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Aug 21

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The Miles Davis Prom

After a somewhat lacklustre first half and a similarly underwhelming resumption, last night’s Prom concert commemorating the centenary of the birth of Miles Davis finally took wing in a sold-out Royal Albert Hall with a sultry version of “Once Upon a Summertime”, Michel Legrand’s melody delivered with understated elegance by the great trumpeter Ambrose Akinmusire in front of the BBC Concert Orchestra, conducted by Miho Hazama.

Miles recorded the tune with Gil Evans in 1962 for Quiet Nights, which turned out to be his most disappointing album. He’d come across it through the singer and pianist Blossom Dearie, who in turn had found it during a stay in Paris in 1954. She was introduced to it through the sponsor of her trip, the record executive Eddie Barclay, who had co-written the original words with the lyricist Eddy Marnay. It was known as “La Valse des Lilas”. Back in the US, Johnny Mercer wrote an English lyric for her to sing. Whenever her friend Miles showed up to hear her in a night club, he’d tell her, “Play me my song.” Now, in a different century, it had a new role to play.

The idea of the Prom was that Hazama, a skilful and experienced conductor, composer and arranger, would take the work Davis and Evans accomplished together between the late ’40s and early ’60s and refashion it into something befitting the larger resources of the Concert Orchestra and Akinmusire’s quartet: a sort of concerto grosso setting.

Was that ever a good idea? It did, after all, answer a need. Only once — at Carnegie Hall in 1961 — did Davis and Evans get to perform a few of the charts, meaning that whenever the original arrangements are performed, they tend to be received with gratitude and reverence by those with a special love for Miles Ahead, Porgy & Bess and Sketches of Spain. I have a fond memory of a performance of the entire Porgy suite by the Royal Academy of Music alumni under Nick Smart at St John’s, Smith Square in 2019, and of a socially distanced recreation of the Concierto de Aranjuez by Ryan Truesdell’s Gil Evans Project in New York in 2020. On the evening before last night’s Prom, in a similar homage 6,000 miles away, Evans’s original scores were performed at the Hollywood Bowl by a band including Herbie Hancock and Ron Carter, two of Davis’s greatest alumni.

But to try and expand Evans’s carefully conceived and refined work, which made such revolutionary use of instrumental combinations and contrasts, might seem at best foolhardy. The addition of a full string section, in particular, carried significant risk, as it always does in jazz. Hazama had her work cut out.

The first half began with pieces from the Gershwin opera: “Bess, You Is My Woman Now”, “Summertime” and “I Loves You, Porgy”, plus Evans’s own “Gone”, While the new orchestrations were sometimes ingenious, the additions were often superfluous, occasionally verging on a bombast that would have been anathema to Evans. Moving on to other material, they meant that Hazema’s variations on “Boplicity” sacrificed much of the 1948 original’s cool agility and gained nothing from a quote from the James Bond theme. Her arrangement of “Blue in Green”, from Kind of Blue, was mostly notable for the space it created for a fine solo by the pianist Taylor Eigsti.

The late critic Max Harrison famously described Evans’s unique approach to existing material not as arrangement but as “recomposition”. As the first half ended with a medley of pieces from Manuel de Falla’s El Amor Brujo, from which Evans extracted “Will o’ the Wisp” for Sketches of Spain, it began to feel that recomposing a recomposition might not be such a great idea, even though Hazema slipped a few measures of the “Milestones” theme into the closing up-tempo section. There were moments when, as my companion said, it felt “a bit lounge”, and I could only agree.

That uneasy feeling re-ermerged after the interval, when the re-recomposition of Kurt Weil’s “My Ship” included one passage that sounded like a Disney soundtrack, albeit followed by a full-strength collective workout for Akinmusire’s stellar quartet, with the oustanding Eigsti (a late replacement for Sam Harris) on piano, Harish Raghavan on bass and Kendrick Scott on drums, temporarily freed from orchestral encumbrance — which, on an arrangement of the next tune, “Miles Ahead”, included a weird passage for Hollywood strings.

At that point I was wishing that the arranger’s job had been handed to Michael Gibbs or Maria Schneider. But then came a thoroughly decent “Once Upon a Summertime”, which settled things down. That seemed to encourage the quartet to take off on their own with an Akinmusire composition called “Henya”, recast from its original recording on the album Owl Song as a spellbinding ballad in slow 3/2 time, its constantly cycling harmonic contour and sense of infinite space drawing the best solos of the night, as well as magnificent distant rolling thunder from Scott.

