Monthly Archives: May 2009

Just back from Branford

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Cracking gig at Birmingham’s Town Hall this evening. Review here in due course, but what struck me was what an extraordinary band it was – surely one of the finest jazz groups currently operating in the world – and how much those who were there enjoyed it.
What I would love to know is:

  • if you were you there, what did you think?
  • if you weren’t there, why weren’t you there? what stopped you from going?

These are really genuine questions – I’m not wanting to point fingers or anything – I really want to know. Just comment on this post. I’d really appreciate it.

It’s Branford night tonight

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There is music that is jazz from its core to its extremities, which can never be confused with anything else, like pure whisky, straight, with no mixer. It is most often found in smaller concert halls, clubs and pubs. When the venue is a larger one, the jazz that is presented there is so often watered down – an easy listening singer with jazz nuances, a band that combines some improvisation with a lot of club beats. 

Nothing wrong with any of that, but something special is on offer when the band plays “real” jazz and the venue is a substantial one. It is there when Sonny Rollins plays a London theatre, when the Keith Jarrett Trio plays the Royal Festival Hall, and it is here when the Branford Marsalis Quartet plays Birmingham’s Town Hall, which is what they do tonight. 

The band’s latest disc, Metamorphosen, on the Marsalis label, reveals a band at the height of its powers, able to shift from storming, Coltrane-inspired intensity, to the most delicate and measured quasi-chamber music. 

Branford Marsalis is without doubt one of the key saxophonists of our time, fluent and broad on tenor, and with quite possibly the most exquisite soprano tone in the world. His pianist Joey Calderazzo and bassist Eric Revis have been with him for ages and their group dynamics are finely tuned. For this tour Justin Faulkner is on drums. If Branford has chosen him, he must be hot. 

The Branford Marsalis Quartet are at the Birmingham Town Hall at 7.30pm this evening, tickets are £25 and are available from 0121 780 3333 or here.

Disc of the day: 26-05-09

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Lura: Eclipse (Lusafrica 562222)
Although born in Lisbon, Lura’s heritage is Cape Verdean and with her 2006 release, M’bem di Fora, she showed herself capable of being the Cesaria Evora of her generation, with an assured ability to deliver the morna style of the Atlantic island as well as ranging wider to encapsulate Portuguese popular music, Brazilian and Cuban sounds, jazz, an African flair and more.

Eclipse is, if anything, even more assured. The title track is written by B Leza, the pen name of Cesaria’s uncle and the man who has written many songs for the grand dame. It is a sumptuous piece with yearning violin, Lura reaching low in here range and one of the most seriously swaying rhythms you’ve ever heard outside of an Evora disc.

Some tracks feature the Madagascan accordionist Regis Gizavo, one other has a retro-pop chorus which suggest the innocence of early doo-wop. Maria, which Lura wrote herself, has the fast guitar led groove of a Zimbabwean popsong, and packs in a lot of words to the line. Has she been listening to some Oliver Mtukudzi, one wonders?

An album of a wide variety of styles, moods and sounds, all of them delivered faultlessly by one of the young shining stars of world music.

Disc of the day: 25-05-09

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Seb Pipe’s Life Experience: Shoot For The Stars (33 Records JSLCD003)
I remember when I first heard Life Experience’s first disc how impressed I was not only with Seb Pipe’s alto saxophone playing and composing but just how complete his whole musical vision was. There are many young and ambitious and interesting jazz musicians making their early forays into band leading and recording, and some of them have great potential but sound like they still have a way to go to achieving a really cohesive personal sound and style. Pipe sounded then like was already there, and he sounds even more securely on his own distinctive path with this album.

It opens with Yonetsu, or rather a Japanese symbol standing for Yonetsu if you look at the CD cover. This translates as “residual energy” and is certainly full of that from Pipe on alto, Arthur Lee on piano and Fender Rhodes, Phil Donkin on bass and George Hart on drums. This is tricksy modern jazz that suggests some Steve Coleman influence in the way the lines are constructed. But, unlike some of Coleman’s work, this does not feel coldly academic, and this feeling is further enhanced when the track segues into an old Brazilian classic, Tico Tico, renamed Yo Tico! by Pipe.

This track is just lovely and both Pipe and Lea play storming solos – it’s often more revealing of a player’s character to hear them solo on a tune you know rather than an original.

No room here to go through the rest of the album except to say there is a wide variety of mood, the songs are all very strong, the playing is great and the band wonderfully cohesive. Pipe’s influences are very wide ranging, from Far Eastern and African music to Eastern European too, and his interest in philosophies is equally inclusive. The effect on the music means there is a strength of purpose that is hard to resist, a dedication to making sophisticated music from the whole band, and a range of music coupled with accessibility that ensures it is not only jazz buffs who will find this album appealing. Oh, and he makes a lovely sound on the saxophone, never sacrificing tone even when there are lots of notes, and some of them in awkward sequences.

Full marks to Jazz Services and Arts Council England for funding this recording – they have spent their money wisely indeed. It’s one of the most accomplished, rounded, finely crafted, buoyant and beautiful discs I have heard this year, and sits very easily beside discs made by veterans of the art.

Concert review: The Necks

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The Necks
CBSO Centre, Birmingham UK
22-05-09

The Necks – Chris Abrahams at the grand piano, Lloyd Swanton on mini upright bass and Tony Buck at the drums –  slow the world down.

Before each of two sets they are silently motionless for a minute as they clear their minds. Then Swanton or Abrahams summons up the first impulse and turns it into sound – a simple bass figure, a trilling piano pattern – and they are off.

The piece of music – spontaneous and unrepeatable – will last 45 minutes, it will not divert hugely from that initial pattern, or it might… The accretion of ideas, of nuances, is so slow, and then so incrementally developed that seconds become minutes, one minute becomes ten, and 45 seem to have acquired the experiences of a whole day and night. Or did they pass in one held breath? Time is definitely being played with.

All three bring very special abilities to their playing.

Buck’s are the most obvious. He slides a small hand cymbal around the metal rim of his floor tom, creating the metallic rhythm of a factory machine. Or, against an immaculately fast high-hat rhythm, he plays a constant bass drum beat which, so slowly, so infinitesimally, itself slows.

Swanton sets up atmospheric bowed monotones and then compulsive rhythms of his own, bouncing bow on strings.

Abrahams spends most of his time on a handful of notes in the middle of the keyboard, playing fidgety repeated patterns, also with finely nuanced adjustments to phrasing. In the second piece he set up an extraordinary double handed, rapidly corrugating sheet of sound, hitting the keys like a bongo-pianist.

A unique musical experience which drew an eclectic crowd though, surprisingly since this was a Birmingham Jazz gig, few jazz regulars.