to develop your rhythmic technique, your time, odd metres, metric modulation etc. etc. - the thing I’ve been doing for years now and am perhaps best known for. So we did some work on that and I gave them some exercises for working with rhythm that are both very simple and also very difficult to do well. There’s a big difference between simple and easy, and often the simplest things are the hardest, (try playing a REALLY slow walking bass line over changes!). If your rhythm in general, and time-feel in particular, is not good, then even if you can play Giant Steps in every key at 360BPM, you’ll still sound terrible.

(At the Conservatoire, if you were ever in any doubt as to the fact that you are in a heavyweight classical school, the names of the rooms will soon set you straight....)

But apart from talking to the students about rhythm we also got to talk a lot about the ‘why’ of what we do. I feel that jazz schools tend to spend their entire focus on how to do everything, but rarely discuss the whys – why should be play this music? Is it important to play this music? If so, to whom? Us? Society? What artistic responsibility do we have? What are we trying to express? Is it important to be different? Should we be trying to innovate? What is our relationship to the audience? Do we have a responsibility to them, or is our primary artistic responsibility to ourselves? What should we be thinking about when the inevitable decision has to be made between playing this music or moving into a more commercial area of the business?

This kind of philosophical discussion is an important one to have with young musicians and particularly important when you’re talking to very talented and highly skilled musicians such as the ones I was working with in the Conservatoire, who are on the cusp of becoming professionals. The students were not only fine players, but great too in terms of their personal attitude, and we had a very nice time working together over the period I was there.

On the Monday I got a Facebook message from my friend Marcelo Coelho in Brazil – I had posted the fact that I was in Paris on FB, and he wrote to let me know that the unique Hermeto Pascoal would be playing in Paris that night. Sometimes the internet is really an amazing invention – a Brazilian guy in Sao Paulo sends a message to an Irish guy who happens to be in Paris for a few days to let him know that there’s a concert he really should go an see while there. You get used to the internet but every now and again you (or at least I) shake your head at the extraordinary things it can do!

So, tickets bought courtesy of Stéphane, he and I set off to see Hermeto that evening. Hermeto was playing at the renowned New Morning club with his ‘Grupo’ a band consisting of a saxophonist, bassist (the great Itabere Zwarg), percussionist, drummer, vocalist, and Hermeto himself on various instruments. As always, the guy is a phenomenon – if you don’t know his music (and you should!), I can say that’s it totally unique, complex yet joyous, brilliantly structured, with a unique sense of harmony, great sing-able melodies and killer rhythms, derived from Brazilian music yet rarely conventional. If you want to hear the kind of thing we heard have a listen to this

This was the second time I’d seen Hermeto and though his genius is undiminished (he did a call/response thing with the audience of over a set of moving changes that was unbelievable in terms of his ability to hear ahead and know what was going to work over the upcoming changes by the time the audience was singing their part), I did notice that he played much less than normal, only took a couple of solos and when he played those solos, the formerly fearsome technique had become ragged. So I’m not sure if he just wasn’t well that night, or whether it’s more a thing related with his age (he is 75 after all!), but it was strange to see this musical dynamo be quite subdued, by his standards at least. But still, the music was fantastic, the band was killing and vibe was as always, joyful and wonderful – I always feel that when you see Hermeto, you’re seeing music the way it should be played, as part of the life-force.

Three very satisfying days at the Conservatoire and then it was on to the next part of the trip – putting together some new music with Stéphane, Dominique and Christophe. Stéphane, Christophe and I had played before and enjoyed the experience very much, and I had played a couple of times with Dominique in a project called Simulacrum a few years previously. I had talked frequently with both Christophe and Dominique about playing together again and my stay in Paris gave us the opportunity to do this.

The music was written by Stéphane and I, and we were just trying out material to see what would work, with a view to developing it further later. It's such a luxury to be able to spend time playing through music without having a specific performance in mind - you can try things out, change things, develop things and have the luxury of time - the one commodity (apart from money...) that's in really short supply in the professional music world.

Stéphane's music and mine is quite different, but compatible. The one common denominator that both musics would have is the extensive use of rhythm as compositional and improvisational devices. Stéphane's pieces tend to be shorter than mine but each section of his pieces usually are capable of being played in several different ways and the music evolves through these variants. Mine tend to be longer and maybe more prescriptive in terms of what goes on - or at least the order of what goes on. But I think the music we both write complement each other and you can hear that we both operate in a similar musical aesthetic. As I mentioned previously Stéphane, Christophe and I had played as a trio before but adding the violin gave the music a whole other sound - the blending of the alto and violin creates a very nice sound, light and flexible. And Dominique is such a great player, easily able to negotiate the rhythmic complexities of the music and immediately understands the conceptual ideas underpinning the pieces.

(Christophe Lavergne)

We rehearsed in an industrial space that some Parisian musicians rent between them - a great idea to have a space like that where you can go and rehearse whenever you need to. So, we worked on the music over a two day period and got a good feeling as to how we could progress it - that was the easy part,now for the more difficult one - getting some gigs and recording!

We don't have any recordings yet of the quartet but here is an example of the trio in action from a couple of years ago......... For music by the quartet - watch this space!

So, the final act in this musical week was the concert at the Irish cultural centre, and on Friday the members of my own group - Michael, Matt and Chris - arrived. I met up with them after the final rehearsal with my French colleagues and we went out for dinner, enjoying the vibrant Parisian eating-out-on-a-Friday vibe. Earlier we'd had a look at the room we'd be playing in and decided that there was no need to get everything set up until late on the following afternoon, which meant a free morning to have a walk around Paris and enjoy the atmosphere and take in the physical beauty of the city. This we duly did, walking around the St Germain district (which,it being November, wasn't too crowded with tourists), and even spending some time in Notre Dame - something I'd never done before even though I've been in Paris so many times.

Chris, Matt and Michael take in the sights.......

The gig that evening was in the Centre, a beautiful building which has a history going back hundreds of years.

I'd played here a couple of times before, in duo with Stéphane and also with the amazing Nguyen Le. It's a wonderful place to play - right in the middle of Paris (near the Pantheon) yet has a tranquil almost isolated feeling. The Centre hosts artists of various kinds, mostly Irish, doing residencies in Paris and there are certainly worse spots you could be in....

And worse places to play too! This gig was far from the poky over-priced Parisian jazz club-type venue - it was in a very nice room at the Centre that had previously hosted an art exhibition. We had to do the usual checking of the acoustic to make sure it wasn't too reverberant and we were pleasantly surprised by the warmth of the sound - often these old buildings can be a bit cavernous and boomy. We did a quick check of the sound, went back to our rooms to change (what a luxury to be staying in the same place we were playing..) and then it was time to play.

And unusually for a jazz gig these days, it was packed. So packed that they had to bring in extra seating - usually they're taking the seating out! So it was really nice to play to a full house and an appreciative audience. The music went well too - we'd done a few warm-up gigs in Dublin in the preceding weeks and this really helped with knowing the music and being able it confidently and feel loose and creative. The audience were terrific, the sound had changed a lot since the soundcheck (it's amazing how much different full room sounds in comparison to an empty one), and we had to alter things a little, but once we got that going everything was fine and we, and I think the audience, had a lot of fun.

Here's our last piece from the evening - a piece of mine (very) loosely based on Scrapple from the Apple'

We played one long set, plus an encore, packed up our stuff and headed out for a late dinner - more great food, more great company.

And that was it - a great week for me, lots of good music, working with talented students, seeing one of music's great geniuses live again, exploring new music with wonderful musicians, playing with my own band to a full house, lots of good food, some great conversations........... Sometimes being a musician can be OK.

Here's to the next time......

Swinging with John and Joey

2011-12-05T13:58:00.004Z

I was tidying my attic music room (just a little, it’s still a shambles) and I came across this video that I’d completely forgotten that I had. It’s from a tour I did in Ireland in 2008 with Michael Buckley, John Abercrombie and Joey Baron. I remember I stuck up a camera behind the sound desk at the Belfast gig and let it run. It’s always interesting to listen to music that you were involved with but can’t remember the details of, and this was the case for me with this clip. I haven’t checked out the rest of the recording, but I’m definitely going to – this tune feels so good!

This was a trio piece – a lovely tune of John’s called ‘Jazz Folk’, and it swings along really nicely. One thing I do remember about this is that we played it in the second set – we had to cut the first set short because one of the guitar amps had malfunctioned, and I remember John being really annoyed about it. Years of using what he describes as ‘amp du jour’ has made him weary of getting either the wrong kind of amps or getting ones, like this one, that didn’t work properly. So during the intermission he was quite pissed off and when we took to the stage for the second set the vibe definitely was a bit on the wrong side of enthusiastic.... But Joey kind of took over and just vibed us back into good spirits, both in the way he played and with audible shouts of encouragement – it was really something to see the way his infectious joy at playing music just steamrollered over the difficulties we’d had and the bad vibes that had resulted. He dragged us along by the scruff of the neck and soon everyone was smiling again. You can clearly see Joey’s amazing spirit in the video.

And check out Joey’s incredible swing feel too – the brush playing, the power of his quarter note. Joey is well known for his playing at the cutting edge of contemporary jazz (Masada, Tongue in Grove, Dave Douglas etc.) but I think a lot of young drummers could learn a lot from looking at this and seeing how great he is at playing in the swing tradition over song form. It’s an object lesson in being aware of where this music comes from and being able to really deal with the skills involved in swing playing over structure. Also this is a masterclass in how a drummer can orchestrate a ‘slow burn’ - the way Joey almost imperceptibly turns up the gas over several choruses is a classic example of this concept.

And of course John is his unique self – lyrical, individual, non-clichéd – every phrase flowing from the last with wonderful musical logic and improvisational virtuosity. And ‘Jazz Folk’ is yet another in the long list of lyrical songs (‘Labor Day’, ‘Even Steven’ etc) that John has written – lovely miniatures that stick in your musical memory hours after the music has finished.

I must have a look and see what else I can dig up from this gig – looks like it was a good one! You can see more from the tour – Here and Here

Now to get back to cleaning the attic...........

You Don't Know What You've Got Till It's Gone.......

2011-11-28T10:22:00.002Z

The passing of Paul Motian has again shown the truth in the adage that you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone.......... And reading the outpouring of tributes to Motian it struck me again what a shame it is that we don’t celebrate great people enough while they’re still around. Despite all the evidence to the contrary we seem to persevere in the belief that these people are immortal and will always be with us. Since his death, there have been been wonderful anecdotes about Motian from people who knew him – would it be so bad to hear all these kinds of anecdotes about great players while they’re still around? I definitely feel I’ve got a more rounded picture of Motian the man since his colleagues and friends spoke so honestly about him and how they felt about him.

There is little need for me to add more to the accolades that have been made about his playing – he was a truly great jazz drummer and musician and hugely influential, and we are lucky that he was so prolific in his performing and recording right up to the end. So instead of adding anything specific myself I would like to point you in the direction of some great online postings about Paul Motian:

Peter Hum invited musicians to speak about their personal experiences of Motian here

Ted Panken republished a wonderful interview with Motian here

And Canadian drummer Ted Warren wrote beautifully about what we can learn from Motian’s life and career here

And finally, something appropriate...........

Let's try and get the Mingus film made!

2011-11-18T11:29:00.004Z

Despite how it may seem from the availability of everything on Youtube, jazz is scandalously underrepresented in the field of serious documentaries. Yes, there are good films on Monk, Miles, Coltrane etc. but in comparison to other genres such as classical music or rock, good jazz documentaries are thin on the ground. Kevin Mingus, grandson of one of the true greats of jazz - Charles Mingus - is trying to redress that balance a little by making a film about the legendary bassist and composer.

He's trying to get it funded to the tune of €45,000 - a laughably small amount by documentary standards, but a daunting amount in the face of the realities of the economics of the jazz world. He's trying to get it funded through the Kickstarter website - you can go to the site and pledge some money to this very worthy and historically important project here.

Here is the Kickstarter video - this whole project looks great, let's try and help make it happen!

On The Road with Lieb

2011-10-30T08:27:00.029Z

It’s been my privilege to know Dave Liebman for over twenty five years. Of course I’ve known him from his recordings long before that - ‘Lookout Farm’ on the Horizon label, the legendary burning and swinging solo on ‘I Concentrate On You’ from The Opal Hearted Aborigine, his passionate and intelligent playing on Steve Swallow’s “Home” album, and the incendiary playing on Elvin’s ‘Live At The Lighthouse’. Of course he was also well known for his work with Miles, but I didn’t get to know those recordings till later. I first met him in person when I attended the Banff Jazz Workshop as a student in 1986. Dave was a member of an extraordinary faculty that was led by Dave Holland, and he made a huge impression on me as a teacher, a philosopher about the music and life, and was (and is), the embodiment of someone who has devoted their lives to the playing and teaching of jazz, and of living a life at the highest level of creative music.

I got to know Dave at the workshop and I played with him for the first time the following year, (a memorable gig with Sonny Fortune, Richie Beirach and Billy Hart, with me hanging on for dear life!), and recorded with him for the first time in 1989 with the Guilfoyle/Nielsen Trio, a group that developed a long term playing relationship with Dave and with whom we toured in Europe and Australia and made two recordings. Since then I’ve played with Dave on many occasions, recorded with him, taught with him, worked with him on the International Association of Schools of Jazz annual meeting, got to know his great family, and generally hung out with him and discussed life, music, and the universe on innumerable occasions. So it was with great pleasure that I welcomed him back to Ireland for a short tour this past October – this is an account of what we did........

The tour was built around three trio gigs, with the addition of the great young Finnish drummer Jussi Lehtonen. I was lucky to get Jussi, he had come in at quite short notice when the original drummer (who shall be nameless) did the unpardonable thing of double-booking himself, leaving me with a headache as how to get a suitable drummer at such short notice, and him (the original drummer) with the reality of never being called again.......

I had played with Jussi before and always enjoyed it, and we had recently hooked up again briefly at the IASJ Meeting in Sao Paulo and had fun playing. And I knew Jussi’s great feel, intensity and sense of spontaneity would be ideal for this gig. Because this gig was based around open playing – I hesitate to use the term ‘free playing’ because like any musical term to describe a style of playing it can have so many different meanings to different people. I’d done this type of thing with Dave before with different drummers (Jim Black, Tom Rainey, Nasheet Waits a.o.) and it’s always been so much fun. It was Dave’s idea – he’d heard me play some of my original music, which involved a lot of complex rhythmic elements, and had suggested playing in trio with that complex rhythmic vibe, but no pre-arranged music – free but rhythmic. ‘I want to play that hula-dula shit, but I don’t want to rehearse!’ was Dave’s hilarious and memorable phrase when he made the initial suggestion. So that was the (very loose) plan for the gigs.

Dave arrived early from NY, I picked him up at the airport, drove to the hotel, he checked in and then we hung out for a while catching up – Lieb has amazing energy and stamina – there he was after a transatlantic flight, and despite having a full schedule ahead of him, choosing to hang and chew the fat rather than go striaght to bed and rest. Eventually he went to bed and later I picked him up, we had lunch and then he did a saxophone masterclass at the school before we headed off for the soundcheck at Whelan’s - a famous Dublin live music venue where I’d played with Dave several times before. So many soundchecks these days become surrogate rehearsals due to the lack of proper rehearsal time before the gigs – but because of the format we’d be playing in there was nothing to rehearse – a very liberating feeling. Tom Rainey once said to me that the four most important words at a soundcheck are ‘sounds great, let’s eat’ - and this was one of those mercifully quick soundchecks.

The gig itself was packed and was musically great. In some jazz quarters playing open or ‘free’ is still considered to be a cop-out, as if it’s easier somehow than playing changes. But playing good music has everything to do with imagination, creativity, experience and attitude and nothing to do with the format you choose to express yourself in. Playing open is hard – to do it well and make good music you have to be listening all the time and creating your own structures in real time. When you’re playing changes (which is not easy either....) you at least have the song form as a prefabricated structure to base your improvisations on – with open playing those structures have to be put together on the spot.

For me, I find this kind of playing calls upon certain aspects of my decision making processes that are not called into play as much in song-form playing. You’re constantly called upon to decide when to play and when not to play, when to go with the flow of the others or when to go in the opposite direction, when to follow and when to lead, when to start something and when to let somebody else start something, when to reinforce the direction and vibe of what’s going on and when to suggest possible other directions and vibes. Everyone in the band needs to have this decision making ability and be open to both leading and following, directing and complementing. Just having one guy in the band who is not in sympathy with this concept will destroy the whole thing. But on this occasion, with this group of musicians, everyone was on the same page aesthetically and so the music took off from the word go.

Myself, Michael Buckley (flute), and Jussi Lehtonen at Whelan's

We played the first set in the trio format, and then in the second set Dave invited two musicians to join us – the saxophonist Michael Buckley, and my son Chris, who’s a guitarist. Michael is a really great saxophonist and has played with Lieb before – he makes a perfect foil for Dave, has a fantastic sense of when to play and when not to, plays the shit out of the horn (to use a technical term), and is a wonderful improviser. He’s also that very rare animal – a truly great jazz flute player. Dave always enjoys playing with him, has taken him on tour with him, and always invites him to sit in whenever he plays in Dublin.

Chris is just starting out in the professional jazz world, though of course he’s been around the music all his life and is now starting to make his way on the scene. He spent a week in August with Dave at his chromatic harmony workshop and Lieb invited him to sit in on the Dublin gig. I was confident that he’d be OK being thrown in at the deep end like this – I knew how he plays, and also knew that Lieb wouldn’t invite him to play unless he felt he was ready for it. And the music turned out even better than expected, with the five of us really gelling from the word go – here’s a flavour of it, taken from the last section of the concert – a real, old fashioned improvised burn-out!

The next day featured a workshop at the school and a very different kind of concert. The concert took the form of a talk by Dave on his time with Miles – this year is the 20th anniversary of the death of Miles and I took the opportunity to set up an evening where Dave would talk about his experiences with Miles in a kind of illustrated lecture – I’d seen Dave do a similar thing on Coltrane a few years earlier and knew he was an entertaining and erudite public speaker, well capable of communicating with members of the general public, towards whom this event was aimed. The music would be provided by Dave playing with Trilogue, my improvising chamber trio featuring two wonderful musicians – the vocalist Sarah Buechi and the pianist
Izumi Kimura

I had done two arrangements – one of ‘Blue in Green’ with seriously altered harmony (in tribute to Dave’s ground breaking work in this area), and ‘Half Nelson’ a piece from the 50s with similar changes to ‘Ladybird’. I radically altered this piece so that the changes would only occur at the end, before that the improv was based off fragments of the melody and allowed Sarah and Izumi to do duo improvisations with Dave, before he and I took over and played the changes and took the head out in conventional manner. We ran the pieces down and Lieb suggested a few changes to my arrangements, all of which worked, and we knew it would be fine. But before the gig Dave had another thing to do – a workshop for the teachers at my school.

Usually workshops and clinics are always aimed at students, but I think it’s a great idea to occasionally have pedagogical workshops that give the teachers something to think and talk about. And there’s nobody more qualified to talk about pedagogy than Dave who’s both a great teacher and also a great believer in the importance of jazz education. He’s the founder and Artistic Director of the International Association of Schools of Jazz and a real force in education. So who better to talk to the teachers than him? It was a very valuable experience for all concerned – Lieb covered many different topics about the philosophy of education, too many to go into here, but here’s a flavour of it – in this clip Dave is talking about the importance of keeping in mind the beauty and mystery of music when teaching.

Dave Liebman talks about teaching by NewparkMusic

From there to the gig at the National Concert Hall - a very different venue to Whelan’s where we’d played the night before..... The audience was very different too, the Whelan’s audience had a high quotient of students and hardcore jazz fans, the Miles talk had an older audience with a higher quotient of ‘civilians’ than the night before. Some footage of Dave playing with Miles was shown and Lieb gave a very entertaining talk full of good anecdotes and insights, and the music went well, we even spontaneously added in another duo piece - “Nardis’ - with Dave on piano.

The following morning there was time for one more workshop, this time for the students, before heading off to Limerick. We had almost the entire student body there and Dave gave them an inspiring talk that covered a lot of areas – practice, transcription, seriousness of purpose etc. all peppered with great anecdotes calculated to both inspire and entertain. It was a typical Lieb call to arms for the jazz army, and the students set off from the workshop with a new sense of purpose while we set off for Limerick with a sense of purpose of our own!

After the Whelan’s performance Lieb invited Chris to join us for the rest of the tour, so we set off for Limerick as a quartet. As any working musician can attest to, travelling can be a drag, but, as I’m sure they can also attest to, it also gives you a chance to to listen to music, talk about music, and life, the universe and everything... And this we duly did as we drove around Ireland over the next couple of days. Lieb is really fun to travel with in this regard because he of course has so many stories and anecdotes, but he’s also interested in your stories and is incredibly opinionated and argumentative – but in the best possible way. Opinions are strongly (and very humorously) expressed, but differing opinions are given due consideration too. I’m quite opinionated and argumentative myself, so we had a great time chewing the fat, batting opinions back and forth, arguing, discussing, listening to music.

We talked about so many things – speculating on how the Coltrane/Elvin saxophone and drum thing originated, (did it just happen one night and they kept it and developed it, or was it discussed and tried out as a preconceived idea?), how one measures whether one has made a positive impact on the world or whether one hasn’t, music collectives (including a great anecdote about the setting up of Free Life Communication the music collective Dave and many other now famous musicians were involved with in the 70s), some Elvin and Miles stories, and a hilarious, passionate, and outraged rant from Dave about a recent experience he’d had with a ‘name’ player who ‘absolutely-could-not-play!!!’ And I’m sorry, but there’s no way I’m going to tell you who that was – ‘what goes on the road stays on the road’, it’s like the seal of the confessional.........

Limerick is the third largest city in Ireland and were were playing for the Limerick Jazz Society a great organisation that’s been putting on jazz concerts in the city for over 20 years. Ireland is a small country and jazz is a minority music so it’s tough to promote the music and put on concerts and all of that, but LJS have been indefatigable stalwarts in promoting the music, have developed an audience, and it’s always a pleasure to play there. On this occasion John Daly – drummer and one of the leading lights in the LJS – has arranged for Dave to do a workshop before the gig for a group of people who attend jazz workshops organised by the LJS. This is a very different audience from the full-time student one Dave had at Newpark that morning – these were adults who are studying the music on a part-time basis and it was fascinating to watch Lieb seamlessly tailor his approach to the situation. We opened the proceedings by playing ‘Autumn Leaves’ and then Dave took questions and everything went well, with Dave, as is his wont, being both informative and entertaining.

Lieb talks jazz at the LJS

A quick dinner (a great thing about the venue - Dolan's - is that they serve very good food downstairs) and then the gig. It's a very guitaristic night this night because in the second set we were joined by Joe O Callaghan, a great guitarist with whom I’ve worked many times before, and who played with me the last time Lieb came to ireland in 2007. So between Joe and Chris the set is very guitar-heavy, but lots of fun to play because the vibe is completely different to the Whelan’s gig. The sonic landscape is very dense, but both guitarists play differently enough to make it interesting and Joe plays one extraordinary intro to a tune in duo with Lieb – completely improvised (as is all the music of course) but feeling like they had worked everything out in advance, so nuanced was the interplay......Jussi was completely grooving, creative and generally killing – again.

The next day we head off to Cork, Ireland’s second largest city, home of Ireland’s biggest jazz festival, but more importantly for Irish jazz musicians, the home of the Triskel Arts Centre, one of the best venues in which to play creative music in Ireland. I’ve always had a good time playing there and have played so many great gigs with great players over the years, including several there with Dave. But this time there’s a new element involved, they have a new auditorium, much admired anecdotally, but this is the first time for me to see it in person. And it’s beautiful! A converted church with state of art sound equipment and great sight lines for the audience.

Triskel Arts Centre

The previous venue was small and very intimate, this is much bigger and impressive, but also has a consequently more reverberant acoustic – ‘Looks like we’re going to have to go ECM’ was Lieb’s half-joking remark, but contained in the humour is a core of pragmatism – the kind of burn-out stuff we did in Dublin, or guitar-heavy music we did in limerick, would never work in this space.

We soundchecked (including Dave trying out Jussi's cymbals and the Triskel's drums) and though the sound is different to the old auditorium, it's a pleasure to be working with the soundman Dennis again. Any musician will tell you that having a sound engineer who knows what he, (or she) is doing and knows how to amplify acoustic instruments and doesn't try and turn everything into a rock gig, is a pearl beyond price. And Dennis is one of those pearls! The soundcheck is quick and painless, a quick dinner at a nearby restaurant and then it's back to the gig.

The gig itself is very enjoyable - the different sound does discourage certain types of approaches, but encourages others that just wouldn't sound good in a drier acoustic. We play a lot more spacious music on this occasion and it's a pleasure to hear the sound of the instruments in that space. Included in the performance (as it is on all the gigs) is what we call a 'free ballad' - the idea being that we approach the piece as if we were playing a typical 'Lover Man' or 'Body and Soul' type ballad, but there are no pre-agreed changes or form. Ballad vibe and feel, but open - here's an excerpt from the very spacious and lyrical one we did at the Triskel:

And that was it - four days in which Dave did 3 gigs, 3 completely different workshops, one rehearsal, and a lecture/performance. Dave turned 65 this year, but he has the energy of somebody 30 years younger, always gives 110% in everything he does and of course is still one of the truly great jazz musicians around today. He's always been an inspiration and example for me, and of course for so many others over the years. I had a great time on the tour - here's to the next one!

Blog Hiatus

2011-10-04T09:02:00.002+01:00

I'm on the road for the next couple of weeks, so I'll be taking a break from attending to the blog during that time. Back in a while - thanks for all the interest and comments.

Listening Again (2) - Mahavishnu Orchestra - Birds of Fire

2011-10-01T11:46:00.023+01:00

I have included several sound clips from the subject of this post - all are very short and are intended as a taster for the music on the album, and to illustrate various points. If you're interested in this music please go and buy the album, support the musicians and enjoy its full sonic beauty - don't settle for some crappy compressed version on Youtube!

I can remember where I was when I first heard ‘Birds of Fire’ – I was fourteen years old, and I was in a friend’s house, in the kitchen (where they had a record player for some now unfathomable reason). We were all prog-rock guys – King Crimson, Gentle Giant etc. and considered ourselves to be very sophisticated (no Black Sabbath for us!) in the superior way that only teenage boys can. I had been raised on classical and jazz music and had been exposed to pop music for the first time only the year before (seriously!). I had a brief flirtation with pop music, an even briefer one with Heavy Metal and then discovered King Crimson, which probably appealed subconsciously to my need for and experience of listening to structurally more complex music. And subconscious rather than conscious would have been an accurate description of my musical knowledge or expertise at that time.

So, back to my friend’s kitchen - he produced the album, (which had a very satisfyingly intriguing cover featuring soaring birds), put the record on the turntable, lowered the needle and…….. And basically my musical life changed from the moment I first heard the gong being struck and shimmering through some kind of phaser effect, followed by a dense and dark arpeggiated guitar figure, in what is one of the most dramatic opening moments of any album in my opinion. I sat there transfixed and almost shocked – I really had never heard anything like this. In retrospect I realize that I had in fact heard some of the elements of this music in other contexts – both classical and jazz – but at the time it just sounded like music coming from another planet.

And to cut a long story short, it set me off on a journey that returned me to jazz, and planted the seed of being a jazz musician inside me.

What’s interesting to me, almost forty years later, is that the music on ‘Birds of Fire’ not only has a function in my own personal history, but objectively, listening to it now, it more than stands up to the scrutiny of the decades. It’s still great music, on any level, and looking at it now, knowing what I know now and having the experiences I’ve had in the intervening years since I first heard it, I realize what a unique musical document it is – something that had never been done before, and has never really been done again – even by the protagonists involved in my opinion.

The Mahavishnu Orchestra was an interesting band for many reasons, one of which is the fact that it was probably the most multi-national major group in the history of jazz. There was only one American in it (Jerry Goodman), a Czech (Jan Hammer), a Panamanian (Billy Cobham), an Englishman (McLaughlin), and an Irish man – the bassist Rick Laird - someone we were very proud of around here because he came from my home town of Dun Laoghaire. Laird had left Dublin many years before Mahavishnu and gone to Australia and later London where he became the house bassist in Ronnie Scott’s club and accompanied an endless stream of American jazz legends including Rollins, Wes Montgomery, Ben Webster, Clark Terry etc etc. This was where McLaughlin, (who went to New York at the behest of Tony Williams who wanted him for the seminal ‘Lifetime’ band) had met Laird. London had an amazing scene in those days with future giants such as John Surman, John Taylor and Dave Holland all playing on the scene.