On, then, to the great set-piece, Evans’s historic 17-minute recasting of the Adagio from Joaquin Rodrigo’s guitar concerto. And here, in the Concierto de Aranjuez. Hazema made better sense of the possibilities of the expanded instrumentation, creating a section in which Akinmusire improvised beautifully through and around sombre and carefully placed stop-time figures, and using the strings to give extra drive to the fantastic crescendo with which piece reaches its climax. No complaints there, and none for the vociferously demanded encore, Ahmad Jamal’s “New Rhumba”, in which Hazema faithfully reproduced the trombone section’s stabs — Evans’s subtle imitation of Red Garland’s comping in Miles’s first great quintet –behind Eigsti’s spirited solo.

In an interview in the concert programme, Akinmusire spoke of the challenge of playing Davis’s role. “I love this music so much that I’ll be thinking, what if Miles was sitting in a seat in the Royal Albert Hall? What would he expect, and what would make him walk away with a smile? I don’t think he’d want me to play like him.” The easy response is that Miles, the enemy of sentimental recreation, wouldn’t have been there at all. But Akinmusire, the most gifted jazz trumpeter of his generation, met the demand with skill and humility. His virtuosity allowed him to make allusions to the rounder tone of the flugelhorn Davis used on some of the recordings with Evans, and to find the sobbing tone that Kenneth Tynan, in his 1961 profile of Miles, quoted his young daughter describing as “like a little boy who’s locked out and wants to get in.”

It was hard to tell whether he was entirely comfortable in the role. There were a few fluffs, and not always did his own sense of space seem to match that of the arrangements. A long sequence of squeezed high notes in the de Falla piece, for instance, didn’t mean much. But as the evening went on, he was able to infiltrate more of himself into the necessary task of interpretation, occasionally doing what he often does in more natural circumstances, unloosing figurations that emerge from somewhere below the horn’s known lowest notes and spiral up via fantastical shapes to end in the uppermost register. And sometimes he found the pathos to match the careful diminuendos with which Hazema closed a few of the pieces.

Those were moments of genuine grace. In the end, despite doubts about how Davis himself would have viewed the project, and although it’s hard to accept that a satisfactory homage to Gil Evans would ever involve rewriting him, there were enough of those to carry away and remember with pleasure.

* The concert is on BBC4 tonight at 8pm. The audio will be available for the next 52 days on BBC Sounds: https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m003029j The photograph of Miles Davis and Gil Evans was taken by Don Hunstein.

Aug 16

Tunes of peace

Earlier today I closed the last page of Regime Change, Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan’s epic dissection of the first 15 months of Donald Trump’s second term at president of the United States. It’s a close-quarters observation of megalomania operating in real time, reaching its climax as the US/Israeli attack on Iran founders in the Strait of Hormuz, a hubristic miscalculation which one profoundly hopes will eventually define Trump’s reputation in the eyes of history. One can only wonder at the identity of the source who gave the two New York Times reporters such extraordinary material.

Now I need something to listen to, and here at hand is Peace Anthems, a new album of 10 short pieces by artists associated with Red Hook Records, the label founded five years ago by the producer Sun Chung, whose first release was Hanamichi, by the late pianist Masabumi Kikuchi. The new release, timed to coincide with the anniversary, is specially commissioned by Chung from the artists, who were invited to contribute pieces inspired by the theme of peace.

The trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith and the pianist Amina Claudine Myers, whose album Central Park made many best-of-the-year lists in 2024, provide two sketches, “Sonic Requiem X” and “Reflections on Palestine”. Smith also appears on “Three Years Later” with the drummer Andrew Cyrille and the modular synthesiser player Qasim Naqvi, whose solo piece, “Al Badawi”, opens the album. Moor Mother’s invocations and BlankFor.ms’ electronics combine on “Imaginary Lines”. The singer Martha Deribe and the pianist Simone Maggio are heard on “War Is Over”. The guitarist Taylor Deupree, the trombonist Kalia Vandever and the bassist Thomas Morgan contribute Deupree’s composition “Wither Light and Airy”. Kit Downes gets two chances to demonstrate his skill with a pipe organ on “Into the Woods — Three Weary Calls” and “Closing Meditation for OM”, the second of which concludes the sequence.

