Monthly Archives: November 2009

Disc of the day: 24-11-09

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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!

Disc of the day: 23-11-09

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Christian Wallumrod Ensemble: Fabula Suite Lugano (ECM 271 1269)
With each release by his ensemble, the Swedish keyboardist and composer seems to have widened his stylistic scope even further. The group started out as a quartet, expanded to a sextet with their previous CD The Zoo Is Far, and maintains that size here with just one personnel change: Eivand Lonning in for Arve Henriksen on trumpet.

So, with the other instruments being cello, violin or Hardanger fiddle, harp and percussion, the palette of sounds remains intriguing and capable of a wide range of moods, which is just how Wallumrod likes it. And this is very much ensemble music, with no particular attention given to individual soloists.

The music picks up influences from the near avant garde classical and experimental composers like Morton Feldman, and from the distant Baroque past of Domenico Scarlatti.

The most immediately compelling pieces are the two versions of Jumpa, which in their strangely stately ways conjure up two very serious circus processions at the court of some 17th-century Swedish king. But then you get a piece like Dancing Deputies which is like a minimalist free jazz work-out full of played echoes. Quote Funebre, Wallumrod claims, is based on a few chords from Olivier Messiaen.

And what textures! On Snake there is the piano in the distance, plucked notes from harp and cello, the cymbals stroked with a bow, and the odd tinkle of a bell.

There is a lot of silence on this recording, and a lot of quiet interaction between the instruments – the listener is left with a fascinating sense of both the spaces between the instruments in the studio and also between the centuries of time which separate the interweaving strands of this music.

Wallumrod creates the equivalent of a coldly-lit Vermeer in sound, and a certain sense of human isolation, too. Both chilling and lovely. And triumphantly unclassifiable.

Russ’s pic of the week: 23-11-09

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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:

Idries Muhammed

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

Jazz Alive at the Hare & Hounds

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Find out what tomorrow’s jazz will sound like today. Clive Powell’s Jazz Alive project gives young people a chance to explore jazz with material provided by Soweto Kinch and Orphy Robinson. Find out what happens when the young lions meet the established big cats this evening when the Live Box relocates to the Hare & Hounds, 106 High St, Kings Heath, Birmingham B14 7JZ. It starts at 7.45pm.

There is more about Jazz Alive here.

Disc of the day: 22-11-09

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Ryuichi Sakamoto: Playing The Piano (Decca 4763609)
He was due to be playing this music in Symphony Hall in Birmingham this evening, but as the concert has been cancelled you will now have to console yourself with this little gem of an album. Sakamoto plays some of his best known tunes – including Merry Christmas Mister Lawrence, The Last Emperor, The Sheltering Sky and, my favourite, Amore – simply and effectively.

No one has quite so strong a personal harmonic sense. There are these brief moments on his two albums with Paula and Jaques Morelenbaum when, even though the music and the performances are so thoroughly concerned with the marvellous Brazilian music of Antonio Carlos Jobim and a few of his fellow composers, a little piano harmony will signal a Japanese nuance and a wholly different musical world.

This is highly melodic and harmonious music, mostly just one piano working through a simply stated tune (though there are moments when he uses very subtle electronic manipulation or it sounds a though multiple parts have been overdubbed) but it is just so effective. Simplicity like this is, of course, not simply achieved. Sakamoto is a quiet master of modern music that draws in the pop, ambient, classical and minimalist listener. And the harmonies of jazz are not far away either. And who can say if he sometimes improvises a bit, too…

Here is a video of him playing solo, though this tune is not on the album. The really interesting thing is that this music could easily be cheesy and veer into blandness, but somehow he keeps it just away from that through the harmonies he uses and the attitude with which he approaches it. Just the cool side of sweet, I’d say: