Symphony Hall Foyer, Birmingham UK
27-11-09
Hey, remember Thad Jones Mel Lewis Big Band? A horn player and a drummer leading a group that became an institution and sparring ring for many a fine young jazz player? Well, fast forward a good few decades and Birmingham could have its own version.

Ed Puddick is a trombonist but spent his time in the front, conducting and name-checking the soloists; Tom Haines is a drummer and kept things tight at the back. Both had written lots of new music for this band which has strong Birmingham Conservatoire connections and a lot of familiar faces.

The Morgan brothers were there in the saxophone section, as was Sub Ensemble bari man Colin Mills. His fellow Subber, Mike Adlington was in the trumpets as was Sam Wooster, leader of a very interesting young quartet in this town.

On bass was Conservatoire grad who has gone on to bigger things in London, Ryan Trebilcock, and on piano was the much travelled Steve Tromans.

Of course the band calls itself an “orchestra” so any Count Basie and other big band connections were out of the question – this was much more serious stuff, full of atmospheric textures and more expansive writing.

Full marks to all concerned – Ed and Tom for writing the stuff, the musicians for buckling down and getting on with it, Birmingham Jazz and Symphony Hall for giving them a platform, and all those who turned up to enjoy and applaud. It was an impressively sized audience, even by the standards of these popular weekly sessions.

What I’d really like to see now is the band given scope to develop. That can only come with the guarantee of a regular gig – local promoters please note. What I’d also like to see is a bit more space for the soloists. A composer and bandleader like Maria Schneider writes specifically for the players in her jazz orchestra, and often gives a specific soloist practically a whole tune to themselves. It’s a very effective ploy and I think soloists like the ones in this band would rise admirably to such occasions.

Also, I know it’s early days but a little more edge and a little less politeness from the soloists would help greatly. Mr Tromans can be relied upon to move things up a gear and this he did in a fine and idiosyncratic solo just before the interval. Chris Proctor on tenor played a great little solo early in the second half but was cut off by the tight arrangement before he could really build on the potential of his feisty beginning.

I confess I had to head off to another engagement 15 minutes before the end – maybe the band broke free from the polite arrangements and scholarly, by-the-book solos at the end. Maybe Haines shouted like Mingus while the trumpets headed for the stratosphere and the trombones broke out in dirty chaos. Maybe the sax section marched out into the crowd wailing all the while.

Or maybe that will happen next time. I live in hope.

Holland/Rubalcaba/Potter/Harland: The Monterey Quartet: Live At The 2007 Monterey Jazz Festival (MJF Records 0888072312449)
Remember that great tenor led quartet concert from 1964, immortalised on the album Forest Flower? The band was the Charles Lloyd Quartet and the festival was in Monterey. In 2007 the quartet is an all-star one with Dave Holland on bass, Gonzalo Rubalcaba on piano, Chris Potter on tenor and Eric Harland on drums. And while it might not achieve the rock-crowd-friendly icon status Forest Flower achieved, this disc is as jam-packed with great jazz.

Just listen to Potter’s solo at the close of Eric Harland’s tune Treachery, the opening number here. It’s the tenor man in fiery form indeed, and the band really cooking behind him. For these few minutes alone, and the resulting standing hairs on the back of the neck, this disc is worth the asking price.

But there is more, much more. All the tunes are originals and all are contributed by the band. Potter’s Minotaur begins with an exemplary solo from Harland, and settles into a strangely accented piece, a strong Holland riff and more exciting saxophone playing.

Rubalcaba, for all his fireworks playing, is also a master of the subtly harmonised ballad, and Otra Mirada is  just such a piece, the composer contributing a precisely articulated and searching solo; Holland’s Step To It shows that dancing groove he brings to so many of his compositions, and the bass and drums interaction is just fab.

Harland’s Maiden is plain gorgeous, while Rubalcaba’s 50 is perhaps the set’s hotspot.

It’s easy to make a connection between this band and another Miles Davis group veteran’s – the Wayne Shorter Quartet. Both contain a Latin pianist, and both include musical princes alongside the kings. If this band isn’t quite a match for the Shorter band, it might be down to the fact that it hasn’t yet built up that kind of time on the road. Let’s hope it does.

Stock photo of a Yamaha YAS 275

A first in my shop – an Indonesian made Yamaha Saxophone. It appears to be quite similar to the old YAS-23, with some cosmetic changes and a darker lacquer.  Here is a review of it from an excellent English site, written by Mr. Stephen Howard.