All of the Mahavishnu group had a jazz pedigree with the exception of Goodman who came from more of a rock background. Mclaughlin had played with Miles and Williams, Jan Hammer with Sarah Vaughan and Elvin Jones, Billy Cobham with Miles and Horace Silver, and Laird with just about everyone (He's almost certainly the only bassist to have played with both Wes Montgomery and John McLaughlin). Yet the music they produced was not a ‘jazz’ sound. This is the early 70s, post-Bitches Brew, post-Lifetime, all the instruments except the drums are electric, there are no swing feel pieces and odd metres abound. Both McLaughlin and Cobham played with Miles (together on Jack Johnson) and were among the Miles diaspora who created the genre that is now known as Fusion, but was known then as Jazz-Rock. And apart from Goodman, McLaughlin had connections with the rock scene, jamming with Jimi Hendrix, and playing in the same London rock/blues scene that produced Eric Clapton and Jimmy Page.

The group had been around for a while and ‘Birds of Fire’ was its second album. The first, ‘The Inner Mounting Flame’ caused a bit of a sensation on its release, its combination of instrumental virtuosity, complex time signatures, electric instruments and rock energy proved hugely popular and the band became an overnight sensation, selling a phenomenal amount of albums for an instrumental group. This album has always had its advocates as THE Mavishnu album, but for me it’s more like a prototype for what was to come rather than a definitive statement. I don’t think the compositions are as interesting or the sound as developed as on ‘Birds of Fire’ and I think at times it lapses into the solo-histrionics-over-static-rhythm-section-groove that was to so blight the Jazz-Rock movement as a whole, and which was to even become apparent on the Mahavishnu’s later live album between ‘Nothingness and Eternity’ - a blitzkrieg of duelling soloists and impossible tempos delivered with great virtuosity to an audibly ecstatic audience in Central Park. But between the bookends of these two albums the band delivered what was to be a seminal recording, both vastly influential on musicians of my generation and beyond, and also featuring music that has more than stood the test of time.

So what’s so special about this recording? It’s a combination of things - first of all there’s a cohesiveness about the entire album, it feels like something that was conceived as a whole rather than as a series of tracks that were put together to make an album. In the manner of ‘A Love Supreme’, ‘Kind of Blue’ and ‘Blues and The Abstract Truth’, a consistent atmosphere hovers over the whole album – the music feels all of a piece and not episodic in any way. It’s a much better recorded album than the previous one and this helps to create the feeling of an over-arching musical intelligence at work.

Then there is the sound of the music, much of which is due to the unusual instrumentation. Guitar, violin and keyboards combine together to give the music a lightness that is unexpected considering the gnarliness, chromaticism, and dense rhythmic tangle of much of the music. Jan Hammer featured the Moog extensively in the music, and these early monophonic synths didn’t have a a very wide sonic range, so Hammer favours the higher register which blends very well with the electric violin and guitar. The sonic spectrum of the front line instruments favours the upper register and they
create so homogenous a sound that sometimes it’s hard to tell who’s soloing where........

At the time I first listened to this music I was just blown away by it in its entirety, and it sounded to me like something that had come out of nowhere. But looking at it from many years later, and with thousands of musician’s flying hours under my belt, I can see the many influences that are in this music. The influence of Hendrix and the electric guitar culture of the 60s is easy to discern, what’s perhaps not so immediately apparent is the influence of Coltrane of the ‘Love Supreme’ period – but it’s there in McLaughlin’s playing – listen to the Coltrane-like way he soars chromatically over the shifting odd metre groove of the title track.

Another interesting thing to my ears now, having spent a lot of time over the past 20 years studying the rhythmic aspects of South Indian music, is just how much Carnatic music influenced McLaughlin’s writing in this period. Later of course he went on to form Shakti, (and presage the jazz meets world music movement by about twenty years), but he made a serious study of the Veena and this clearly be heard both in the sound of some of the melodies he composed and in the rhythmic structures of the odd metres he used which are clearly related to the tala structures of Carnatic music, while the structure of the melody, in a typical McLaughlin-ism, is clearly related to both Indian music and the blues

But I think McLaughlin not only used Indian music in his own writing, he very probably influenced other members of the group in this respect. On ‘One Word’ - which Cobham famously opens with a snare drum roll that has left generations of drummers in open mouthed disbelief – the drum groove that Cobham uses has no real precedent in jazz, yet is very common in Mridangam grooves of South India. Here is a percussion group from South India

And here is Cobham on ‘One Word’

Was Cobham checking out Indian percussion at the behest of McLaughlin? It certainly sounds like it!

But not all the pieces were either lightning fast, or odd metre workouts, the group could also get in the pocket with the best of them - ‘Miles Ahead’ is almost Headhunter-esque

But Headhunters would never have done anything as radical with this groove as Cobham and McLaughlin do later in the piece

Or how about this haunting Moog solo on ‘Sanctuary’, played over the shifting metre of the rhythm section, evoking an atmosphere worthy of the quieter passages of ‘The Rite of Spring’..............

There is just so much great music on this album – so many different ideas and approaches yet all contained within a very unique and immediately identifiable sound. The virtuosity of the players, even at a distance of forty years, is amazing (has there ever been a greater guitar right hand technique in jazz than McLaughlin’s? How can he play at that speed, with such rhythmic accuracy yet never slur anything!?), yet the virtuosity is put at the service of the music and is never subservient to it. Unfortunately the success of the Mahavishnu unleashed a slew of poor imitations all vying with each other to be the fastest, loudest highest.......

And unfortunately the Mahavishnu itself imploded not long afterwards, with the other members of the band wanting a share of the composing duties (McLaughlin had previously been the sole composer)– which wasn’t a great idea as evidenced by the release years later of ‘The Lost Trident Sessions’ which featured compositions by Hammer, Laird and Goodman, none of which rises to the heights of the earlier McLaughlin compositions. Internal disagreements ensured the the disintegration of the band, but by the time they split up they had already fallen from the heights of ‘Birds of Fire’ and had allowed their virtuosity to take precedent over the other elements of their music. But for a while their flame really did burn brightly, inventing a whole genre, influencing and inspiring countless musicians and creating one of the greatest albums of the modern jazz era.

Here they are in their prime playing in London in 1972 – chops and ideas to go, and notice the quote of the 'Jack Johnson' riff, which McLaughlin almost certainly wrote despite Miles being credited with it.............

Physician, Heal Thyself

2011-09-24T18:12:00.010+01:00

So Branford is at it again......... He gave his verdict on students a while back (‘students today are completely full of shit’), and now his wrath has become broader and is turned on jazz music itself (‘There’s so little of it that’s actually good, that when it’s good, it shocks me’). In doing this he joined another A-list musician, Kurt Rosenwinkel who recently created a furore by stating that most jazz sucks He recently recanted a little, (didn’t have the courage of his convictions once the proverbial shit hit the fan?), but unfortunately this phenomenon of well known musicians, (who really should have better things to do other than pronouncing judgement on everybody else), lashing out at all and sundry doesn’t seem to be going away.

I don’t think any of these guys should be wasting their time thumping the pulpit like this (don’t they have any music they could be working on.....?), but I think it’s particularly true of Branford. At least with Kurt you’re dealing with an influential musician, but with Branford? He is certainly a famous musician and he is a also a great musician, and a great player of the saxophone. And the combination of his abilities and his association with Wynton, the Tonight Show, Sting etc will ensure he’ll always be a crowd-puller and (luckily for his students) will never have to take a teaching job to make ends meet. But Branford, for all his fame and ability, has never had an influence on the jazz mainstream – his music, for all its accomplishment, has always been too derivative.

The closest that Branford has gotten to being musically influential on the international jazz scene would have been during the time he and Wynton were doing the wonderful ‘Black Codes’ music in the early to mid-80s – more than twenty years ago. That music had a genuine impact and you can hear its influence even today. But since then Branford’s jazz playing has been remarkable for how unremarkable it is. Yes he’s a virtuoso, yes he knows the history of the saxophone and can demonstrate different stylistic influences at will. Yes his quartet members can all really play. No question. But when was the last time the jazz world was excitedly anticipating the release of Branford’s next album? Branford dismisses the idea that jazz has to always be new to be good (something I’d agree with actually....), but in his case it comes over as being one of those ‘well he would say that, wouldn’t he?’ things, since he himself has not produced anything new, (as opposed to well played), in a very long time.

Even as a tenor player – and he really is a virtuoso – he’s not particularly influential. He’s been on the scene for a long time, but I’ve never heard a young saxophonist who sounded like they were influenced by Branford. He’s a great player, he’s in the public eye more than almost any other jazz saxophonist, with a public recognition that goes way beyond the narrow jazz audience. So why isn’t he influential on players of his own instrument? Because, for all his accomplishment and virtuosity, he’s too derivative. I think he’s a stylist – I think I’d recognise his playing when I heard it, (as long as he wasn’t doing one of his all too common Branford does Sonny, or Branford does Trane schticks), but it’s not different enough and hasn’t enough individuality to attract young players in the way that Joe Lovano, Mark Turner and Chris Potter do.

Of course Branford is entitled to his opinion – after all, what is a blog such as this one if not an opinion piece? And he could well point the finger at me and ask what have I ever done that was influential? Fair enough, but then again I’m not the one pronouncing judgement on the entire jazz scene and telling everyone that they’re not good enough. The artists that people like Branford name-check as being exemplars of the highest level of jazz achievement, and to whom they look to for inspiration (sometimes to the point of blatant imitation) - people such as Rollins or Coltrane - never spent any of their time criticising their colleagues. They were far more concerned with developing their own music than telling everyone else how to do it.

Even if Branford were a much more influential and innovative musician than he is, it would be drag to have him pontificating on ‘the problem with jazz’ in the way that he has. The fact that he has done so little truly original work over the past twenty five years puts him in a very weak position to be pointing the finger at others - at least artistically, commercially of course we could all take lessons from him.

If Branford really wants to change the music, it would be much better if he found something in his own music that interested enough musicians to make them change the way they play. Just telling them, (in an incredibly arrogant way) that they’re all wrong, while presiding over such a narrow bandwidth of artistic achievement himself, is never going to work.

PS. My argument is based around the opinion that Branford’s own musical output puts him in a weak position to tell others what to do, for a reasoned response to the arguments that Branford puts forward, have a look at Peter Hum’s blog

Miles and Trane - Two Beautiful Aberrations

2011-09-24T00:24:00.003+01:00

If, like me, you're a hard-core Miles and Coltrane fan, with a particular interest in the latter half of their careers, you will no doubt have amassed a pretty large collection of live performances, either in audio format, or very commonly these days, on video or DVD. And if you have a large collection of live performances, you pretty much know what to expect in terms of the set-lists of these bands, and the tunes they most commonly played. With Trane, you probably have dozens of versions of “Impressions”, “Afro–Blue”, and perhaps a few of “Chasin’ The Trane”. With Miles, you probably have multiple versions of “Round Midnight”, “So What”, and “Walkin”. These guys' repertoires did change over time, but slowly, and by listening to these recordings you can get a good idea of what pieces they liked to play and explore.

But every now and then there's a surprise........a tune you rarely if ever hear them play, and it can be really interesting when this happens. For me as a working musician I always wonder what prompted the bandleader to call the tune on that particular night? Were they just tired of the regular repertoire? Was it a sudden impulse? Could it have been a request? Actually, that last possibility is unrealistic in the case of Miles, and probably in Coltrane's case too. But for whatever reason they decided to call it, for me it's always a real bonus to hear a familiar band playing unfamiliar repertoire, and recently I came across two great examples of pieces you wouldn't normally associate with - a) Miles second great quintet of the 60s (with Shorter, Corea, Holland and DeJohnette), and b) Coltrane’s great quartet - being played in live performances, in what, as much as I can tell, were one-offs.

In the case of Coltrane, its a version of “Autumn Leaves” performed in Graz in 1962. I was really surprised to come across this, I have never heard of Coltrane playing ‘Autumn Leaves’, even when he was with Miles, though no doubt he may have done since it was such a staple part of Miles’ repertoire for such a long time. But as far as I know he never recorded it with Miles, certainly not in the studio and in none of the live recordings I’ve heard. So it was a real surprise to come across this recently, and again I was intrigued to think about why Coltrane decided to play this tune on this particular evening.

And they played it quite straight too, with no arrangement. McCoy begins by playing the melody, and as was often the case with that band, takes the first solo. This is McCoy in really swinging mode – of course McCoy always swung, but here he’s playing a bit closer to the original changes than he subsequently would as the group evolved. There’s definitely traces of the McCoy of ‘Inception’ here, which was recorded with Elvin and Art Davis in the same year. Elvin demonstrates his uniquely virile brush technique and shows just how great a brush player he was and how great brushes can be at driving a fast tempo along – something you don’t hear too often, especially these days when great brush playing is at a premium and seems to have become the preserve of Brazilian drummers such as Edu Ribeiro and Kiko Freitas. After a while Elvin changes to sticks which is unusual in itself, as there are very few recordings of Elvin where he changes from brushes to sticks – usually, such as on Tommy Flanagan’s great ‘Eclypso’ album, once he starts on brushes he stays on them. Coltrane’s live recording of ‘Softly As in a Morning Sunrise’ is an exception and he changes to brushes for the soprano solo. Here he switches also – though interestingly he does so during the piano solo and half way through the form, giving the piece a lift in an unexpected place.

All of this gives the music a real wind-up for Coltrane’s entry, though they’re still swinging in a quite conventional way by the time he comes in - on soprano. In a way this treatment of Autumn Leaves is a bit like the aforementioned ‘Softly As in a Morning Sunrise’ in the way McCoy sets it up, Elvin changes to sticks and Coltrane plays his solo on soprano. I can’t think of any other ‘standard’ kind of tune that Coltrane chose to play on soprano – usually he used it for extended churning 3/4 modal pieces such as ‘My Favourite Things’ or ‘Afro-Blue’. But here it’s used on a burning swing piece, over the changes of one of the most ubiquitous standards of all. Unusual in itself, but what’s also unusual is the fact the solo is almost all 8th notes – in fact it’s a masterclass in burning 8th note playing over changes and how to seamlessly move in and out of them. Elvin and McCoy really get it going behind Trane’s solo and by 7.30 they’re thundering, with that giant dotted quarter being brought in when reinforcements are needed. To drop into Jazz Robot argot for a moment – completely killing!

Again, I’d love to know why Trane chose to play this tune this one time – maybe he just felt like burning up some II-Vs! By the way – the tempo hardly budges despite the whole band being on fire by the end – how did Elvin do that!?

The second surprise is Miles’ second great quintet of the 60s playing ‘Milestones’ at Juan Les Pins in 1969. Now Milestones was of course played many times by the seminal quintet with Shorter, Hancock, Carter and Williams, had been transformed from a loping swinging modal piece into an up-tempo burner, (often at around 300bpm), and was given the full abstract treatment on live recordings such as ‘Live at the Plugged Nickel’, but by the time the second quintet was extant it had disappeared from the repertoire. However here it makes a comeback as a loping swing tune at about 190bpm– at least at the beginning.

Again, as far as I know there are no other recordings of this piece with this band, and I’m sure there were people in the audience, devotees of the good old days of ‘Kind of Blue’ and the Gil Evans recordings who were probably horrified by what they were hearing with this band, only to be apparently thrown a lifeline when Miles starts this familiar theme in a familiar way. But their relief must have been short-lived – Miles solos quite conventionally for a few choruses and then gradually gets more animated and agitated, setting it up for Wayne (I’d love to know what Miles said to Wayne as they passed each other at 3.50.....), who starts to move it outwards, with the help of the rhythm section, and then the piece takes on the familiar contour with this band – Miles plays pretty much over the form, Wayne starts to stretch it and then Chick, Dave, and Jack take it completely out. The rhythm section were definitely going for a different thing than Miles and Wayne, really into stretching everything beyond breaking point and using the themes as a jumping off point to collective improvisation, rather than as structures to solo over. And it’s interesting to see Miles in the background, clearly paying close attention while the young guys are doing their open thing. This band was definitely the closest Miles ever got to playing in an open and free context.

So, were they playing ‘Milestones’ every night (if so there are no other recordings of it as far as I know)? The ending seems almost like an arrangement, but Wayne and Miles were so telepathic and had played together for so long by this time, they could have improvised this ending too. Or did Miles spontaneously decide to play it? I suspect the latter, partly due to the non-existence of other examples of the band playing 'Milestones'. And partly due to a fantastic story Dave Liebman told me about Miles, while playing with the ‘On The Corner/Agharta’ band, suddenly going into ‘Milestones’, and just playing the theme and then walking off the stage leaving chaos in his wake - Mtume, Michael Henderson and the two guitarists, wrestling with the form and upsetting Al Foster (who loved the earlier music) so much that he was in tears after the gig.

There are no tears here though – just incredible playing. Hearing a great band play unfamiliar material somehow reinforces their greatness. Check it out.

The Gods Have Spoken - Most Jazz Sucks!

2011-09-03T23:44:00.010+01:00

Does jazz suck? A question being discussed on jazz blogs courtesy of a remark by Kurt Rosenwinkel on his Facebook page – as follows:

yo- most jazz now sucks. at least not the good s—. please can we all just make sure that the music doesnt suck? and get real if it does. take care of it. please! FWiW MF’s thx k

As I’m not one of Kurt’s followers (in more ways than one), and missed the remark and ensuing brouhaha, I came across this debate via Peter Hum’s excellent blog. The bassist and jazz curmudgeon Dwayne Burno weighed in with what can only be described as a rant against pretty much everybody (except himself presumably..), as follows:

most jazz today sucks because not many people trying to play what they believe JAZZ to be, really even KNOW what it IS or really should FEEL and SOUND like. ruined by the monetary pitfall of collegiate jazz higher education, undergrad to Ph.D, I have to laugh at all the kids with masters degrees that can’t play a blues, rhythm changes, a standard ballad, sit at a piano and comp two choruses of swinging blues, or just flat out SWING on their instrument. Everyone wants to make some jazz-hybrid concoction, magic BULL—- elixir to circumvent showing that deep down, they’re really rock and roll lovers that think jazz is something cool with no rules. there’s even a bulls—er’s manifesto you can buy and read talking about how effortlessly you can master the music and yourself, yada, f—ing yada, yada. YET, none have mastered anything enough to surpass the MASTERS like Tatum, Monk, Ellington, Coltrane, Parker, Gillespie, Basie and too many more to fit here. The idiot’s response would now be to talk of how old and outdated swing is. I go back to my statement where I said there are a great deal that THINK they KNOW what the MUSIC IS but are not even on the same planet because they haven’t and cannot deal with the prerequisites, like knowing how to swing and make music that sounds pleasing to the ear. It is not our job to allow d—heads at BEATDOWN and JazzTimes or any other pompous publication to dictate the direction of the music with the ignorance of their agenda or their underlying hatred and lack of respect of the music as the creative and expressive form and forum of art that it is. Our job as musicians is to soothe and heal the soul of those that listen to us. We may also stir up emotions and feelings and provoke contemplative thought as well but the backlash I know that is coming my way once I hit reply won’t be from those in the know or from those that can play this music. It will be from the posers and charlatans that work everyday to fool themselves as well as the fools they can rope in to listen to their sad s— because the truth hurts.

What strikes me about Dwayne Burno, both in this interview and others I’ve read, is that he is an incredibly bitter man. Rather than coming over as someone who is defending and promoting something he loves, he always seems to be just resentful of everyone else. The level of anger and bitterness (and the almost scary amount of capitalisation) he displays clouds any message he may have. He comes over as the kind of guy you would back away from if you met him in person and you inadvertently pressed his red button by mentioning the state of jazz today. He obviously believes he’s telling it like it is, but he comes over as just being an intemperate angry man. His dismissal of Kenny’s great book as being an attempt to provide a magic bullet for lazy musicians who don’t want to do any work, only shows that Burno has never read the book. He’s the jazz version of the choleric ex-army man who believes in compulsory service in the army as the cure-all for society’s ills.

Peter Hum described his diatribe as powerful and passionate, but for me it’s just so full of generalisations and half-truths and is delivered in such an intemperate way, that it is closer to being a foaming-mouthed rant than being powerful and passionate, and any points he may be making get lost in the bile he displays towards virtually everybody

And as for the ‘jazz sucks’ argument, (actually a completely daft generalisation using a scatter-gun approach worthy of the St Valentine Day Massacre), it is probably true to say that there is a lot of sub-standard jazz played these days, but the truth is that most jazz around the world is played by musicians who are not that great. Just like most pop music is played by very ordinary musicians, and most classical music too. The majority will always be ordinary, and their music may not be the most impressive advertisement for the art form, but then you get the better players who are the ones who define the music and move it forward.

And it’s always been thus – there seems to be an idea out there that in certain eras all the jazz players were great. But that’s just not true. History is written by the winners, and the great players we hear from the 30s, 40s and 50s were, for the most part, the best players around. And for every great jazz artist of that era, you can be sure that there were hundreds of jazz hacks in every city in America, playing jazz that, to use the current buzz-word, sucked. The only difference between then and now is that the poor players in that era were never recorded, but now, due to the cheapness of the technology, anyone can a) record, and b) get it out there via the internet. So we’re probably more exposed to poor jazz than we ever were, but I’m pretty sure the amount of poor jazz being played is about the same as always.

And there’s so much great jazz being played all the time by players coming from a myriad of bckgrounds, that to say that ‘most jazz now sucks’ is just a ludicrous statement and makes me question the motives of Kurt in saying it. Presumably he’s not including his own music in the general suckiness he perceives, so is he surveying the jazz world from his own creative Olympus and telling the rest of the mere mortals to ’take care of it’? And if he does see himself in that kind of superior position, what does that say about his objectivity about his own music? Shouldn’t he be focussing on his own music rather than expending his energy telling everyone else that they suck?

And in the same vein, I have to say, the clip Hum posted of Burno in action (below) revealed precisely the kind of music that puts so many lay people off jazz – saxophone players battling it out over a vamp, having no doubt already played lengthy solos – faster, higher, louder! That has to be good, right? That couldn’t suck, right? Could it..........?

Addendum

Recently regarding this blog post, Dwayne Burno has been directly in touch with me and told me that he was personally offended by what I wrote. I should make it clear that I never intend to personally offend anybody with my opinions, and I regret that Mr. Burno has felt personally offended by them in this case. I should make it clear, that though Mr. Burno and I may disagree on several issues relating to this subject, and very definitely on how the opinions on these issues are expressed, I had no intention of personally offending anybody, least of all a fellow musician. And I should also say that I have the highest respect for Mr. Burno’s musicianship, and have done for many years.

Saying hello to the bass again......

2011-08-30T00:07:00.001+01:00

Having spent the past few weeks writing a guitar concerto (more on this soon), it's so nice to come back and just play a standard.......

To Play or Not To Play?

2011-08-22T23:15:00.004+01:00

Recently I took part in a very interesting discussion as to whether jazz critics should be able to play jazz or not. I came down on the side of 'yes - someone writing about the music should have some knowledge of how it works on a technical level'.

I think jazz has suffered very often at the hands of critics who have no idea of how the music works and come up with some extraordinarily half-baked ideas when writing about the music. I remember seeing Chick Corea being referred to in Downbeat as a 'chops-meister', and seeing Monk's 'Little Rootie Tootie' being referred to as 'Little Tutti Frutti' by a jazz 'critic' in Jazz Times, etc. etc. Of course this is just ignorance and bad journalism rather than a misunderstanding of a technical detail, but a musician with a working knowledge of the music would never make either of those statements. And I've always enjoyed reading musicians writing about music, and I think they should do it more often, rather than leaving the field only for the writers. I wrote extensively about this subject a while ago

But many great jazz critics responded to this question in this article, some pro the idea of being able to play in order to write, and some con - all make cogent points and it's a fascinating read for anyone interested in how the music is written about.

Sao Paulo - The IASJ Meeting (Part 2)

2011-07-24T22:48:00.016+01:00

The second part of my report on the recent IASJ meeting in Sao Paulo in July 2011. For part one go here

Day 4

Today is a very Brazilian kind of day – it begins and ends with Choro.

Opening up the day we’re treated to an explanation and demonstration of Choro music by Pedro Ramos, one of the teachers at Souza Lima, our host school. Choro is a wonderful music typically played by at least two guitars (a small one called a Caviquinho, and a big 7-string guitar), one or more melody instruments (saxophone, clarinet, or flute usually) and Pandeiro – the Brazilian tambourine. It dates to the early part of the 20th Century and is sometimes described as Brazil’s Ragtime. It is full of counterpoint and the voice-leading prowess of a good Choro player is really something to behold – the 7-string guitar acts as a bass, but a constantly moving bass, playing wonderful obbligato lines underneath the melody. In fact the way the melody and accompaniment switch back and forth between the different instruments is in itself reminiscent (in terms of instrumental roles rather than sound) of traditional jazz. But the rhythms are unmistakably Brazilian, with that slightly behind, triplet-y samba so unique to the music of this country. Pedro also gave a handout that outlined the racial history of Brazil and how the very striking variety of races and skin colour that one sees in Brazil came about and how unique to Brazil that was.

(Pedro Ramos Group)

After we’ve all been uplifted by the Choro music we go to Masterclass again and this time Herbie Kopf takes the helm and has some great things to say about dealing with sound issues in venues of different types and also some very valuable stuff on practice techniques. The students weigh in with some great stuff too – questions and suggestions. This is exactly what IASJ Masterclasses are about – the sharing of ideas rather than stuff being handed down in a hierarchical way. In the afternoon, more student rehearsals and ongoing dialogues for the teachers, and then in the evening we go off to finish the day with the same music we started it with – Choro, and the legendary Ó Do Borogodó club.

Ó Do Borogodó is a unique place – small, very basic, with a tiny bar and space for maybe 100+ people, but it is THE place in Sao Paulo to go and hear Choro and other Brazilian music, and dance. Every time I’ve been to Sao Paulo I’ve come to this club, and every time it’s been great – the vibe is extraordinary. The gig starts at around 10.30, and it’s usually packed out. There are tables and chairs on the floor, but usually these gradually disappear as the dancers commandeer all available space and the music really gets going. The musicians sit behind a table, which acts both as something to place their drinks on and as a barrier to keep the dancers from actually falling on top of them! Another interesting thing is the age of the dancers – it’s totally mixed, with young and older people dancing together unselfconsciously – no age apartheid here!

And these musicians really work! Their first set will usually be almost 2 hours long, then they take a break and play for another two hours, finishing after 3am – it’s reminiscent of jazz in the old jazz club days in that respect. And the music has an insistent quality to it, where the intensity level gets raised over a period of time and just goes and goes. A singer will usually join them after a while and then the dancers really get going, singing along to the Anthemic choruses of these songs and just having a great time. What amazes me about this place is that it is totally packed, with no room to move for anybody – dancers, staff, musicians - but the vibe is universally good humoured with no sense of any annoyance or suggestion that things could get ugly. And this is at 3am - in Europe and the US, late night places that sell alcohol are usually places to avoid in the small hours – but not here.

Here’s a video I shot in Ó Do Borogodó, but not on the night in question (there were too many people there that night to film – the locals were astonished to arrive and find the place already packed with jazz musicians at 9.30pm!) - I shot this a few weeks before the IASJ meeting on a previous visit, but it gives a good idea of how the music sounds and what a great vibe this is.

Day 5

A relaxed day – traditionally at IASJ meetings the middle day of the meeting week features a trip of some kind which introduces the participants to some aspect of the city or area that we’re in – something they wouldn’t be able to experience anywhere else. On this occasion the host school has organised a trip to nearby Santos Beach - birthplace of Pele! Since Brazil is synonymous with beach life (at least in the minds of non-Brazilians!), this seems like a great trip to do. However, it being winter here at the moment, and the weather has been cold, I decide discretion is the better part of valour and skip the trip in favour of rehearsing a little with Carlos and George (we have a couple of gigs at the end of the week), and doing some school work on the computer.