The mood is restrained and reflective, as if the performers agreed that the message would be allowed to find its way gently into the listeners’ ears. These are little tone poems whose delicacy is their strength. And nowhere is that more apparent than on a piece called “The River of Imjin” by the Korean saxophonist and composer Sungjae Son (photographed above), whose previous release, Near East Quartet, appeared in 2016, at a time when Sun Chung was an in-house producer for the ECM label.

“The River of Imjin”, bearing a name made famous by a battle between Chinese and UN (predominantly British) forces during the Korean War in 1951, finds Son overdubbing his tenor, bass clarinet and pump organ on two choruses of something that sounds like an old Methodist hymn tune. If you have fond memories of Thelonious Monk’s “Abide With Me”, John Surman’s “Doxology” or Don Cherry’s “Desireless”, then this fits right alongside them. After 414 pages describing Trump’s attempt to drag the world into his own darkness, sometimes two minutes and 15 seconds of music is all it takes to switch the light back on.

* Peace Anthems is out now on Red Hook Records. All proceeds will go to the International Red Cross: https://redhookrecords.bandcamp.com/album/peace-anthems

Jul 30

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The art of the duo

Elias Stemeseder (left) and Thomas Morgan

The new album by the pianist Elias Stemeseder and the bassist Thomas Morgan begins with variations on the piece from which it takes its name: Io Pur Respiro, a madrigal by the 17th century Italian composer Carlo Gesualdo. I love Gesualdo’s music so much that once, during a visit to Naples, I went looking for his tomb: it’s an inscribed stone laid into the floor of one of the chapels in the Church of Gesù Nuovo on the Via Benedetto Croce, should you find yourself in that extraordinary city.

Whether intentionally or not, Stemeseder and Morgan spend the first 10 minutes evoking the harmonic restlessness underlying the beauty of all Gesualdo’s choral music, the sudden shifts that make you feel as though the ground is sliding under you. Titled “Madrigal, Variation, Courante”, it opens with a lyrical two-part invention, before accelerating into an almost pointilliste dialogue, staccato phrases flying back and forth until the pair reach a conclusion so perfectly formed that it might make you gasp with pleasure.

Already it’s obvious that the combination of the Austrian pianist and the Californian bassist, both now based in New York, is an exceptionally empathetic one. I love the firmness and clarity of Stemeseder’s touch and the way, very often, equally interesting things are happening in both hands, bringing Lennie Tristano and Brad Mehldau to mind, although he never sounds like either of them. Morgan never ceases to demonstrate his ability to operate as an equal creative partner without neglecting the essential function of his instrument; in that respect, he’s the heir to Gary Peacock.

The recording was made in the Sala Vanni at the Basilica of Santa Maria del Carmine in Florence, during a short European tour in 2024**. The two musicians reassembled there the following morning, with the idea of making what would be in effect studio versions of the material they’d been exploring during the series of concerts, but eventually they and their producer, Martin Brugger, decided to use the live recording, despite the occasional cough from the audience.

Two of the five tracks are standard ballads. The first is Billy Strayhorn’s yearning “Love Came”, the second Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein’s “I Have the Room Above Her”, from the musical Showboat, already familiar to the contemporary jazz audience as the title track of a Paul Motian album from 2005. Both tunes are investigated with great care and beautifully restrained warmth: listen closely to the opening section of the Kern song and appreciate how those microscopic differences in timing are evidence not of imprecision but of spontaneity, of the closeness with which they’re listening to each other.

Like the opener, the other tracks are original compositions by Stemeseder. He begins “On the Euclidian Plane” on what sounds like a spinet before moving back to the piano for a piece whose rhythmic energy is imparted equally by both players, the keyboard prodding and the bass strings snapping as they urge each other forward in a double helix of invention. “Subject Carved From Words Uttered” begins with a ruminative passage, Morgan pushing phrases against Stemeseder’s carefully spaced chords before the pianist starts to unfurl single-note lines that begin to clot into chords as the piece nears its closure. The texture thins out again as the two pace each other towards an ending in which the notes seem to evaporate, forming an elegant conclusion to a highly original and truly outstanding album.

* Io Pur Respiro by Elias Stemeseder and Thomas Morgan is released on the Squama label: https://eliasstemesederthomasmorgan.bandcamp.com/album/io-pur-respiro. The photograph is by Johannes Brugger.

** For some reason I typed “2004” and didn’t spot it before I posted the piece. Now corrected. Thanks to Paul Kelly for pointing it out.

