Monthly Archives: June 2010

Disc of the day: 29-06-10

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Christine Tobin & Liam Noble: Tapestry Unravelled (Trail Belle Records, distrib Proper Note TBR01)
In addition to writing some pretty fab stuff herself, the Irish-born, Kent and London resident singer has shown herself to be a wonderful interpreter of other people’s songs. She has leaned increasingly to covering Leonard Cohen rather than Rodgers and Hart, and when her older sister, Deirdre, died last year, Christine recalled how Deirdre had played Carole King’s Tapestry so much when the sisters were young, and how strongly she linked that album to her.

So this project is dedicated to the memory of Deirdre. One doesn’t need to know that to feel the rich resonances in the music.

The singer and her pianist collaborator have changed the order of the songs and Christine has added her original Closing Time to round the album out, but otherwise this is all the songs on King’s Tapestry LP given new interpretations. What is remarkable is how much is achieved in such an apparently unadventurous way. No, that’s not quite the right word, because in a way the most adventurous thing to do is to sing these songs fairly straight and unadorned, and to play them in a relatively unjazzy way, too.

There are few leaps off into improvisation, certainly not from Tobin and only from Noble in the most sensitive and subtle ways. Both musicians have come to that point in their art, it seems, where they have realised the beauty of simplicity and straightforwardness. It’s often the most difficult thing for jazz musicians to do – to avoid the tendency to show off – and yet it is the key to really great music. And I think this is really great music.

Of course you might be wondering – probably especially so if, like me, you also grew up with the original Tapestry album and have it kind of hard-wired into your youth – why you would need another version of it. It’s a thought that completely dissolved for me about 42 seconds into the opening track, Beautiful. Noble’s chunky yet graceful piano intro and the nuanced phrasing of Tobin’s first line were enough to convince me that this disc was going to become even more special to me than King’s.

Songs you have heard a million times and often murdered by poor singers – like You’ve Got A Friend, for example – come up reinvigorated and filled with new depth of feeling. The pair do some lovely spontaneous things at the end of It’s Too Late, while Home Again features a beautiful solo from Noble in the middle of a beautiful bit of singing from Tobin.

It’s not really a CD that I would want to spend a lot of time analysing and trying to describe – that would be to interfere with the magic of it. So suffice to say, if this disc sells as many as Carole King’s original, the world will undoubtedly be a better place. It might have been made as a response to a death, but I can’t remember when I last heard a more direct and profound affirmation of life.

Find out more here

On the highway to Jim

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Drummer Jim Bashford will be familiar to anyone who has been going to interesting gigs in Birmingham over the last few years. Go back a few more years than that and he was building roads to earn a living and just playing the drums for fun, until he realised that the future could be skin and stick-based rather than built on tarmac and gravel. So, he achieved a place on the Birmingham Conservatoire jazz course and hasn’t looked back.

You may have heard him driving the beat in the Sam Wooster Quartet, or getting arty with the Lluis Mather Quartet, but tomorrow and Thursday he brings an international band to, respectively, the Jazz Club at The Rainbow in Digbeth and the Yardbird in central Birmingham. On guitar is Iceland’s Hilmar Jensson, who is also in AlasNoAxis and in Tyft. On saxophone is Anglo-Frenchman Robin Fincker, from the band Outhouse and also Alcyona Mick’s Blink trio, while on bass is another Outhouse musician, Johnny Brierley.

The band is at the Vortex in London this evening, too, if you happen to be in that big sticky city. Quite why the  band is playing two consecutive nights at different Birmingham venues is a bit of a mystery, but two evenings listening to these guys is better than one, I suppose.

For more about the Rainbow gig, go here

Disc of the day: 28-06-10

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Dino Saluzzi: El Encuentro (ECM 476 3834)
The Argentine master of the bandoneon has made his previous ECM albums with small combinations of other players. For this he chooses to work closely with the cellist Anja Lechner again, and with his brother Felix on saxophone. But the big departures here are that the trio have a string orchestra behind them, and the album has been recorded in concert.

The orchestra is drawn from the ranks of the superb Metropole from Holland, not with their usual conductor, the ace arranger Vince Mendoza, but with the young Englishman Jules Buckley, best known in these parts for his work with the Heritage Orchestra.

