a sleeve-note too long for any sleeve.
some blurb about the one-take wonders CD
(and related musico-philosophical stuff).
It's a well-known fact that recording is as far away from performance as New Labour is from the rest of humanity: so far, indeed, as to be in another dimension. What may flatter and dazzle on a stage, when you're cranked up to nine and the crowd's rapidly progressing from cropped to pickled, is likely to jar the lugs at best when reduced to a simple noise on a disc. In a recording you hope to produce something more lasting, a noise that befits repetition; a multi-dimensional art. Hence we musicians tend to pore over the mix, dropping in too much flannel, and generally overdressing a sound that was probably undesirable in the first place, only palatable covered in tomato and digital effects relish. The best recordings belie the attention to detail that went into them, or result from the sort of luck that only usually involves a packet of three or some relation's surprise Will and Testament.
A fair amount of planning went into One-Take Wonders, most of it on my own in bed, in the bath, on those far too often forays for milk and tobacco; but I drew the line at anything that took more than 10 seconds to explain to the rest of the band between numbers. The recording itself would be a hit-and-run project; unavoidable without two grand and a plate of sandwiches at the very least. So, the four of us gathered in Olivier's pub, together with Andy the engineer; a couple of borrowed SM58s and some mike stands held together with gaffer-tape; and the mood was as a band of bank-robbers who had an hour in the vault before discovery and summary nickedness. We noodled for five minutes; sort of tuned up while Andy set the levels on his Mac; and rattled off a set- from start to finish took around and hour and a half.
Because it was a rush job, because we'd barely played as a group together, because we were on cheap gear, because afternoon sessions are often deathly sober, the resulting recording couldn't be further from the polished banality that currently passes as 'jazz' in the charts, all strangled melisma and unfeasible bass-drum; and much nearer to the instantaneous, off-the-cuff music verite that characterises so much of my favourite jazz of the past. An antithesis to the salient saccharine suits my temprament; the rough is the smooth- like whiskey.
A note on my compatriots. John Webb is the most self-effacing of drummers, a mood borne of thankless years of sweaty classrooms and twelve-year-olds who'd master the paradiddle if they could only tear their gaze from Celebrity Hollyoaks for long enough. In the coterie of piss-takers that comprises my own musical community he's the godfather of la batterie: what he can't swing won't swing no-how. Dave Moses, here sans his trademark simul-scat, is one of the great unmentioned artisans, done educashun, done the telly; the double-bass is less played than danced with, well-worn with every step. Composer, arranger, bon vivant, he intends to get that much busier just as soon as he can get away with 'retirement'. To call Phil Mead the ultimate accompanist belittles his jazz talents: primarily a master harmonist, his understated bravura displays a breadth of touch more suited to a world-class masseur; and he knows the jazz pantheon as well as the cats
who wrote it- and in a wider range of key. I've played with all three on the odd lucky jam session occasion. But a tightly rehearsed unit we ain't. That's just part of what makes it so interesting.
We played 8 tracks straight through, with a ten-minute break at half-time. I counted two false starts. There were no retakes. No post-production tarting up. Certainly no 'dropping in' or 'Auto-tune' or 'Beat Doctor' sexing up. I shouted the head arrangement and the cats obliged, without so much as a wiser whimper. The opening 'St. Thomas' didn't go well, full of that unwarmed limbering that reminds the best of us we really ought to practice. We also did Kern's 'Look For The Silver Lining' but I don't know it well enough to do it justice. So these two tracks were shelved; heard only by my most forgiving friends.
The remaining 6 tracks, in the order we played them, have made it here onto my non-album. There's a tune by each of the legendary bop triumvirate: 'Diz' the dazzle-meister, the Jehova; 'Bird' the tragic champion, jazz's own Christ figure; Thelonius the Buddha of eclecticism. Plus two ballads and an epilogue from their most rightful heir: Miles Davis. The intended message is that bop's alive if a little unsteady on its feet lately. I'm no neo-traditionalist by nature, but, in music as anywhere else, if you haven't grasped your past then you have no future worth its name. Just as a so-called modern 'Labour' Party is worthless without a perpetual grounding in the fierce history of the labour movement, so modern jazz that ignores bebop, or relies on sugary mockeries of bebop, will fall worthlessly on ears that deserve better. Of course bebop is a complex art, based as it is on challenging rhythms and the maths of meta-harmony.