After dinner the second jam session of the week is organised for a nice club called Ao Vivo – after the spit and sawdust vibe of Ó Do Borogodó the night before, Ao Vivo seems positively opulent! Before the jam session itself, Marcelo Coelho’s group plays a set of his rhythmically involved compositions for soprano sax, trombone, bass, drums and percussion. The difficult music is very well played and Emilio Martins’ percussion playing is particularly impressive.

After Marcelo’s set, the jam session starts and this time, after my previous experience, I decided not to bring my instrument. However I again make a strategic error since this time there are much less people here because the bus taking a lot of the participants to Santos developed mechanical problems and is very late getting back. So this time I could easily have played if I’d brought my instrument, but I didn’t and console myself by having a great time listening to Herbie Kopf, and American expat and SP resident, drummer Bob Wyatt swinging the band into bad health on two pieces! It’s a pleasure to hear a great bassist and drummer really lock in together and drive the band along – listening to Herbie and Bob is almost as much fun as playing! Almost.......

(Lieb playing at the jam session)

At the end Lieb turns up and plays two tunes with one of the teachers and two of the students – ‘Milestones’ and ‘I Hear A Rhapsody’ get the Lieb treatment – total commitment to the music, everything stretched almost (but only almost) to the point of the dissolution of the form. Always great to see him playing standards..... There is a bit of controversy when the student playing the piano, visibly displeased with his own playing, abruptly leaves the stage after the first tune, the keyboard then being ably taken over by Cliff Korman, author of a fine book on the Brazilian Rhythm Section.

The night ends up being a late one due mainly to the length of time it takes to pay the bar tab – they have a very inefficient system where you’re given a card at the beginning of the night and the drinks you get are marked on it. At the end of the night you pay the tab – but of course when the music ends then everyone tries to pay at the same time so a huge queue forms and it takes more than 45 minutes for everyone to pay, and then we have to get on the bus and be taken back to the hotel, so it’s after 2am by the time we get back.

Day 6

We’re at the business end of the Meeting now – literally and figuratively. The business of the IASJ is taken care of at the General Assembly which takes place in the afternoon – the housekeeping of the organisation is dealt with including the venues for upcoming meetings (Graz in Austria in 2012, Denmark in 2013, and very excitingly, Cape Town in South Africa in 2014).

But before all of that, in the morning there is another lecture and another Masterclass. The lecture is given by Emilio Martins and some colleagues on Afro-Brazilian rhythms and it’s just fantastic! The sheer variety of styles and approaches demonstrated is amazing and also gives the lie to the idea that Brazilian music is only about Samba or Baossa Nova. The guys switch effortlessly from one regional style to another and the whole thing is a revelation to all of us.

(Emilio Martins and group)

At the Masterclass, due to some confusion in scheduling, I am the only teacher there and so I spend some time talking about, and demonstrating, the benefits of playing solo bass – solo bass as opposed to bass soloing – i.e playing on your own and figuring out ways to make that work so that the music rather than the instrument becomes paramount. I demonstrate some techniques and ways of thinking about it and we get into some very interesting discussions about this and related topics. A very nice way to finish the Masterclass series.

So that evening, the empirical evidence of the value of the IASJ meeting is on display – the student concerts. Tonight is the first one, featuring three groups, with the other three performing on the following night. The gig takes place in a nice theatre about 30 minutes away by bus. I while away the journey by having a great conversation with Francois Théberge about the history of Ireland and Francois’ native Quebec. On arrival we find that Lieb has been struck down with severe laryngitis and will not be able to do his normal MC role for the student concerts, though he will be at the concerts. However his place is ably taken by his daughter Lydia and she does a great job of introducing all the groups and telling the audience about the IASJ. As usual the concert itself is full of good music and it’s amazing to hear how well these young musicians play together only 5 days after their first meeting......

Barry, the student I brought with me, performs with his group tonight and does very well – the band is a killer (see the video clip at the end) and they bring the evening to a suitably spectacular close.

I haven’t seen much of Barry since we arrived, just brief chats here and there - and that’s how it should be at these meetings. He’s been off hanging with the other students, making friends and connections and talking incessantly about music, as have I................

(Student Concert)

Day 7

The final day and it begins with the traditional Lieb rousing speech to the troops! Every year Dave talks directly to the students, encouraging them, cajoling them, making them realise what a special thing they’ve become involved with by choosing to play this music at this level. He gives them practical advice as well as a lot of philosophical stuff to chew on. I’ve heard versions of this speech about 20 times now and I never tire of it! It’s always inspiring and send the stiudents off in high spirits and full of determination and the will to win. And I always hear something new or something I hadn’t noticed him say before – this year it’s about how the difference between a good player and a great player is how the great players take care of ALL ‘the details’. And how right he is.......

The fact that he manages to give this talk despite his ongoing laryngitis problem is amazing, but after the meeting he asks me if I will go and sound check with the students for the final concert tonight, since he’s not feeling up to it. So, after a farewell reception, off we go to the theatre at 5pm – earlier than last night and what was a 30 minute journey the previous evening turns into one more than an hour long due to the heavier traffic at the earlier time. SP has 5 million cars and tonight I think we were on the road with at least 3 million of them........ The soundcheck is relatively painless thanks to the amazing Jesse – (the guy who seems to look after EVERYTHING at Souza Lima – from the sound in a huge theatre, to getting a glass of water for Lieb during his morning speech – what a guy!) and also thanks to the help of Carlos Ezequiel who blends his musician’s knowledge with an ability to speak Portuguese to great effect. Pretty soon the job is done, time for a quick dinner and then the final three concerts.

(Me and the amazing Jesse!)

Again, great music, great playing, great spirit – to see these young musicians, from all over the world, communicating together through the medium of jazz is truly touching.

After the concert comes the 'long goodbye' where everyone says goodbye to everyone else - with more than 200 people involved, this can take a while! I manage to get a photo opportunity with Dimos Dimitriades from Greece and Bruno Santos from Portugal. Our three countries are currently in hock to the International Monetary Fund to the tune of about 400 billion Euro, so we dub ourselves the 'IMF Trio' - the world's most expensive jazz group!

(Bruno, Dimos and I - the IMF Trio!)

The IASJ Meeting is a truly wonderful event – every one is different but each meeting has one thing in common – a demonstration of the true spirit of jazz – creativity, generosity, individuality, collective spirit. It is a musical language that started in America but is now truly international. To see the proof of all of that – watch the clip below - The full personnel is:

Darren Craig English - Trumpet (University Of Cape Town, Cape Town,South Africa)
Kasperi Sarikoski - Trombone (Paris Conservatoire/Sibelius Acdemy, Helsinki, Finland)
Florian Wempe - Tenor Saxophone (Royal Conservatory, Den Haag, Netherlands)
Kaneo Ramos - Guitar (Souza Lima Conservatorio, Sao Paulo, Brazil)
Christian Li - Piano (Berklee College of Music, Boston, USA)
Barry Donohue - Bass (Newpark Music Centre, Dublin Ireland)
Ariel Tessier - Drums (Paris Conservatoire, Paris, France)

Barry Donohue's 'Anti-Matter' at the IASJ... by NewparkMusic

Sao Paulo - The IASJ Meeting (Part 1)

2011-07-24T12:30:00.018+01:00

I recently attended the International Association of Schools of Jazz Meeting at the Conservatorio Souza Lima in Sao Paulo. The IASJ is an organisation which is the brainchild of the great saxophonist Dave Liebman who in 1989 contacted a group of people from around the world who were involved in jazz education with a view to forming an organisation that would allow for the free-flowing exchange of ideas, students and teachers between schools that teach jazz. I was one of the people who sat in that room in Germany over 20 years ago, and I’ve seen the organisation grow into what it is today.

The jewel in the crown of the organisation is the Annual Meeting which takes place in a different country each year, and in which schools of the organisation send teachers, students and representatives to meet for a week, exchange ideas, do masterclasses and have the students play together and play a concert together at the end of the week. It’s an amazing week and one that really emphsises the notion of jazz as an international musical language.

These are some of my memories and impressions of this year’s meeting...............

Day One

Arrived with my student Barry Donohue (a very talented young bassist) in the early hours after the long Dublin-London-Sao Paulo flight – it’s winter here , but in Sao Paulo that means a pleasant 17 degrees even at this ungodly hour. Sao Paulo is HUGE – it has more than 20 million people and more than 5 million cars, and is a city with little architectural merit. But its real treasure is its people who are just fantastic – friendly and laid-back in a way that is extraordinary considering what a huge Metropolis they live in and how stressful it must be to live in such a huge place.

I left Barry to go to the student hotel with some other arriving students and went to my own hotel. Lucky enough to get into the room early (7am) and decided to go down and have a quick breakfast. Of course this being the IASJ, of which I’ve been a member for more than 21 years, the ‘quick’ breakfast turns into anything but as I run into so many friends. The internationalised nature of jazz these days becomes really clear from the composition of the assembly at the breakfast table – Mike Rossi of the University of Capetown, Gary Keller from Miami, Micu Narunsky (a very old friend of mine who was a fellow student with me at the Banff jazz workshop way back in 1986!) from Israel, George Kontrafouris from Greece and Martin Mueller from the New School in New York. All are great musicians with the exception of Martin, who is not a musician but has very dedicatedly and successfully lead the New School’s jazz programme for more than 20 years. So a couple of hours are spent catching up and by the time I get to the room I’ve got a very impressive level of exhaustion which can only be partly alleviated by a couple of hours sleep.

The afternoon is spent taking care of some logistics for myself and trying to deal with hotel bureaucracy for Barry at his hotel, where extraordinarily for such a big hotel in such a big city, nobody speaks any English..... Then it’s off to the celebratory opening concert, the legendary Brazilian singer and guitarist Guinga playing with the equally legendary Dave Liebman (who is the Artistic Director of the IASJ and the guy whose idea it all was back in in ’89) and Marcelo Coelho on saxophones, a great saxophonist from Sao Paulo, and the founder member along with me and my brother Conor of IRSA). There’s a 6pm call for the bus to take the delegates to the gig, but the bus gets stuck in the traffic snarl and eventually Mario – the founder and director of our host school - in an an incredibly generous and expensive move, hails a fleet of taxi to take almost a hundred people to the concert.

(Lieb and Guinga)

The gig itself is packed and for me, sitting there a bit jet-lagged, it brings home to me again what a great player Liebman is. All the material is comprised of Guinga’s downbeat yet harmonically rich lyrical songs, and Dave plays them with him with extraordinary sensitivity while sounding completely like himself. He plays piano, soprano and a little wooden flute, and what he plays is just magical. Talking afterwards with some of my musician friends we all agree that Dave has been around for so long and has played so consistently great in all that time, that it’s easy sometimes to almost take him for granted, but on a night like tonight you’re reminded of just how great he really is. Marcelo Coelho plays some beautiful soprano saxophone on a couple of pieces also.

Myself George Kontrafouris and two great Brazilian musician friends of ours – Lupa Santiago and Carlos Ezequiel– finish the evening in a Churascarria one of those temples of grilled meat that are a Brazilian speciality – you sit at the table and they just keep bringing you a multitude of different kinds of perfectly cooked meat until you beg them to stop! It’s a vegetarian’s nightmare and a recipe for meat poisoning, but as a devoted carnivore I have to say I felt it was the perfect way to end the day.

Day 2

Jetlag........ Awake at 5am SP time. Gave up the struggle to sleep after a while and got up and did various killing-time things until the hotel restaurant opened for breakfast. It’s cold today! A brisk 11 degrees – not what one traditionally associates with Brazil.......

This morning is the first day proper of the meeting, and it begins with a few opening remarks from Liebman and Mario – the school director here, and then goes on to the ‘auditions’. These are not really auditions, but are a way for us to get the hear the students play and for the students to hear each other play. So the students play together - it’s like a jam-session format – pick a tune and off you go. As usual, since each school sends their best students, the standard is very high, with a couple of students being outstanding, most of the others being very good and a couple slightly weaker but no major problems.

When it’s over Dave and I sit down together and put the ensembles together. Since the standard of the students is broadly similar this is an exercise in internationalisation – we try and mix the ensembles by country to ensure that the students get a real cosmopolitan experience and have a chance to work together for a week with colleagues from many different countries. Dave’s original idea for this all those years ago was to form ‘a real United Nations of jazz’ - and this is pretty much what it is except without the factionalism, power struggles and incessant bickering! Each ensemble has a pair of teachers working with them – not teaching them as such, but working with then to make sure everything’s working effectively. Once the ensembles get going the teachers melt into the background and leave them to it.

The students go to their ensembles after lunch, and the teachers who are not working with ensembles the representatives go to the ‘ongoing dialogues’ forum – a meeting to discuss various pedagogical issues relating to the teaching of jazz.

After that the teachers get together to put together the ‘Teacher’s Concert’ - a chance for us to play with each other, and to play for the students. Various teachers will put together bands and ask other teachers to play with them. This is always fun, but of course there’s almost no rehearsal time so the material has to be practical and have the possibility of being put together in a short space of time.

After dinner it’s jam session time – I hum and haw about whether to go, and whether to bring my bass. I decide (foolishly) on doing both those things and the bus takes us to the jam session place which of course is jammed (no pun intended), and a) there is no way I’ll be able to play a tune unless I’m willing to fight my way onto the stage – which I’m not – and b) there’s nowhere to safely leave my bass either, so I have the cumbersome object with me for the whole two hours of the session before getting the bus back. I should have listened to my wiser self earlier, who was urging me to at least not take the bass. We live and learn – or in my case, not..................

Day 3

(Antonio Adolfo)

This morning the great Brazilian pianist and educator Antonio Adolfo starts the day with a wonderful lecture on the rhythmic underpinning of Brazilian music – it’s erudite, informative and delivered in a wonderfully soft spoken way, leavened with gentle wit.

Following this we have Masterclass in which the instrumentalists group together by instrument – all the bassists in one room, all the drummers in another etc. Since the IASJ meeting isn’t a typical workshop, and each school sends a teacher, it’s never clear how many teachers of a particular instrument there are going to be until arrival day. Sometimes there are many piano teachers, sometimes only one etc. This year there are about 8 drum teachers, so they have to work carefully together to give the masterclass a decent structure. As for bass, this year it’s just me and the wonderful Herbie Kopf from Lucerne, so it’s a relatively simple matter to organise the masterclass between us.

It helps that the students are a very nice bunch of people too and very receptive – there’s a theory that I’ve heard that says that certain personalities are drawn towards certain instruments, and while I know this is a highly debatable idea, I must say I do find that bassists as a rule are very easy going people and quite generous. And I think these are qualities that you need as a bassist – if you’re a nervous, narcissistic, egotistical bassist, you’re unlikely to get much work! Over the 20+ years I’ve been attending the IASJ meetings there have been occasional conflicts of ego among students, but these rare conflicts have never involved any bassists. Of course we all know a bassist who may not fall into the ‘nice guy’ category, but I think there’s enough evidence there to at least start a damn good argument on the band bus about the personality=instrument theory!

One of the students asks me about playing in odd metres, so I give a little demonstration of some strategies for that and we try a few things out together. The Masterclass continues with discussions of various other topics and eventually a little duet between two of the students – it’s been a nice way to start.

(Teacher's Concert)

Since this concert is one night only there are always a lot of groups. These concerts are also marathons...... Tonight there were 13 groups playing! Each one played for about 10 minutes, so if you add in time between pieces for the groups to set up (very quick actually) and a few announcements – well, you can do the maths yourself, but it was long! But good. This year (naturally) there was a real Brazilian influence on the music and a lot of energy in general, which kept things moving along nicely. I play with three different groups, all fun – the last is one I put together myself consisting of Francois Théberge (tenor), Mats Holtne (guitar), Dimos Dimitriadis (alto), George Kontrafouris(piano) and Carlos Ezequiel (drums). Carlos and George are of course my partners in crime from the tour of the Far East we did last year and it was great to hook up with them again. We play a piece of mine called ’Traditional’ , a time-no-changes piece based on lots of different bebop-type motifs put together in an unusual way. It was a lot of fun and finished the evening off with a rabble-rousing finale!

For part two go here

Give the Drummer Some!

2011-07-21T22:18:00.007+01:00

I originally wrote this post over a year ago, and also posted it on my website, but having recently listened to yet another multitude of drum solos over vamps, I thought it might be useful to re-publish it in the hope of putting some ideas out there that might be helpful for musicians who want to feature the drums as a solo instrument and are interested in putting a different wrinkle on it.....

For one reason or another, I’ve been listening to a lot of concerts and performances in recent weeks. And one thing I've heard SO many times in all kinds of contexts, is the drum solo over a vamp. Time was when the drummer’s soloing opportunities were limited to trades with the horns, or maybe a solo at the end of the night or on the obligatory burner at the end of the set or performance. This came to be seen as a cliché and other ways were sought to include the drums as a solo instrument without going to the obvious trades/solo option. Enter the solo over the vamp.

I'm not sure when this entered the vocabulary of jazz musicians -- I can think of Billy Cobham soloing over complex vamps with the Mahavishnu Orchestra back in the early 70s, but it was probably done before that, no doubt an enlightened reader can fill in the gaps for us. But only in the last 20 years or so that this become really ubiquitous, and is a stock in trade of most bands in contemporary jazz. And it’s only when you listen to as many performances back to back as I have in recent weeks that you realise that the solo-over-vamp thing has become as big a cliché in itself as the drum breaks/big solo was before it.

This is not to say that the drum solo over a vamp is not an effective device – it is and, like the drum break/big solo before it, it’s precisely because it is so effective that it’s become so ubiquitous and now somewhat tired. So is there a way to incorporate the drummer as a soloist in a piece without resorting to either of these rather overused devices? Here are a few suggestions:

1) Drum Breaks.

As usual it’s not necessary to reinvent the wheel in order to come up with something fresh to do – just a bit of finessing of what’s already there can often yield interesting results. Take the ubiquitous drum break for example – drum breaks are still a cool idea, it’s just that they’re always done in the same way – i.e after all the other solos are finished. But here’s a suggestion: Let’s say you’re playing a changes/form kind of piece, (could be swing or not) why not have each soloist begin their solos with a chorus of exchanges with the drums? So each soloist will start with 8s (or whatever) with the drums for a chorus (or two depending on the form length), then continue with their own solo, the next soloist in turn will do exchanges with the drums and then continue on with their solo and so forth. In this way the drummer gets to both play and interact with the soloists yet the breaks are more incorporated into the structure of the piece than in the traditional way.

2) Drum Solo

Again this is just a variation on what’s already done. So if we imagine again it’s a traditional form piece, why not have the drummer play a solo chorus in between each soloist rather than a big solo at the end? Once again this will make the drum solo into a more holistic element of the overall piece and give the drummer a lot of material to work with since he/she will be soloing after more than one soloist. Each soloist in turn will be given a lift into their own solos by the preceding drum solo.

If the piece is less conventional, then other ways to incorporate this drum solo as interlude idea can be brought into place. So if the piece is multi-tempo’d for example, the drums could set up the new tempos with some solo improvised passages, or announce the different sections with a small solo section.

3) Solo Over Vamp!

The very cliché that started this train of thought can also be used in a fresh way – like so: Let’s imagine that you’re playing a piece at a brisk tempo – 200 or above – and you want to give the drummer a solo over a rhythmic vamp....... Well instead of playing the vamp over and over again while the drummer plays over the top of it, why not have a few members of the band (3 at most – any more than that and it can get messy), come in and out, and play any section of the vamp at any time? In this way it becomes a very playful thing with nobody knowing which part of the vamp will be played by any one of the players. It’s more challenging too for the players since everyone has to keep the vamp in mind at all times in order not to get lost!

4) Duets

Have the drummer solo with somebody instead of on his/her own, a series of duets (or at least one), probably (though not necessarily), without bass can be both stimulating for drummer and other soloist alike and also create a fresh texture for the ears of the audience.

5) Write longer sections for the drummer to solo over

Instead of writing a bare vamp for the drummer to play over, why not write something a bit more involved? This can be particularly nice in a slower tempo piece where drum solos are rarely heard. If you have a good creative drummer there’s no reason why they should only be given a chance to solo over ‘wham-bam-thank you ma’am’ kind of tunes. A slower piece with some nicely written passages for the drummer to interpret as a soloist rather than an accompanist can make a welcome change for everybody and freshen things up.

There are many more possibilities for using the drums, (or any instrument), as a solo instrument - like so much, it’s just a matter of having a think about the various possibilities available to us instead of always going for the default position. As we know, jazz has a fantastic tradition of drum soloists, and this continues to the present day - there are so many great drummers out there. So let’s try and take advantage of that by using our imagination on how best to incorporate solo drums into our music as an organic constituent rather than always as a flag-waving rabble rouser. Let’s give the drummer some

To finish - here's a piece by John Zorn's Masada where the drum solo is not only incorporated into the piece but almost IS the piece! This is quite an old-fashioned 'drum feature' in a way, but still great nevertheless - especially since it features one of the great contemporary drum soloists - Joey Baron

No Culture

2011-07-16T22:44:00.006+01:00

I was in the huge branch of FNAC in Sao Paulo recently, looking for some Brazilian music, and while I was browsing, some kind of anodyne generic pop music was playing over the sound system. It’s the kind of thing you hear all the time – female singer, the sound processed to the Nth degree, some kind of one-size-fits-all beat – and usually I pay little or no attention to it. But there was something about being in Brazil and listening to Brazilian music on the sound post devices they have in FNAC (that allows you to listen to CDs before buying), and juxtaposing that with the aural schlock on the sound system that made me think about this music.

And what I realised was – this is probably the first time in human history that a music has arisen that is derived from no national, or linguistic, or tribal or indigenous culture. It has no geographical centre – apart maybe from being vaguely positioned in the western world. It is something that can be heard anywhere in the world, yet represents no individual part of it. It is not American, though it has American influences, it is not British though though it is sung in English. It is some kind of featureless bland bromide that has its roots in no particular society, that speaks of, or for no particular people. Whose rhythm is not derived from or based on the rhythm of any language. It is a culture-less music – manufactured and spat out for the sole purpose of making money.

The songs do not speak of anything other than anodyne teenage love pangs, the voices are a bizarre electronic soup, compressed and manipulated to the point where they lose any semblence of being a real human voice. If someone sang in your livingroom and produced a sound as bizarre as the sounds that allegedly emanate from the throats of such singers as Madonna or Britney Spears it would be a truly scary experience. To hear that kind of robotic synthesis coming from a real human being would be just bizarre.

Yet it’s the norm in this music – this no tone, no passion, crocodile tears flat-line voice..........

If you go to India and hear the people there speak you can understand how the music links with the culture and the speech patterns of everyday life. The same goes for Brazilian music, Hip Hop, or jazz. The Beatles (possibly the first group whose music became truly global), are clearly British and represent a time and place. Go to Vienna and look at the 18th century buildings and the culture from which they arose and you can get a clearer understanding of classical music. Go to County Clare and listen to Irish Traditional Music in its natural environment and you will again see how music arose from and is aligned with linguistic, cultural and environmental factors – and history. The history, geography and culture of races and peoples are inextricably linked with, and represented by their music.

This other music on the other hand – this sticky treacly manufactured international pop goo, whose sticky effusions have polluted the entire planet, springs from no culture other than money. It represents only the international corporate business behemoth that has taken the name ‘music’ into its title, despite having no interest in the concept of what music really is.

It is unprecedented in human musical history – a music without any culture. A music without any message. And ultimately a music without any true humanity.

Boston or Berlin?

2011-06-26T12:21:00.009+01:00

And so I gingerly set foot in the shark infested waters of the topic of American and European jazz. The title of this post, “Boston or Berlin?”, refers to a classic question asked of any Irish government of the last 30 years — do they lean more towards America, a traditional ally with deep historical ties to Ireland, or to mainland Europe with which Ireland has been allied since entering the EU in 1974. This could equally be a question that’s asked of any young jazz musician in Europe - do they identify more with American jazz, or do they take European models as their starting point? The same question probably couldn’t be asked of a young American jazz musician, since while young European jazz musicians are aware of what’s going on in the US, it’s rarely the case that their young American counterparts have any knowledge of jazz outside of the United States.

And why should they? After all, in the recent Jazz Journalist’s Awards only one European (Toots Thielemans for ‘Instruments Rare in Jazz’) made it into the winner’s enclosure, and only two, (add Evan Parker), even made it into the nominees list.

Of course the focus on American jazz by American jazz journalists is completely understandable – but I think it’s a shame that they are so insular. Not only are they missing out on a lot of great musicians and music, they’re also not really doing the right thing by their readers – which, if anecdotal evidence is to be believed, comprises largely of musicians. Yes, musicians who do the European touring circuit are more aware of the wide variety of jazz activity in Europe - but for those who are not lucky enough to get on the European gravy train, and who ply their trade solely in the US? Well they’re certainly not going to learn about European jazz activity from the US jazz scribes.

I originally considered writing this post a while ago while reading the ’Can Jazz Be Saved?’ controversy in the US. Terry Teachout used NEA figures to posit that jazz was in danger of disappearing, which prompted a firestorm of reaction from all quarters in US jazz blogdom. What was interesting to me as a European jazz musician, as I sit on the edge of a Continent that supports a huge amount of jazz activity – festivals, recordings, big bands, tours, clubs etc. - was the implicit suggestion in this discussion that jazz exists only in the US, which of course isn’t true. I feel that a more accurate title for that controversy would have been ‘Can Jazz Be Saved in America?’. Because jazz in Europe, relative to the US at least, is in rude health. Of course the same recent economic travails have affected the music in Europe too, but there’s still a huge amount of activity, young audiences, and money (less then there was, but there nevertheless), to support jazz activity of all kinds.

And it’s not just European musicians who benefit from this activity, In fact it’s true to say that over the past thirty years at least, that for many American musicians, making a living in jazz has only been made possible by the vitality and economic clout of the European jazz scene. Jazz - at least as a viable way to make a living for many American musicians – was ‘saved’ decades ago by the European tax payer! Even the biggest names depend on Europe for a large part of their work – just having a quick look at Brad Mehldau’s upcoming concerts for example: From the list of 65 listed on his website, 39 are in Europe. So Europe accounts over 60% of Brad’s upcoming concerts – a statistic that tells its own story.

So while I can understand the concern over the music’s travails in the land of its birth, to carry on a debate about the economic woes of jazz, and the possibility of its disappearance, without once mentioning the vitality of the European jazz scene, and its impact on keeping the music alive and economically viable seems a bit blinkered to say the least.

But American jazz journalists ARE a bit blinkered when it comes to this topic. I’m not in the slightest bit interested in the US vs European jazz wars bullshit, this is much more about the fact that serious jazz writers are not checking out some very good music and bringing it to the attention of their readers.

And what is a shame about this is that many people are missing out on learning about great music and great musicians. This is especially a pity for young American jazz musicians who have absolutely no idea of the existence of great players on their instruments. For example - if you are young trombonist you HAVE to know about Nils Wogram, certainly one of the greatest players on the instrument today. If you’re a bassist and you like Scott Colley for example, you are definitely going to like Anders Jormin. If you’re a pianist who likes Brad Mehldau you are definitely going to find great things in Stefano Bollani and Enrico Pieranunzi, if you are a drummer and you like Ari Hoenig then check out Chander Sardjoe. If you like that whole M-Base scene then check out Stéphane Payen or Franck Vaillant. If you’re an improvising string player you’ll find killer and very original players in Europe like Dominique Pifarely, or the cellist Vincent Courtois. Is there a more original guitarist anywhere than Marc Ducret? What about Christy Doran? Nguyen Le? You like virtuosic legato lyrical playing? Try Julian Arguelles. And as for an unclassifiable original, how about Mederic Collignon? If you’re into composition, how about Django Bates? And there are many many more.

While all of these musicians are influenced to a greater or lesser degree by American musicians, they all bring a European sensibility to their playing and writing – a different approach that is definitely worth checking out, and worth listening to.