Jul 28

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Waiting for a friend

When I first met Lenny Kaye in 1970, his two immense contributions to contemporary culture were still in the future: (1) his compilation of the profoundly influential double album Nuggets: Original Artyfacts from the First Psychedelic Era, 1965-68, released in 1972, and (2) his founder-membership of the Patti Smith Group, which he helped the young poet to put together in 1973 and in which he’s still active whenever they reconvene, as they did so memorably last year for the 50th anniversary of Horses.

We met in New York, introduced by our mutual friends Richard and Lisa Robinson at a time when Lenny was working at Village Oldies on Bleecker Street and writing rock reviews for various publications. Somewhere I have copies of his two solo 45s: “Crazy Like a Fox”, released on the Hollywood label under the pseudonym Link Cromwell in 1966, and “Child Bride”, which came out on Mer Records in 1980 under his own name. Now — not before time, you might think — comes his first solo album*, titled Goin’ Local and just released on Yep Roc Records, based in North Carolina and the home of Dave Alvin, Tift Merritt and others.

It was worth the wait. These dozen songs have a (mostly) straightforward warmth and clarity, ranging from the no-frills roadhouse boogie of the opening title track — for my money, better than anything on the new Stones album — to the touching ballad “Yes I Will”, dedicated to his late friend Andy Paley and adorned by a discreet string arrangement from David Mansfield, which ends the album.

Lenny sings sometimes in a confiding semi-whisper, sometimes in the New Jersey drawl of a kinder, gentler Lou Reed (particularly on a sweet song called “Pennsylvania Girls”). He keeps the arrangements simple, generally confined to himself on guitars, Tony Shanahan on bass, and Mark Sacco, Jeff Berg or Jay Dee Daugherty on drums. One or two other guests show up, among them the mandolinist John Jackson on “If I Were You” and, most surprisingly, the avant-jazz pianist Matthew Shipp on “Let’s Make a Memory”, adding texture to a Fourth-of-July dawning-of-romance song of bitter-sweet resonance: “My hand on your waist, your hand on my knee / Trying to understand who we want us to be…”

Lenny keeps his own lead playing mostly under wraps, although there are a couple of eight-bar solos on “A Friend Like You” that made me think of Mark Knopfler. More generally, to my surprise there were times when I found myself reminded of John Prine, James McMurtry and John Hiatt in the comfortable command of a familiar idiom, and the lack of a need to overstate anything. “Solstice”, a co-write with Patti, has the most poetic lyric, “World Book Night” the most amusing: there are “…books you have to study / And books that are so rare / And books you give to someone / To show how much you care.”

So here we are, in the photo above, sitting on the steps of the Island Records headquarters at 22 St Peter’s Square in Hammersmith in, I think, 1974, when Lenny, on a visit to London, was looking every inch the future rock star in his shades and slim-cut jeans (obviously I hadn’t got the memo yet). Next time I see him, I’m going to tell him that he hasn’t changed a bit.

* See Mike Scott’s comment, below.

Jul 24

7 Comments

The coolest of cats

Georgie Fame’s career has been an affair of ups and downs, from the huge and unexpected success of “Yeh Yeh”, which knocked the Beatles off the No 1 spot in January 1965, to the medical problems — a fall from a ladder in 2019, breaking his hip and severing tendons in his right hand, followed in 2025 by a diagnosis of hydrocephalus, impairing his mobility — that have restricted his musical activities in recent years. He’s 83 now, and there probably won’t be any more gigs or records, so it seems all the more worthwhile to investigate a new biography, Cool Cat Blues, written by his friend and fellow singer-keyboardist Ben Sidran.

It’s a slender book, only 140-odd pages, but the story is well told, particularly that of his early childhood in the 1940s amid the mills and pits of Lancashire, and the warmth of a family in which music played a significant role. Then the Butlin’s and Larry Parnes years, during which Clive Powell became Georgie Fame and evolved from the pianist with Billy Fury and the Blue Flames to the singer and organist with his own Blue Flames, settling in London and taking up residence at the Flamingo Club, where the all-nighters with an audience of American servicemen and Caribbean immigrants provided the environment in which he could hone his distinctive musical character.