In its time it became labelled as 'Chinese music': Bob Hope took the piss on a weekly basis. In truth it threatened its contemporary music industry, with its 'sweet' bands and lush crooners; offered a war-weary public the very New World the likes of Harry Truman and Clement Atlee were promising: the overthrow of musical Facism; the counter-invasion as black people took back their territory after years of resistance in Artie Shaw's backline. In its sparkling and catchy way, bebop forged the new avenues, gave glimpses of the future, as culturally significant as Webern or Picasso or Le Courbusier or a B52 loaded with atom bombs. Only the best players could play it: that was part of the point; a necessary regenerative weeding, a genuine working class elite. Once you heard it you fully appreciated the banality of the chug-chug swing bands, pastiches of their former selves, as they groaned another Torme or Sinatra showcase. For the
US servicemen in Europe and South-East Asia at the end of the war, hearing Gillespie's 'Salt Peanuts' was like tasting the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge. The Andrews Sisters could never recover.
The disc's opener, 'A Night In Tunisia', an early Dizzy classic, contains much that bebop was to offer. It's in an uncompromising D minor. The tune filled with major 7ths and flattened 9ths, rapid triplets and barely notatable grace-notes. The rhythm held down by the bass while the drums rumble a sort of Martian Latin. A bridge passage as chromatic as anything by Wagner. In writing it Diz seems to have been saying: "thank you Glen Miller- now welcome to AFRICA !!" We simplified the bass-line a little in order to play it that bit faster, and only played the bridge once to avoid a predictable procession of soli. The clarinet break will never sound like that again, at least not by me: my one motive was an attempt to be at least half as dazzling as Bird's break on the classic recording. My solo is primarily rhythmic, sticking fairly closely to the changes, ending with a mock-atonal paraphrase of the
head. Phil takes his symphonic rendering, his tactile filigree down a peg to enable the drum solo to start quiet and build. I figured this would give the number a desirable arch. A terse reprise of the head ends with a fairly standard clarinet glissando smear and a brief coda i'm not all that pleased with. But we'd made our point by then.
'Anthropology' is one of those Charlie Parker tunes which seems to have been written specifically to scare clarinettists: so awkward it is for our clanky 19th century technique. I take it down the octave, away from the register break, in the hope it would be smoother and less likely to squeak. We don't play full-on in this one: I wanted it at smoochy moderato, feline and measured to bring out the subtleties of melody. Most players rattle through it (mainly because they're so proud they can!) but essentially it's a rhythm sequence, for all the tune's rakish angles. The double bass gets the first solo, replete with mellow groove, handing neatly to the piano who turns up the sultry heat just a little. I keep to one brief chorus, ending with a hopefully Bird-like rising sequence, taking us back to the head.
Be-bop, particularly at its inception, had a reputation for being Diz-zyingly fast and virtuosic. And yet bop's main progenitors were too skilful as musicians to simply set the tempo at over 200 and waggle their fingers as fast as they could. Real virtuosity involves a world of musical taste and feeling that defies mere linear logic: indeed a plausible raison d'être for all art is metaphysical, mutually exclusive of those straight lines our brains so often take. Besides, the most impassioned Bird left to us, as well as the most sublime Monk, comes from the ballads, those slow trains to the heart.In a purely technical sense, a ballad allows greater freedom, in both rthymic variation and implied harmony. In a more artistic sense, the emotional palette is broader. Fast music can imbue sex, excitement, joy, fervour, even frenzy. But slow music allows passion and all the darker hues to hang
out. If you add in the simple historical fact that throughout bebop, the masters and their memories are so often tragic tales of addiction and loss and you can see how artistically important their more introspective work is forced to be, particularly in our age of alienation and apocalyptic menace. To the best of my less than encyclopaedic knowledge, there is no classic version of 'Cry Me A River'. My less than encyclopaedic pseudo-Real Book cites Ray Charles and Julie London, separately i'm assuming, although a collaboration twixt the sly old junky and the breasty old show-stopper is strangely tempting. The tune is in D minor, relatively straightforward for most of the trumpets, saxophones and of course clarinets of this world. We play it straight through as an extended solo: if you listen carefully you won't even hear me grab a slurp of beer halfway through. At that slow a tempo we play the changes three times through in the 7-odd minutes.
There's not much I can say about the playing: I tried to keep it just this side of restrained, while still trying to get to a nub of true emotion, blues romanticism. I take a few pertinent phrases, and develop them thematically, using the harmony as a departure rather than a journey in itself. To my way of figuring, there are precious few sets of harmonic changes in the standard jazz repertoire, and thousands of players who've used them in as original a way as they could muster. Which means those changes have been obediently played, well, just about every way possible. Being original, therefore, on a II-V-I in E flat, is pretty much impossible: it's all been done. Which in turn defeats the object of the harmonic structure, which was to free the jazz player from the melody long enough to say something new. That leaves the modern jazz player with a handful of narrow choices.
(a). You can do what we're ostensibly paid to do, which is churn out the same old changes the same old way, keeping anything new and true back for novelty purposes, retaining a kind of mock-'50s aesthetic so that old George has a 'nice' retirement party and you get your £65 less taxi. For that you need regular breakfasts, a sustainable level of alcoholism, and a thick enough skin for when you're paid off to make way for Doris the Barmaid Sings Lulu.