And there are great things going on between Americans and Europeans at the moment too. And not just the kind of ‘American star with local rhythm section’ thing that used to be the most common form of European/American interaction, but genuine artistic triumphs that represent the collective backgrounds of musicians from both sides of the ocean. For example Enrico Pieranunzi’s trio with Marc Johnson and Joey Baron, or Tim Berne’s ‘Big Satan’ with Marc Ducret and Tom Rainey and Carlos Bica’s ‘Azul’ with Frank Mobus and Jim Black. And I’ll even risk the charge of being self serving by mention MSG, the trio I’m in with Rudresh Mahanthappa and Chander Sardjoe. These are all examples of groups producing great music which reflect a combination of American and European approaches to contemporary improvisation.

There is a whole continent out there with a lot of gigs, festivals, musicians, ideas, tours and creativity going on. Europe provides a financial lifeline for many American musicians, as well as the opportunity to collaborate with their European colleagues (and also gives Europeans the chance to collaborate with their US colleagues too of course). European musicians themselves are producing vital original music all the time. And of course though I’m just mentioning European jazz here, because there are also great musicians in other non-American environments too – Brazil, Canada and Australia immediately spring to mind. Yet as far as the JJA Awards are concerned, and most American jazz writers, anything east (or North or South) of the US just doesn’t exist.

In terms of what’s really going on in the WORLD of jazz, it makes their writing and by extension their awards quite parochial. It’s like having a major American newspaper that doesn’t have a Foreign News desk.

Elitist? Moi!?

2011-06-09T20:27:00.004+01:00

Recently I took part in a back and forth in an online discussion, on the Irish Times music blog, about jazz and its perception in the eyes of the public. And there was lots of the ‘people think of jazz musicians as being ‘elitist’ accusation. And of course there were lots of ‘we’re not elitist!’ rebuttals from various respondents. And this is a thing I’ve seen many times recently – a kind of desperation on the part of jazz musicians to not be seen as being any different to any others, to be accepted as being the same as any other musicians, to be seen as being the same as rock musicians, or country musicians (though different to classical musicians for some reason.....). And in a way I’d, in an intellectually lazy way, almost come to believe that myself. But if I’m being honest with myself, I have to say that deep down I don’t believe we’re the same as everybody else. I believe that as musicians, as people who are involved in the craft of music (as opposed to the art – that’s a different story....), we’re as good as anyone, and better than most. And we should stop apologising for it.

In fact we should, I believe, not be afraid to have pride in what we do and in the uniqueness of what we do.

I remember when I was in secondary school, in a religion class, the teacher stated the view that to be a true Catholic you had to believe that all other religions were wrong. I (being the worst Catholic since Genghis Khan), thought at the time that this was a shockingly intolerant opinion expressed by an old reactionary, but then when I thought about it I realised that he was right – if you’re a Catholic but believe that Buddhists (for example) might be equally right in their beliefs, then why would you be a Catholic? To put this into a musical context – for me, given the amount of work it takes to play the instrument well enough to play jazz, to know harmony well enough etc. - given all that, then if I believed that Indie-rock (for example) a music that is much less technically demanding, had the same value as jazz, then why would I go to the trouble of doing all that extra work on the instrument? If, in my heart of hearts, I really believed that Indie-rock was of equal value (to me) as playing jazz, then why wouldn’t I become an Indie-Rock musician and save myself all this technical practice? And the simple answer has to be that for me, being a jazz musician is more important than being an Indie-rock musician.

I’m tired of the apologetic stance taken by jazz musicians about their own music – why should we be so desperate to not be seen to believe that this music is somehow special? This music IS special! This tradition is special. It is unique, it has been peopled by some of the greatest musicians and artists of the 20th Century and it has produced some of the greatest works of musical art of the past 100 years. It has enhanced and enriched the lives of millions of people, it has influenced thousands of musicians, many of whom work outside the strict ambit of jazz. It prizes the musicians who work for the good of the group, while at the same time honouring individuality. To play it at its best demands, at the very least, great technical skill, an ability to listen to others while improvising your own part, sensitivity to your immediate musical environment, an ability to make split-second musical decisions, to hear everything you’re about to play just before you play it and then reproduce it on the instrument instantly.

Add to that an ability to read music, to know large amounts of jazz repertoire (melodies AND harmonic schemes), from memory, and an understanding of the major stylistic developments in music (all music, not just jazz) over the past century and you have a job description of the minimum requirements for a contemporary jazz musician aspiring to play the music on a high level.

When you see a jazz musician playing this music well, you are seeing someone who has submitted him or herself to years of discipline and practice in order to be able to play a music that is not only profoundly difficult to master, but is also generally financially unrewarding. You are also looking at someone who has at some point had the imagination and determination to set out on what they know will be a long and tough road, but a road they’re willing to travel in order to partake of one the world’s great musical traditions. They are prepared to undergo all of this work, all of this effort, for the sake of the music and in order to be able to play it with others.

Does that make them elitist?

Am I an elitist?

Frankly I’m past caring what people think – in general this ‘elitist’ accusation is born from a very lazy intellectual standpoint, usually made from the kind of person who would in no way submit themselves, in any music, to the kind of discipline and hard work necessary to be a jazz musician. If someday I’m accused of being an elitist by a musician who has spent over 20 years of technical practice and total immersion in their music and who plays it at the highest level, then maybe I’ll give the accusation some thought. Until then I couldn’t be arsed answering those accusations any more. I don’t have time for that kind of time-wasting distraction, I’m too busy working on the music.

Metronome Lesson

2011-05-05T08:32:00.003+01:00

This is pretty amazing to watch.

When the metronomes cannot connect to each other, they get out of synch. As soon as they can connect, or 'hear' each other they get in synch pretty much immediately. It's like a lesson in microcosm showing how musicians will always play together if they listen to each other, but can't if they're in their own world. I've noticed this phenomena sometimes when working with classical musicians. They'll be great players and can read anything, but when playing a piece together they sometimes just read their own part and don't try to hear where they are in relation to the ground pulse and in relation to where everybody else is. As a result they get out of sync pretty easily. Not all the time of course, but it's a phenomenon I've noticed before - reading the part in isolation and not relating it to everyone else's part. In symphony orchestras of course this is endemic - but that's a whole other story!

Enjoy............

Non-Mobile Me

2011-05-01T23:36:00.010+01:00

I don't have a mobile phone

This is the answer given to numerous people who ask me for my cell phone number, and it has been greeted with varying levels of disbelief, particularly in recent years. When I set my face against getting a mobile phone years ago, people would greet the news that I didn't have one with, at first, vague admiration, which then changed to a feeling that I was vaguely eccentric (especially as time passed and more people organised their lives around mobile phones), and finally ended up with people thinking I was barking mad.

My original objection to mobile phones was that I didn't want to be reached simply anywhere, that I didn't need the extra stress of being available at all hours of the day or night no matter where I was. But another reason for not getting a mobile phone became apparent to me a few years later after my original decision not to get one - the distancing effect of these devices.

This was brought home to me on a trip to Cairo in 2004, when I was there to do research in order to write a piece of music. On one occasion I was travelling round old Cairo with an Italian film crew, and we ended up in an old coffee house in an alleyway, with the sun setting and the moon rising above a minaret on the other side of the alley - a completely “Arabian Nights” scene. And I looked around to see if everyone else was getting this incredible vibe from where we were, only to find that all seven of my companions were on seven different mobile phones having seven different conversations, and being completely oblivious to where they were.

This kind of copper-fastened my intense dislike of these machines. And don't get me wrong, I'm not a technophobe. In fact I’m very computer literate, and internet literate, I have an iPod touch, a laptop, an iMac, I write music on my computer, I’m king of the e-mails, and write this blog. I'm very aware of what technology can do for us, and for me. I use Facebook and YouTube etc etc and I realise these are just part and parcel of being a professional musician these days.

But I've managed to hold out against the mobile phone. For the reasons mentioned above. Of course it's probably a pain in the ass for people to deal with me, since everybody is so used to being able to reach anybody at any time. And doubtless there are those who consider me to be a crank. And maybe I am. But I don't give a shit! I'm definitely happier without a mobile phone than I would be with one. I love the fact that when I leave the house nobody can reach me, that when I go for a walk nobody can call me or bother me with stuff that can, 99 times out of 100, wait. I love the fact that when I am out I never feel the need to “check my messages”, in that obsessive way that the vast majority of mobile phone users have. I never taken out a mobile phone at a restaurant and rudely put it on the table, the way so many people do. And I love the fact that I am 100% IN the environment that I find myself in at any time.

Because it is this partial removal from any situation that the mobile phone user submits to, that bothers me the most about this particular technology. These people are having a conversation with you and giving you their full attention only for as long as the phone stays silent or doesn't vibrate in their pocket or otherwise tell them that they need to disengage from whatever it is they’re doing and see who's trying to call. It's this tyranny of the phone that I really object to.

And this distancing effect is not confined to phone use either. I was in Valencia last week and I went to the amazing aquarium that they have there. It was a holiday that day and very packed, but I noticed that the vast majority of the people who were there spent most of the time photographing the fish and the tanks, and not looking at them at all. They were photographing and not seeing. Everything was about “the shot” - in previous times people would have gone through the aquarium gazing around them at the exhibits, talking to each other pointing out this and that. Here, they were walking from tank to tank, getting the shot, then moving onto the next one. They were there, but they were not there. More distancing.

Last night I played opposite Kurt Rosenwinkel at a festival here in Ireland, during Kurt’s set I went into the auditorium to check it out. And sitting in the audience, every few minutes, I would see someone take the phone out of the pocket or out of the bag turn it on, look at it, and put it back from where it came. Obsessively checking their messages - for what!? Almost certainly nothing important. How can you be at a concert, and not even be able to give your attention to the music that is being played right in front of you? A concert for which you have bought a ticket and paid good money to go and see. As always, the mobile phone has primacy. The users have become so addicted to “being connected” that they cannot even devote 45 minutes without meaninglessly checking their phones. More distancing.

With the development of this kind of technology we are more and more being removed from where we are, to the point where we cannot commit to being 100% involved in almost anything. Even the most fundamental things. I saw a family in a restaurant a couple of weeks ago - father, mother, two kids - the youngest of which, (a child of about 6), had been given his fathers iPad to play with at the table. So there they were, having a family meal with their six-year-old playing games on the iPad and wearing headphones. I looked at that and I thought, this is ultimately where it's going. A situation where four or five people, even family members, sit together but they pay absolutely no attention to each other, because they're all somewhere else.

This technology has all kinds of ramifications for musicians, not least the fostering of attention deficit in both listeners and musicians - especially young musicians who are growing up with this technology as part of their daily lives (this is a big subject on its own........). Can a young musician trying to learn to play jazz for example, resist the temptation to check his or her phone or computer while they're practising? It's a hard question to answer. All I can say is that if I'd had an iPhone, or a PowerBook connected to the World Wide Web in the corner of my practice room when I was 19, I definitely would have done a lot less practice than I did...............

Of course the genie is out of the bottle, there is no way of getting it back in, but that doesn't mean that we have to surrender to to it in every way - which is what most people seem to do. Of course I have no idea where this mobile phone technology and etiquette (or lack of it), is going to go, but for as long as possible, I’m going to keep going in the opposite direction.

Monk, Martial and Melody

2011-04-14T20:33:00.017+01:00

In a recent blog post, Ethan Iverson has a good swipe at anyone (and there are many) who wilfully, or stupidly, misunderstand the work of Thelonious Monk. Ethan said in a post a while ago that should he and I meet we’d probably disagree on most things relating to jazz - an opinion I’ve never really understood quite frankly, because I find myself in agreement on most things that he writes about in jazz, and in particular when he writes about the historical jazz canon. And in this post in particular I think he’s right on the money, both in relation to Monk and his other sidebar criticism of Martial Solal.

I’ve always found Solal to be brilliant, but almost too brilliant. His fluid technique and febrile imagination seem to conspire to refuse to allow him to ever settle on a vibe or an idea for longer than a couple of seconds before he’s off again to demonstrate some other kind of pianistic or improvisational legerdemain. His playing is the musical equivalent of being on a Roller Coaster – full of thrills and adventure, but not something you’d want to do all day.........

Having said that, he IS a true original with a style that incorporates Tatum-esque flourishes but with a very different harmonic approach. His ability to leap from idea to idea is startling and there’s obviously a brilliant improvisational mind at work. He was one of the first really original European jazz musicians and his style was almost fully formed from a very early stage. Here’s an example of his quixotic brilliance in a trio performance of ‘Green Dolphin Street’ recorded in the 60s (couldn’t find any more of this footage on Youtube, which is a pity – looks like a fascinating show) - check out Johnny Griffin’s admiring comment at the end - ‘Ridiculous!’. Yes indeed, it IS ridiculous

But despite the brilliance, or maybe because of it, I often find myself tiring of Solal quite quickly, especially because of his inability, or disinterest perhaps, in sticking with one idea for any length of time, or with letting the music breathe at all.

Which is in stark contrast to Monk’s approach – a man who had an incredible ability to explore and/or repeat small amounts of material for long periods of time. It was Solal’s public dismissal of Monk’s pianism, at a recent talk in New York, that set Ethan off on his angry rebuttal of both Solal’s opinion that Monk couldn’t really play the piano, and of the people who thought Monk’s music lacked seriousness. He also took a swipe at the many people who over the years have believed that Monk’s music could be reduced to a stereotype by just adding a few clusters or sudden displacement of a note or two.

Which is something I’ve felt for years too, and in reading Robin Kelley’s biography (which I previously discussed at length here) it’s clear that this kind of dismissal of Monk as a kind clownish amateur pianist who, as was sometimes grudgingly admitted, wrote interesting tunes, was an opinion that dogged Monk for years when he was alive, (doubtless denying him many work opportunities), and incredibly, seems to be still around in some quarters.

I’ve never ever understood the idea that Monk was a ‘bad pianist’. Unless you maintain the narrow view (and some people do), that a virtuosic 19th century classical approach to the piano is the only barometer of pianistic worth, then surely it’s obvious that Monk was one of the most original pianists in the history of the instrument. How can his detractors on the pianistic front, not hear the SOUND he makes on the instrument? It’s totally unique and has never, to my ears, ever been reproduced by anybody. He is a virtuoso of sound and sonority. And he is a virtuoso of rhythm – he swings as much as anybody, but in his own unique way. His use of rhythm is both extraordinary and ceaselessly inventive

Here’s an example of both of those attributes – the unique sound, and the rhythmic virtuosity and of course the amazing swing

Ethan also mentions, and is critical, about the anecdote in the book that tells of Monk flying through some Chopin, and how this was used in the book (along with the proof of his knowledge of the European classical piano repertoire), as some kind of validation of Monk as a ‘real’ pianist. Ethan makes the point that Monk was often erroneously associated by critics with the European avant garde and this is another point I would agree with totally. Monk’s roots are irredeemably, both socially and musically, in the community from which he came. The section of Kelley’s book that deals with Monk’s childhood in the San Juan Hill area of New York was for me one of the most fascinating aspects of the book. It really clarifies where Monk was coming from – black evangelist church music, stride piano, Duke Ellington – and I think all of that is evident in the Caravan performance that I posted above.

There are a couple of related stories to the Chopin story mentioned in the book, that involve anecdotes concerning Monk playing privately like Tatum or like Bud Powell. I’ve heard these stories before and they’ve always irritated me because they are based on the premise that the way Tatum or Powell played the piano was the correct way to play, and that Monk could do it if he wanted to, but he chose not to. So in an effort to defend Monk, the purveyors of these stories are just reinforcing the stereotype that Monk’s way of playing the piano was wrong. I do not personally believe that Monk could, or would have wanted to, play the piano like Art Tatum, any more than I believe that Tatum could or would have wanted to play like Monk. Monk does not need to be validated in this way – his piano playing represents a unique achievement and he did not need to play like Tatum or Powell (or Chopin!) to demonstrate his bona-fides as a pianist

(Monk's Advice)

Another point touched on in Ethan’s piece is the rarity of good interpretations of Monk’s music. Again musicians often seem to believe that just adding the odd cluster to any phrase makes the music into an authentic interpretation of Monk. But this is such a shallow approach and misses the point completely – in fact misses many points. One of Monk’s strongest opinions revolved around how his music should be played and he apparently said ‘Never mind the so-called chord changes, play the melody!’. And as listed in the famous ‘Monk’s Advice’ page, (transcribed by Steve Lacy from various nuggets of info given to him by Monk) this ‘play the melody’ theme was a consistent one as far as Monk was concerned - ‘Pat your foot and sing the melody in your head when you play’, and ‘stop playing those weird notes (that bullshit), play the melody!’

Melody was sacrosanct to Monk, as was rhythm, and yet so many people playing Monk approach the music as if the melody was something to be dispensed with as quickly as possible in order to get to the changes. It’s a very bebop approach and one that just doesn’t work for Monk’s music. All the character and individuality of his music gets flattened by the blunt instrument of changes running. I remember seeing the band ‘Sphere’ in 1983 – a band with great Monk credentials since both Charlie Rouse and Ben Riley had spent extended periods with Monk – and being very disappointed with the music, mainly because of the pianist in the band, Kenny Barron. Now Kenny Barron is a GREAT jazz pianist, but to my ears he played Monk as if the music was just another set of changes to be negotiated. Sphere were a great band, but in my opinion, not a great band for playing Monk.

One of my favourite recordings of Monk’s music comes from what might seem like an unlikely source – Chick Corea. He recorded what was originally a double LP on ECM – ‘Trio Music’ with the ‘Now He Sings Now He Sobs’ group with Miroslav Vitous and Roy Haynes. One of the LPs consisted of free improvisations, which never convinced me at all. But the other LP was comprised completely of Monk’s compositions and this was great. Corea really gets inside Monk’s music in the sense that the melody is referred to constantly during the solos, and his rhythmic sense is so strong – his phrases are carved out of the melodies.

Corea manages to both reference Monk and yet remain unmistakably himself – the sound he gets from the instrument has that bright sparkling tone that always characterises his acoustic piano work, and here it’s put at the service of the music, using his rhythmic prowess to point up the shapes and angles of Monk’s melodies while generating some of his most swinging playing on record. Having the addition of Haynes, himself of course a former Monk sideman, really helps the music and his bubbling snappy drumming dovetails perfectly with Corea’s clear articulation. Vitous is perhaps not the ideal Monk bassist, with the huge reverb applied to the instrument (by ECM or by Vitous?) making the bass a bit swimmy at times, but as always he’s an impressive soloist and of course this trio has some serious jazz history of it own.

Here they are, more than a decade later, playing Rhythm-a-Ning, and again Corea and Haynes’ affinity with Monk is beautifully on display again. (I have NO idea why Vitous is wearing headphones!)

I recently watched an interview with Corea where he told of working opposite Monk many times in the 60s and described Monk as being ‘one of the greatest musical figures of our culture’. Maybe he needs to have a chat with Martial........

Monk - music and inimitable minimalism

2011-03-19T00:32:00.018Z

Probably well behind everybody else, I’ve been reading the Thelonious Monk Biography by Robin Kelley And in what amounts to a private Monk festival, I’ve also been listening to the Complete Riverside Monk box set which I picked up in Paris recently.

I’ve been listening to Monk’s music for over thirty years now – I remember my father bringing home a double LP Riverside compilation when I was about 13 or so (pictured above – liner notes by Hall Overton!), and being really struck by the unique sound world of this music, which was unlike anything I’d heard in even my father’s extensive collection of jazz records. I didn’t understand it, but then again, not being a musician until I bought my first instrument at 18, I didn’t really understand anything............

Fast-forward several years and I not only played a lot of Monk’s music in various bands (as any jazz musician does in the course of playing this music), I also put together two different trios – one saxophone, one piano – devoted solely to his music, and also wrote the arrangements for a quartet tour where the entire repertoire was Monk’s. So his music has been part of my musical and everyday life for the majority of my time on the planet.

So, given all that, it’s taken me a while to get to Kelley’s book – I think I tried to order it when it came out first but it hadn’t been printed on this side of the water and then it became one of those ‘to do’ things. But it was worth the wait – I’m not finished it yet (as I write this), and I’ll be sad when I am, because it’s been a great read. As has been remarked previously by others, the amount of research Kelley did was phenomenal – the guy seems to have found out what Monk was doing on a week by week basis for about thirty years! And he not only undertakes amazing research, he also casts some light on on Monk’s (in)famous ‘eccentricity’, by showing that Monk was clearly bipolar and far from his eccentricity being something amusing, his condition caused tremendous difficulties both for him and for his family. The fact that his illness went undiagnosed for so long was caused both by a less developed understanding of the condition in those days, and the fact that the mental state of a black man was a very low priority for 1950s and 60s America.

The person that emerges in this book is a very admirable man – a genuine family man, generous to his friends and with his time to other musicians if they showed a genuine interest in what he was doing. He was also very musically demanding on his sidemen and colleagues, hurt and offended by the lack of recognition he often got, and by the reputation he had for being ‘crazy’. I knew that Monk had a difficult time in his early career, but until I read this book I hadn’t realised just HOW difficult it was. For the first 15 years of his professional life he struggled to get work of almost any kind – his reputation for being ‘weird’ both musically and personally, (not to mention a couple of minor drug busts with the consequent loss of his cabaret card), made it incredibly difficult, for a man with a wife and two young children, to support his family and develop his music.

Despite the appalling general lack of recognition he received around that time, there were several people who really swam against the tide and supported him professionally and who come out with great credit for it – Alfred Lion and Francis Wolff of Blue Note Records, Max and Lorraine Gordon (the latter going as far as carrying boxes of Monk’s records to record stores in an effort to get them to sell them), and George Wein. And his manager Harry Colomby emerges with a lot of credit for the work he put in trying to get work for someone who must have been both difficult to sell, and a very difficult client at times. In fact he was Colomby’s ONLY client for years – Colomby remained a schoolteacher throughout his association with Monk, and his role as a friend, manager, and agent for one of the world’s greatest composers and jazz musicians is a truly extraordinary story in itself.

As is the story of Nellie...... Without her, Monk wouldn’t have had a hope of surviving the early days in the way that he did, or dealing with the pressures associated with his fame from the late-50s onwards. Her devotion to him is both touching and extraordinary, and he was in turn devoted to, and totally dependant on her. Theirs is a unique story in the New York jazz world of that time – a stable relationship that was put under the most incredible pressure by economics and social class. How she managed to support Monk, raise a family, and deal with her own health issues over a fifteen year period, when almost no money was coming into the house almost beggars belief. But she did, and then when Monk received the recognition due to him at last, she metamorphosed into his road manager, talking care of literally everything for him while they we touring and working.

Of course the legendary Nica is heavily featured in the book too. Hers is a unique story – European nobility, wealthy but disowned by her family because of her bohemian ways, takes up with the NY jazz world and becomes an intimate friend and supporter to some of the most important figures in the music at that time, and to Monk in particular. The extraordinarily comfortable relationship there seems to have been between herself, Monk and Nellie is a story in itself. An unorthodox triumvirate that shouldn’t have worked, but did – for years.

While the book went over some ground I already knew from a previous biography of Monk by Leslie Gourse, I really learned a lot from this book about where Monk came from, the society from which he emerged and the whole jazz scene at that time.

I was again struck by just how much playing these guys did! The scene has changed so much and it’s very easy to forget the huge impact on everybody’s playing that must have been made by the sheer number of gigs they played. In a time when a jazz club gig was a minimum of three sets per night, 6 nights per week, and a possible couple of extra matinees thrown in, jazz musicians put in hours on their instruments in a way that’s almost impossible to do these days. Bands could stay together for long periods and develop their music in a way that to today’s jazz musician is really enviable.

And for those of us (which is nearly everyone by now) who only know that period from the recordings, it’s startling to see how much playing guys like Monk did with bands other than the ones we know from the recordings. For example there’s a mention of a gig at Town Hall with a bass and drum team of Scott LaFaro and Elvin Jones! I know I would pay a LOT of money to hear how that sounded – to hear how Elvin and Scotty sounded together, and how they sounded playing Monk’s music. Monk also hired LaFaro and Paul Motian for a week in a club in Boston! The legendary Evans’ bass and drum team, but playing with Monk – wow..... Apparently Monk was very taken with LaFaro and wanted him to join his band, but he’d already committed to Evans. In the book, Motian spoke very highly of the gig with Monk and tells a great anecdote about Monk asking him to sing his ride cymbal beat to him before the first gig and suggesting adjustments to it.

What also becomes clear by virtue of an accumulation of anecdotes, is just how dysfunctional many of the musicians were in the NY bebop jazz scene in the 40s and 50s in particular, but also into the 60s. The book is littered with stories of guys not showing up for gigs, being late, being drunk, being stoned, starting fights (physically sometimes), disappearing without explanation, dying young from diseases that would normally be rare in their age group, being psychotic, getting shot, knifed etc etc. Of course we all know these stories but when you read them in concentrated form like this, one after another, it really brings it home what the scene was like. It was (with some exceptions) a drug ravaged, alcoholic and dysfunctional community – severely discriminated against by society in general and by the organs of the State in particular. The story of Monk’s treatment at the hands of the police in Baltimore for example is both tragic and, even at this distance, enraging. Yet this underclass, operating in these appalling economic and societal conditions, managed to produce some of the greatest musicians and music of the 20th Century. Extraordinary.

A recurring theme in the last third of the book is the lack of new compositions created by Monk after about 1958. It’s interesting that he seemed much more prolific in the years when he was struggling to get gigs or be taken seriously as a player or composer. Once he became famous and began to get the recognition he’d always deserved the compositions dried up and his contract with Columbia seemed to be one long conflict between his contract, which demanded three albums a year, and his inability to come up with the material required. It was clear that the demand for new pieces stressed him considerably during this period, and Kelley puts down his inability to compose to exhaustion brought on by constant performing. But I’m not sure this is a strong enough reason for Monk’s compositional river running dry – when you look at Monk’s schedule, even at the height of his fame, he often had three weeks off here and a month there, and contemporaries like Coltrane for example, who was even busier than Monk, were producing new compositions all the time. It seems to me that Monk’s illness must have had something to do with his latter-day struggle and inability to come up with new material.

He was heavily criticised for playing the same repertoire over and over in the 60s, yet if you look at the videos on Youtube from this period, it’s hard to see why the critics are complaining, since his approach to these particular hoary old chestnuts is so fresh every time. Here was a guy who was really improvising every time he played. He never does any mere running through the changes, he’s always improvising off the melody. He does NOT play the same on Blue Monk as he does on Straight No Chaser – Monk doesn’t have a blues template, he really improvises every time he plays a tune – no matter how many times he’s played it in the past.

Another thing that struck me as I was listening to the Riverside Monk collection was how influential Monk was outside of the more obvious players usually discussed when Monk’s influence is mentioned (Jaki Byard, Andrew Hill, Herbie Nichols, Eric Dolphy etc). Listening to his solo piano recordings in particular, I came to realise that Monk was really the first minimalist in modern jazz. Yes, Basie had that aspect to him too, but it’s different. Basie swings tremendously while just using a few notes, and Monk does that too, but in Monk’s solo piano music there’s a stripped down quality and a deliberation about playing sometimes really tiny amounts of musical information that’s uniquely Monk. A kind of stillness and ability to listen to the sound the music is making rather than just listening to the notes being played. Monk will hang a chord or a cluster and just leave them there for a moment, savouring the effect, in a way that you hear in later music by people like Ran Blake (another Monk disciple) for example. And I can even hear it in the sometimes minimalist approach of Paul Bley, or Bill Frisell, or the pared-down drumming of present-day Paul Motian. In an era when jazz musicians moved towards ever greater levels of floridity and virtuosity, Monk sometimes espoused a Spartan approach to his material in a way that not only had never been done before but pointed to a whole aesthetic philosophy that would be adopted by future generations of players. He seemed to have an ability to listen to sound as an end in itself – a concern with timbre that was years ahead of his time. Only Ellington (a clear influence) can really be compared to Monk in this respect, and even then it was different.

Let’s finish by taking advantage of the still miraculous Youtube to watch Monk in Japan in 1963 playing ‘Ba-Lues-Bolivar-Ba-Lues-Are’. Check out the rhythmic vitality of the comping, and the way he takes the last phrase of the melody and uses it to comp for the first two choruses of the tenor solo. And also listen to the way he solos thematically all the time... And when you watch him play, you can see the great truth in what Kenny Werner wrote in Effortless Mastery where he said something like, “I don’t want to play like Monk, I want to feel like Monk felt when he played!’