During that period, 1964-67, I took every opportunity to see the Blue Flames whenever they visited my home town, which was often. I loved their blend of R&B and jazz, influenced by Ray Charles’s small bands, the vocalese of Eddie Jefferson and King Pleasure, and Mose Allison’s vocal delivery and wry wit. And I loved Fame’s choice of sidemen with jazz instincts — has any British jazz saxophonist produced a better ballad solo than the effort by baritonist Johnny Marshall on “Moody’s Mood for Love”, from their second album, Fame at Last?

The book runs through the partnership with Alan Price, CBS’s attempts to turn him into a hipper Andy Williams, the surprisingly unsuccessful hook-up with Chris Blackwell and Island Records in the mid-’70s, his popularity in Sweden and his work with various big bands around the world, the creation of an Australian Blue Flames, the recordings produced by Sidran in New York for the Go Jazz label, Fame’s years as a star sideman with Van Morrison and Bill Wyman’s all-star Rhythm Kings, the integration into his band of his two sons, Tristan and James Powell, on guitar and drums respectively, and his decision, following the tragic death of his wife, Nico, in 1993 and the failure of a subsequent relationship, to move to Sweden, where he had many happy and fruitful years until moving back to England in 2018. He made his last London appearances at Ronnie Scott’s with Guy Barker’s big band in the autumn of 2022.

It’s a lot to get into a short book, and some might feel that much goes unmentioned. But this is, after all, Fame’s biography, not that, for instance, of the sidemen who always fascinated me — Mick Eve, Bill Eyden, Glenn Hughes, Cliff Barton, Tan Tan Thornton, Speedy Acquaye and so on. For that, and a detailed chart of their comings and goings, as well as a discography, you’d need to consult the German writer Uli Twelker’s much more compendious work, Georgie Fame: There’s Nothing Else to Do, published in 2014. Twelker also goes through his albums track by track, including the great Fame at Last and Sweet Things, which pass unmentioned in Cool Cat Blues. Sidran doesn’t mention the Blue Flames’ first recordings, two 45s issued on Rita and Benny Eisen’s tiny North London-based R&B label in 1963.

I’d have liked more on the evolution of Fame’s songwriting, which produced three fabulous ballads: the fondly lubricious “Eros Hotel”, his setting of Fran Landsman’s words, which made its debut on the album Right Now in 1979 and subsequently became a live favourite, and the entirely self-penned “Lost in a Lover’s Dream” and “A Declaration of Love”. In those songs, the cool cat revealed himself as a dyed-in-the-wool romantic. It would have been nice, too, if Sidran’s publisher had employed an editor who knew that it’s Tadd (not Tad) Dameron, Karl (not Carl) Jenkins, and “Buona (not Bona) Sera”, that James Brown led a revue (not a review), and that Bill Wyman’s real name is Bill Perks (not Perkins).

But the compensations for any deficiencies are many, not least in an entire chapter devoted to his decade with Van Morrison, gnomically titled “Ulster Logic” and as charmingly enlightening an insider portrait of the “difficult” Belfast genius as you’re likely to read, and in the judicious intimacy of the book’s overall tone — this is not a hagiography but a biography written by a friend, with the complicity of the subject, to whom it does proper honour.

* Cool Cat Blues: The Life and Times of Georgie Fame is published by Equinox: https://www.equinoxpub.com/projects/cool-cat-blues.

Jul 21

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René Urtreger 1932-2026

The photo above was taken at the Institut Français in Berlin in 2017, during a Q&A session with the pianist René Urtreger following a screening to celebrate the 60th anniversary of Louis Malle’s Ascenseur pour l’échafaud (released in the UK as Lift to the Scaffold and in the US as Elevator to the Gallows). The last surviving member of the quintet with which Miles Davis recorded the soundtrack for that classic film, René had accepted my invitation to come to JazzFest Berlin for the event, and to play and then talk in front of an audience. What he’s just said has clearly cracked me up. It may have been his observation about Thelonious Monk — a great composer, he said, but an absolutely terrible pianist.

He said it with a twinkle, but he meant it. René was a bebop purist. Bud Powell was his idol and his model. He knew Powell, of course, from Paris in the 1960s; one of his early trio albums was called René Urtreger Plays Bud Powell, including his versions of “Dance of the Infidels”, “Parisian Thoroughfare”, “Celia” and so on. He never lost that allegiance.