The music, all composed by Saluzzi, takes the form of a four-part single piece – one part has all three individual instruments, two have just bandoneon and cello with the orchestra and for the final, Miserere, Dino is alone with the orchestra. It is rich and thoughtful music, not far removed from what he have come to expect from Saluzzi, and not necessarily with a more varied palette of colours. As composer and arranger he has chosen to use the orchestra to enrich his tonal range within the fairly sombre, slowish music, and to give it more resonance and depth.

It ends up conveying fathomless depths of emotion, but held in with great dignity. There is something of the inheritance of Astor Piazzolla here, especially in the final movement, though there is nothing resembling tango, nuevo or otherwise.

What there is is a gorgeous disc from a man who seems to scale new heights with each recording. El Encuentro was released on 20 May to tie in with Dino Saluzzi’s 75th birthday. Age is certainly not withering him or his talents.

Concert review: Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra

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Symphony Hall, Birmingham UK
25-06-10

Those who have been paying sufficient attention might have thought that Wynton Marsalis’s big band was somehow rooted in the classic big band era. They would have been surprised at the range and scope of the material the band covered here.

“Wynton Marsalis” might be the biggest words on the publicity material, but the man is not standing out in front of the band, directing and taking the bows. No, he is in the back row and seated like the rest. When he makes his opening introductions it’s hard to tell which of the elegantly besuited men on the stage (only drummer Ali Jackson had removed his jacket to reveal a smart set of braces) is speaking.

It’s not difficult to identify the trumpeter in the opening solo of Jackie McLean’s Appointment In Ghana, however. Here is the bravura tone, the declamatory phrasing, the smears and slides that root Marsalis’s sound in the city of his birth, New Orleans.

The 15-piece band (four trumpets, three trombones, five saxophones plus rhythm trio) Marsalis formed at the jazz centre in New York that he helped to establish acts both as a vehicle for new and original big band material and as a touring repertory company, keeping alive the whole history of jazz. They also swing so fine – possibly the finest in the world.

On Friday night they started in the middle of the last century, following the MacLean with an arrangement of John Coltrane’s My Favourite Things (the original featured Trane’s single soprano saxophone; this one featured five) and Alabama (a showcase for the timeless baritone saxophone brilliance if Joe Temperley).

Then they moved further into the modern jazz period with an arrangement of Herbie Hancock’s One Finger Snap (complete with, as Wynton called it, Freddie Hubbard’s “impossible trumpet part”), before going back in time to the classic big band swing of Count Basie and Thad Jones, and then further back to Jelly Roll Morton’s New Orleans Bop (though played more like ‘60s hard bop).

Everyone had a chance to solo and all reminded us that this band is a magnet for the best musicians in what is still the premier jazz city on the planet. Among the outstanding delights for me was the playing of tenor saxophonist Walter Blanding Jr, though the piano solos of Dan Nimmer also had me sitting up in my seat (pity he wasn’t a little louder in the mix).

Overall, to hear in person the full swinging joy that is the Lincoln Center band is to enjoy the fundamental pleasures of this 100-year-old style of music. The audience had a fine time, and were treated to a septet encore that included local man Soweto Kinch, who just happened to be in the audience and just happened to have his saxophone with him.

I was slightly surprised that there were empty seats in Symphony Hall. Maybe everyone was out in the sunshine. Or saving themselves for World Cup anguish. The band didn’t seem to care, though. “We love to play for you,” said Marsalis. And I believe they do.

Read thejazzbreakfast interview with Wynton Marsalis here.

Russ’s pic of the week: 28-06-10

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It’s all about the hands! Another Jason from the Archives this time, for Russ Escritt’s pic of the week. This time it’s Jason Moran from his CBSO Centre, Monk-inspired gig in 2008.

Russ has hundreds more like this – in fact when it comes to jazz musicians, if they’ve played in Birmingham he has probably taken their picture. And they are all on Russ’s website which is here. It’s a work in progress as Russ consolidates the content from his previous two sites and moves it all to the new one but there is already a great deal to look at. And now there is the added bonus that you can search for a particular musician. Russ also has available three books of his photographs: two of general pictures and one dedicated to the legendary great grandaddy of Birmingham jazz, Andy Hamilton. Go to the ABOUT section of the site for more details.