Then there’s Rouse playing the music with such authority, and John Ore swinging the quarter note into bad health........And then there’s the amazingly musical Frankie Dunlop who as always, carves out a uniquely individual approach to the jazz drum solo. I LOVE Dunlop’s playing (I always preferred this quartet to the later one with Larry Gales and Ben Riley, good and all as it was), it’s such a shame he went off to a showbiz career (including apparently, stints as a female impersonator!) and left so little recorded work behind.

So, this is the Monk quartet of the early 60s – and the critics were complaining about THIS!?

A Few Observations on Wynton

2011-02-26T19:32:00.011Z

This post was prompted by the recent Randy Sandke affair (Peter Hum has a particularly good article on this here), where Wynton’s name loomed large in the arguments on both sides, yet it was something that he himself had no direct involvement with. Wynton’s huge profile in American musical politics in general and jazz politics in particular ensures that his name comes up again and again in all kinds of contexts.

I remember the first time I saw Wynton Marsalis play live. It was in 1983 at the Cork Jazz Festival and he was playing with the ‘Black Codes’ band. Not that it was called the Black Codes band, but it was virtually the same band that made Black Codes from the Underground a little later. It was a late night gig, starting at midnight, and there were about 7 of us musicians sitting together, ready to check it out. We knew who Wynton was, because there’d been such a palaver about him already, and we had heard both him and Branford (on recordings), with Blakey’s band. But we didn’t know Jeff Watts, or Kenny Kirkland, (or the bassist Phil Bowler) and didn’t really know what to expect. They came on stage and launched into something – probably Nozz-Moe_King which I wouldn’t have known by name at that time – and it was like being punched in the stomach. That is if being punched in the stomach can ever be described as being a pleasant experience. It was amazing – the power, the virtuosity, the turn-on-a-dime tempo changes – the sheer brilliance of it. At the time there was nothing really like it – yes, it was coming from the Miles 60s quintet conceptually, but it had its own thing too, especially the way the rhythm section played, espousing a kind of codification of the experiments in metric modulation that Miles’ group had touched on, and the hook-up between Watts and Kirkland in particular was spectacular.

At this point Wynton hadn’t taken on the role as spokesman for ‘real jazz’ in the way that he later did – he was outspoken, but people were still focussing on his trumpet playing at that time, and the sound of his band, rather than discussing him as a demagogue or seeing him as a divisive figure. And I think this is an interesting thing about Wynton, looking at it from the vantage point of where we are now – the more political power he took on, the more discussed his positions on what constitutes jazz were argued over, the more controversial he became, the less interest there seemed to be in his actual music.

His personal charisma, amazing trumpet playing and the way his band played was at one point incredibly influential on a particular constituency of young musicians, founding the ‘Young Lions’ movement and espousing a return to a way of playing that looked to emulate earlier generations of players rather than forging ahead with something that hadn’t been done before. Ted Gioia in his very fine History of Jazz, makes the interesting suggestion that this movement represented possibly the first time in jazz that a large coterie of young musicians had set their aesthetic compasses backwards rather than forwards. Jazz had always had a cult of modernism from its very earliest days, and this was the first time that any kind of serious, and philosophically underpinned, retro movement had been seen among young musicians.

For myself there was a period where I had an avid interest in what Wynton was doing musically – particularly in the area of rhythm. I got the eponymous first album and then bought Think of One, ‘Black Codes’, and then on into J Mood, Marsalis Standard Time Vol.1, and finally Live at Blues Alley. When first Kenny Kirkland and then Jeff Watts left the band and the music became even more referential to the past, and Wynton became more and more outspoken regarding his views on what did or did not constitute jazz, I became less and less interested in his music. I never enjoyed his large scale pieces, or his new band, and the final straw for me was when he recorded with pianist Eric Reed on Jelly Roll Morton’s “Tom Cat Blues,” recorded on the same sort of wax cylinder equipment that Morton used on his first recordings in the 1920s – the cover also featured Wynton in a sepia-toned imitation of an old photograph.

After that I paid little attention to Wynton’s music, his prolific output all passed me by with the exception of two recordings that were sent to me in a brief incarnation I had as an online jazz CD reviewer. It was a pretty good deal – I got free CDs and a little taste in return for 100 word reviews. Two of Wynton’s CDs landed on my doorstep - Marsalis Plays Monk and Live at the Village Vanguard- the latter an 8 CD set that I’d never have laid out folding money for, but that contained within it reminders of how great a player Wynton was. Some of the solos on this recording are simply stunning in terms of inventiveness and virtuosity. But again I feel some of the other players are not even close to matching Marsalis’ improvisational ability and there are real longeurs on the album – I found myself waiting impatiently for Wynton’ next solo. The Plays Monk recording is the only one of Wynton’s later recordings that I like in its totality and listen to occasionally. I think he captured the essence of Monk’s music really well there, and there are some terrific arrangements of Monk’s lesser known pieces.

But considering how prolific he is, and how long he’s been on the scene, it’s interesting to note that his recordings seem to make very little impression on the contemporary jazz scene these days. There is no question that Wynton looms much larger as a prosletiser for for a particular viewpoint, as a politician who deals with the big business world of arts funding in the US and of course as the eminence grise behind the whole JALC project. I wonder how he feels about the fact that he’s much more prominent as a public figure than he is as an improviser, composer and trumpet player? For someone with the prodigious gifts he has, it must be galling to have to spend so much time discussing your musical politics and have so much interest heaped on you for this aspect of your life, and very little interest taken in whatever your current musical project is.

And it’s understandable that his doings and pronouncements are so closely followed in the States. He does after all control, in a country with almost no funding for its own indigenous art-music, the largest funded jazz entity in the US under the umbrella of the JALC. In Europe however, Wynton’s doings and sayings don’t hold nearly the same fascination for the jazz fraternity as they do in the US – naturally enough I suppose. As someone who deals with young jazz musicians on a daily basis it’s interesting for me to see that Wynton has a very low profile for these same young musicians. In general they know him of course by reputation, but usually they only know two albums – ‘Black Codes’ and ‘Standard Time Volume 1’ - they’d be hard pressed to name any other albums from that period and they certainly don’t know anything by him recorded in the past 15 to 20 years. I find it ironic that for all his boosting and espousal of earlier styles of playing, he is best known musically for a few albums he recorded a quarter of a century ago, and ones in which he genuinely did something new with material taken from earlier players, rather than playing something that sounds like a pastiche (no matter how well played a pastiche it might be) of those earlier players.

As for me, I have the utmost respect for Wynton both as a musician and as a jazz philosopher. I don’t agree with some (and sometimes a lot) of what he says, but everything is argued from such a position of deep conviction and intelligence that it’s impossible not to give what he says a fair hearing, even if you disagree completely with it. He’s incredibly articulate and has become genuinely more fair-minded as he’s gotten older, and of course there’s still the trumpet playing......... In all of the stuff that goes on around him, it’s often forgotten just what a great jazz trumpet player he is. It was after all his playing that gave him the platform to air his views, and that made people pay attention to those views. Yes, he is an astute politician, but if his playing had been in any way run of the mill, nobody would have listened to anything he said, any more than they would have listened to the rest of us...........

Though I’ve devoted my professional life to the playing of jazz, the teaching of jazz and have been immersed in listening to jazz for at least as long as Wynton has, I know he wouldn’t even allow me to play as much as a few bars with him because I play the ‘wrong’ bass. But despite this and despite the fact that he often says things with which I strongly disagree, I still forgive him, because of stuff like this............

Black and White?

2011-02-05T14:49:00.019Z

I can’t believe they’re still arguing over the black/white thing in the US jazz blogosphere at the moment......... The trumpeter Randy Sandke wrote a book called Where the Dark and the Light Folks Meet: Race and the Mythology, Politics, and Business of Jazz which apparently, (I haven’t read the book), claims that some white jazz musicians got/are getting a raw deal from left-leaning white critics over the years and, due to the political/PC bias of these critics, were never given the credit for their achievements. This has created a storm in a teacup effect with heavy hitters from the jazz blog world weighing in (mostly negatively towards Sandke’s thesis) and Sandke taking on all-comers with huge rebuttals of their arguments, (how much time does Sandke have!? If it was me it would be just too exhausting to go into the minutiae of everyone’s arguments for the sake of rebuttal).

To an outsider to American jazz politics like myself, the arguments about whether somebody dissed Michael Brecker in an article several years ago, or who did or did not claim Bix had a poor sense of rhythm just seems daft. Ethan Iverson has a gigantic piece on it which gets into the fine detail of who said what, when, and about whom. Apparently Sandke is about to give a rebuttal to this piece – which will join the rebuttals he’s already made in response to Howard Mandel and David Adler

From where I’m sitting it seems extraordinary to watch some very famous writers and musicians savaging each other over this subject. Surely this argument about who was most influential and why, or who got their due and who didn’t, is over? It seems especially bizarre to see suggestions being made that X didn’t get his due because he was white, and Y was over-praised because he was black. And vice versa. I really didn’t think so many serious writers and musicians could get so passionately involved in the arcana of these arguments. Surely there are more important things to discuss these days – such as the dwindling playing opportunities for ALL musicians, black OR white?

As to the argument that jazz history has been skewed by a political/racial agenda - without having read the book, but being an avid student of jazz history (via the music rather than the books on it), it seems glaringly obvious that though there have always been good and great white players, the vast bulk of what constitutes the influential history of the music (at least up to 1970), and the major developments in jazz, have emanated from the Afro-American community. There’s no getting away from it – no matter how many Bix’s, Artie Shaws, Benny Goodmans, Stan Getz’s, and Bill Evans’ (and many other great white players) you acknowledge, if you take Armstrong, Ellington, Parker, Davis, Ornette and Coltrane (not to mention Monk and Mingus.....), out of the mix then it’s all over – there’s no real major body of work around which the other musicians – black and white – revolve.

You could make an analogy with classical music in this respect – yes there are lots of great non-German composers (especially post 20th century) but if you take Bach, Mozart, Haydn, Brahms, Mahler, and Schoenberg out of the picture then there probably is no picture left since the development of the music itself is so dependant on the work of these German composers.

Jazz history is completely dependant on the work of these aforementioned jazz greats and the music can’t be imagined without them. And they’re all Afro-Americans. It’s a music that sprung from the Afro-American community in the US and while there were great white players involved from even the earliest times, the major development of the music revolves around Afro-Americans.

At least up as far as 1970

After that the picture is far less clear – you have the rise of the fusion movement, most of which was dominated by white players, and the transformation and maturation of European jazz – undergoing an evolutionary process which saw it change from being an imitation (sometimes poor) of American jazz into something which had highly individual regional characteristics and many really great and original instrumentalists. In America over the past thirty years many influential instrumentalists – Pat Metheny, Michael Brecker, Dave Holland, Brad Mehldau, Kurt Wosenwinkel, Joey Baron, Dave Douglas and many others – have been white. And of course there have been many influential black players as well – Jeff Watts, Terence Blanchard, Mark Turner, Kenny Kirkland, and many others including of course Wynton and Branford Marsalis. However the domination of the music by Afro-Americans has waned since 1970 and to me this is a subject far more worthy of discussion than the current furore over who dissed who, who was quoted out of context, and who said what and when.

It seems to me that Afro-American society at large has pretty much abandoned jazz as being something that has any relevance for them. Of course there are still players coming out of the Afro-American community, and people in the community for whom the whom the music has importance, but as a whole the music doesn’t seem to have much support from the people from whom it originally sprang. In my recent trip to New York I went to 11 gigs in 5 days and saw hardly any Afro-Americans in the audience.

And I think the current apathy and lack of interest in jazz displayed by the vast majority of Afro-Americans is a tragedy for the music and a tragedy for Afro-American culture. And I think it’s a far more interesting and important discussion than the current Stateside squabble that seems to be more about bruised egos and people scoring points off each other than any effort to bring clarity to their argument. And, sitting here on the other side of the Atlantic, the argument itself seems like such a waste of time to me. Surely we have more important fish to fry these days than whether somebody misquoted Gary Giddins!?

New York Jazz Holiday

2011-01-20T12:02:00.030Z

To the Village Vanguard to see Kurt Rosenwinkel

Me: ‘Hi, I’ve bought three tickets online for tonight – here they are. Thank You’

Door Guy: ‘Certainly, let me see.......(consults list), yes, here we are and there you go – enjoy the show’

Now that’s what MIGHT have happened if it had been any other jazz club in any other city in the world, but this being the Vanguard, in New York City what actually happened was that I delivered my part of the script and the tickets, and was met with a blank stare and disinterested shuffling of the list by the troglodyte on the door, whose studied boredom and lack of any verbal response made be feel like giving him a richly-deserved clump across the side of his head for his rudeness and stupidity.

Of course there are rude people everywhere, and other places where rudeness is the norm (Hong Kong!), but only in New York do some people pride themselves on being jerks. They imagine it’s cool somehow, and wear it as a badge of honour, and of all the possible things one could be proud of, this has to be the stupidest – being a jerk is easy! Anyone can do it! Being polite takes a little (and only a little) more effort. The rudeness itself I don’t mind, (and after about 15 visits to NYC I expect it), but the pride that some New Yorker’s take in it I find really irritating, stupid and a bit pathetic actually. Rudeness as hipness? Ha!

Rant over.

I went to New York with my son Chris, who’s a guitarist, for a ‘jazz holiday’, packing in as much music as possible in 6 days, picking up my new bass, catching the Winterjazz Fest, and seeing as many friends as possible. There’s no better place to undertake a musical orgy of this nature – there is no question that New York IS the jazz capital of the world. There are more great (and some not so great) jazz musicians living there and more jazz activity going on there, than in any other one single place in the world. This has both advantages and disadvantages for the musicians who live there (more on that anon), but for the casual visitor such as myself, it’s nothing short of an embarrassment of riches and I try to get over there at fairly regular intervals to see friends, play sometimes, and see as much music as I can.

Back to the Vanguard and Kurt. He was playing with a quartet (Aaron Parks, Ben Street and Ted Poor), and I was kind of disappointed with it – I felt it was underpowered in terms of energy and commitment from the group and I couldn’t make up my mind whether it was because the band didn’t feel like getting it going or whether they were just having an off night. It seemed a bit careless and casual at times, and really, considering its history, carelessness and casualness are not qualities you should be bringing to the Vanguard if you’re lucky enough to get a week there. Kurt really did get it going on a Byard blues in the second set and then you could see what all the fuss is about, but overall I felt a bit short-changed.

My son disagreed with me, he thought it was great – but then again, he’s a guitarist! The deification of Kurt by pretty much all guitarists under the age of thirty continues apace, and I can appreciate why – he really is unique and has his own thing. But he’s reaching that point where (like other icons before him) he’s in a winning situation with the audience as soon as he takes the guitar out of the case and so the motivation to grow and challenge himself has to come from him and him alone all the time. I’m not sure he really was up for that particular challenge on this particular evening.

(Dafnis Prieto)

Winter Jazzfest

The following night it was on to the Winter Jazzfest. I had deliberately made sure our visit coincided with the festival having read great reports of it the year before. And it was great – musically. But organisationally, to use a technical term, it sucks. It’s been a long time since I’ve had to listen to music under more uncomfortable conditions, where the audience is treated more shabbily and where the admission and ticketing procedures are more shambolic and audience-unfriendly. To buy a two-night ticket in advance and then to have to queue in the freezing cold two nights in a row to pick up tickets for the individual nights (why!?) and then not to be guaranteed entry to anything (more freezing queue-ing), and to have to endure hours of standing at the concerts themselves while not being able to actually see what you were hearing, is an indictment of the festival organisers.

Anecdotally too I’ve heard the musicians are paid very little if anything at all. If this is true then it’s a disgrace, since the much touted musical riches of which the festival boasts is based on these same musicians not getting paid. Which would be cool if nobody else got paid either. If ever I’m asked to play for nothing I always say that I’ll be happy to do it as long as the promoter, the bar staff, sound engineers, ticket sellers, doormen, and anyone else involved with the event (including the venues) are not getting any money either. But that’s never the case – it’s pretty much always the musicians who are the saps in these situations. It really leaves a bad taste in my mouth when everybody wins except the guys around whose work and dedication the whole event revolves.

But musically, and hardly surprisingly given where we were, there was some incredible music to be heard (if not seen). We attended some great performances by bands working in a wide variety of stylistic/musical approaches and the 40-minute set format of the festival really does aid multiple consumption of music, especially given the diversity of the acts. Not everything was great, but most was at least very good and often much more than very good.

I managed to catch Nguyen Le with Rudresh Mahanthappa (great!), Dafnis Prieto with Jason Lindner and Kokayi (very interesting and the improvised ‘auction’ was outstanding), Jamie Baum’s Octet (great writing), Dana Leong, (terrible, risible), Tineke Postma (very well played, but maybe a bit naively programmed considering the wham-bam-thank you ma’am nature of the festival set), Miles Okazaki with Guillaume Perret and Damion Reed (fantastic set, some very original music played by a real band), and Steve Coleman and Five Elements (a real return to form, killer set and the new band sounds great – the addition of piano and guitar really adds something).

Musically it was great for the most part and I know I inevitably missed a lot of great music too, you can’t be everywhere. But really the organisers need to get their act together – a festival boasting of its greatness while treating both audiences and musicians badly, and depending on their goodwill and willingness to put up with poor conditions is doing some pretty hollow boasting................

(with Lindsey Horner)
Socially the festival was very nice too of course and I ran into so many musician friends – Jim Black, Ben Perowsky, Rudresh Mahanthappa, Curtis Hasselbring, Nguyen Le and and many others just in the two nights we were there. And I hung out with several other musicians over the course of our visit – Arthur Kell (our very generous and gracious host while we were in NY), Jonathan Mele (whom I knew from his time in Dublin), David O Rourke (another Dublin connection – we knew each other when we were both jazz tyros, going to every gig we could in the late 70s), and especially Lindsey Horner the great bassist who is one of my oldest friends in music. Lindsey studied music in Dublin in the late 70s/eartly 80s and was on the scene, and we became good friends and have been ever since. In recession-ridden Ireland of the 80s (though we have now renewed our acquaintance with recession in recent times) about 30,000 people a year were leaving Ireland to work abroad – we used to say that Lindsey was the only person of that era to travel in the opposite direction.

(Manifestation of the iPhone Plague at Kenny's Castaways)

One thing I noticed at the gigs in NY, which is now pretty common everywhere, is the iPhone Plague....... At every gig, little beacons of light appear in all corners of the room as people obsessively check their messages, or send SMS messages. It’s impossible to look around the room and not see someone checking their phones. It’s become both a plague at gigs, and a worrying indicator that people find it more and more difficult just to concentrate on one thing at a time. Even something as great as live music can’t hold their attention anymore, everything takes second place to those damn phones. And these are adults who presumably have only had cell phones for about the past 10 years – what will it be like for kids who have been raised with them? Will they have any attention span at all or be capable of listening to music without doing something else at the same time? Brave New World..........

To the Jazz Standard on a Sunday morning to do a rhythmic clinic for young musicians. This was part of the programme they run there for talented kids called the Jazz Standard Discovery Programme, a terrific initiative directed by my old friend, guitarist arranger and composer David O Rourke, where the kids get a clinic or workshop or some kind of educational event first and then play – for real people, in a real jazz club! One of the biggest problems for young musicians (and many older ones too) these days is that it’s really hard just to be able to find places to play. For these kids the chance to play in the Jazz Standard on a Sunday morning to a full house in a jazz club atmosphere is invaluable and something that they’ll always remember.

And they were very talented kids too – very pleasant and engaged during my presentation and enthusiastic and disciplined in how they presented their music to the public. After all the ‘is jazz finished?’ talk that seems to excise the minds of everyone in the music these days it’s somehow very reassuring to see a bunch of 14-18 year olds who are interested enough in the music to take the time to learn something as challenging as ‘Fee-Fi-Fo-Fum’

Terence Blanchard

In the evening we went to see Terence Blanchard’s quintet at the Jazz Standard – something I thoroughly enjoyed. With guys like Blanchard, who because of his gifted youth has been around for so long already, it’s easy to take them for granted. At this point he has such a huge body of work behind him and is recording and writing all the time, it’s easy to underestimate just how exceptional this guy is. This was brought home to me during a blistering set with his quintet in which Blanchard demonstrated what a true improvising virtuoso is, and in which his group, propelled along by Kendrick Scott, explored three pieces in a set that harked back to traditional jazz values. Having just come from the Winter Jazzfest where the eclecticism of contemporary jazz was patently evident and where all kinds of grooves were utilised and influences flaunted, Blanchard’s gig was a nice reminder of how good more traditional jazz can be in the right hands. His band demonstrated again that in the end it’s not really about the material (he finished the set with ‘Autumn Leaves, the hoariest of all hoary old chestnuts), but the imagination and creativity that you bring to it. As a bassist I must say I was really impressed by Joe Sanders, a guy I’d not heard before but who operated in the creative space between the drums and the soloists in a way reminiscent of the way Ron Carter bossed Miles’ quintet in the 60s, but without aping any of his mannerisms. Real creativity in accompaniment and cracking the whip in the rhythm section.

Brazil!

(Cidinho Teixeira, Fabiana, Itaguara Brandao - Zinc Bar)

Whenever I’m in New York on a Sunday, I always go to the Zinc Bar to hear Cindinho Teixeira’s group playing outstanding Brazilian jazz (it’s almost a religious observance for me......). The spirit that’s on display here – and the almost careless virtuosity – is always uplifting, and they play music in the way that I believe it should be played. They always give you the vibe that there is nothing better a person could be doing than playing music. And that’s how it should be – it IS a privilege for us to be playing music, and especially creative music, yet you’d often not know that from our onstage demeanour - shuffling on stage, almost never speaking to the audience, no tune announcements. No wonder ‘civilians’ often feel that attending a jazz gig is like being at a meeting of a secret society........ But not with the Brazilians – they display a wonderful combination of incredible musicianship with an esprit de corps that’s just a pleasure to witness. And of course the music is great too! They’ve been doing this gig on Sunday nights for 15 years, and it shows. Piano, bass, drums and voice with occasional sitters in. Unfortunately the second set was blighted by one of these – the saxophonist Alex Foster who sat in on difficult tunes he patently didn’t know, played overlong solos littered with blues scale clichés, with the microphone rammed into the bell of his horn and generally managed to suck all the life out of every piece he played on. It’s the kind of thing that gives saxophone players a bad name...........

(My new bass)

The New Baby

Apart from the music and the hang, the other major reason for me to go to NYC on this trip was to pick up my beautiful new bass. This was custom built for me by the great luthier Harvey Citron who lives and works in Woodstock. Lindsey was kind enough to drive us up, so we set off in a blizzard and made our way to Harvey’s place and picked up my new baby. It’s a very exciting thing to get a new instrument, especially one as good as this. Once again it’s an acoustic bass guitar, but with a narrower body than my old bass and with more electronic control.

I’ve been exclusively playing my other bass since 1993, so to get a new one at this stage is really something – terra incognita. I was wondering if it would be too different to the one I have and maybe I’d not enjoy playing it as much as I’d hoped. But one quick run up and down the neck of the bass scotched all those fears – it’s a wonderful instrument to play with a great sound, and fits my hand beautifully. What’s interesting to me is how different it is to my other one – because of the narrower body it doesn’t have as loud an acoustic sound as my old bass, and it has more of a feel of a bass guitar than the old one too. The old bass has a lot of upright qualities to it, due to its large body size and lack of any volume or tone buttons on the body – it’s just the sound of the instrument and trying to reproduce that as closely as possible on the amp. With the Citron there’s far more control (bass geek alert!), since it has 2 Piezos and a magnetic pickup so you can move between the acoustic sound to a completely electric sound. I can see myself using both instruments in different settings – the older one for more out-and-out ‘jazz’ settings, and the Citron for other situations.

(Lindsey and I collecting the bass in the middle of a blizzard....)

New York - Beauty and The Beast

So, a week in New York and a good battery charge as always. Looking back on it, the Winter Jazzfest pointed to both the strengths and weaknesses of the NY jazz scene. On the one hand there’s an extraordinary concentration of great musicians in a very small area, making for a hothouse creative atmosphere and an abundance of players on every instrument who play on a very high level. If you’ve got a creative project that you want to do, you will definitely find the right musicians for it in NY. I think that’s especially true of drummers – the amount of great drummers in New York is just scary, I really envy New York musicians the access they have to these drummers.

Being a jazz musician in New York also means being exposed to an endless stream of great gigs too and opportunities to hear some of the best players in the world playing in intimate settings. As a player you can measure yourself against some of the best and this can drive your development and technical abilities (sink or swim!). You can also get opportunities to play with great musicians in informal settings that don’t really exist outside the NY ‘session’ scene. These are all serious plusses for the way things are in New York.

On the minus side it has to be said there are just far too many musicians in New York for it to make any sense on an economic level. The money paid for playing clubs in NY is laughable – there is no way you could make a living by solely performing creative music in New York. The abundance and availability of musicians and the lack of places to play drives the price musicians can charge for NY gigs down to below subsistence levels. It’s a buyers market for the clubs and the musicians suffer. For all the advantages of being cheek by jowl with so many great musicians, there is the reality of the economics of it. A lot of the New York musicians I know work in (often menial) day jobs that have nothing to do with music, and the reality for them is that they’re not going to get out of that situation anytime soon. As they get older and take on responsibilities the typical situation of doing two rehearsals of original music for a gig that pays $30 is revealed for the economic luxury that it is. All that work, all that practice, all that study, all of that creative energy, and in the end you get less than if you’d done a four-hour shift at Dunkin’ Donuts......... The New York jazz scene depends on the willingness of a large percentage of its musicians to put musical value before economic reality. But with performance opportunities shrinking even further, and ever more musicians arriving in New York like gunslingers riding into town to prove themselves, can this model survive?

(Rudresh and I survey the scene....)

And one other aspect of this that I’ve not seen discussed too much is the distortion and depletion of the national jazz scene created by the never ending influx of musicians into New York. The US jazz scene, as a national scene, is almost non-existent. Apart from NY there are some scenes of reasonable size in a few places – Boston, Chicago, New Orleans, San Francisco, and maybe a few others. But all of these pale into insignificance beside the bloated New York scene. And this just can’t be healthy for jazz in the US. What you have in the US is one huge scene with far too many musicians and no money, and a series of cities, often with over a million people in them, with virtually no scene at all. If you read any jazz history (and fairly recent history at that) you learn that there were scenes in many cities (Detroit, Philadelphia, Los Angeles etc.) and that each scene had a particular flavour in the way the music was played. There were in fact regional dialects of jazz and there was a touring circuit. There may be still regional ways of playing the music these days (I’m not in a position to say, but outside the New Orleans scene, I suspect not), but the touring circuit is certainly gone. To get an idea of how difficult it is economically to tour in the US, have a look at this.

There is a constant refrain of ‘man, you gotta go to New York’ that’s sung to any player of any ability in the US - it’s held up as the Nirvana for jazz musicians, and that’s perfectly understandable. But the reality is that if a really good player from a regional city leaves that scene, it will be impoverished by his or her leaving. If every major city in the US had a relatively healthy scene, the audience for jazz would be bigger since regional cities would not just depend on the occasional visits by heavy hitters from NY in order to hear some good improvised music, and audiences would grow. Good local players would grow the scenes in these towns and in turn create a touring circuit for other musicians (and themselves).

A good example of this can be seen in Europe – not by any design, but simply by geography and culture. In Europe you have a variety of different and relatively healthy scenes based around different cities. Paris, Berlin, Koln, Amsterdam, Brussels, Copenhagen, Oslo, London, Barcelona, Rome , Helsinki and Stockholm all have sizeable scenes – none on the scale of New York, but big enough to sustain local musicians and create a touring circuit both for them and for visiting Americans (Europe is still the financial El Dorado for a lot of NY musicians). If a city were to emerge in Europe in which all the activity of the European scene were focussed, in the way that exists in NY, the other city’s scenes would wither and die, just like the regional scenes in so many US cities have withered and died. And the regional dialects of French, Swedish, Italian and German jazz would probably die too along with it.

As a jazz scene New York reminds me of one of those huge edge of town malls that arrives in an area and sucks all the economic life out of the high streets of any town within 50 miles of it. Nearly the entire US scene is based there, and this ‘gotta go to New York’ mentality means that it’s almost impossible for a regional scene to hold on to its good players. They in turn all arrive in New York where they have to scuffle and jostle for financial crumbs.