Having finished work on the horn, I find that I agree with most of what Mr. Howard has to say about it.  Especially the issues with the low D key – the pad cup is way too small.  The only point on which we differ is on the high-F# key.  I have always thought it to be wasted on a student instrument, just one more thing junior can create problems with. Overall it seems to be quite similar to the YAS models made in China that are much the rage over here.  I am curious why Yamaha releases horns manufactured in different countries in different markets.

There are a lot of people spending an awful lot of money trying to cheat the effects of aging; three men are in Birmingham this week who could share with them the secrets of eternal youth.

I’m guessing, but I think they would probably include constant searching and striving for innovation, and would certainly involve keeping working hard. Crucially, they would involve being jazz musicians.

The real veteran of the bunch is 82-year-old Lee Konitz from Chicago. He played in Miles Davis’s Birth Of The Cool band, he followed Lennie Tristano’s particular branch of cool jazz in the 1950s, sat in with Chet Baker and Gerry Mulligan, and has continued to form new and exciting collaborations in the US and Europe ever since.

I met him once when he had got to bed after midnight after a gig in Copenhagen, risen again at 4am to catch a plane, had an argument with airport staff and still had the energy to regale me with anecdotes and advice throughout a two-hour drive through the English countryside.

To retire was to go to an early grave, he told me. And all the hotel rooms, the airports, the tedium of travel, all were worth it for those brief hours on stage, playing jazz, improvising, being truly alive in the moment. He was only 79 then.

These days Lee still plays jazz standards, but so absorbed into his psyche are these tunes that they can emerge in all kinds of disguises, stretched, twisted, refashioned by the thousands of times they have been given the Konitz makeover.

He demands sharp ears and a quick mind, not only from his audience, but especially from his collaborators, and his partner for a concert in the CBSO Centre on Tuesday is pianist Dan Tepfer, just 27.

The pair have recorded a CD together, and Tepfer has also played with Paul Motian, Steve Lacy and Bob Brookmeyer.

Tickets are £15 (£13 for members of Birmingham Jazz), are available from www.thsh.co.uk and the fun starts at 8pm.

Before that, on Saturday, and in the same venue, Andrew Cyrille, 70, from Brooklyn, sits down at the drums and Henry Grimes, 74, from Philadelphia, picks up the double bass. With them is the younger Briton, Paul Dunmall, on saxophone.

Together they are the Profound Sound Trio, a transatlantic meeting of the freest jazz minds brought about by Birmingham Jazz, first at the New York Vision Festival last year, then at the Cheltenham Jazz Festival earlier this year, and now on a UK tour.

Cyrille and Grimes have the dust of lofts and cellars upon them, so long have they been working in the demanding and ill-rewarded world of free improvisation in the US. Dunmall has been paying his dues in similar fashion around the pubs and clubs of this island and Europe since the 1970s.

Together they make a fiercely original and extraordinarily powerful music that gets to the very molten core of free jazz.

The band starts at 8pm, and tickets are £14 (£12 for BJ members) from www.thsh.co.uk

Vibes player Jim Hart brings his excellent Gemini quartet, featuring fellow Loop musicians Ivo Neame on saxophone, Jasper Hoiby on bass and Dave Smith on drums, to the Yardbird in Birmingham this evening for a gig organised by the Cobweb Collective. Read my review of Gemini’s album, Narrada, here, and hotfoot it to the Yardbird now – more info here.

Shabaka Hutchings (Pic: Russ Escritt)

Jazz Club
The Rainbow, Digbeth, Birmingham
26-11-09
Many bands like to take their time and build to a big finish – not this trio of saxophonist/clarinettist Shabaka Hutchings, electric bassist Neil Charles and, for this gig, Seb Rochford on drums. We were in at the top, at the centre of a churning storm of free jazz intensity, Hutchings on tenor howling and screaming with double notes, harmonics and overblowing, Charles hitting thumb slaps and strumming chords simultaneously, Rochford stirring around the kit playing those accents only he can.

It was pretty full-on for the first three quarters of the set with pieces like Surman Part 2, and even when Hutchings finally switched to the gentler clarinet and tunes like The Forest the storm only abated temporarily.

There is a great amount of delicacy there in the digits of the band’s debut CD, Night Time On The Middle Passage (Babel BDV2982) and the band played nearly all material from it, but in live performance, and in the cruder ambience of the Rainbow’s back courtyard, delicacy needs to give way to power and intensity and, quite rightly, that’s the side of the band it chose to accentuate.