René died last week, aged 92. Back in 2014, after I’d brought him to London to play at a private event, I wrote here about his career. I won’t repeat myself, but I will say that if you don’t know his playing, the discovery will be worthwhile, whether it’s on that great soundtrack album (just given a de luxe vinyl reissue on Blue Note/Fontana), on the live album from his 1957 Salle Pleyel concert with Miles (Fresh Sound, 2023), on his beautiful album of solo ballads titled Tentatives, released in 2006 on the Minium label, or on his 2017 album with the singer Agnès Desarthe.

Desarthe, incidentally, was also the author of his biography, published in 2016 (in French only) under the title Le Roi René. It told his fascinating story, including the long and ultimately successful battle against his heroin addiction, the yé-yé years with Claude François and Serge Gainsbourg, the soundtracks he composed for the films of his childhood friend Claude Berri, and his eventual return to the idiom he loved. He was a delightful man, and one of the greatest European jazz pianists.

* The photograph was taken by Camille Blake. Le Roi René is published by Odile Jacob.

Jul 17

12 Comments

Brian Case 1937-2026

When Brian Case joined the Melody Maker in 1978, at my invitation, he dubbed himself “Junior Beret” in tribute to Max Jones, the paper’s senior jazz writer, who habitually covered his bald pate with just such a piece of jaunty headgear. Brian died oin Monday, aged 88. I hope to write more about him elsewhere, but for now I’ll just say how much I loved his work, which was as full of surprises as the music he described.

It was my privilege to supply the foreword to a collection of pieces about his favourite subjects (On the Snap, published in 2015 by Caught by the River), including Dexter Gordon, Sam Fuller, Rahsaan Roland Kirk, Norman Mailer, Jimmy Smith, Al Pacino, Ian Dury, and Gerry Mulligan. And, of course, Art Pepper. Here’s Brian opening a feature on the great saxophonist with a description of his long-awaited UK debut at a London church in 1979:

Few among the congregation who rose to their feet and applauded before a note was played at St. Paul’s Church, Hammersmith, could have had much idea of what that ovation meant to the performer. They wouldn’t have learned much from his face, but they were to hear it in his music. It was one of those spontaneous exchanges of gifts that achieve a rare, fulfilling parity, a love for a love, and not the love-all of those exchange & mart comebacks with the bombardiering boxed orchids. The tribute to Art Pepper was compounded of respect for his endurance, his artistry, and — for those who understood the shifting symmetry of anguish and elegance in his playing — an acknowledgement of the toll of that equation. Real music costs.

Afterwards Brian told Ronnie Scott he should get Pepper in for a season. Knowing Pepper’s reputation as a major junkie who had spent years in and out of Chino, Folsom, Lexington and San Quentin, Scott was dubious. But a year later it happened. The photograph above was given to me by Jak Kilby, who took it backstage at Ronnie’s one night in 1980. Pepper is in the middle, Brian is on the right, I’m on the left. Happy times. Be seeing you, Junior Beret.

Jul 12

5 Comments

Henry Lowther at 85

It seemed entirely typical of the trumpeter Henry Lowther that, during last night’s concert in celebration of his 85th birthday, he should wait to deliver his first solo until the third piece of the evening. As ever, his improvisation was beautifully conceived and perfectly flighted, with that perfect tone. But Henry is a man whose modesty is as deeply rooted as his talent, despite a career that has made him one of the most remarkable figures in contemporary British music.

Born in Leicester, Henry learned to play the cornet with a Salvation Army band. He came to London to study the violin at the Royal Academy of Music but gave up those studies in favour of a life in jazz and related fields. I wrote a bit about his remarkable CV five years ago, when he turned 80 and played the Vortex with his quintet, Still Waters, but here at the American International Church in Tottenham Court Road there was a chance to hear his compositions for large ensemble interpreted by the London Jazz Composers Orchestra, of which he has been a member for 30 years.

The 19-piece band — five trumpets, four trombones, five reeds, four rhythm — was last night conducted by Scott Stroman, the orchestra’s co-founder back in 1991 with Noel Langley, who was sitting next to Henry in the trumpet section. Other distiguished members and soloists included the saxophonists Pete Hurt and Tori Freestone, the bassist Callum Gourlay, the pianist Liam Noble, the drummer Paul Clarvis and the guitarist Nick Costley-White. The lead altoist, Matt Sulzmann, is the son of another founder member, the great Stan Sulzmann.