Let’s imagine that say 30 players of every instrument were to leave NY tomorrow and go back to their home cities and expend their energy there and develop their own scenes there, how much healthier would both those regional scenes be and how much better economically would the New York scene be for giving the musicians there a little more economic room to breathe? I’m not suggesting forced repatriation of all bassists! Nor do I have any solution to the problem as I see it – it is what it is and it’s hard to see, for lots of reasons, how it will ever be any other way. I’m just making the point that the huge concentration of musicians in New York is definitely not an unreservedly healthy thing – yes it provides an incredible level of musicianship and creative music, but at what cost to the musicians and the national scene?

New York has always been great for jazz, and always will be. I just wonder how long more can the musicians pay the real-life price for that greatness?

Lies, Damned Lies and Statistics (and Happy New Year)

2011-01-02T01:10:00.004Z

Another year, another blog. This is either the last one of 2010 or the first of 2011, depending on your point of view – or mine I suppose. It’s been an interesting year in terms of writing the blog – with the arrival of Google Stats I’ve been able to see which posts created the most interest and were the most read. And reading the stats taught me that I often completely misjudge which topics are of the most interest to readers. A quick look at the stats for the year give me the following top five:

1. The post about great jazz musicians playing on terrible ‘jazz’ recordings by classical musicians looking for a bit of street cred

2. A post about the possibility that Bill Evans influence has slid somewhat off the jazz radar of young musicians

3. Elvin Jones – the perfect drummer?

4. The recordings that Steve Coleman and Dave Holland made together

5. Child Prodigies in Jazz

The post about the jazz/classical thing was by far the most read post on the blog, which I guess makes sense since there is a whiff of a rant in it and it names names a bit – everyone loves controversy! The child prodigy post also provoked some interest. But the three of the top five most popular posts were about well known figures in the jazz world, which tells me that people still prefer to read about what, or whom, they know. For myself, although I’m interested in all my subjects, I often find the stuff about the actual music – structural, conceptual, philosophical, technical things – to be the most interesting things to discuss. But my readers seem to prefer to read about the musicians who play the music rather than read about the music itself.

One interesting aside came from someone commenting on the Bill Evans post, who said that it had come as a relief to him that this post was less ‘angry’ than my normal efforts. Angry!? Me!? Disputatious maybe, a malcontent quite possibly – but angry? Hmmmm....... interesting. I’m quite conscious of not trying to personalise things unless I feel I can’t make my point any other way, and though I do get angry about some aspects of the jazz world, I try and reign in my baser instincts and remain within the bounds of civilised discourse. The classical musician post was about as close as I get to a rant – I think! It’s definitely interesting to see yourself as others see you sometimes.

One thing I do recognise is my tendency to be a bit verbose sometimes – I fight against it but I tend not to be able to get out in under 5000 words. This will probably be the shortest post of 2011........... I’ve got an interview with Steve Coleman coming up that’s huge – but at least on this occasion the post is huge because Steve is being verbose rather than me.

Thanks as always to everyone who read the blog over the past year, and particularly to those who took the time to write and express their opinions – I really appreciate you taking the time and am flattered by your interest.

Next up for me – and no doubt some kind of report will feature on these pages – I’ll be heading off to New York for a week or so, to see some music, meet lots of friends and bring home my new custom-made bass – a pretty good way to start the year.

Happy 2011!

Under The Influence

2010-12-05T11:39:00.023Z

I recently read a very interesting interview with Brad Mehldau, via Peter Hum, where Brad, in discussing his influences, makes the following very good point:

“In terms of influence, one discourse that's curiously non-existent over players of my generation is: how we are influenced by our musical peers -- the living breathing people we are actively playing with and listening to now, players of our own generation.”

This is absolutely true – the questions most often asked by jazz journalists and casual listeners, (probably because it’s a relatively easy question to ask and demands little research or proof to back-up), when discussing a young or young-ish, (anyone under 40 seems to be described as ‘young’ there days.......), musician is: ‘who does he/she sound like?’. And by extension who are they influenced by? What they (the journalist or listener) are listening for is some kind of surface idiomatic similarity between the person they’re discussing and the playing of some other musician whose playing they’re familiar with. ‘His playing bears the discernible influence of X’, or ‘she’s clearly been listening to Y’, or ‘the music sounds like the mid-period recordings of Z’. It’s an easy game to play and doesn’t require much effort on the part of the writer or listener – hear a phrase or two you’ve heard in the playing of somebody else and then make a blanket statement outlining the clear influence of same.

But the point Brad makes is an important one - you are not only influenced by the people you’ve listened to, you are also influenced by the people you play with. I would venture to suggest that the people you play with are far more influential on you than any player you’ve only heard on record or seen live but have never actually been with. Because being with other musicians goes beyond the actual playing time, it also includes the hours you spend with them not playing - the travelling, and hanging and the endless discussions about music and life that are an inseparable part of being a working jazz musician. All of these things can help to shape your outlook on music in a way that goes way beyond the mere playing of your instrument.

As a bassist, a saxophone player telling me what they listen for in bass playing, or suggesting something they think might work in the music we’re playing, might make a big difference to how I think about the piece and may have a big influence on how I play it. That can also be true for the music as a whole – sometimes somebody can say something to you, (not necessarily a player of the same instrument as you) which can change your entire approach to the kind of music under discussion, or even the totality of how you think about music. I’ve had several of those what I call ‘light bulb moments’, where another musician has said something to me – often casually – that has completely changed how I think about something. These are huge influences, and go way beyond which bassist I was listening to when I was younger.

And there can be other influences too. Seeing Woody Shaw at the Village Vanguard and Elvin Jones in Ronnie Scott’s, both when I was in my early 20s, had a profound influence on me. I can honestly say that my approach to music completely changed after seeing them play, and my playing changed, but not in any way that could be discerned by a casual listener. These were fundamental core influences for me that went beyond the playing of the bass and into the music I wanted to play and how I wanted to play it.

And then there’s the influence of playing. This is the point that Brad makes – how we’re influenced by the people we’re playing with. This is by far the most important influence you can have in my opinion. Your first-hand experiences on the bandstand are far more influential on your playing than any second-hand experience you can have by listening to a CD or going to a gig – no matter how great those may be. For myself, I learned different things from different people – and most of it from playing situations rather than being taught formally.

In fact my formal jazz education is limited to two 3-week stints at the Banff Centre in Canada in the mid-80s, where I met many of my peers with whom I stayed in touch and later played with (Simon Nabatov, Andy Laster, Owen Howard, Tanya Kalmanovitch among others), which of itself was very valuable to me. But another reason Banff was hugely influential on me was because it put me in personal contact with Dave Holland, Dave Liebman, Kenny Wheeler and Steve Coleman

The opportunity to study with Dave Holland was invaluable to me – he’d always been a favourite of mine and to spend six weeks in all in his company, listening to him play, teach, and talk about playing was really game changing as far as my playing was concerned.

With Steve I was introduced to a whole new world of music – everything was new with him – rhythm, harmony, melody – it was simply the opening of a new universe in terms of conception and had a profound impact on me. I spent a lot of time hanging with him and talking and we’ve stayed in touch ever since either by email or in person and he remains a huge influence on me. I never played in his band, but we’ve played in several informal sessions, (and I did a recording with him in NY that was never released) – and all of these playing experiences were important ones for me too.

NB I will be posting an interview with Steve on the subject of rhythm very soon.

The contact I made with Dave Liebman in Banff went on to become one of the most important influences in my musical life – more on this below, and more on Kenny Wheeler.

So those ‘formal’ education experiences were important to me, but really I’ve been mostly shaped by playing, both with older musicians and with my peers. I’ve been lucky enough to play with a lot of older, more experienced musicians - in a way I did a kind of apprenticeship that would be familiar to musicians of an earlier era. I was lucky enough to come in on the tail end of that system and it really formed the basis of my education in music – on the job training. And I can look back and pinpoint particular aspects of music that I was exposed to by specific musicians, and that influenced me hugely.

My first, and a huge playing influence, was with the Irish guitarist Louis Stewart. I began playing with him in 1979 and I freely admit I hadn’t got a clue what I was doing at that point! My theory and harmony knowledge was pretty much nil, (though I’d been raised listening to jazz and so was familiar with the music and innately through that, with song form), and then suddenly there I was playing with a master of voice leading, of bebop, of swing – someone who was at the height of his powers. Louis was the first Irish jazz musician to have an international reputation and career and to be exposed to that level of playing and experience at that point in my development was a huge thing for me. I was forced to improve and try and keep up – this was a real bebop environment – almost no originals, no Real Book, no charts, just tunes – which you were supposed to know. I scrambled to keep up but in the process learned lots of tunes, began to understand harmony and learned how to play off instinct when all else failed. Some videos from that time have surfaced on Youtube recently – and here’s one of a very gauche 21 year old me at the Cork Jazz Festival, hanging onto Louis’ coat tails as he tears through Morning of the Carnival.

At that time I was also involved with a trio with the drummer from that clip, the late great John Wadham, and another great Irish guitar player (with whom I still often play), Tommy Halferty. That was a very adventurous group for its time, and we played original compositions and also played free (heresy on the Irish scene at the time!) and it was my first exposure to a milieu where pretty much anything went. We also played some of the fastest tempos I have ever played and this was great for getting my chops in shape!

After that I played a lot on the Irish scene and in subsequent years began playing with international musicians and I learned something from all of those situations, but there were a few that influenced me hugely for various reasons:

From playing with Sonny Fortune I learned about stamina! Sonny is a product of the 1960s NY jazz scene and musically he came up just at the end of that decade and he saw Coltrane many times (I remember him telling me about a conversation he had with Trane), played with McCoy and Elvin, as well as with Miles, (‘Agharta"), and many others. And he was definitely an energy player who emerged in the era of the long solo. I played with him quite a lot at the end of the 1980s and playing with Sonny you had to learn how to both pace yourself AND play with high energy and intensity. When Sonny called ‘Invitation’ you knew you were in for the long haul – Sonny loved to stretch on that tune (in fact on most tunes.....) and as a rhythm section you’d better be giving him the energy he wants!

From the drummer Steve Argüelles I learned about spontaneity and really being in the moment with no predetermined strategies for any particular piece. I played in a trio with Steve and the English altoist Martin Speake for about two years and Steve really opened me up to a lot of stuff, especially the idea of not necessarily playing anything the same way twice. It was in this group too that I first got to play Ornette’s music and where a lot of the repertoire was comprised of open form pieces, and I had to learn how to deal with that in a convincing way. Coming from a more conventional background this wasn't easy for me at first, and Steve really opened me up to new ways of thinking about playing improvised music. I learned a lot about all sorts of things from playing over a 20 year period with Steve’s brother Julian too – a great musician and a good friend

Simon Nabatov really influenced me in terms of thinking about music in a conceptual way. Simon is very strong on structure and the importance of being aware of the philosophy underpinning what you do as an improvising musician. Many hours on the bandstand with Simon (who is also of course an incredible pianist), and even more hours talking and hanging had a profound influence on how I think about certain aspects of music.

Another very important person for me was the Indian percussionist Ramesh Shotham. At a time when I was really trying to develop my rhythmic vocabulary Ramesh explained the technicalities of South Indian classical rhythmic techniques to me. He hooked me up with many Indian musicians, and we played together with the Karnataka College of Percussion and Charlie Mariano and many others, both in Europe and in India. Without Ramesh’s influence my rhythmic knowledge wouldn’t be anything like what it is now.

Playing with Kenny Wheeler really taught me how to negotiate complex harmonies while being lyrical at the same time. Kenny’s tunes are of course some of the most exquisite pieces in contemporary jazz, but are also extremely challenging to play. I had to work really hard in the practice room to learn how to navigate through the changes of some of those pieces, and to play his music with him was an education in itself.

Where to start on the influence playing with Dave Liebman has had on me.........? I’ve learned so much from him that it’s hard to narrow it down, but some of the most important things I’ve learned from him would include DRAMA! I remember him saying to the band before one of first gigs we did with him, in that classic Lieb straight-to-the-point way - ‘When we play I want drama – I don’t want any of that boring, in-the-middle-shit!’. I learned about the importance of programming a set effectively – how to best do that. How to balance discipline with spontaneity – the importance of keeping everything fresh. And, like with Sonny Fortune (whose musical background is similar in some ways – Miles, Elvin etc.) to be able to play with real intensity ALL the time! The countless musical discussions I’ve had with Lieb over the years - on the road, in restaurants, bars, clubs, planes, hanging out – has really helped shape me in terms of how I think about music.

This clip is taken from a gig with Lieb in the 55 Bar in NY with myself and Jim Black – the picture quality is not good, but the music gives an example of the importance that Lieb places on drama, energy and spontaneity.

But although I’ve learned so much from playing with these great international musicians, there’s something about playing with your contemporaries that feels different to any other playing situation, and since you do that more often than you do playing with visiting musicians, or being on the road with occasional projects, it has a far bigger effect on you than pretty much anything else.

By far the longest playing association I’ve had was with the Guilfoyle/Nielsen trio – with Mike Nielsen on guitar, and my brother Conor on drums. Over a fifteen year period we played together on innumerable occasions, either as a trio or as a rhythm section. In one particularly intense five-year period we developed a very forward thinking approach to expanding our rhythmic language which culminated in me writing my Rhythm Book which is still in print, and us recording our (hardly surprisingly) unreleased ‘Fucked-Up Classics’ album in 1993, featuring a whole album of standards played in Odd Metres. I’ve written about the trio elsewhere and you can download the album Here. But really the time spent with Mike and Conor either working as a trio or as a rhythm section accompanying a myriad of great players (Lieb, Sonny Fortune, Kenny Wheeler, Kenny Werner, Joe Lovano, Larry Coryell, Pat LaBarbera, Conrad Herwig etc.) had by far a bigger influence on my development as a musician than any other single thing, and far exceeds any influence I may have gleaned from listening to records or seeing gigs. The years of talking and experimenting, of developing ideas together and working on them had an incalculable influence on how I play and how I think as a creative musician.

So, influence is not (or definitely shouldn’t be!) just about who you listen to on your own instrument and who you most admire – it’s about ideas and experience, concepts and compositions, mentors and role models, exemplars and experiences. We are not just products of narrow instrumental concerns - loose clones of who we listen to on recordings - but are guided by the totality of our experience in music. Influence is not a simple thing, it, like the music, is a complex mixture of things - at any moment our music reflects not only who we've listened to, but also where we've been, who we've been with and who we are.

On the Road - Hong Kong and Japan - Addendum

2010-12-03T13:00:00.005Z

To give a little musical context to my recent travel blog, Pekka Pylkkanen, the leader of the band that I went to Hong Kong and Japan with recently, has posted a Video from the Hong Kong concert. I really had fun playing and travelling with these guys!

Pekka Pylkkanen - alto
George Contrafouris - piano
RG - bass
Carlos Ezequiel

MSG's new CD out at last!

2010-12-03T12:10:00.003Z

MSG - Rudresh Mahanthappa (alto), Chander Sardjoe(drums) and myself have just released our first CD on the Plus Loin label. We've been together for 4 years now and play whenever the Rubik's Cube of our three schedules can be reconciled! The CD is very representative of what we do and it's great to have it out at last!

I don't think it's been released in the US yet, but it's available in Europe and you can buy it Here

For a taste of what we do, here's a typical live performance by the band featuring one of the pieces we don't do on the CD - Rudresh's 'Enhanced Performance'

Music for Soprano Sax and String Quartet

2010-11-28T08:57:00.004Z

It's a a pleasant surprise to accidentally stumble across a performance of your work that you didn't know had been done. In this case it was on Youtube and was a performance by a Polish group of the first movement of my 'Music for Soprano Sax and String Quartet', which I wrote for Dave Liebman in 1998. I think this piece is a good companion to the blog post I wrote about string writing in jazz, involving as it does a lot of the issues I discussed in that article.

The performers here are Andrzej Olejniczak & Apertus String Quartet. I knew Andrzej via email and I knew he'd performed the piece in Spain, but I didn't know about this performance or recording. They play the piece very well too and so it was a nice piece of Serendipity for a Sunday morning................

There's Something about Elvin.........

2010-11-02T00:07:00.025Z

This is actually my second post on Elvin – I also interviewed Dave Liebman about his time with Elvin, if you’re interested, you can see it Here)

I recently had a Coltrane blow-out. Watched all of the great ‘Jazz Icons’ DVD from start to finish, listened to ‘Transition’ which for me, (at least the track ’Transition’ itself), is even greater than Love Supreme in terms of the depths it reaches) and a few other things. If ever there was such a thing as a ‘perfect’ band in jazz the Coltrane Quartet could be said to be it. They were like a monolith, once Garrison joined the band they were no longer in the act of becoming something they just were. When I listen to the Miles Quintet of this period – the other incredibly influential band in the mid-60s – I get a sense of the band changing and evolving all the time. With Coltrane’s band there’s a feeling of everything being perfect as soon as the final personnel of the ‘classic’ quartet is in place. Of course the band did evolve and Coltrane in particular constantly explored every aspect of his playing, but nevertheless there is a sense of certainty, and a homogeneity about the group sound that’s different to the Miles band in the sense that the ensemble sound you hear on the recordings from 1963 is very similar to the one you hear in ‘65, just before the group broke up. It’s as if they found the ideal vehicle for their creativity early on and it didn’t need to change after that, it just got deeper and deeper

And as so often happens to me when I’m listening to that band I found myself listening as much to Elvin as I do Coltrane.................

As far as I’m concerned, and I know this is a ridiculous statement to make, but I’m going to do it anyway, Elvin is THE jazz drummer. Big words, as a friend of mine would say, but for me he represents the art of jazz drumming in its most complete form. The combination of innovation, tradition, mighty swing allied to incredible virtuosity and the sheer depth of his playing puts him on a level that few jazz musicians on any instrument have ever reached. He was a genius. That word is bandied about far too freely these days in all kinds of contexts, (I saw Lady GaGa referred to as a genius recently – sigh..............), but I think Elvin did represent that word perfectly. What he did was beyond even the exceptionally good – it was in a league of its own and to listen to him play at his best is to hear something that is ultimately beyond the explainable.

Yes, the details of the playing can be explained – the polyrhythmic juggling, the giant triplet that hovers over everything he does etc. - but how he came up with this concept in the first place, how he put these elements together, and then made them swing SO much, is unexplainable. And then there’s the conviction........... when he plays, what you’re hearing is certainty – his playing is of an intensity and power that brooks no argument. It says THIS is where it’s at, there can be no other option. It’s this combination of emotional and physical power, innovation, swing, and virtuosity that marks him out above all others for me, on an intellectual level at least. And on an emotional level (and I admit this is completely subjective) his feel just does more for me than anyone else’s.

And what a feel that is! His beat has this slightly behind feeling that seems at times to defy logic in terms of how he manages to propel the music forward while playing behind. I remember talking to Tom Rainey about this one time and Tom made the additional point that when you see Elvin playing what you see is often not what you hear – he seems to play, at least visually, almost in slow motion sometimes, yet what you’re hearing can be incredibly busy and active. Tom said Elvin seemed to have the ability to almost suspend the laws of physics and movement when he played, and I know exactly what he meant. Even on fast tempos, when Elvin hits that big ‘1’ at the beginning of a new section, it’s a split second behind where others would play it and this creates a spaciousness about the time feel that both allows the music to breathe while at the same time making it swing even more. Watch Elvin playing here with Coltrane on ‘Impressions’ and check out that almost imperceptible pause before the ‘1’ is struck – that tiny little micro-second gives the music so much space – it’s the art of ‘back-of-the-beat’, even at this tempo

Of course the other thing that’s noticeable on this piece is the polyrhythmic activity that churns underneath the music at all times (check out the snare drum triplet on the bridge of the 3rd chorus of Dolphy’s solo!). A lot of discussion of Elvin’s polyrhythmic style focuses on the stuff he plays on the drums, but in my opinion Elvin’s whole polyrhythmic thing starts with the cymbal. That cymbal beat just changes all the time – it’s no longer the traditional Spang-Spang-A-Lang beat, but an endlessly moving tattoo around which all the other drums revolve. It’s the power of this cymbal beat that gives Elvin’s playing the incredible swing feel that it has – somehow by varying the traditional swinging pattern he makes it swing even more. Of his contemporaries, Roy Haynes was the only other drummer who had this varying ride cymbal beat (it’s no surprise that when Elvin wasn’t available Coltrane used Haynes if he could get him), but he has a very different feel – more edgy and definitely lighter.

Haynes of course is a very interesting drummer since he not only was (and is!) a great drummer in his own right, he strongly influenced the other drummer who changed the way the instrument was played and conceived of in the 1960s – Tony Williams. Williams and Elvin completely changed the role and concept of how drums could or should be played in the core repertoire of the jazz tradition, but their playing couldn’t be more different. Williams' playing is front-of-the-beat edgy, with a tight cymbal beat, and with a crisp explosiveness about it. Elvin is back-of-the-beat and utilises a kind of relentless polyrhythmic approach rather than than Tony’s explosive thing.

But despite the fact that both changed the way drums are played in contemporary jazz, (and you can’t hope to even understand contemporary jazz drumming unless you’ve checked both these guys out), I think it’s true to say that Williams’ influence is more to the fore these days than Elvin’s is. And I think the reason for this is two-fold:

Firstly (and probably most importantly) Tony’s style is more suitable for straight-8s playing than Elvin’s is. Tony was after all one of the pioneers of bringing straight 8’s playing into the jazz mainstream (’Eighty One') and through ‘Lifetime’ was one of the most important figures in the integration of rock music energy into a creative jazz context. Post-Bitches Brew/Weather Report/Mahavishnu, straight 8’s were here to stay in jazz, and if as a drummer you were looking at how to use the drums in this new rhythmic landscape, Tony provided a great model. His influence permeated the drummers who came after him – Lenny White, Billy Cobham etc., and down through subsequent generations. Elvin, though his influence became greatest at around the same time that Tony made his first big impact, was an older player whose playing was rooted in the swing idiom. Although he did so much to open up that idiom, and in showing how a drummer could engage in an equal dialogue with a soloist, his style of playing, based as it was (in a structural sense at least) on the 3:2 polyrhythm, never really lent itself to straight 8’s playing.

Secondly, I think Tony’s thing is easier to codify into something comprehensible to the aspirant drummer. This is not to say that what he did was conceptually of a lower level than Elvin, but his approach lends itself more readily to the kind of intellectual analysis that people like to make. This is especially true in the later Tony style of the 4 in the bar swishing hi hat and endless flams. Put simply – and somewhat superficially, Tony is easier to cop than Elvin. Elvin’s thing is more mysterious in a way, it lends itself less easily to analysis. OK, one can identify the constant triple versus duple stuff going on, but the juggling act of keeping all those rhythmic balls in the air while playing behind the beat, not getting in the way of the music, AND swinging the whole band is beyond technical analysis. A comparison (simplistic but with some truth in it) of the two approaches could be that Tony’s playing is linear, while Elvin’s is multi-layered. The linear thing is easier to comprehend, but to figure out how to make that multi-layered thing work requires a conceptual intelligence, not just an ability to technically analyse patterns.

(Interestingly, I think Jack DeJohnette has shown a way to integrate the two approaches. He has a real affinity for straight 8s playing yet also espouses the all four limbs in perpetual motion approach of Elvin. His ride cymbal beat can have the edginess of Tony on fast tempos, yet maintain that perpetual motion thing of Elvin's. At slower tempos his beat can be broad like Elvin's, yet feature the explosiveness of Tony. He's figured it out somehow, but few have followed in his footsteps......)

So this combination of the difficulty of figuring out what exactly is going on in Elvin’s playing allied to the fact that his work was mostly in the swing idiom at a time when swing began to cede some of its dominance to the straight 8’s feel pushed the influence pendulum more in the direction of Tony rather than Elvin. Of course most good contemporary jazz drummers can approximate some of the Elvin thing when they feel it’s required, but the predominant influence I hear in most contemporary mainstream drummers would be coming more from Tony than Elvin.

But actually if you look at what Elvin did beyond the Coltrane group he was pretty much game for anything. Back in the 60s, with Andrew Hill he played in 7/4 (on Siete Ocho), and he also recorded with Earl Hines. He played with Ornette as well as Duke Ellington. In the 70s he was happy to play with synths and played on a little-known but particular Elvin favourite of mine 'On The Mountain’ with Jan Hammer and Gene Perla. Have a listen to him deal effortlessly with the quite complex vamp (at 4.07) on ’Destiny’, or play some savagely swinging brushes (he was a true master of brush playing) on Oleo with Tommy Flanagan.

And to hear him at the peak of his polyrhythmic virtuosity outside of the Coltrane Quartet, listen to him here with George Coleman and Wilbur Little from a live date in the Vanguard – the solo on this is just extraordinary, the way it goes from clearly metric to a kind of impressionistic outline of the beat and back again, and check out the way he sets up the re-entry of the melody. Nobody really played drums like this before or has since.

And it could be argued (and no doubt someone will argue with me!) that even leaving aside his landmark work with Coltrane, Elvin appeared on more truly classic albums than any other single drummer – with Wayne on ‘Ju Ju’, ‘Night Dreamer’ and ‘Speak No Evil’, with Joe Henderson on ‘In and Out’ and ‘Inner Urge’, with Rollins on ‘Live at the Village Vanguard’ and ‘East Broadway Rundown’, with Lee Konitz on ‘Motion’, with McCoy on ‘Inception’ and ‘The Real McCoy’, with Freddie Hubbard on ‘Ready for Freddie’, with Larry Young on ‘Unity’ etc. etc. - the list goes on and on. He played with Charlie Parker, with Monk, with Mingus, with Miles, Trane, Rollins, Ornette, Bud Powell, Ellington, he lead bands that included people like Dave Liebman, Sonny Fortune, Chick Corea, Jan Hammer, Steve Grossman, (Check out the classic ’Live at the Lighthouse'), and in later years he played with John McLaughlin, Michael Brecker, Bill Frisell and Bennie Wallace. He did it all.

And he did everything with a conviction that has always been an inspiration to me. I first saw him play at Ronnie Scott’s Club on a rainy Tuesday evening in 1979 – the club was half empty, the band comprised of unknown young players, and yet Elvin played as if that was the most important thing that anyone could be doing anywhere. For me it was, musically speaking, a life-changing experience to see that. Of course I was thrilled just to be in the same room as him, and to hear that extraordinary playing live – but what left the biggest impression on me was the intensity. This was the way music should always be played – with complete conviction and immersion on the moment. I’m still inspired by what I saw that evening over thirty years ago.

As an example of that conviction allied to the science of his playing, check out Elvin with Trane towards the end of the quartet’s life, in Belgium in 1965. It’s outdoors, it’s freezing cold and yet both Trane and Elvin play as if their lives depended on it (Elvin is playing so hard there’s steam rising from him!). For me, it just doesn’t get any better than this. Ever.

On the Road - Hong Kong and Japan

2010-10-16T13:09:00.043+01:00

I’ve just returned from a tour to the Far East, mostly in Hong Kong and Japan. The band, put together by Pekka Pylkkanen (alto) from Finland, consisted of the Greek pianist George Contrafouris and the Brazilian Drummer Carlos Ezequiel – a truly international band, put together in the way these things often are in jazz these days, through mutual connections. I’d played with George with Dave Liebman and in various trio and quartet settings, I’d played with Carlos in Brazil, and with Carlos and Pekka in Denmark, George had played with Pekka in Finland. So we all knew each other in different ways, though I think I was the only one who knew everybody. We rehearsed by email in advance (as you do these days) and then put the music together in real time when we got there.

What follows is as much a travelogue as a blog, with some thoughts along the way on various subjects that were prompted by our experiences

Hong Kong

And so it begins - Asia. We had a typical Asian experience this morning - i.e. not knowing what's going on. We had a place booked for a rehearsal this morning only for it to be cancelled at the last minute. Efforts to find another place seemed to have borne fruit and so we waited for the confirmation phone call – and waited and waited......... So here we are, still in the hotel lobby three hours after we arranged to meet there to head off to rehearsal. Pekka has fought the good fight, multi-tasking on his iPhone and Macbook, but to no avail. So we’ve decided to give in and go out. You can’t fight the local ways, the best thing you can do is be glad you’re in as interesting a place as Hong Kong and get out and enjoy it – and that’s what we’re going to do............