And what intensity! For those of us who remember the young Shabaka Hutchings standing tentatively at the side of the stage awaiting Andy Hamilton’s encouragement, or rising from his chair in the Walsall Jazz Orchestra saxophone section to play a quietly powerful solo, the man who on Wednesday evening turned his silver tenor into a raging bull elephant has come an awfully long way and grown immeasurably in stature. He is surely now one of the most original voices on his instrument(s) in this country today.

The man he most strikingly reminded me of was Pharoah Sanders – for his sheer instrumental force, for his expertise way up in the higher reaches of the tenor saxophone, and also for the way he worked away at fairly simple melodic phrases. So many modern saxophonists are keen to rip up and down the instrument, fitting in as many different notes as quickly as they can. Hutchings can do that if he chooses to – thankfully he chooses to quite rarely and so those lightning runs are always eloquent contrasts to the power of a piece like Chief, in which he restricts himself to a single note for a fair amount of the time, relying on tonal and rhythmic variation to give the interest.

Charles is an original player, too, using quiet wah-wah and a lot of chordal work. He could have been louder for a lot of the gig, but that is a minor carp. Rochford is not this band’s regular drummer but he fits in just fine, having just the right melodic sense and trans-stylistic abilities to do free rhythms when they are needed, or a kind of jazz metal or hip-hop when that might be appropriate.

Very strong playing, especially from Hutchings, but employed to bring out strong writing, too, and that makes it even more rewarding. Great band, great gig.

Birmingham Jazz doesn’t just put on gigs in Birmingham – sometimes it organises national tours and spreads the jazz word far and wide. Currently BJ artistic director Tony Dudley-Evans is spending some of his time on the road with the Profound Sound Trio. They arrive in Birmingham on Saturday for a gig at the CBSO Centre.

More on them and how jazz can be the elixir of a long life in a while. Before then, read how the Profound Sound Trio tour has been going here.

Wobbly and splayed, this performance of the Jobim classic sounds more like a soundtrack for my life than the silky Getz/Gilberto original ever could.

Ran Blake, “The Girl From Ipanema”

*****

Stan Getz/Astrud Gilberto (with a very young Gary Burton on vibes), “The Girl From Ipanema” (1964 [charted at #5 on the Billboard Hot 100]; this is from the 1964 movie “Get Yourself A College Girl”)

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lagniappe

mail

The immediacy of the e-world never ceases to amaze. After posting yesterday’s clip, I sent Sam Newsome an email—I’d happened upon his e-address at his website—to let him know that his music was being featured here. A few hours later, this was in my e-mailbox: “Thanks, Richard. It looks like I’m in good company. Peace, S”

*****

reading table

On this Thanksgiving Day, here’s a favorite quote.

Three things in human life are important. The first is to be kind. The second is to be kind. And the third is to be kind.—Henry James

Yeah, the format might seem a little strange: soprano saxophone, unaccompanied. But Monk’s musical language—its tangy mix of geometric elegance and off-kilter bluesiness—is rarely spoken this eloquently.

Sam Newsome, Thelonious Monk Medley, live, 2008

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lagniappe

The clarity and logic of his [Thelonious Monk's] work might have been compared with the craft of an architect. Each phrase, each fragment, each plump chord had its exact place in his musicial structure.—Mimi Clar (in Robin D. G. Kelley, Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original [2009])

*****

‘All jazz musicians are mathematicians unconsciously’ was a favorite theory of Monk’s.—Randy Weston (in Deborah Kapchan, Traveling Spirit Masters: Moroccan Gnawa Trance and Music in the Global Marketplace [2007])

The Red Garland Quintet with John Coltrane: Dig It! (Prestige PR7229)
Of course it is that crucial “with…” that makes the ears prick up, and pricked ears are just the thing for listening to Coltrane’s dazzling opening solo on Billie’s Bounce, filled as it is with the remnants of bop and the beginnings of the sheets of sound explorations that the saxophonist would increasingly engage in.

This was 1957 and along with Trane, the Miles Davis Quintet pianist had Donald Byrd on trumpet, Paul Chambers or George Joyner on bass and Arthur Taylor on drums. This was an influential band for record collectors but not a live playing unit. Nevertheless it has that late ’50s jazz essence, and Garland remained a favourite for many piano fans.

The tracks are unusually long for the era – Garland’s original composition, Lazy Mae, which concludes this Rudy Van Gelder remastered edition CD, runs to over 16 minutes. It’s a stately blues with the leader laying out the basics in a left hand riff before he adds some treble, and the rhythm team enter for a strong, swinging work through. In fact, it’s not until near the halfway mark that Coltrane enters with another masterful solo, followed by Joyner and finally Byrd, high and lyrical.