(b). You can do what Andy Sheppard's generation tried to do and Ian Carr's generation tried to do and Tubby Hayes generation tried to do which was sit down and write whole new exciting sets of changes involving new ways of hearing, leaving a mass audience behind with the rent. For this you need a regularly enhanced state of psychological and social oblivion, coupled with a doting girlfriend who has a car.
(c). You can do what Don Rendell does these days and play the old changes with 60 years' worth of subtlety and sensitivity brought to bear, so that a particular lick will sound beautiful and new whether or not it's really a carefully subliminally remembered bit of Lester Young. For this all you need is the harmonic sense of the average Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, and a profound belief in God.
(d). You can become a 'performance artist' which is like a musician but somehow gets paid even less (around £10 for every fourth gig) and pretend there never was a Gershwin or a Gerry Mulligan, and do things like drinking a glass of water through a bass clarinet, or reciting Blake in Hindi while stark bollock naked. For this you need a tolerable level of Income Support (suggest a wooden leg or sixteen kids) and friends in local radio: without an established network of 'underground' publicity you risk simply being locked up.
(e). You can do what i'm doing at the moment, given that i've tried all of the above in my time, which is pretend i'm playing 'legit'', minimally marketable mainstream, while taking every opportunity to forget all about the harmonic changes and their knitted tramlines, to produce something which might be 'wrong', but it conceivably also might be new. My aim, when I grow up, is to extend the concept to embrace all twelve notes of the atonal scale at all times, not as 'free' jazz (with all its own unwritten do's and don't's), but as a constantly changing unified jazz. The music needs to do two things at once: it needs to grow and move forwards, given that jazz has barely caught up with Schoenberg let alone Jimi Hendrix, and; it needs to re-establish itself as a culture, a root and branch living art, instead of something weirdos talk about at parties. Coltrane has become like Shakespeare: you'll hear idiots
prattling on about him, but the idea of actually sitting through an hour of it and listening, is, well, simply tediously retro. The best jazz is about the nature of art, the nature of the human soul, the nature of truth. And nowhere in the quest for truth does it say you can't play a G# over a chord of E flat 7th. Bird and Diz and the boys were already halfway there as early as 1946. They worked out you could extend the implied harmony with a system of extrapolation, bringing in the flattened 5th, the 9th, the 11th of ostensibly simple chords: this opens up about two thirds of the chromatic scale to the player at any one time, but the magic in it is the musicality, the harmonic richness; the beautiful fact that, whatever detractors said at the time, it doesn't sound 'Chinese' at all. And that was 1946 ! Almost sixty years ago. Sixty years took us from the harpsichord to the iron-framed concert grand. Sixty years
took us from the purist line of Mozart, past Berlioz and Beethoven to the experiments of Wagner and Liszt. Sixty years span the time between Webern deciding any tune worth writing had been written, and Marc Bolan's discovery that the crappest tune can sell a million copies if it's loud enough to dance to. In jazz, though, we have 'traditional' jazz which is at least 100 years old, and 'modern' jazz, most of which is a mere 60 years old. Anything a new as Coltrane (d. '67) is still considered 'avant garde', which is record compayese for totally unmarketable. Ornette Coleman began his experiments in free-form music in the late 1950s. Since then, if anything we've gone backwards, both as an art, and as a meaningful way of life.
Track four is 'Blue Monk'; or rather, an adaptation of one of Monk's simpler chromatic explorations to be more in keeping with the blues as we now know it. The jazz-players' blues has become much as the jazz-players' 'Latin' music: a good 75% is profoundly mediocre, mannered; music for bored dead people. i've cut through the swathes of the world that doesn't swing to hopefully produce a classically British blues: thud, thud, 12/8 time, joyously raucous if harmonically banal. Indeed it's the banality of the harmony that makes it so musically attractive. The music has only three rules: each of the rules is a simple chord, tonic, sub-dominant, dominant, and their procession rarely if ever varies. For a player living in a time when free atonalism ain't exactly collateral for a mortgage, it's about as much freedom as a musician is likely to get. As it turned out on our dank, wet
afternoon, I wanted to get like Buddy Guy doing Zappa's 'Directly From My Heart To You'; Phil came up with a delicately rendered Billy Preston doing that London pub classic: "Jools Holland's Bank Balance Don't Mean Shit To Me'; while Dave took his bass solo opportunity to audition for the Bonzo (Doo-Dah) Dog Band. The eternal question: 'Can Blue Men Sing The Whites?' The real heart of the blues is the ambivalent major/minor tonality: this gives the music the capacity to be joyously mournful; or mournfully joyous; or contendly angry; or hatefully loving; or any other number of ambivalent emotional states. My attitude to the blues is as a freedom-giver: the fewer the chords the less i'm inhibited by the grand old buffer in my head telling I shouldn't do that there- if i'm fucking about with a blues then it's my problem, beneath the radar of the chord police.