...............And that’s what we did - took a bus to Kowloon, got lost after staying on the bus too long, walked part of the way back and eventually found the subway. I love figuring out subway systems in different cities in various parts of the world. Once you figure it out it the city just opens up to you and you get a great sense of liberation and independence – the city is your Oyster.

And Oysters seem to be the only type of seafood I haven’t seen in the vast amounts of it here – stalls, shops, restaurants, all selling fish and seafood. And it’s sold dried, fresh, salted, roasted, spiced, steamed........ The number of ways the Chinese do seafood (and many other kinds of food) is always dazzling. Even the vegetable dishes are dazzling. I’m a reluctant vegetarian myself, (as in only if I’ve no choice!), but here the vegetables are cooked so freshly that I didn’t think twice about ordering a vegetable dish for lunch instead of my usual carnivorous spread.

The following morning is the beginning of our first really musical day – a rehearsal followed by a workshop at the Hong Kong Academy for the Performing Arts. The rehearsal took place in an unusual setting – as these these kinds of rehearsals often do once you get off the beaten jazz track – in the nightclub section of a fancy hotel. How Pekka managed to get the use of the place is beyond me, but he did, so here we are amidst the chintzy glitz of a nightclub – all fake gold and sequins and thick carpet – playing contemporary jazz. Or trying to play it – we’re all a little jet lagged and nightclubs by day are always strange places. Stripped of whatever allure they have in the evenings, in broad daylight they reveal all their tackiness and their false promises of glamour. It’s hard to get it going in such a setting, but we work efficiently, have a brief lunch next door, a brief rest back at the hotel and then off to the workshop.

The Hong Kong Academy for the Performing Arts is a very impressive looking building with state of the art facilities. As far as music goes the two big subjects here are Classical Music and Chinese Music, but an American flautist and saxophonist called Tim Wilson has begun a part time jazz programme for interested students – 2 hours a week, playing standard tunes etc. I have real admiration for people like Tim who work really hard to get something going in a place like Hong Kong, so far removed from the geographical mainstream of jazz activity – Europe and America. Of course Japan, with its long history of jazz support, is pretty close by, but China and Japan do NOT get on, for all kinds of historical and political reasons, so don’t expect Japanese musicians and teachers becoming active in founding a scene in China anytime soon.......

The workshop consists of us playing a few tunes, taking questions and then having the students play while we listen and then make comments. The technical level is quite low, as is their knowledge of the jazz idiom, but they’re really enthusiastic and I must say I get a warmer feeling teaching in a place like this than I often do at some of the high level jazz schools in Europe where the students are sometimes so spoiled you can nearly drown from the combination of their sense of entitlement and their apathy.

What’s interesting musically is that the problems the students have, even at this quite low technical level, are the same problems I see with jazz students everywhere, they’re just a little more extreme. They don’t listen to each other, they play in a very literal way with a high element of role playing – press button A and play this, press button B and play that......... These kids don’t have much vocabulary, but otherwise there are similar issues that one sees in students everywhere. Of course being so far from the jazz mainstream it’s probably also very difficult for them to feel part of something larger – the jazz community and history – but that’s something I often wonder about anyway – how much are young jazz students learning this music as a kind of classical music, and how much are they learning it and seeing themselves as being part of a much larger thing? Questions for another day perhaps........... But first, dinner!

The following day we go to the Hong Kong Institute for Education and do a workshop and performance for the students there. These guys are studying pedagogy, and some have taken jazz studies as part of that. The students are of a higher technical level than in the previous institution, but the same problems are evident. Lack of listening is a big problem – not just to each other, but to the recorded history of the music. Out of 10 guys playing ‘Impressions’ only three had ever listened to the original recording, or heard Coltrane play it! An extreme example perhaps, but again lack of in-depth listening is another current issue among young musicians – the sheer availability of so much stuff does actually impact negatively on their listening habits I believe. They listen to lots of stuff – but often just once, and rarely in-depth. Again, a question for another day......... But the vibe is great, and everyone is so nice and enthusiastic, it made the 2 hours trek out there by subway worthwhile. Dinner in a great Thai Restaurant ends the day very satisfactorily

(Two Students from the Hong Kong Institute for Education try out my bass)

Hong Kong Jazz Festival

Today is the anchor gig of the tour, the Hong Kong Jazz Festival, but before the gig Carlos and I take a trek out to Mong Kok, the electronics Mecca of Kowloon. I want to by a DV Camcorder in order to have a second camera to give a different angle on things when I record music and gigs etc. (In recent years I’ve probably got too into this – spent far too much time on Final Cut Express and not enough on the simple 4 string bass!). We go the Mong Kok Computer Centre – three floors of electronics and a geek’s haven. I eventually settle on a Sanyo hand held device that functions as both a DV camcorder and a digital camera. I save myself an estimated 70 euro on the deal by buying it here, so I’m, pretty happy leaving the store. Out on the street there are even more electronics places – some really huge (see below) - it’s an extraordinary two blocks............

And so to the gig – at the Hong Kong City Hall Theatre – a big 800 seater theatre with very nice acoustics for jazz. Everything is very well organised and the soundcheck runs smoothly and there’s very good equipment and a decent dressing room. Add a free dinner courtesy of the festival to that and you can’t really ask for more. Over dinner we talk to two of the girls running the gig – Carol and Alison and it turns out they’re both piano teachers but also studied other things - business studies of some kind. So the Asian work ethic is very clear from these two young women – you can see why Japan forged ahead in the past, and why China and Korea are galloping up now.

The gig itself is great – the last 2 days of playing/workshops has got our individual and collective chops up and the band really clicks and plays a very high energy set that’s very well received. We’re playing opposite the Rusconi Trio, (whose sound engineer very generously helps us with our soundcheck), whose music is much different to ours, but the audience seems to like both. We have to wait till the end of the concert before we can go back to the hotel since the tradition here is that people get autographs. Since Pekka and Carlos are the only ones who brought CDs George and I let them do the meet and greet while George and I hang out and solve even more of the world’s musical and social problems..........

Back to the hotel – tomorrow, Japan!

Tokyo

Tokyo is so huge it took us two hours by train to get from the airport to the city. It’s SO different here from China – I’ve been in Japan before but it’s very interesting to come to Japan from another Asian country rather than from Europe – you get a different perspective. First of all it’s so clean and everything looks so modern and less traditional than in China. And the other thing that hit us the minute we got on the plane was the politeness! Of course I know about Japanese politeness, but when you come from China it’s thrown into even sharper relief. The Hong Kong Chinese (at least to strangers on the street or in shops etc.) are not really polite at all, they’re quite brusque and rude sometimes and never give you the impression they’ve the slightest interest in you. Which is fair enough – it’s their country and they can decide what attitude they want to take to visitors (though I think the waiter who gave me a sort of slap on the arm to remind me to take my bass with me was taking it a BIT far!).Here it’s so different, people are incredibly polite – and friendly! I had at least three exchanges with people by the time we got to the hotel, I don’t think a Chinese person outside of our business dealings, spoke to us even once.

So tonight we went out looking for a restaurant and ran into a girl giving out leaflets about a restaurant on the street – she had very little English, but Pekka has a little Japanese and so we decided to go to that restaurant. When we said we’d go she nearly had hysterics – laughing and doing the Japanese equivalent of ‘OH MY GOD!” - ringing ahead to say she was bringing four foreigners with her. And so we ended up in this tiny traditional restaurant, full of Japanese, and we sat on the floor on Tatamis around a table and had some really great food – sashimi, and Yakitori, rice and various other bits and pieces. There was great hilarity as we tried to figure out from the Japanese menu what to order and the same girl with the leaflets turned out to be the waitress there too – she was a really fun character, up for anything and laughing all the time. Then a man came in who spoke some English, and he helped us with the translation and promptly joined us at the dinner table and had dinner with us and became George’s smoking partner. So it was great fun, and it was very pleasant to be in a real authentic restaurant eating real Japanese food. Everyone in the restaurant waved goodbye to us as we left, and it was a very nice personaiised evening after the hustle and bustle of Hong Kong.

(The band with the two ladies who ran the very nice restaurant on our first night in Tokyo)

The next day we had a gig in the city, in a small venue converted for the evening into a concert space. We got there early, set up, soundchecked and having a few hours to kill we went back to the centre of town, the extraordinary Shinjuku district. Shinjuku epitomises the stereotype about Tokyo – thousands of people, flashing lights, constant movement, noise. It’s almost futuristic around there, ‘like a scene from Blade Runner’ as George described it. I’d imagine you either love it or you hate it – we loved it!

It was a real rush being there, especially being in Shinjuku station which is huge – a million people pass through it every day! - and SO easy to get lost in. Pekka did a very good job in figuring out the lines to take which, when you take a look at the Tokyo subway map (below), you can see is no easy task.

And if you do get lost it’s very hard to get information to help you with because hardly anybody speaks English. In the whole time we were in Tokyo and stopped people to ask for help, and asked them if they spoke English the answer was always no. And these were young people in one of the world’s best educated and richest nations on earth. I’m not saying they SHOULD speak English – we English speakers get away with far too much linguistic colonialism as it is – but there’s no denying that English is the travel and business language of the world, yet in Japan the level of English speaking was lower than almost any country I can remember travelling in. One of the Japanese guys I met, who does speak good English, said it was because the way English was taught - nearly all through written work - was very bad. Anyway, the fact that there's so little English spoken and a lot of the signs are unreadable to a westerner, forces you to really make an effort and to not mind the fact that it's hard to find out what's going on, or where to go, or what stuff is on a menu etc. - sometimes it's fun being lost!

We ended up at Disk Union – a famous Japanese record shop that specialises in jazz and – even more specialised – in jazz on vinyl. George is a collector of vinyl jazz LPs and there was no way he was going to visit Tokyo without visiting Disk Union as well. And it was extraordinary in there – the place was packed with people buying LPs! It reminded me of specialist record shops like Mole Jazz in London (long gone) 20 years ago. Actually it’s amazing how much jazz you hear walking around Tokyo – in shops, restaurants etc. They seem to have a real taste for it, though I notice it tends to be very much focussed around the 50s Hard Bop era. And they’re much more attached to American jazz than they are European (or Japanese for that matter), in fact European jazz musicians rarely play here in comparison to their American counterparts.

(Result! - George with a prized Clare Fischer LP at Disk Union)

George’s LP cravings having been sated for now, we head back to the gig and a play a 90 minute set, which is preceded by an interview with Pekka and George on the subject of ‘what is Finnish Jazz?’ Yutaka, the organiser of the gig, has a passion for Finnish jazz and is selling a bunch of Finnish jazz CDs at the gig. The gig itself is really good – again the band gels very well from the first bar, and it all feels great. Sometimes when you’re on the road and you’re dealing with lots of stuff – hotels, airports, food, money, etc. - you forget that the real reason you are there is to play music. And then if the band is good – which it is on this occasion – you are pleasantly reminded of it once you start playing, as in, “Now I remember - THIS is why we’re here!” After the very well received gig, we head back to Shinjuku and find a restaurant, which is packed with Saturday night diners and which is a bit of a squeeze for four large-ish westerners to get into. But all is achieved with good humour on everyone’s part and the food is delicious.

Then back out into Shinjuku subway station for the train back to the hotel. What was interesting was the fact that at night there are only young people in the subway - all the older people disappear - it was amazing! We were by far the oldest people on the subway that night. And of course everyone was dressed up - or what passes for dressed up among Japanese youth. For the girls it usually means short skirts or shorts, or even more popular, the mini skirt with the knee socks pulled to above the knee. It’s actually a very strange phenomenon in my opinion – this, (as a Japanese friend of mine described it) ‘Lolita Complex’ Almost none of them dress like women - they all dress like girls. There's a kind of childishness about their image - the kind of schoolgirly outfits (and I saw a couple of really weird ones - like Bo-Peep or something!), the Hello Kitty handbags, the miniature pink teddy bears hanging from their mobile phones - that's a little disturbing after a while. And the guys were in all kinds of weird and wonderful haircuts, sunglasses, outlandish clothes etc. It's really unique to walk through Shinjuku station on a Saturday night and see Japanese youth en-masse. An extraordinary sight. Yet, for all this apparent rebellion against the sober dress of the adult Japanese there’s no sense of anarchy about them, nor do you feel any threat, as I would in a Western city late on a Saturday night. They’re very well behaved and they form neat rows, side by side in twos, at the designated areas, to get on the subway trains. I got the feeling that the outfits constituted the beginning and the end of the rebelliousness, and that in other ways they were probably quite comfortably part of mainstream society.

The friendliness of everyone continues to be impressive. The following morning George and I were talking outside the hotel and three ladies came out - very well dressed - and invited us to come and have lunch with them - despite the fact that they had barely any English. But they were SO friendly, trying to find out where were were from (they were baffled by Greece, but were very excited by 'Irelando!') and being giggly and friendly. And in Starbucks in Shinjuku later on a man offered me his seat, said welcome and shook my hand, and then the girls came out from behind the counter and got chairs for all four of us - in a packed Starbucks on a Saturday afternoon! Never saw that anywhere else in the world.......

Having some free time before the gig, George, Carlos and I take a walk in the suburbs, and once you get off the main streets you enter a different world – quiet, narrow streets, very little traffic. It all makes for a very pleasant walk after the madness of Shinjuku and we buy some Yakatori chicken that is being grilled freshly on the side of the road, and finish the walk by having a cappucino in a café – everything was very pleasant except the price of the coffee.......... Japan is an EXPENSIVE country! I’d say it’s more expensive than even Switzerland, and that’s saying something. It’s hard to have a meal in a restaurant for less than €30 a head, and that’s just in a regular place – it’s very easy to spend much more than that. In this little café, we had 5 coffees between the three of us, I decided it was my turn to buy the coffees and was somewhat stunned to be handed a bill of €22!

The gig that night is in the ‘Finland Café’, in Shubiya (another incredibly busy area), in a café devoted to all things Finnish. It seems particularly Japanese to do this – this kind of obsessive attention being paid to one thing – though I’m hardly in a position to comment since the whole world is infected with the terrible ‘Irish Pub’ plague. The interior of the café is studded with fake birch trees and books on Finland are strewn around casually (though of course, being in Japan, there’s nothing casual about it at all). It’s a very swish looking place in the basement of an apartment block.

There are no drums in the place, so it’s to be trio, and George, being the trouper that he is, doesn’t balk at the electric keyboard he’s given to play. We play the first set - all standards, which we figure is more apposite for this audience, and which we like to play anyway - and then Yutaka approaches me, looking very embarrassed. It seems there’s been a complaint from a resident about the sound of the bass going up to his/her apartment, and would I mind not playing the second set. He assures me that it’s got nothing to do with my playing! Well, what can you do? So Pekka and George play the 2nd set, with George’s left-hand working overtime...... The audience are great, and interestingly (though it’s tragic that this is something worth mentioning), are mostly women. They pay rapt attention throughout, applaud all solos and insist on an encore at the end. If only all audiences were like this......... Another expensive dinner, an even more expensive taxi ride (having missed the last subway train) and the evening ends.

Kobe

We take the Shinkansen to Kobe – the famous Japanese Bullet Trains. Very comfortable and very fast, we cover the 600+ Km to Kobe in 3 hours. During the journey Carlos and I order a coffee from the girl pushing the coffee trolley through the carriages, and she pours the coffee and then carefully arranges the coffee, sugar, milk and napkin in a very symmetric design on the fold-down table on the couch. Having done that she then pushes her trolley out of the carriage, turns around and bows ceremoniously to the carriage before leaving. Only in Japan would the ordering of a coffee on a train involve such an elaborate display of manners complete with a little ceremony to go with it.

We arrive in Kobe and are picked up at the station by Tako, one of the main guys at the Koyo Conservatory – our hosts during our stay. We go straight from the station to the workshop/performance which will take place in a club called Maiden Voyage. It always feels strange to be in these club situations during daylight – as I mentioned earlier there’s something that doesn’t quite fit about a club shorn of its night-time allure - being exposed like an ageing stage performer who is dragged out into daylight so that their true flaws and imperfections can be seen all the more clearly. But this place is actually quite nice, even during the day and the audience is made up of about 40 Japanese students who are very polite and attentive throughout. We play several tunes first and then open it up to questions.

This workshop (like all the ones we did in Japan) is being translated for us – again the low level of English is pointed up by the necessity of having a translator, something that was never necessary in the Hong Kong workshops that we did. Translated workshops are always difficult since it’s impossible to have any real interaction with the students, the delay of having everything translated kills any spontaneity, and you can only speak in short sentences since the translator has to deal with all the points you’re making, and can’t be expected to remember more than a few sentences at a time. But we do our best (and the translator does a great job), and the students are responsive, if a little shy.

They do get up to play though, and that’s always interesting since you can engage more personally with them having heard them play, rather than just doing a lecture/demonstration kind of thing. Walking cold into a room full of students in a school and figuring out what the best approach for a workshop might be is a very difficult task since you’ve no idea of their experience or concerns or needs. It’s a bit easier in a typical 3rd level US or European jazz school since the curriculum tends to be similar throughout these institutions, but in more far flung places it’s often a bit tricky regarding what level to pitch your teaching to, and what information might be most useful in the short space of time you have. In an instrumental masterclass where you’re dealing with a specific instrument it gets a bit easier, but in these mixed classes it requires a bit of care in order to maximise the impact of whatever information, or help, or even philosophical thoughts you might be be able to give. The students play through Autumn Leaves and this gives us some good talking points and allows us to focus our comments more effectively for the short time we have

The evening ends with a group photo with those who haven’t already left to smoke or go about their business (why do all Japanese kids make the Peace Sign every time a camera is pointed at them!?) then it’s off to the hotel to drop the cases and out for dinner with our hosts Akihito (whom I’ve known for a long time through the IASJ) and Tako.

They take us to a great restaurant and miraculously convert me to Sushi! I’ve never been a fan, (a friend of mine used to say ‘that’s not food, that’s bait!), though I’ve always wished I was, but on this trip the joys of Sushi are fully revealed to me and I’m now a complete convert. But I think for it to work the fish has to be as incredibly fresh, and everything else as well cooked and presented as it was at this restaurant. The food was just amazing, and foodie that I am, I’m delighted to be able to share in a gastronomic miracle that was a closed book to me up to this point.

Back to Tokyo

On any tour there are days that prove trying, and the day after the Kobe workshop/performance proves to be one of those days. Carlos and George have offered to do some extra teaching at Koyo Conservatory before we leave for Tokyo and so we head off there first and, teaching finished, go to the station for the train to Tokyo. There, for reasons too dull too go into, there’s a delay in getting the tickets and we end up missing our train and hanging around for nearly an hour and a half before eventually getting a later train. This delay means we’re behind schedule when we get to to Tokyo, where we have a workshop to do at Tokyo College of Music in the late afternoon. Before doing the workshop we have to check into our hotel in Shinjuku, and Tokyo is so huge that by far the fastest (and cheapest) way to get around, is by subway. Which is fine when you’re travelling with just a shoulder bag or something, but when you’ve got all your luggage and your bass, and you’ve several subway line changes to make on a humid afternoon, the whole thing becomes a bit of an ordeal really. By the time we reach the hotel my shoulders are aching from carrying the gear and manipulating it up and down escalators, across platforms and onto trains. Then it’s into the hotel, drop the stuff and back on the subway for the trip to TCM.

When we arrive at the nearest subway station we’re met by our hosts and then it turns out to be a 15 minute walk to the college and our hosts (both Westerners BTW), are quite happy to walk along beside us for this long trek and it never once occurs to them to offer to help carry the gear – I’ve got my bass, Pekka his alto and backpack, and Carlos his cymbals and they know we’ve had a bit of a trying day, but still they walk along empty-handed, chattering away and never offering to take anything from anyone, and this causes me to add grumpiness to my already tired mood.

So when we arrive at the college (which is an amazing modern building ), late due to all the earlier problems, I’m not really in the mood to do the workshop at all. But once we enter the room the students cheer and applaud and this immediately lifts our mood – how can you resist such enthusiasm? So, on with the show – again we play, and although it’s a cliché, the healing power of music shows itself again in that once we start playing the tired grumpy mood disappears and it’s fun time again! We’ve been playing together for almost two weeks now, the band has really gelled, and we can hit a very high level almost from the first beat. Good humour restored, we answer questions and then have the students play. Again the workshop is translated which slows things down a bit, but these students are really charming and very sweet and enthusiastic and it’s a lot of fun working with them. There are a couple of really talented improvisers among them too – all they need is a bit more experience and access to good information and a wider playing environment.

I find it extraordinary that there is no undergraduate degree that can be taken in jazz alone in Japan. When you see the history of engagement with the music here, and the popularity of it, it’s amazing that there’s no way of studying full time to degree level through the state institutions. But from talking to teachers here who are trying to change things it seems the Japanese education system is very rigid and the same structural problems that prevent effective English language teaching, also stymie any attempt to bring jazz into mainstream music education here. The Koyo Conservatory has a 2-Year full time programme, but it’s a private school and as far as I know it can’t offer an undergraduate degree at the end of the course.

As always, the evening ends with food. This time the some of the students and one of the teachers comes with us and it’s a fine way to end the tour, chatting with these very nice people and eating, again, GREAT food that arrives one dish after another in that very nice communal eating style found in Asia. George gives one of the piano players an impromptu lesson in upper structure chord voicings while I expound the joys of the Ligeti Études to another group of pianists and Carlos and I explain the geographical position, and relative difference in size and population between Ireland (4.2 million people) and Brazil (200 million). The students talk about their lives and studies and the whole evening is a great way to end the working part of the tour – we have a day off the next day before heading home.

Which Carlos and I decide to spend in Akihabara, the famed electronics district of Tokyo. It’s a noisy crowded area, full of electronics shops blaring out music and sound effects from computer games, and Anime films and all kids of other things. I remark to Carlos that this area is definitely many people’s idea of hell – noise, commercialism, crowds – but it’s also fascinating, at least for a couple of hours. The sheer energy of the place is extraordinary and it’s a real luxury to have a couple of hours to wander around and observe the scene. Again this strange Lolita complex is in evidence as the area has girls of about 17 years old on every street corner, dressed in kind of French Maid outfits handing out leaflets for various shops. The whole thing is kind of weird – there would be outrage in the West if teenagers were asked to parade around in outfits like that for the purposes of selling electronics, but here, in modern industrialised Japan, it doesn’t seem to provoke even a raised eyebrow among the passers-by.........

I end up not buying anything – the prices are dearer than Hong Kong and nothing really catches my eye. In the evening Carlos, George and I meet up for a last meal and on impulse go to an Indian restaurant (Indian food is a passion of mine), where the food is very good and the portions more in keeping with the needs of someone of George’s size. George has been enjoying the Japanese food but has felt that the meals often feel more like a snack to him than a proper meal. We finish up having a coffee in Starbucks – not a chain I like particularly, but I have been missing the after dinner coffee while in Japan – they haven’t really embraced coffee culture and, uncultured addict that I am, I’ve been feeling that the one thing these great Japanese meals need to make them even greater is an espresso at the end.

So that was that – the next day we all undertook the long trip home, (Carlos’ journey was 44 hours via South Africa......) and brought to an end a really great trip involving music, crowds, culture shock, traffic, teachers, students, subways, soundchecks, festivals, sushi, sashimi, stir fry, yakitori, neon signs, unreadable signs, noise, politeness, impoliteness, efficiency, inefficiency, planes, trains, automobiles..................

After 2 weeks of man-made wonder, on the way home my plane flies over Siberia on a perfect day for viewing the beauty and wonder of nature...........

Bill Evans - A Forgotten Man?

2010-09-19T21:49:00.008+01:00

Bill Evans a forgotten man? Seems like an absurd thought – but with the arrival of the 30th anniversary of Evans’ death on September 15th, I definitely got the feeling that his one-time huge profile as one of the most influential, important, and admired, pianists in jazz had taken a serious tumble. Yes there were jazz blogs which mentioned him and marked the anniversary, but they were in general blogs that have a stylistic leaning towards the music of the 50s and earlier, rather than blogs that deal with contemporary jazz and its doings. It was a combination of reading these blogs, noting the absence of mentions of Evans in others, and watching some Youtube clips of Evans that gave me this feeling that as far as the contemporary jazz world is concerned his star has fallen considerably in recent years.

But a forgotten man? This post is more me thinking aloud rather than me coming to any definite conclusion.

There was a time when Evans was ubiquitous, where he was mentioned in any serious discussion of jazz piano, when everyone could list their favourite Evans albums (which in those days were NOT just ‘Everybody Digs Bill Evans’ and the trio recordings with LaFaro and Motian). And of course up to 1980 he was touring and recording, so I knew many people, even in Ireland, who had seen him play. I just missed that particular boat myself, he died just as I started to get around, get out of Dublin and go to NY and London to see international artists who, at that time, never appeared in Ireland. So at that time his reputation and influence were enormous – it was very much accepted as a sine qua non that he would be always mentioned in the pantheon of jazz piano Gods alongside such deities as Art Tatum, Bud Powell etc.

But now? I don’t think that if you asked contemporary pianists about Evans that they would downplay his importance in the jazz piano lineage, but you rarely hear them volunteer Evans when asked about their influences. Of course as time passes all young musicians listen to different stuff than their elders did, and that’s how it should be. But it’s not uncommon to hear contemporary pianists cite Monk, and Bud Powell, (both of whom would have been mentioned in the same breath as Evans in the roll call of great pianists by an earlier generation), as influences. And it’s not uncommon to hear people such as Andrew Hill, or even Herbie Nichols and Jaki Byard being mentioned as being important figures for several well known contemporary pianists. But it’s been a long time since I heard a young cutting edge pianist make any reference to Bill Evans. Even Mehldau got quite miffed about his trio constantly being compared to Evans’ in the early days (rightly so – it was just lazy journalism to conflate the two bands) and went out of his way to deny the influence.

Shortly after Evans died a tribute recording was released which featured many great pianists then active on the jazz scene – some older, some younger, some not so well known, some legendary. The line-up included Herbie Hancock, McCoy Tyner, Chick Corea, Teddy Wilson, George Shearing, John Lewis, Dave Mckenna, Denny Zeitlin, Jimmy Rowles, Richie Beirach, JoAnne Brackeen and Andy LaVerne. Quite an impressive tally of great pianists, and all lining up to praise Evans and play pieces by him or associated with him. I wonder if you did the same thing today – i.e put together an ‘Evans recording’ featuring the current crop of well known contemporary American pianists – Vijay Iyer, Jason Moran, Ethan Iverson, Craig Taborn etc. - what the result would be? I think the musical results could be intriguing, but I wonder how many pianists, (outside of pianists who deliberately position themselves within earlier styles of playing), would have any interest in recording Evans material these days? In these days where the music of others is deconstructed or ‘re-imagined’ or whatever the current phrase might be, by young musicians, how in sympathy would they feel in working with pieces like ‘Turn Out the Stars’ or ‘Very Early’? That harmonic world of constantly moving chords seems very far away from a lot of current pianistic concerns. Not that I’m bemoaning that – it’s just an observation.

An aside – for me the greatest Evans ‘tribute’ album was made by Paul Motian with Frisell and Lovano and Marc Johnson without a piano in sight. Frisell is just scary on this recording, the way he can distil the harmonic complexity of Evans music into a two-note guitar chord is an object lesson in accompaniment and ingenuity. John McLaughlin also made an often very beautiful Evans recording using five guitars!

In Europe there is a stream of contemporary pianism that is more clearly linked, in evolutionary terms, to Evans – for example the Scandinavian tradition espoused by the descendants of Bobo Stenson, Lars Jansson etc. and the Italian piano tradition of such great players as Enrico Pieranunzi and Stefano Bollani. But the European pianists who are influenced by Evans seem to favour the more ‘classical’ elements in his playing – the rich voicings, the impressionistic melodicism – and ignore the hard-swinging Evans. While the American pianists who these days do speak about Evans tend to focus on the swinging aspects of his playing and not be too interested in the pianistic impressionism. Of course these are generalisations, but I do detect a trend in the contemporary response on both sides of the Atlantic to Evans’ legacy.