Having played in aggregations led by John Dankworth, Kurt Edelhagen, Mike Westbrook, Graham Collier, Mike Gibbs, Kenny Wheeler, Gil Evans, George Russell, Stan Tracey and others, Henry knows what makes a big-band arrangement work. It’s a field in which opportunities today are limited, to say the least, so this was a wonderful opportunity to hear compositions such as “Primetime”, “Shropshire Glad” and “Can’t Believe, Won’t Believe” in their fullest form. His familiarity with so many kinds of music, from free improvisation to the wonderful, unclassifiable albums of Talk Talk, isn’t in evidence in these compositions, which represent what we used to call modern jazz operating at an extremely high level. There are a few brassy climaxes, but also woodwind passages of subtle grace along with some clever combinations, like a pair of muted trumpets and a pair of flugelhorns, or bass and bass clarinet. And there is always the spirit of Gil Evans, of whose London Orchestra he was a member, aerating the voicings.

His pieces tend to run between eight and 10 minutes, which allows space for introductions, variations, backgrounds, recapitulations and codas, with soloists carefully encouraged and deployed. At one point during a suite whose movements are titled “Jadran”, “Emona” and “Golovec”, The tenors of Hurt and Freestone engaged in a lengthy and particularly fruitful dialogue. But there was always something interesting going on and, on an unusually joyful occasion, the absence of amplification combined with the modern church’s friendly acoustic to enable us to hear it all.

* All the compositions I’ve mentioned, and some others, are contained in Primetime, a new vinyl double-album with basically the same personnel, released to coincide with Henry’s birthday. Recorded in 2022 at Morley College Studio, it’s on the Analogue October Records label, mastered and pressed to audiophile standards in an edition of 300 copies: https://analogueoctober.com/product/ljo-henry-lowther-primetime/. Henry’s 1970 debut album, Child Song, is due to reappear later this year as part of a Universal Music Group programme of vinyl reissues of British jazz albums on the Deram and Argo labels.

Jul 9

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Rubén Blades at the Roundhouse

A heatwave on the streets of Camden, tipping over 30 degrees. Inside the Roundhouse, the relief of air-conditioning. Until Rubén Blades took the stage, at which point the temperature soared even higher as a packed crowd welcomed the great singer, actor and sometime politician.

They cheered the opening strains of “Plasticó”, from Siembre, his 1978 collaboration with Willie Colón which became the biggest selling salsa album in history, a preface to a career which has brought Blades a dozen Grammys and countless other awards, and they never let up through a 20-song set in which every member of the audience appeared to be word-perfect.

As Blades observed during one of his between-songs monologues, no one is a success without the help of others, and the 20-piece band was sensational. Based in Panama City, where Blades himself was born 77 years ago to a Cuban mother and a Colombian father, and led by Roberto Delgado, the bass guitarist and arranger, they offered a widescreen version of every Latin orquesta you’ve ever dreamed of hearing. Piano and keyboards to the left, bass guitar and kit drummer to the right, three percussionists — bongos, timbales and congas — lined up in front of a stretched-out wall of horns: five saxophones (two altos, two tenors, baritone), four trombones, four trumpets. A majestic, magnificent noise, full of blare and clatter, overflowing with virtuosity, a giant expression of the clave rhythm come to life, with all the trimmings.

In his black suit, shirt and hat, Blades presented himself as one of the black-clad band, frequently retreating to add maracas to the percussion section during trumpet or piano solos, stepping forward again to swap vocal phrases in the long montuno sections with his coro, formed of the reed section and others. He was in wonderful voice, too. I found it impossible not to be reminded of the enduring vigour of Bruce Springsteen, and of a similarity in the way the two singers conduct their relationships with their musicians and their audiences.

Blades paid tribute to figures from his early career, including Colón (who played a farewell gig on the same stage almost 20 years ago), the flautist and bandleader Johnny Pacheco, the singer and percussionist Pete “El Conde” Rdoriguez, with whom he made his first recording in 1969, and Hector Lavoe, who made his song “El Cantante” a huge Latin hit in 1978. The only false note came with a very off-the-peg big band arrangement of Michel Legrand’s “Watch What Happens”, from the 2021 album Salswing!. Since he was in London, Blades observed, he felt he had to sing a song in English; honestly, there was no need.

But it was mostly a blazing set, two and a quarter hours long, its highlights including the song — “Emigrantes”, I think — in which he gave a shout-out to Central and South American nations, to be rewarded with loud cheers and waving of the appropriate flags. And around the fringes, on the floor and even in the balcony, couples danced together with that special Latin fluency and grace, lost in their own bliss.