George Gershwin is that comparatively singular of beasts: such a globally popular musician that it's virtually de rigeur to hate his guts, without ever appreciating that his art is ingrained in our consciousness. i'm in two minds about him myself: he wrote dozens of iconic tunes, but if 'Rhapsody In Blue' is symphonic jazz then I want a Turner Prize for two coats of off-white gloss on my kitchen door. i'm ambivalent about similar icons. Richard Wagner's tedious pomposity pervades, in one way or another, every Hollywood epic i've ever seen or am likely to see. Paul McCartney has become, almost always was, the epitome of that middle-of-the-road the old rock and roll was trying so desperately to destroy; while wave after predictable wave of new 'Brit-pack' acts use him, chord, line and scansion at every little turn, from Oasis to Travis. Gershwin, who died aged 38, in 1937, wealthy but creatively unfulfilled, never got to see
his cultural impact. In jazz his role was two-fold. In the first place his popular songs provided just that blend of simplicities to provide a lingua franca for the jazz community- he was so adept at turning blues licks into structured European songs that pretty soon they were using the songs to show off the licks. Secondly, it is wrong to underestimate Gershwin's posthumous contribution to bebop. It was his colourful showtime harmonies, and those of his imitators, they used as the basis to extrapolate from. Charlie Parker's 'Anthropology' is of course 'I Got Rhythm' with the rhythm rearranged and the tune changed to a meandering worm to sound cool on. Other 'standards' got the treatment from the new bop mathematics. Their love was here to stay.
Our rendition features my attempts not to repeat myself while staying in a fairly narrow set of keys; the delicate uber-accompaniment from Phil Mead, who always seems to know what notes to leave out and when, and; a superb solo from Mr. Moses' double bass, showing you can be lyrical with a wardrobe under your arm. The ending, like everything else, was unrehearsed, but that's exactly what jazz is about.
The last track, 'Milestones', available here as MP3, is a tribute to where bop was heading before the Empire of the Mediocre kicked in. Music and capitalism spent many a fruitful century keeping a contemptuous distance from one another, in so far as a composer might flirt with a Duchess (or a Duke in Wagner's case) or a violinist might charge considerable amounts for a recital; but then came the world of the recording industry. At first, these bright new capitalists were content to sell whatever anyone would buy, even if it was all obscure blues music played by all colour of people. Then they discovered they could dictate their own trends to a certain extent. For one thing, for all the sleazy black bands people seemed to like, there was always a clean-cut, cheap, white version of much the same thing. Pretty soon they realised the great listening public had only one golden
rule: we'll keep buying fish fingers just so long as you never let us taste smoked salmon. So music as a mass market was born. Out went other-worldly 'difficult' artists and in came young poppets who smiled for the cameras and wore leather to look that tiny bit 'street'. Instrumental virtuosity was ditched in favour of close harmony singing and big bands only survived as a gratuitous accompaniment to crooners like Mel Torme. Jazz itself was moving in a whole different direction, away from the money men and their homogenous dreams. Small bucks meant small groups; new directions meant ever smaller audiences, as each generation grew to love fish fingers ever more.
'Milestones' is an old Miles Davis standard, from the days when he worked with Adderly and Coltrane. The key it never settles in is F major. i've heard it called a 'modal' tune, but essentially it's an ornamented two-chord trick, like 'So What' from the same period. I like its straightforward to and fro, the cure for lines of complex changes. I take a rapid free-form solo, gesture at the trademark Miles held notes, and hand over to the piano, who plays with the tempo in a variety of guises. John Webb's drum solo (note the coy use of silence at the beginning) got even a nod of approval from my Dad, a man who approves of very little. I add a little freeform howling before John reintroduces the head, and the disc concludes like an old steam train grinding to a halt, all bluster, steam and tuneful screeching.
'One-Take Wonders' is an honest attempt to show how vital this music can still be. You can keep your lush vocals and improbable bass drums. My music is about instrumental virtuosity, a talent that doesn't go away just because no-one's paying for it. It was made possible by the rare and flexible talents of the sidemen, and a common purpose to create good and honest music, even when the cheque barely covers the parking. If I had a spare ten grand, i'd augment the same guys and spend a week somewhere hi-tech, to create the jazz concept albumn of my dreams. But that will have to wait. In the meantime, we got what we put in, in terms of time and effort. i'm never completely happy with anything. i'm never even completely happy with never being happy with anything. Jazz has always been about taking the rough passions of the adrenaline 'now' moment along with the smooth curves built on a lifetime of such improvisation.
The day it becomes a precise science it will die; and a part of us will die with it.
