Monthly Archives: January 2009

Take Five worth taking again

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Dave Brubeck and Paul Desmond at Birdland

Dave Brubeck and Paul Desmond at Birdland

“Oooh, I like jazz – Take Five! Doobie-doobie doobie-doobie doobie-doobie doobie-doo doo bie doooooo” How many times have you been told that? And you’ve kept that rictus grin and tried to nod enthusiastically while thinking “If I have to hear that tune once more…”
But, let’s face it, it wasn’t the Dave Brubeck original with Paul Desmond’s dry martini tone and Joe Morello’s great drum solo that you didn’t want to hear ever again – it was all the bad cover versions (and I’d say the same for Girl from Ipanema).
But I’ve just heard a new version of Take Five that I do want to hear again – and again!
It’s one of 12 really fine tracks on Brubeck, the Basho disc by the Liam Noble Trio (Dave Whitford on double bass, Dave Wickins on drums) that is released in April but which you can get a live preview of this evening at the CBSO Centre in Birmingham.
It’s a Birmingham Jazz gig, so for more information go here.

Look out for the circle of caravans

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Those hot gypsy sounds a la Django Reinhardt and Stephane Grappelli will be heard in the Symphony Hall foyer bar early this evening when guitarist Simon Harris and his Bright Size Gypsies (I’m assuming their name is inspired by the Pat Metheny album Bright Size Life) cure those Friday rush-hour blues.
The band applies the Hot Club de Paris magic to some novel material – including Michael Jackson’s Billie Jean, as well as songs by those other well-known campers, Wolfie Mozart and John, Paul, George and Ringo.
The band starts at 5.30pm but pensioner musical chairs starts much earlier than that. Entrance is free, and they do a particularly good Shiraz at the bar if memory serves…

John Martyn R.I.P.

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Sad day for fans of the singer/songwriter who brought more than a touch of jazz to the folk scene in the ’70s, and who died this morning at the age of 60. For many he must have functioned as a bridge from the folk and rock music they knew to the jazz they might not have been so familiar with. His long-time cohort on the road, the double bassist Danny Thompson was another vital link. Later Martyn bands featured the crucial fretless electric bass sound that Jaco Pastorius had made famous and which fitted in well with the neo-folk sound. Martyn’s own echoplex-drenched guitar work had, if not a conventional jazz solo connection, certainly elements of the attempts to reflect transcendence and ecstasy that many horn players had tried in the ’60s and later.
Martyn also gave gigs to jazz musicians in his bands and embraced the jazz philosophy when it came to leaving some chance in the music. And his increasingly mannered singing has been compared to the sound of a saxophone. If the words became more difficult to discern, it was certainly a glorious and rich, multi-layered sound.
He will be best remembered for the string of wonderful tunes he wrote and sang between 1973 and 1980.
Here he is in his prime:

A room with a Vu

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So how does hearing a member of the Pat Metheny Group play live and up close for £3 sound? That’s just what is on offer at the Rainbow in Digbeth, Birmingham, tonight when trumpeter Cuong Vu & The V-Tet fill the monthly Jazz Club slot.

Vu, based in New York, played on the last two Pat Metheny Group discs and toured with the guitar master. The Vietnamese-born musician first picked up the trumpet not long after his family moved to Seattle in the States. He has been in New York since 1994 and, remarkably, the first time I heard him play live was but a hefty throw of a stone from the Rainbow – at the Custard Factory in the band of drummer Bobby Previte back in the ‘90s. He has also played with Laurie Anderson, Dave Douglas and David Bowie.

The Vu-Tet is his edgy trio with Stomu Takeishi on bass and Ted Poor on drums. The music, which should appeal to a demographically vast range from die-hard jazzers to death metal fans, gets going about 9pm, and this is a very relaxed venue, so could be the ideal place to hear some cutting edge and very contemporary authentic Downtown New York jazz. For £3, that has to be the bargain of the year. Read more about Cuong Vu here.

Concert review: Julian Siegel Trio

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Julian Siegel Trio
CBSO Centre
23-01-09
*****
A certain feeling of déjà vu would have been correct. It was January, the CBSO Centre, the same players and the same opening tune: Siegel’s composition A Night At The Opera. Had we jumped back two years? Quite a bit of the material was repeated from the ’07 gig: Atlantic, Stop Go Man, Alfie, Haunted Waltz, Sandpit.

It didn’t matter, of course – the tunes and arrangements might have been familiar, but jazz is forever fresh, especially when three such creative spirits as Siegel (saxophone, clarinets), Joey Baron (drums) and Greg Cohen (double bass) are at work. The change was one of development and maturity, a sense that now these three knew each other even better, that what had started out as a festival commission and a transatlantic project had grown into a deeper musical friendship.

The acme came immediately after interval. In Seven Days, one of several new pieces, Siegel took a cryptic and persistent motif of four or five notes, repeating and reworking it both in order and timing. His solos shared the motif’s urgent material and pulled and pushed it about, while Baron and Cohen fired away underneath him. The result swept the listener along in high excitement, as if caught in a raging river.

Siegel just gets better and better, his tone rich and burnished, and heard to great effect in this unamplified way. He doesn’t write simple “head and solos” pieces but incorporates the improvisations more organically, returning regularly to the theme. He also manages to indulge himself and the band in some personal and quirky harmonic twists and turns while still incorporating enough melodic content to ensure his listeners have a strap to hang on to. And all that goes for his improvisations as well as his compositions.

Baron is simply my favourite drummer – enthralling, whether supporting, leading or responding in the group, or in his own intensely musical solos. Cohen’s mastery is less obvious, and at the start he suffered from being too quiet, but his tuneful solos, incorporating rich chords into the logical lines, and his effortlessly spot-on timing are equally rewarding.

The other new tunes, one untitled, were all strong, with Baron and Cohen having particular fun showing how seemingly conventional swing drums and walking bass can still sound fresh and new on Trent Lock.

The inclusion of another standard – the perenially wonderful Moonlight in Vermont – was one more treat in a whole evening of them. And isn’t it great to hear a band playing without amplification? It reminds us that when we have to lean forward and concentrate hard to catch every nuance, every subtle shift of tone and beat, that we get so much more out of the experience because we have put so much more into it. For me, contemporary jazz doesn’t get any better than this.