Jul 7

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Raising John Brown

The only time I can remember seeing the 19th century abolitionist John Brown mentioned in a jazz context was in a piece called “The Day John Brown Was Hanged”, written by George Russell for the altoist Hal McKusick’s 1956 album Jazz Workshop. In that intricate seven-minute composition for quartet, Russell interpolated lines from the melody of “John Brown’s Body Lies a-Mouldering in His Grave”, the marching song sung by Union soldiers during the American Civil War, a conflict whose prefatory skirmishes included a Brown-led assault on a federal armoury at Harper’s Ferry, Virginia, in 1859.

A white man, and an evangelical Christian, Brown believed in the Declaration of Independence’s words about all men being created equal, and came to the conclusion that violence offered the only way to overthrow slavery and everything it represented. He had hidden escaped slaves and helped them along the Underground Railroad to freedom, and already led anti-slavery forces in several conflicts. The attack on the armoury, intended to capture weapons with which slaves could be armed for an insurrection, involved an elaborate plan devised with the support of Harriet Tubman (although not that of Frederick Douglass, who disapproved of the tactics). A bloody failure, it led to Brown’s capture and trial, after which he became the first man to be executed in the United States on a charge of treason.

He was hanged on the morning of December 2, 1859, in a small field in Charles Town, Virginia. Onlookers included the future Confederate generals Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson, John Wilkes Booth, the future assassin of Abraham Lincoln, and Walt Whitman, who mentioned it in his poem Year of the Meteors. In a speech in 1881, Frederick Douglass — an escaped slave become statesman and orator — said that whereas his own abolitionist zeal was “bounded by time, (Brown’s) stretched away to the boundless shores of eternity. I could live for the slave, but he could die for him.”

Now comes the distinguished American tenor saxophonist and composer Chris Potter with an album titled Alive With Ghosts Today, a suite of pieces for septet inspired by the continuing resonance of Brown’s story. There’s nothing programmatic about it — no quotes from the Battle Hymn of the Republic (except in the use of “Mine Eyes” as the title of one piece) — but it’s a work that seems somehow marinated in American history, from then to now, in the way jazz somehow always is, being perhaps that turblent story’s most remarkable single outgrowth.

I have a special fondness for medium-sized groups, from seven to 10 pieces, led by people such as Charles Mingus, Slide Hampton, John Surman, Jef Gilson, George Coleman, Keith Tippett, Steve Lehmann and Vijay Iyer. In the right hands, they combine power with flexibility and a range of tone colour. Potter says he was looking for the sound of a “slightly unruly village band”, and besides himself the group is completed by Rane Moore on clarinet, Zekkereya El-Magharbel on trombone, Bill Frisell on guitar, Sara Caswell on violin, Burniss Travis on bass and Nate Smith on drums. It’s an unusual line-up, and a perfect one for his purposes, which was to have “Copland, blues and gospel and African rhythm all living in the same space.”

The eight tracks are carefully wrought, making fine use of the individual timbres, and inevitably of Frisell’s ability to use his guitar and pedals as an orchestral resource, colouring the backgrounds with purpose and restraint. In fact the album that Alive With Ghosts Today most reminds me of is Frisell’s Blues Dream, his classic septet album from 2001, and praise doesn’t come much higher than that. A sense of conciseness in endemic to Potter’s writing, but also a sense of space; density is counterbalanced by ease of delivery. The mood ranges from sombre to playful. sometimes within the same piece. On “Mine Eyes”, Potter produces his finest solo over lively backgrounds before an interlude for trombone, guitar and drums leads to a hymn-like ensemble passage prefacing a return to the nimble theme.

There’s nothing hectoring about Potter’s album, despite its origins. The musical atmosphere is warm and companionable, with just enough surprise to keep you on your toes. But thinking about the source of his inspiration, the parallels with our own world are unavoidable. Acknowledging the complexity of the story, Potter concludes: “I have no easy answers, I only feel that ours is a beautiful, heartbreaking country, where we are still living with these ghosts.” This music, rather than firework displays, military flypasts or cage-fighting contests on the White House lawn, might represent a better way to commemorate America’s 250th birthday.

* Chris Potter’s Alive With Ghosts Today is out now on the Edition label. The photograph of Potter is by Dave Stapleton. Bandscamp link: https://chrispotterjazz.bandcamp.com/album/alive-with-ghosts-today

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