© Richard Russell 2004
Front Page
a sleeve-note too long for any sleeve.
some blurb about the one-take wonders CD
(and related musico-philosophical stuff).
It's a well-known fact that recording is as far away from performance as New Labour is from the rest of humanity: so far, indeed, as to be in another dimension. What may flatter and dazzle on a stage, when you're cranked up to nine and the crowd's rapidly progressing from cropped to pickled, is likely to jar the lugs at best when reduced to a simple noise on a disc. In a recording you hope to produce something more lasting, a noise that befits repetition; a multi-dimensional art. Hence we musicians tend to pore over the mix, dropping in too much flannel, and generally overdressing a sound that was probably undesirable in the first place, only palatable covered in tomato and digital effects relish. The best recordings belie the attention to detail that went into them, or result from the sort of luck that only usually involves a packet of three or some relation's surprise Will and Testament.
A fair amount of planning went into One-Take Wonders, most of it on my own in bed, in the bath, on those far too often forays for milk and tobacco; but I drew the line at anything that took more than 10 seconds to explain to the rest of the band between numbers. The recording itself would be a hit-and-run project; unavoidable without two grand and a plate of sandwiches at the very least. So, the four of us gathered in Olivier's pub, together with Andy the engineer; a couple of borrowed SM58s and some mike stands held together with gaffer-tape; and the mood was as a band of bank-robbers who had an hour in the vault before discovery and summary nickedness. We noodled for five minutes; sort of tuned up while Andy set the levels on his Mac; and rattled off a set- from start to finish took around and hour and a half.
Because it was a rush job, because we'd barely played as a group together, because we were on cheap gear, because afternoon sessions are often deathly sober, the resulting recording couldn't be further from the polished banality that currently passes as 'jazz' in the charts, all strangled melisma and unfeasible bass-drum; and much nearer to the instantaneous, off-the-cuff music verite that characterises so much of my favourite jazz of the past. An antithesis to the salient saccharine suits my temprament; the rough is the smooth- like whiskey.
A note on my compatriots. John Webb is the most self-effacing of drummers, a mood borne of thankless years of sweaty classrooms and twelve-year-olds who'd master the paradiddle if they could only tear their gaze from Celebrity Hollyoaks for long enough. In the coterie of piss-takers that comprises my own musical community he's the godfather of la batterie: what he can't swing won't swing no-how. Dave Moses, here sans his trademark simul-scat, is one of the great unmentioned artisans, done educashun, done the telly; the double-bass is less played than danced with, well-worn with every step. Composer, arranger, bon vivant, he intends to get that much busier just as soon as he can get away with 'retirement'. To call Phil Mead the ultimate accompanist belittles his jazz talents: primarily a master harmonist, his understated bravura displays a breadth of touch more suited to a world-class masseur; and he knows the jazz pantheon as well as the cats who wrote it- and in a wider range of key. I've played with all three on the odd lucky jam session occasion. But a tightly rehearsed unit we ain't. That's just part of what makes it so interesting.
We played 8 tracks straight through, with a ten-minute break at half-time. I counted two false starts. There were no retakes. No post-production tarting up. Certainly no 'dropping in' or 'Auto-tune' or 'Beat Doctor' sexing up. I shouted the head arrangement and the cats obliged, without so much as a wiser whimper. The opening 'St. Thomas' didn't go well, full of that unwarmed limbering that reminds the best of us we really ought to practice. We also did Kern's 'Look For The Silver Lining' but I don't know it well enough to do it justice. So these two tracks were shelved; heard only by my most forgiving friends.
The remaining 6 tracks, in the order we played them, have made it here onto my non-album. There's a tune by each of the legendary bop triumvirate: 'Diz' the dazzle-meister, the Jehova; 'Bird' the tragic champion, jazz's own Christ figure; Thelonius the Buddha of eclecticism. Plus two ballads and an epilogue from their most rightful heir: Miles Davis. The intended message is that bop's alive if a little unsteady on its feet lately. I'm no neo-traditionalist by nature, but, in music as anywhere else, if you haven't grasped your past then you have no future worth its name. Just as a so-called modern 'Labour' Party is worthless without a perpetual grounding in the fierce history of the labour movement, so modern jazz that ignores bebop, or relies on sugary mockeries of bebop, will fall worthlessly on ears that deserve better. Of course bebop is a complex art, based as it is on challenging rhythms and the maths of meta-harmony. In its time it became labelled as 'Chinese music': Bob Hope took the piss on a weekly basis. In truth it threatened its contemporary music industry, with its 'sweet' bands and lush crooners; offered a war-weary public the very New World the likes of Harry Truman and Clement Atlee were promising: the overthrow of musical Facism; the counter-invasion as black people took back their territory after years of resistance in Artie Shaw's backline. In its sparkling and catchy way, bebop forged the new avenues, gave glimpses of the future, as culturally significant as Webern or Picasso or Le Courbusier or a B52 loaded with atom bombs. Only the best players could play it: that was part of the point; a necessary regenerative weeding, a genuine working class elite. Once you heard it you fully appreciated the banality of the chug-chug swing bands, pastiches of their former selves, as they groaned another Torme or Sinatra showcase. For the US servicemen in Europe and South-East Asia at the end of the war, hearing Gillespie's 'Salt Peanuts' was like tasting the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge. The Andrews Sisters could never recover.
The disc's opener, 'A Night In Tunisia', an early Dizzy classic, contains much that bebop was to offer. It's in an uncompromising D minor. The tune filled with major 7ths and flattened 9ths, rapid triplets and barely notatable grace-notes. The rhythm held down by the bass while the drums rumble a sort of Martian Latin. A bridge passage as chromatic as anything by Wagner. In writing it Diz seems to have been saying: "thank you Glen Miller- now welcome to AFRICA !!" We simplified the bass-line a little in order to play it that bit faster, and only played the bridge once to avoid a predictable procession of soli. The clarinet break will never sound like that again, at least not by me: my one motive was an attempt to be at least half as dazzling as Bird's break on the classic recording. My solo is primarily rhythmic, sticking fairly closely to the changes, ending with a mock-atonal paraphrase of the head. Phil takes his symphonic rendering, his tactile filigree down a peg to enable the drum solo to start quiet and build. I figured this would give the number a desirable arch. A terse reprise of the head ends with a fairly standard clarinet glissando smear and a brief coda i'm not all that pleased with. But we'd made our point by then.
'Anthropology' is one of those Charlie Parker tunes which seems to have been written specifically to scare clarinettists: so awkward it is for our clanky 19th century technique. I take it down the octave, away from the register break, in the hope it would be smoother and less likely to squeak. We don't play full-on in this one: I wanted it at smoochy moderato, feline and measured to bring out the subtleties of melody. Most players rattle through it (mainly because they're so proud they can!) but essentially it's a rhythm sequence, for all the tune's rakish angles. The double bass gets the first solo, replete with mellow groove, handing neatly to the piano who turns up the sultry heat just a little. I keep to one brief chorus, ending with a hopefully Bird-like rising sequence, taking us back to the head.
Be-bop, particularly at its inception, had a reputation for being Diz-zyingly fast and virtuosic. And yet bop's main progenitors were too skilful as musicians to simply set the tempo at over 200 and waggle their fingers as fast as they could. Real virtuosity involves a world of musical taste and feeling that defies mere linear logic: indeed a plausible raison d'être for all art is metaphysical, mutually exclusive of those straight lines our brains so often take. Besides, the most impassioned Bird left to us, as well as the most sublime Monk, comes from the ballads, those slow trains to the heart.In a purely technical sense, a ballad allows greater freedom, in both rthymic variation and implied harmony. In a more artistic sense, the emotional palette is broader. Fast music can imbue sex, excitement, joy, fervour, even frenzy. But slow music allows passion and all the darker hues to hang out. If you add in the simple historical fact that throughout bebop, the masters and their memories are so often tragic tales of addiction and loss and you can see how artistically important their more introspective work is forced to be, particularly in our age of alienation and apocalyptic menace. To the best of my less than encyclopaedic knowledge, there is no classic version of 'Cry Me A River'. My less than encyclopaedic pseudo-Real Book cites Ray Charles and Julie London, separately i'm assuming, although a collaboration twixt the sly old junky and the breasty old show-stopper is strangely tempting. The tune is in D minor, relatively straightforward for most of the trumpets, saxophones and of course clarinets of this world. We play it straight through as an extended solo: if you listen carefully you won't even hear me grab a slurp of beer halfway through. At that slow a tempo we play the changes three times through in the 7-odd minutes.
There's not much I can say about the playing: I tried to keep it just this side of restrained, while still trying to get to a nub of true emotion, blues romanticism. I take a few pertinent phrases, and develop them thematically, using the harmony as a departure rather than a journey in itself. To my way of figuring, there are precious few sets of harmonic changes in the standard jazz repertoire, and thousands of players who've used them in as original a way as they could muster. Which means those changes have been obediently played, well, just about every way possible. Being original, therefore, on a II-V-I in E flat, is pretty much impossible: it's all been done. Which in turn defeats the object of the harmonic structure, which was to free the jazz player from the melody long enough to say something new. That leaves the modern jazz player with a handful of narrow choices.
(a). You can do what we're ostensibly paid to do, which is churn out the same old changes the same old way, keeping anything new and true back for novelty purposes, retaining a kind of mock-'50s aesthetic so that old George has a 'nice' retirement party and you get your £65 less taxi. For that you need regular breakfasts, a sustainable level of alcoholism, and a thick enough skin for when you're paid off to make way for Doris the Barmaid Sings Lulu.
(b). You can do what Andy Sheppard's generation tried to do and Ian Carr's generation tried to do and Tubby Hayes generation tried to do which was sit down and write whole new exciting sets of changes involving new ways of hearing, leaving a mass audience behind with the rent. For this you need a regularly enhanced state of psychological and social oblivion, coupled with a doting girlfriend who has a car.
(c). You can do what Don Rendell does these days and play the old changes with 60 years' worth of subtlety and sensitivity brought to bear, so that a particular lick will sound beautiful and new whether or not it's really a carefully subliminally remembered bit of Lester Young. For this all you need is the harmonic sense of the average Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, and a profound belief in God.
(d). You can become a 'performance artist' which is like a musician but somehow gets paid even less (around £10 for every fourth gig) and pretend there never was a Gershwin or a Gerry Mulligan, and do things like drinking a glass of water through a bass clarinet, or reciting Blake in Hindi while stark bollock naked. For this you need a tolerable level of Income Support (suggest a wooden leg or sixteen kids) and friends in local radio: without an established network of 'underground' publicity you risk simply being locked up.
(e). You can do what i'm doing at the moment, given that i've tried all of the above in my time, which is pretend i'm playing 'legit'', minimally marketable mainstream, while taking every opportunity to forget all about the harmonic changes and their knitted tramlines, to produce something which might be 'wrong', but it conceivably also might be new. My aim, when I grow up, is to extend the concept to embrace all twelve notes of the atonal scale at all times, not as 'free' jazz (with all its own unwritten do's and don't's), but as a constantly changing unified jazz. The music needs to do two things at once: it needs to grow and move forwards, given that jazz has barely caught up with Schoenberg let alone Jimi Hendrix, and; it needs to re-establish itself as a culture, a root and branch living art, instead of something weirdos talk about at parties. Coltrane has become like Shakespeare: you'll hear idiots prattling on about him, but the idea of actually sitting through an hour of it and listening, is, well, simply tediously retro. The best jazz is about the nature of art, the nature of the human soul, the nature of truth. And nowhere in the quest for truth does it say you can't play a G# over a chord of E flat 7th. Bird and Diz and the boys were already halfway there as early as 1946. They worked out you could extend the implied harmony with a system of extrapolation, bringing in the flattened 5th, the 9th, the 11th of ostensibly simple chords: this opens up about two thirds of the chromatic scale to the player at any one time, but the magic in it is the musicality, the harmonic richness; the beautiful fact that, whatever detractors said at the time, it doesn't sound 'Chinese' at all. And that was 1946 ! Almost sixty years ago. Sixty years took us from the harpsichord to the iron-framed concert grand. Sixty years took us from the purist line of Mozart, past Berlioz and Beethoven to the experiments of Wagner and Liszt. Sixty years span the time between Webern deciding any tune worth writing had been written, and Marc Bolan's discovery that the crappest tune can sell a million copies if it's loud enough to dance to. In jazz, though, we have 'traditional' jazz which is at least 100 years old, and 'modern' jazz, most of which is a mere 60 years old. Anything a new as Coltrane (d. '67) is still considered 'avant garde', which is record compayese for totally unmarketable. Ornette Coleman began his experiments in free-form music in the late 1950s. Since then, if anything we've gone backwards, both as an art, and as a meaningful way of life.
Track four is 'Blue Monk'; or rather, an adaptation of one of Monk's simpler chromatic explorations to be more in keeping with the blues as we now know it. The jazz-players' blues has become much as the jazz-players' 'Latin' music: a good 75% is profoundly mediocre, mannered; music for bored dead people. i've cut through the swathes of the world that doesn't swing to hopefully produce a classically British blues: thud, thud, 12/8 time, joyously raucous if harmonically banal. Indeed it's the banality of the harmony that makes it so musically attractive. The music has only three rules: each of the rules is a simple chord, tonic, sub-dominant, dominant, and their procession rarely if ever varies. For a player living in a time when free atonalism ain't exactly collateral for a mortgage, it's about as much freedom as a musician is likely to get. As it turned out on our dank, wet afternoon, I wanted to get like Buddy Guy doing Zappa's 'Directly From My Heart To You'; Phil came up with a delicately rendered Billy Preston doing that London pub classic: "Jools Holland's Bank Balance Don't Mean Shit To Me'; while Dave took his bass solo opportunity to audition for the Bonzo (Doo-Dah) Dog Band. The eternal question: 'Can Blue Men Sing The Whites?' The real heart of the blues is the ambivalent major/minor tonality: this gives the music the capacity to be joyously mournful; or mournfully joyous; or contendly angry; or hatefully loving; or any other number of ambivalent emotional states. My attitude to the blues is as a freedom-giver: the fewer the chords the less i'm inhibited by the grand old buffer in my head telling I shouldn't do that there- if i'm fucking about with a blues then it's my problem, beneath the radar of the chord police.
George Gershwin is that comparatively singular of beasts: such a globally popular musician that it's virtually de rigeur to hate his guts, without ever appreciating that his art is ingrained in our consciousness. i'm in two minds about him myself: he wrote dozens of iconic tunes, but if 'Rhapsody In Blue' is symphonic jazz then I want a Turner Prize for two coats of off-white gloss on my kitchen door. i'm ambivalent about similar icons. Richard Wagner's tedious pomposity pervades, in one way or another, every Hollywood epic i've ever seen or am likely to see. Paul McCartney has become, almost always was, the epitome of that middle-of-the-road the old rock and roll was trying so desperately to destroy; while wave after predictable wave of new 'Brit-pack' acts use him, chord, line and scansion at every little turn, from Oasis to Travis. Gershwin, who died aged 38, in 1937, wealthy but creatively unfulfilled, never got to see his cultural impact. In jazz his role was two-fold. In the first place his popular songs provided just that blend of simplicities to provide a lingua franca for the jazz community- he was so adept at turning blues licks into structured European songs that pretty soon they were using the songs to show off the licks. Secondly, it is wrong to underestimate Gershwin's posthumous contribution to bebop. It was his colourful showtime harmonies, and those of his imitators, they used as the basis to extrapolate from. Charlie Parker's 'Anthropology' is of course 'I Got Rhythm' with the rhythm rearranged and the tune changed to a meandering worm to sound cool on. Other 'standards' got the treatment from the new bop mathematics. Their love was here to stay.
Our rendition features my attempts not to repeat myself while staying in a fairly narrow set of keys; the delicate uber-accompaniment from Phil Mead, who always seems to know what notes to leave out and when, and; a superb solo from Mr. Moses' double bass, showing you can be lyrical with a wardrobe under your arm. The ending, like everything else, was unrehearsed, but that's exactly what jazz is about.
The last track, 'Milestones', available here as MP3, is a tribute to where bop was heading before the Empire of the Mediocre kicked in. Music and capitalism spent many a fruitful century keeping a contemptuous distance from one another, in so far as a composer might flirt with a Duchess (or a Duke in Wagner's case) or a violinist might charge considerable amounts for a recital; but then came the world of the recording industry. At first, these bright new capitalists were content to sell whatever anyone would buy, even if it was all obscure blues music played by all colour of people. Then they discovered they could dictate their own trends to a certain extent. For one thing, for all the sleazy black bands people seemed to like, there was always a clean-cut, cheap, white version of much the same thing. Pretty soon they realised the great listening public had only one golden rule: we'll keep buying fish fingers just so long as you never let us taste smoked salmon. So music as a mass market was born. Out went other-worldly 'difficult' artists and in came young poppets who smiled for the cameras and wore leather to look that tiny bit 'street'. Instrumental virtuosity was ditched in favour of close harmony singing and big bands only survived as a gratuitous accompaniment to crooners like Mel Torme. Jazz itself was moving in a whole different direction, away from the money men and their homogenous dreams. Small bucks meant small groups; new directions meant ever smaller audiences, as each generation grew to love fish fingers ever more.
'Milestones' is an old Miles Davis standard, from the days when he worked with Adderly and Coltrane. The key it never settles in is F major. i've heard it called a 'modal' tune, but essentially it's an ornamented two-chord trick, like 'So What' from the same period. I like its straightforward to and fro, the cure for lines of complex changes. I take a rapid free-form solo, gesture at the trademark Miles held notes, and hand over to the piano, who plays with the tempo in a variety of guises. John Webb's drum solo (note the coy use of silence at the beginning) got even a nod of approval from my Dad, a man who approves of very little. I add a little freeform howling before John reintroduces the head, and the disc concludes like an old steam train grinding to a halt, all bluster, steam and tuneful screeching.
'One-Take Wonders' is an honest attempt to show how vital this music can still be. You can keep your lush vocals and improbable bass drums. My music is about instrumental virtuosity, a talent that doesn't go away just because no-one's paying for it. It was made possible by the rare and flexible talents of the sidemen, and a common purpose to create good and honest music, even when the cheque barely covers the parking. If I had a spare ten grand, i'd augment the same guys and spend a week somewhere hi-tech, to create the jazz concept albumn of my dreams. But that will have to wait. In the meantime, we got what we put in, in terms of time and effort. i'm never completely happy with anything. i'm never even completely happy with never being happy with anything. Jazz has always been about taking the rough passions of the adrenaline 'now' moment along with the smooth curves built on a lifetime of such improvisation. The day it becomes a precise science it will die; and a part of us will die with it.