As for me, I kind of go in and out of an Evans thing. I have a huge collection of his recordings – most on LP – and mostly collected in the early 80s when it was a given around these parts that Evans was a God and that it behoved any serious student of the music to have everything he recorded. And in collecting all these recordings I got to hear much great music that I think a lot of present-day musicians maybe don’t know since, these days, there seems to be a lot of focus on the earlier part of Evans career, and the later trios (post LaFaro/Motian, pre Johnson/Labarbera) seem to be unfashionable now.

But actually I particularly like the trio that was together the longest – the one with Eddie Gomez and Marty Morell. This trio is often accused of going through the motions, and much comment is made on their proclivity to rush. But I really like this band – I think the very underrated Morell really brought a kind of muscularity to the trio that was missing in some of the earlier versions. And yes they do rush, but it can be very exciting, and besides, other famous groups rushed – Tony and Ron with Miles for example – and never got the same opprobrium heaped on them for doing so. And Gomez, particularly in the earlier recordings by this trio, was just savage! Check out his solo on this version of ‘Emily’ - his motivic development stuff is amazing - and also check out how hard swinging this trio could be, even on a ‘sensitive’ jazz waltz like this one. (I love the setting for this clip, and the others in the series – a house in Helsinki, with the stark Scandinavian landscape outside and the clean lines of the house furnishings creating a contrasting backdrop to the rather florid music)

When I hear something like this I can easily get back into an Evans kick, because these days I can also easily go for long periods without listening to him, and sometimes I wonder how the slightly ‘rootie-tootie’ swing 8th notes of the later Evans still manages to swing, because it shouldn’t! And the over-amplified bass of the later trios bothers me, and how many times can you hear the same arrangement of ‘Autumn Leaves’ anyway?

But then something will spark me to listen again to Evans and it becomes evident again what an incredible amount of great music he was responsible for both under his own name and as a sideman – George Russell’s ‘Jazz Workshop’, ‘Blues and the Abstract Truth’, ‘Kind of Blue’, ‘Montreux’ with Gomez and Jack DeJohnette’, the first great trio with LaFaro and Motian, the intros to Nardis on the last trio’s live recordings, the poignancy of ‘We Will Meet Again’, etc. etc. He really was one of the greatest jazz musicians of his era, a huge influence on pianists whether directly or through pianists such as Herbie Hancock (the only major post-Evans pianist to openly acknowledge the influence) or Jarrett, and a true giant of the music. I think it’s a shame the 30th anniversary of his death wasn’t highlighted in a way a bit more in keeping with Evans’ stature, but I also think it’s interesting that it wasn’t – it says something about how Evans is now viewed in contemporary jazz – I’m just not sure what that something is! If there are any working jazz pianists under the age of 40 reading this I’d be interested to hear what your take on Evans is, and whether he had any influence on you as a pianist and/or improviser.

And to finish this rather rambling post – here’s the Evans/Gomez/Morell trio again burning their way through ‘Gloria’s Step’ from 1971. God bless Youtube.................

Every (Jazz) Man Has His Price

2010-09-11T22:34:00.006+01:00

Why do many truly great jazz musicians, musicians who over many years have played some of the greatest music in the idiom and forged reputations as being among the finest in the world, agree to make recordings with people who, in jazz terms at least, simply can’t play?

Why do many truly great classical musicians, have such a lack of respect for jazz that they feel they can hire some of the greatest players in the music to accompany them while they butcher the idiom?

These questions were prompted by listening to an absolutely dire recording by the classical violinist Nigel Kennedy called ‘Blue Note Sessions’ in which Kennedy is joined by some of the greatest jazz musicians active today, who seem quite happy to play with someone who, to descend into Irish argot for a moment, doesn’t come within an ass’s roar of the kind of level of improvisational ability, or vocabulary, that should be required for anyone hoping to come within the aforesaid braying distance of any recording studio containing the likes of Jack DeJohnette, Ron Carter, Joe Lovano and Kenny Werner. And listening to Kennedy’s playing here, he’s so far below the level of the other players – stilted phrasing, clichéd, unimaginative, throwing notes at improvisational problems – it seems extraordinary, at least on the surface, that he could make an album like this with players of this calibre. Yet not only can he be on this album, he is actually the leader on it.

I find these kids of classical ‘crossover’ recordings very both infuriating and depressing.

Infuriating because of the arrogance of the classical musicians who on the one hand claim to love jazz (or Brazilian music, or Indian music or whatever genre they or their record company feel is worthy of exploitation), yet never stop to ask the question whether, if they really respect and love the music as they claim to, they should REALLY be playing with true masters of the idiom, recording it, and putting it out under their own name? Have they no shame? Are they so immured in their own sense of self-worth that they believe themselves to be capable of playing pretty much anything at the highest level? Is it a case of ‘listen, I can play Beethoven’s violin concerto at the greatest concert halls in the world, how could I NOT be able to play a blues with jazz guys!? I’ve been touring the planet and been playing great music with the world’s greatest orchestras for over 25 years, and I’m a household name – of course I can improvise over a simple tune like Autumn Leaves!’ Do they never listen back to the recordings they make with great jazz musicians and writhe with shame at the vapid clichés, stilted phrasing, crocodile tears attempts at blues phrasing, and general corniness of what they play in these projects?

Maybe they do, maybe they’re just pressurised so much by the record company, who feel this will help broaden their appeal, that they’ve no choice but to do it. Mind you, in the EPK video for his Blue Note album Kennedy states that one of the things that persuaded him to do the album was the fact that people like DeJohnette and Carter would be on it – so, no fear of HIM feeling like he’s not worthy to play with jazz people of that calibre. He obviously sees it as a meeting of equals. Nigel Kennedy is a great classical violinist, but is, at best, a hack as a jazz musician (others can comment on the success or otherwise of his ‘Hendrix’ project), so the idea that in this milieu he has the artistic right to record with these musicians is in my opinion laughable. Just because you have the money and the opportunity, should you still do it? Not if you’ve even a shred of respect for the music or musicians involved. But I’m convinced that despite all the profession of love for jazz and respect for the tradition these players pay lip service to, underneath it all they don’t really believe this to be a serious genre – or at least as serious as theirs. Otherwise they wouldn’t record and release these awful discs.

And I find these recordings depressing because of the jazz musicians’ compliance with this disrespecting of the music to which they’ve devoted their lives, to which they’ve contributed immensely, and by which they have inspired thousands of musicians all over the world. Now of course there’s money involved here, and I’m not condemning anyone for having a big pay day. But I think that surely there must be a cut-off point – a point decided upon by a combination of the stature of the jazz musician involved and how much or how little they need the money. I can’t believe at this point in their careers that either Ron Carter or Jack DeJohnette – two musicians who command big fees all over the world – really needed the money Kennedy gave them for their involvement in this mediocre (to put it generously) project.

Nor can I believe that they did this for any other reason than the money – if they really believed Kennedy was any good as a jazz musician they’d be including him in some of their own projects – right? Has any jazz musician of any stature, anywhere, ever included Kennedy (or any other classical high-flyer for that matter) in their own creative projects? I don’t think so. The whole history of this genre is one of the classical musicians waving a wad of money at the jazz guys and the jazz guys scampering over, only too happy to lend their names and prestige to any lame ‘jazz’ project as long as the price is right. Maybe it’s a hangover from the days when you did whatever you could to get by, a gig’s a gig etc. etc. But surely there must come a point where you reach a level of financial security when you really don’t need to place your talent and achievement at the service of anyone who has the price to hire you, regardless of their ability?

Because what I find doubly depressing about this is that I don’t believe the reverse to be true. That is, in the classical world, that the true heavyweights – the Evgeny Kissins, Arturo Benedettis, Anne-Sophie Mutters etc. - , no matter HOW much money was involved, would countenance a jazz guy hiring them to play on a classical recording that he (or she) was making, listen to him butchering Brahms or Shostakovitch or whatever, and agree to have their names lent to the project in order to allow it to gain credibility, and to allow the jazz guys to pretend to their own jazz public that really could play classical music at the highest level. I just don’t believe it would happen. These people have too much regard for their own genre, their own art, their own tradition to traduce it like that in public for folding money. Why can’t the jazz equivalents of these great musicians have the same self-respect and the same respect for their own tradition?

If the greatest players in the jazz world can’t respect the music they’ve helped to shape enough to refuse to publicly appear and record with players who can’t play – no matter how well they may be known in other fields – then what hope have the rest of us got in convincing the world that what we do is serious and worthy of equal consideration with any music?

The String Problem

2010-08-27T23:31:00.007+01:00

I’ve just been listening to Alan Ferber’s new recording ’Chamber Songs’, which features his nonet with the addition of a string group. I always keep an eye out for new jazz recordings that feature strings, because I have a particular interest in string writing, and am very curious as to how strings can be better integrated into a jazz context. I enjoyed Ferber’s recording, it has some very nice writing and playing on it and it’s really well recorded. He definitely knows what he’s doing, particularly with the nonet. Some of the writing had a tone poem quality to it that is quite attractively elegaic. But, for my own taste, I could have used a bit more counterpoint and polyphony from the strings and in the string writing in general.

This tends to be quite a bugbear for me – I love writing for strings and have done a lot of it both in my capacity as a jazz composer and also while writing for classical musicians. So far I’ve written two violin and piano sonatas, a violin concerto, a string quartet, a sonata for solo violin, a sonata for solo viola, a sonata for viola and piano, (for Tanya Kalmanovitch), a piece for string orchestra, music for string trio and clarinet, music for jazz guitar trio and string quartet (for John Abercrombie), and music for soprano saxophone and string quartet (for Dave Liebman) , as well as using strings in various orchestral pieces. As a bassist I am of course a string player myself, so I’m perhaps biased towards them and therefore fussier than the normal jazz musician when it comes to writing for strings..

Strings have proven to be problematic in jazz, in the sense that even in the 21st century a violin soloist, (or even rarer, a cello soloist, or viola soloist) in a jazz group is the exception rather than the rule. However in this post, I’m interested in discussing the integration of a string group as part of a composed piece, rather than discussing the paucity of string soloists in jazz, (perhaps that’s for another time).

String writing in jazz tends to be rather hit and miss – and perhaps more miss than hit. In general jazz writers tend to go for one of two options when writing for strings–they either use the strings as surrogate horns, or go for the dreaded “string pad” effect. “String Pad” is the term I’ve heard string players use to describe, in a less than complimentary way, the type of writing they often encounter from composers outside the classical world when dealing with strings. In this String Pad genre the composer goes for slow-moving chordal, lush backgrounds over which the jazz soloist does his or her thing. You can hear a lot of this string pad affect on “Bird With Strings”, where the lush backgrounds support Parker’s fantastic soloing. In this kind of writing the composer uses a string ensemble as a kind of block effect - slow moving chords that display the richness of the string sound. I can understand the temptation to use this kind of effect – after all the natural sound of a string group playing a chord is one of the richest sounds you can ever experience in music. And since we don’t normally deal with strings in jazz, when we get the opportunity to do so it’s very hard to resist the novelty of having this rich sound at your disposal. But it really is a kind of one-size-fits-all unimaginative way to use strings, and whenever I hear that kind of sound I always think to myself that the writer is being, at the very least, a bit lazy.

in reality string ensemble writing is all about counterpoint. From the baroque period onwards, (and even before this), counterpoint is the major feature of all string writing. They lend themselves so well to polyphony, and of course extend across the full range from deepest bass to highest treble. And strings not only cover the full range of the human voice, they also are able use as many expressive devices as the human voice. So with their ability to cover a very wide pitch range, and the huge range of techniques and devices that are available when writing for strings, it really is a cop-out to mainly use the strings as a kind of harmonic blotting paper filling up all the available space with their woody richness.

As I said, in string writing counterpoint is, to use the technical term, the shit. But in jazz we don’t tend to use counterpoint a whole lot – at least not in mainstream jazz writing. Have a listen to any post-bop recordings, then try and identify any use of counterpoint in the tunes. There’s usually not a lot there - any small bits of counterpoint tend to be used as small fillers to the main melody rather than any truly independent line. Like anything of course, there are exceptions to this – Mulligan’s piano-less quartet being a famous example, then George Russell’s masterpiece ’Jazz Workshop’ is another. But these are exceptions, counterpoint is rare in post-bop mainstream jazz.

And when we do use counterpoint, we tend to use a very “top–down” kind of writing, where the melody is played mostly in the higher pitched instruments and any counterpoint that’s going on is really just engaged with filling out the chords of the harmony underneath the melody - they’re often really just glorified guide-tone melodies. When I hear this kind of thing, I always get a sense that the composer conceived the music at the piano – you get that sense of the melody being played in the right hand while being supported by left hand chordal action. But examining compositions for string quartet by great composers reveals a whole other world of counterpoint. In this genre all four instruments are equal - the violins, the viola, or the cello can have the lead at any time, and themes, sub-themes, melody, and accompaniment are constantly flipped around through the ensemble. Rather than have the violin play the melody all the time supported by the lower instruments as in so much jazz string writing, in this world all the instruments are equal and are fully engaged in the cut and thrust of the musical dialogue.

There’s probably a reason why we jazz composers tend not to do this when writing for strings – this shit is hard! Counterpoint is hard. When you have four voices moving independently, their horizontal forward motion creates a vertical harmony. The writer needs to be aware at all times of the function of every note in all four instruments, how they relate to each other, and how they relate to the underlying harmony of the piece. Classical composers train for years to be able to do this, we get little or no instruction in this area–naturally enough, since we have other fish to fry, fish that take years in themselves to fry properly. But that’s no reason to succumb to the lazy string pad syndrome. I think if you have the luxury of working with a good string group you should try and write something worthy of the possibilities that this kind of ensemble can bring to your music.

My most recent piece that involved a string group is a recording that will be coming out in the not too distant future of a piece that I composed called “Renaissance Man”. This is a a large-scale piece for a jazz guitar trio and string quartet, with John Abercrombie as the guitar soloist. In this six movement work, I tried at all times to use the strings in the way that I believe they should be used, as contrapuntal protagonists in the musical dialogue, as well as occasionally using them for their beautiful colouristic tendencies. Here’s a sneak preview of one of the movements – the only one that is completely written, and features the string quartet alone - its called “And This Was Odd Because”, and features the group in very rhythmic groove oriented playing, as well as the aforementioned counterpoint.

If one has ever attempted to write string music, the best advice I can possibly give to anyone who wants to write for strings, but maybe hasn’t had much training in the genre, is to check out Bela Bartok’s six string quartets. Everything you need to know about string writing is contained somewhere in these quartets. The whole history of string writing to that point, is contained here - Everything you need is here with the possible exception of extended techniques, but really if you’re not an experienced string writer you is shouldn’t be worrying too much about extended techniques anyway. And Bartok puts plenty of different techniques into the string writing anyway – more than enough for all but the most experienced of string writers. Check out the amazing movement no. 2 from Quartet No. 4, where he uses the mutes to create a creepy rustling effect as the music hurtles around the four instruments.

Now THAT’S string writing! And of course great music. I still keep my ears and eyes open for great jazz string writing, but I’ve not had a huge amount of luck so far. Any suggestions as to good stuff to check out will be gratefully accepted and acted upon.

In the meantime here’s a little video clip from the making of the aforementioned ‘Renaissance Man’ recording – the CD should be out in early 2011.

Blog to Blog

2010-08-21T23:08:00.004+01:00

I just saw where Ethan Iverson - without doubt the most respected jazz blogger around (at least as far as writing about the actual music is concerned), mentioned this blog in a round-up in his always fascinating 'Do The Math' blog. Which is nice since it was reading Ethan's blog that originally inspired me to start writing myself. As I mentioned in a post called 'Musicians on Music' I felt that far too much of the jazz writing online was being done by non-musicians - or maybe it would be fairer to say that far too little was being written by the guys in the trenches, and too little of the musicians' own voices was being heard. A combination of this belief and seeing, via in particular a blog by Ethan on Lennie Tristano, (which was on the old DTM site and will be over on the new one soon apparently), how good it could be when musicians write in depth about what they really know, that inspired me to start writing.

Interestingly - to me anyway! - Ethan, in speaking about the blog says the following:

Actually, I’m pretty sure Ronan and I disagree about nearly everything in jazz from A to Z, and look forward to looking him up in Dublin sometime and arguing all night long over some Jameson.

Actually I'm not so sure we would disagree quite as much as Ethan thinks we would - or at least I can say that I rarely read his writing about the music and violently disagree with what he says. For example I really enjoyed his recent post on the 'Great Jazz Trio' recordings with Hank Jones, Ron Carter and Tony Williams, since these are recordings I know really well and bought on LP back in the 80s when they were originally released and have lived with for a long time. He wrote very well about them and what he said pretty much jibed with my own opinion on those recordings.

But obviously, if I agree with much of what he writes, the same can't be said for his view of the opinions I express in my blog! Since he doesn't write comments on other people's blogs (as far as I know, and it's a stance I can completely understand. It's so easy to get sucked into stuff and suddenly, BAM! - the whole night's gone........) I'm not sure which part(s) of my A-Z of jazz he disagrees with, but I look forward to the all-nighter the next time he's in Dublin, (probably minus the Jameson though - for me anyway..........).

Don't Give Up the Day Job!

2010-08-05T20:24:00.003+01:00

In the previous post on Denny Zeitlin, I questioned whether anyone apart from Denny had ever really scaled the jazz heights as a player despite not pursuing the music full time. I've just remembered another exceptional part-time player - Franco Ambrosetti. The Swiss Flugelhorn player, (whose family business has made him very rich and for whom he still works), may not be in the same compositional/conceptual league as Zeitlin, but as a player he's truly world class. Here he is burning out on 'Sidewinder' from 2001, and in some very heavy company too...................

Overlooked Masterpieces 1 - Denny Zeitlin

2010-07-28T16:19:00.031+01:00

(Since I wrote this post I receieved some factual corrections, observations and clarifications from Denny - I've added these in an addendum to the blog - please make sure to read this at the end of the post)

Denny Zeitlin is the exception that proves the rule - the rule in this case being that contemporary jazz is such a complex and demanding art form that to be a true master of it demands that one devotes one's entire attention to it, and spends one's whole life in its singular pursuit. This ‘rule’ is something that I actually believe to be true – while there have been many fine part-time jazz musicians, there’s never really been many (if any?) who only devoted some of their time to it yet played it at truly the very highest level. In fact I would go as far as to say that it’s not possible to really play it at the very highest level while devoting half of your time to doing something completely different.

Or perhaps it's more accurate to state that I would say that if I didn’t know about Denny Zeitlin...........

Zeitlin is, and has been for over 40 years, a full time psychiatrist and a part-time jazz musician – or at least part-time in that he has always fulfilled a fulltime role as a medical man while presumably (though I don’t know this for sure), playing jazz only when he has time away from his medical practice. And what is extraordinary about him is not that you could say he’s an amazing jazz pianist considering he doesn’t devote himself full time to it – what’s extraordinary is that he is a truly great jazz pianist by any standard. He is truly world class, and always has been ever since the time he came to New York as a medical student in the early 1960s, playing gigs and making recordings while studying medicine .

His brilliance and originality is immediately evident on the first recordings he appeared on, and no less than Bill Evans recorded his beautiful composition ‘Quiet Now’ which became a staple of Evans’ repertoire at that time. He released several albums during the 60s and then seemed to disappear from performance, emerging again in the early 80s with a beautiful duo recording for ECM with Charlie Haden ('Time Remembers One Time Once'), and even locking horns with Herbie Hancock on Straight No Chaser from a live recording, ('Jazz at the Opera House'), that I don’t think has ever been released on CD, but is one on which Zeitlin demonstrates again his right to be considered as one of the truly great jazz pianists.

Yet he remains under-appreciated and under-recognised, despite the fact that he remains active as a pianist and is playing as well as ever both solo, and in his trio with Buster Williams and Matt Wilson. I was recently talking to some musician friends of mine, and I brought Zeitlin’s name up, and while some of them had heard his name, few were aware of his work, and none were aware of the great trio recordings he made in the early 60s. I think it’s a travesty that these recordings are not better known – hence this blog post.

In 1964, while only 25 years old, he made what is for me an incredibly forward looking and prophetic piano trio album – Cathexis – with Cecil McBee and Freddie Waits. This recording is full of compositional, pianistic and ensemble concepts that were very uncommon at the time, but that later went on to become part and parcel of the contemporary jazz pianist's (and musician’s) vocabulary. It was very far ahead of its time in so many ways.

At a festival we were both playing at in Belgium last year I had the good fortune to have a conversation with Cecil McBee, the bassist on Cathexis, during which I brought up this recording (Cathexis) and asked Cecil about it. He said a very interesting thing – he told me that it was the first recording he (and Freddie Waits), made in New York when he arrived there, but that in hindsight he felt that he wasn’t really ready to make that recording. When I asked him what he meant by that, he said that though his reading skills and technique were in good condition due to his just having left music college, and he was able to negotiate the many technical difficulties of the music, at the same time he said that the conceptual material was so varied and demanding, he felt that he didn’t have the experience at that time to deal with the music in the way he now wished he could have.

Listening to Cathexis even now, there are so many challenges for the rhythm section, and so many varieties of feel and approach demanded of them. Waits and McBee do a fantastic job on the music, especially given the difficulties involved - I wonder if they did any gigs in preparation for the recording...... Even today this music would be challenging, I can’t imagine what it must have been like to be faced with those pieces at that time – it remains incredible to me that this recording was conceived and recorded in early 1964, and by someone who wasn't devoting all of his time to music!

For example – here are a few audio clips which give an idea of the sheer breadth of conception and ease of execution of this music and this CD (Thanks to Mr. Zeitlin for permission to use these clips - depending on your internet connection some clips may load slowly, if so, please be patient)

‘I-Thou’ is an exquisite melody, which has a wonderful circular feel with a deceptively tricky form – melody is one of Zeitlin’s great gifts

'Stonehenge' on the other hand, is a fast modal piece that has a hair-raising (for the rhythm section) rhythmic and densely chorded section that's used to launch the solos. Even in today's jazz world, where we're used to rhythmically difficult passages in the music, this would be considered challenging.

The use of 20th century harmony (as in the chromatic harmony of Schoenberg and Stravinsky, featuring stacked triads etc.) to re-harmonise standards became very popular in jazz the mid-to late 70s, particularly through the work of Richie Beirach and Dave Liebman. But Zeitlin was doing this many years before, such as in this take on Gershwin's classic 'Soon'

Or how about this chromatic take on the even more classic 'Round Midnight............

'Nica's Tempo' on the other hand features many tempo changes - a very unusual thing in a piano trio recording in 1964, though Mingus had been using it as a compositional device for a while

'Little Children, Don't Go Near That House' (the title is worth the price of admission alone!) is a very unusual melody showing a real original mind at work - the harmony is dense, the melody is lyrical and a little poignant, yet stylistically unclassifiable.........

'Cathexis' itself is a burn-out, with lots of chords including the fast moving Trane type progression heard here that shows that Zeitlin, along with pretty much everyone else at that time, was affected by Coltrane's contemporary harmonic explorations

And finally - an extended form composition - in this case an exploration of the minor blues. 'Blue Phoenix' works its way through three different sections, starting off very slowly with solo piano before getting into an extraordinary evocation of a walking bass line with the left hand of the piano. Zeitlin has always been brilliant at this (check out his 'Billie's Bounce' from 'Time Remembers One Time Once' on ECM for another amazing example). As a bassist I've rarely heard pianists successfully imitate the feel of a walking bass line - it's usually too angular and percussive. But Zeitlin seems to have figured out how to get that legato driving thing that bassists often do - as in this example:

He finishes 'Blue Phoenix' as a fast burning minor blues, utilising the following accelerando (another rare thing in jazz) to get to the desired tempo

He moved to the West Coast in the mid-60's and in between his medical work put together a new trio with Jerry Granelli and Charlie Haden which made several recordings - 'Carnival', 'Live at the Trident' and (with Joe Halpin on bass and Oliver Johnson on drums on half of it) 'Zeitgeist'. Carnival and Zeitgeist were recently released on a Mosaic box set that also includes 'Cathexis', though the Trident recording wasn't included in this collection for some reason.

While Haden and Granelli recorded more extensively with Zeitlin and form an obvious trio rapport with him, I've always been very fond of the pieces on Zeitgeist that have the Joe Halpin/Oliver Johnson bass and drum team. They have a muscularity of approach that really fires the music and puts it into other areas. This is particularly true on 'Dormammu' where Zeitlin shows the breadth of his creative abilities yet again. Here he ventures into some ferocious open improvisation with Halpin and Johnson that shows he was au fait with the 60s free scene

I also really like Johnson's time feel too - he has a wonderfully springy cymbal feel with an edge to it - slightly pushy but not rushing, reminiscent of Jack DeJohnette's time feel. 'Night and Day' is a good example

And finally, have a listen to the playfulness of the way they play the hoary old classic 'I Got Rhythm' - dense voicings yet underpinned with real swing

These albums contain an extraordinary amount of improvisational and compositional approaches - extended form, lyrical ballads, complex rhythms, sophisticated chromatic reharmonization of standards, free playing, fantastic swing. They are major statements in the art of the possible for piano trio, and given the time they were made, were very prophetic. The dominant piano trio influence in mainstream jazz in the 60s was Bill Evans, yet to my mind, these trio recordings show a greater variety of approach within what is largely a conventional jazz context, than does the various Evans trios. This is not to denigrate the Evans trios, but rather is meant to point up the extraordinary achievements of the Zeitlin trios.

Achievements that have not been given their due recognition. Which brings us back to the opening point - can you really reach the highest level you can reach if you don't devote yourself full time to the music? I think its clear that Zeitlin has reached and surpassed the level that most full time pianists can reach. But could the achievements have been even greater had he devoted himself fulltime to music? He certainly would have been given greater recognition - as Monk famously said, even if you don't have a gig you should always be on the scene. Out of sight, out of mind is a truism - there's no doubt that Zeitlin's absence from the scene - especially in NY - has contributed to the lack of awareness of his work, especially today.

However he has an interesting take on all of this, in which he posits the idea that his medical and musical work feed off each other. So - do check out these great trio albums, check out what he's doing currently, and let's leave the last words to him

Addendum

After I wrote this blog I received a message from Denny pointing out a couple of factual errors and giving some insight into some of the points I raised.

With regard to the errors - ‘Billie’s Bounce’ was actually recorded on a Palo Alto recording called Tidal Wave. And the audio clip version of ‘I Got Rhythm’ that I posted featured the bass and drum team of Charlie Haden and Jerry Granelli – there’s a different version featuring Joe Halpin and Oliver Johnson on the bonus tracks of the Mosaic Box Set I mentioned in the post.

Here are Denny’s observations and clarifications:

It is accurate that over the years I have maintained a primary responsibility to patient care and psychiatric education, and have woven music into this fabric as best as I have been able.

Re my "disappearance" : After the Columbia series of 5 LPs in the sixties, I became very interested in the integration of acoustic and electronic instruments, jazz, classical, rock, funk, and free music. I withdrew from public performance for several years while I got the instrumentation, technology, and group together, and then performed this music through the seventies. This journey was recorded on the small independent label, 1750 Arch, and culminated in my acoustic-symphonic-electronic score for the remake of "Invasion of the Body Snatchers." That score was recently released on CD. I then returned to a focus on acoustic music, and the duet album for ECM with Charlie soon followed, reaching a larger audience.

Re Cathexis: I had one night of rehearsal with Cecil before our first recording session, and met Freddie for the first time in the studio. We never gigged as a trio. I agree that they did an absolutely superb job on the date. It was very interesting to learn of Cecil's conversation with you.

RE Blue Phoenix: You might want to mention also that my new solo CD, "Precipice," has several examples of walking bass lines at different tempos.

RE the Mosaic Box Set: The reason Live At The Trident was not included in this set is that the set focuses exclusively on the studio dates. Mosaic plans to release LATT on CD, probably within the next 12 months.

(Your description of the Johnson/Halpin team and Oliver's contribution is right on, and tallies with my experience of them.)

RE: I Got Rhythm: The version you audio-clipped and described is actually one of the Haden/Granelli

Bonus tracks. The version with Johnson/Halpin is the very brief, more avant-garde reconstructed/deconstructed track 6 of Disc #3.

Many, many thanks for your support of my music, Ronan, and I hope our paths will cross in person before too long.

All best,

Denny