The single trio track is Crazy Rhythm, with Garland in exemplary form.

Apparently this disc was originally compiled from the left-overs from sessions which had produced three previous records. Well, what delicious leftovers!

Each week photographer Russ Escritt sends me his favourite picture of the week, or perhaps one from his extensive archive. Here’s one from the archive with a current relevance. It’s Paul Dunmall at the opening night of Tony Levin’s TL’s Jazz Club in Moseley, Birmingham, on 30-01-06. Paul will be playing on Saturday at the CBSO Centre in Birmingham as part of the Profound Sound Trio alongside US free jazz veterans Andrew Cyrille and Henry Grimes. He’ll be sticking to tenor saxophone this time, I guess, and leaving the pipes at home. Ah well, you can’t have everything.

Russ has been shooting (in the nicest possible way) local and visiting jazz musicians for a good few years now. In fact, he has recently compiled a book of the ones he likes best. Here is the cover:

You can order a copy here, or if you want to check out more of Russ Escrit’s superb pictures, go here.

Here is day two of the Mark VI rebuild.  The mundane act of cleaning.

body with no keys

Started a new page today regarding a long term project rebuilding a Selmer Mark VI alto saxophone.  If you have ever been curious about the complete job, tune in Here for more details.

Below is the latest, newest and shiniest addition to the family. Doesnt take a strain of the eyes to figure out what it is. Great – now we have horns and wind with the wood

I had a few hours to kill before a meeting yesterday so I wandered over to Central Park. I’d gone there planning to take pictures of trees, but was drawn to the street musicians instead (finding bare trees at The Mall swayed things that way).

There was Boris, the saxophone player from somewhere near Argentina. When I told him I hadn’t heard of his town, he kindly told me I needed to review my geography (which is true). On a good day he makes more than $100. On a slow one, like yesterday, he expected to make no more than $80. I hadn’t taken three shots before he started talking to me… and kept talking to me, which is why I have no decent pictures of him in action. I guess you’ll have to take my word for it.

Then there was the double bassist under the Terrace by the Bethesda Fountain. Using my nonexistent Russian vocabulary, or something that sounded Russian, I inferred from a conversation he was having with a passerby that his bass was 150 years old.

I sat near him to take pictures, with full intentions to exit past him. I somehow ended up staying a half hour, never making it to the other side.

Then, I was off to Brooklyn.

The latest podcast just launched featuring a video interview with Yamaha saxophone artist (and all around good bloke) Paul “Shilts” Weimar.  It was very interesting to get his perspective on a number of different topics.  He’s made a great name for himself in the United States after moving to Los Angeles several years ago.

Watch the video on the YamahaHub.  Visit the “Shilts Music” website as well for more cool music and info.

ps.  If you look closely, Jeff is indeed wearing his shop apron backwards in the video – but we’re not sure if he did that on purpose….

Tonight, New Haven’s Firehouse 12 presents a two-set celebration of New York-based alto saxophonist/composer Darius Jones‘ long-awaited debut CD, Man’ish Boy (A Raw & Beautiful Thing) (AUM Fidelity).

Described by Jones as “a sonic tone poem about me and my life growing up in the South,” the record draws on such early influences as his Jamaican father’s love of reggae, the revelatory vocal music of the church and countless hours of listening to everything from classical to rock on the radio.

Heralded as “a new voice poised to receive widespread acclaim” (Troy Collins, AllAboutJazz.com), Jones brings this diverse and passionate music to life with his mentors, the eminent master musicians Cooper-Moore (piano and diddley-bo) and Rakalam Bob Moses (drums).

“On Man’ish Boy,” writes PointofDeparture.org’s Ed Hazell, “alto saxophonist Darius Jones delivers one of the most impressive debuts in recent memory, displaying a remarkably well-developed concept and individual sound. Jones has a big, fleshy, lived-in tone, with a vibrato that owes as much to Johnny Hodges as it does to Albert Ayler. It’s defiant, vulnerable, proud, and weary; there is laughter and sobbing in it.”

Jason Crane, host of The Jazz Session and columnist at PopDose.com, adds, “For his debut statement, 31-year-old Jones wanted to tell his story. To talk about what it means to be poor and black and struggling and intelligent in this day and age. Jones has fit all that and more into an incredible recording that will make you sing, make you weep and make you marvel.”