Lightning Bolt at The Scala

So, to The Scala last Thursday to see Lightning Bolt, supported by the archly-named Sly & The Family Drone. The latter were neither especially droney or indeed funky, but I enjoyed their multivalent shtick: three drummers, a baritone sax, two keyboards and a guy mostly shouting and making moves. For some strange reason, they called the late 90s band, Add N to (X) to my mind. All good, noisy fun, and it reminded me that I haven't attended a 'rock' event since (I think) Swans at Brixton circa 2014/15. Or Maybe Current 93 also around that time. Whatever, it made me feel my age: rather than the mixed age range of your average free improv event (including many of my contemporaries), we must have been 30 years older than any of the rest of the audience. Oh well, carpe diem and all that, I suppose.

The Scala was, of course, the site of the infamous Iggy/Stooges gig of exactly 50 years ago. It's far less scuzzy now (I haven't been there since a 29th Saxophone performance sometime in the late 80s) and the sound was good, and the audience vibe pretty chilled, given the music on offer. There were mild attempts at crowd surfing, easily curtailed by security, but it was all very good-humoured (having seen Woodstock '99 recently, I was very pleased by this). Lightning Bolt were awesome. Brian Appledale (his' gimp mask' triggering a colossal amount of samples) must have shed a stone or two in weight in just one hour, given the temperature both inside and out, and Brian 2.0, born Gibson, nailed down Appleyard's excesses with a Bill Wyman-type froideur.

I've only seen LB once before, supporting the rather tedious Om, but their performance the other night easily topped that one. In fact, it's hard to imagine any band being happy to follow these two, so immersive is their act. Album's don't and can't really give a true representation of their live sound, which is perhaps why there are relatively few of them, for a band that has been in existence for more than 20 years.

It's also great to see an American band over here, by the way, in our 'hostile environment'.

One thing that I noticed, beyond the bag searches and pat-downs by a professionally friendly security team (maybe we were given a 'senior citizen' exception?), was that ALL of them, and all of the bar staff, seemed to be black. I'm not going to extrapolate especially much from this snap shot, but all I can say is that "it wasn't like that in my day". (Please don't misread this, it's an observation, not a judgement.) Cafe Oto, in comparison, is replete with young white staff, mostly volunteers. I was reminded of just how skilled bar and security work is in these situations (not especially at Cafe Oto), but I'm sure that, in Priti Patel's mind, they would come under the 'unskilled' banner.

'If a City Is Set Upon a Hill': Current 93's Latest Esoterica

I missed this one until now. Apparently, it came out a few months ago, but I haven't seen it reviewed in Wire, for example. Maybe I need to expand my infotainment, but a copy of Current 93's newie was delivered today, and I've already got some thoughts about it, even after only three hearings (few recordings excite me immediately nowadays).

Firstly, it's nothing really new. The usual Tibet obsessions are present and correct (including, as ever, cats, stags, witches and children), and If a City Is Set Upon a Hill is very much a companion piece to 2018's The Light Is Leaving Us All. Which is a good thing. I discussed the latter at the time, and most of the group of that recording are still here, including, miraculously, the ever-wonderful Alasdair Roberts. It seems that, finally (after a woeful time using heavy metal guitarists) David Tibet has found a satisfactory replacement for Michael Cashmore, who was a vital contributor, along with Steve Stapleton, to Current 93's epic series of recordings throughout the nineties. It certainly, on initial hearing, seems to be of a similar quality to that canon, the best albums by this band seeming to stand out almost instantaneously. Cashmore and Stapleton are long gone, but Roberts seems to have stepped in, and propelled Tibet to produce two albums that stand with any of the other key albums that the group has recorded since 1982. It's oddly reminiscent in mood to Of Ruine or Some Blazing Starre, probably my favourite C93 record of all. (Tibet constantly sounds close to tears, which is oddly affecting rather than merely annoying.)

In addition, the whole album lasts a very satisfactory 37 minutes in all. (9 minutes shorter than The Light Is Leaving Us All.) Both films and recordings still seem hypertrophied, so some discipline and brevity are always welcomed, for this viewer and listener at least. So, it's good news all round for Current 93 fans. They, for me, are one of the oddest bands I have ever encountered - they should be terribly embarrassing, but somehow achieve, at their best, some of the most resonant emotional experiences that David Keenan's 'hidden reverse' can provide.

1966 and All That: The Four Tops

In 1986, twenty years on, Billy Bragg released 'Levi Stubbs' Tears', a depressing-but-vital song about domestic abuse, and the woman-in-question's recourse to The Four Tops' music to help her cope. What I didn't fully appreciate when I bought this 45, was just how much the lyrics of Holland/Dozier/Holland also hinted at emotional abuse, possessiveness and potential violence. Berry Gordy didn't allow such subject matter in his artist's work at the time, but this began to change by the end of the sixties (The Temptations' 'Cloud Nine', for example), when Stevie Wonder (no longer 'little' by this time), Marvin Gaye and The Temps began to demand the expansion of what they were allowed to say about the more unpalatable aspect of inner city Amerika.

This summer's Love Island, mostly unfurling/unravelling across July (this month again!), has gained some notoriety, mostly through the antics of Luca and Gemma, with the former displaying (and being 'outed' by the public, culminating, in it's most extreme form, in several death threats towards him) controlling and over-possessive behaviour towards and around Gemma. (Some have suggested that clips of Luca's behaviour would make a good video to show school children, especially girls, about the forms that indirect 'controlling behaviour' can take.) I'd suggest listening to The Four Tops' work, for a further glimpse into the mindset of 'a man possessed', i.e. Levi Stubbs' persona of a man driven half-mad by his rantings and ravings about his 'love object'. They can be read as mere 'love songs', but, given a close listen, they demonstrate controlling and passive-aggressive signals, with emotional blackmail and veiled threats of either harm to self or even, potentially, to 'the loved one'.

1966 and 1967, in particular, contained a plethora of these songs. Look at the following titles - 'Standing In the Shadow of Love', 'Without the One You Love (Life Is Not Worth Living', 'I Can't Help Myself (Sugar Pie, Honey Bunch)', 'You Keep Running Away', 'If You Don't Want My Love', 'I'll Turn To Stone', and 'Sad Souvenirs' - just to get a flavour of the hectoring tones that Stubbs' uses on the women that he is obsessed with. The listener will make up their own mind, but I will leave you with a sample of the lyrics of 'Bernadette' (probably the most chilling) and 'You Keep Running Away'. I'm sure that Luca would approve of their sentiments:

"And when I speak to you, I see you in other men's eyes, and I'm well aware of what's on their minds. They pretend to be my friend, while all the time they try to persuade you from my side. They'd give the world and all they own for just one moment of what we have known...I want you in order to live. And while I live only to hold you, other men they long to control you. But how can they control you, Bernadette, when they cannot control themselves?...But, darling, you belong to me, you're the soul of me, you're part of me..." ('Bernadette')

One would be hard pressed to find a better example anywhere of projective identification. Stubbs sound deranged.

"All I want to do is to take care of you, this soul of mine has been possessed by you. Darling, my heart has been obsessed with you...Just look at me, I'm not the man I used to be" ('You Keep Running Away")

And little wonder she keeps running, one might remark. Self - pity and blame-syndrome seem to be driving this iteration of Stubbs' volatile and injured man-child. "It's not my fault, look what you've done to me", etc., etc. The emotional depths of the early Tamla pantheon has not always been acknowledged, with the focus often of it's 'later' album-length products. The Four Top's canon forms one of the label's most profound creations.

All the songs referred to can be found on The Ultimate Collection compilation. However, it sadly excludes The Tops' masterful rendition of Tim Hardin's 'If I Was A Carpenter'.

1966 and All That: AMM and The Four Tops Part One

I haven't been doing much else in the writing department than trying to finish the first draft of my psychogeography-informed (says he) book about Crouch End ('niche' topics being definitely my thing). But reading the great Richard Williams' blog ("The last of AMM") about the final gig of the equally great AMM (30th. July) got me thinking about the improvising ensemble's very first album, AMMusic1966, a year that also arguably marked the apogee of the career of a group that I have been listening a lot to recently, Tamla Motown's The Four Tops. I realise that this is something of a "commodius vicus of recirculation", as Joyce puts it in the opening of Finnegans Wake, but there you go, it was a famous year for many different forms of music.

At Saturday 30th. July (coincidently the 56th, anniversary of England winning the Jules Rimet trophy) at Cafe Oto, a duo of Eddie Prevost and Keith Rowe played what was purportedly their last ever gig as AMM. In the same July as the World Cup triumph (not repeated in any way until the Lionesses triumph just a week ago, also in the seventh month), a five member AMM recorded their first vinyl outing, on the 8th. and the 27th. I've talked a lot about AMM in my books, so don't intend to dwell on them here, except to acknowledge the importance of this final performance, as the group was the last one standing, after 57 years, of the first generation of free improvisers, with AMMusic1966 being the first recorded release of genuine free improv in Britain. The group's retirement thus represents a definite fin de siecle moment for this 'movement'.

At another remove, 1966 was a defining year for The Four Tops' unique take on pop psychodrama. I became eleven years of age in July (a theme seems to be developing here?) 1966, and I clearly remember 'Reach Out, I'll Be There' There' being number 1 in that summer, along with so many immortal pop songs, but I was too callow to appreciate both the emotional intensity of Levi Stubbs' lead vocals or the sheer power they lent to the frequently rather subtly dark lyrics of Eddie and Brian Holland and Lamont Dozier.

To be continued.

Wire is 40 years old/young!!

Just a brief one today, but this could be much longer, given the vicissitudes that the Wire/The Wire has gone through over it's 40-year existence. I have considered cancelling my 30+ years subscriptions on several occasion (and still do) but somehow it continues to provide me with enough valuable information about off-the-radar music to still make it a "must-do tomorrow" event horizon.

Nowadays, for me, the magazine consists, in the main, of articles about artists that remain definitely above my radar: this month's (August 2022) edition's cover features concerns Saul Williams (never heard of). Most of the sub-features cover people who I've never come across, but this is hardly the point. Wire has always pushed me to explore new horizons, and I continue to enjoy the mainstays of the mag's contents, the editorial, the letters section (to which I still regularly contribute), the Invisible Jukebox, and, of course, the extensive Reviews. This month's article on Alan Skidmore alone was worth the price of admission.

My very first copy of The Wire (bought for my 30th. birthday by my future sister-in-law) was issue 17 (July 1985) and featured Ray Charles on the cover, with articles on "Miles and Duke on record", John Gilmore and Herbie Nichols. The latter two were hardly known then (the 'hard bop revival' being all the thing at that point), and I have always henceforth thought of this publication as being 'a niche for the less lauded".

It still is, and all the better for it.

Wire is 40 years old/young!!

Just a brief one today, but this could be much longer, given the vicissitudes that the Wire/The Wire has gone through over it's 40-year existence. I have considered cancelling my 30+ years subscriptions on several occasion (and still do) but somehow it continues to provide me with enough valuable information about off-the-radar music to still make it a "must-do tomorrow" event horizon.

Nowadays, for me, the magazine consists, in the main, of articles about artists that remain definitely above my radar: this month's (August 2022) edition's cover features concerns Saul Williams (never heard of). Most of the sub-features cover people who I've never come across, but this is hardly the point. Wire has always pushed me to explore new horizons, and I continue to enjoy the mainstays of the mag's contents, the editorial, the letters section (to which I still regularly contribute), the Invisible Jukebox, and, of course, the extensive Reviews. This month's article on Alan Skidmore alone was worth the price of admission.

My very first copy of The Wire (bought for my 30th. birthday by my future sister-in-law) was issue 17 (July 1985) and featured Ray Charles on the cover, with articles on "Miles and Duke on record", John Gilmore and Herbie Nichols. The latter two were hardly known then (the 'hard bop revival' being all the thing at that point), and I have always henceforth thought of this publication as being 'a niche for the less lauded".

It still is, and all the better for it.

Prototypical Americana

Part Two

This is my list of ' Some Americana before the term was invented'. They are off the top of my head, and I'm sure that readers would want to add other groups and single artists that I have left out

Bob Dylan It is almost inevitable that Dylan is at the head of this list. The 'basement tapes', recorded when psychedelia was at its colourful height in the 1967 Summer of Love, contained a slew of parched oddities that began to woke musicians up from their day-glo reveries. (Several went on to have hits with songs from the Little White Wonder bootleg, 'Quinn the Eskimo', 'Million Dollar Bash', This Wheel's on Fire', 'Tears of Rage', 'I Shall Be Released', 'You Ain't Going Nowhere', by acts as varied as The Byrds, The Band, Brian Auger & the Trinity, Manfred Mann and Fairport Convention.) CBS took until 1975 to officially release the vinyl double album The Basement Tapes, from the sessions, by which time Dylan has produced several other recordings that had cemented his latest 'new direction': John Wesley Harding (the real game-changer, from 1968), Nashville Skyline (with that other white wonder, Johnny Cash), Self Portrait and New Morning. Mercilessly panned at the time, their undoubted influence began to be slowly acknowledged by younger musicians.

The Band Dylan's backing band on the momentous world tour of 1966, The Band made The Basement Tapes with him, before recording two epochal albums in 1968 and 1969, Music From Big Pink and The Band. Both of these were to prove immensely influential for British and American musicians of the time (the inclusion of 'The Weight' on the Easy Rider soundtrack didn't hurt either). If there is one group that laid the tracks down for the Americana juggernaut, that group has to be The Band?

The Byrds and their offshoot, The Flying Burrito Brothers, both featured Gram Parsons for a time, another visionary who had dug deep into the American musical palimpsest, going back, as Dylan had, to Victorian forebears. The Byrds also featured David Crosby, a Hollywood brat who was kicked out of the band (for being a pain in the ***, basically) and went on to join Crosby, Stills and Nash, a move that was certainly to prove immensely successful, even if just judged in financial terms (much of the money went up Crosby's nose, however). The cover of their sophomore album Deja Vu, a sepia-tinted exercise in deep nostalgia, featured the band (by now also featuring Neil Young) in frontier drag, in a pose that echoed both The Band and Workingman's Dead by the Grateful Dead.

Both Workingman's Dead (1969) and American Beauty (1970) marked a screeching change of direction for the Grateful Dead, and their folk and country influences emerged in a set of songs that celebrated, most clearly and famously in 'Truckin' ', their love of travelling through the American landscape, and a freedom of movement, both of the body and in the mind. Their particular offshoot, The New Riders of the Purple Sage, were another band enamoured of cowboy chic, most obviously on the cover of their third record Gypsy Cowboy, a relatively late 1972 release that could have been designed with John Ford in mind.

1967-1970 saw the birth pangs of a sort of anti-modernism in American rock, and a (re)discovery of the American past and landscape. (We had out own version over here with the 'getting it together in the country' shtick, most famously captured by Traffic on their first album Dear Mr. Fantasy, with the group moving to Berkshire to 'get their heads together'.) But the past is always 'another country', and 'nostalgia ain't what it used to be', and it took artists of the stature of Joni Mitchell and Leonard Cohen to produce bodies of work that celebrated the past without reinventing it. Johnny Cash too, miraculously created a late series of 'American music' that owed much to the past (and his own), while keeping his feet firmly on modern ground.

Prototypical Americana

Part Two

This is my list of ' Some Americana before the term was invented'. They are off the top of my head, and I'm sure that readers would want to add other groups and single artists that I have left out

Bob Dylan It is almost inevitable that Dylan is at the head of this list. The 'basement tapes', recorded when psychedelia was at its colourful height in the 1967 Summer of Love, contained a slew of parched oddities that began to woke musicians up from their day-glo reveries. (Several went on to have hits with songs from the Little White Wonder bootleg, 'Quinn the Eskimo', 'Million Dollar Bash', This Wheel's on Fire', 'Tears of Rage', 'I Shall Be Released', 'You Ain't Going Nowhere', by acts as varied as The Byrds, The Band, Brian Auger & the Trinity, Manfred Mann and Fairport Convention.) CBS took until 1975 to officially release the vinyl double album The Basement Tapes, from the sessions, by which time Dylan has produced several other recordings that had cemented his latest 'new direction': John Wesley Harding (the real game-changer, from 1968), Nashville Skyline (with that other white wonder, Johnny Cash), Self Portrait and New Morning. Mercilessly panned at the time, their undoubted influence began to be slowly acknowledged by younger musicians.

The Band Dylan's backing band on the momentous world tour of 1966, The Band made The Basement Tapes with him, before recording two epochal albums in 1968 and 1969, Music From Big Pink and The Band. Both of these were to prove immensely influential for British and American musicians of the time (the inclusion of 'The Weight' on the Easy Rider soundtrack didn't hurt either). If there is one group that laid the tracks down for the Americana juggernaut, that group has to be The Band?

The Byrds and their offshoot, The Flying Burrito Brothers, both featured Gram Parsons for a time, another visionary who had dug deep into the American musical palimpsest, going back, as Dylan had, to Victorian forebears. The Byrds also featured David Crosby, a Hollywood brat who was kicked out of the band (for being a pain in the ***, basically) and went on to join Crosby, Stills and Nash, a move that was certainly to prove immensely successful, even if just judged in financial terms (much of the money went up Crosby's nose, however). The cover of their sophomore album Deja Vu, a sepia-tinted exercise in deep nostalgia, featured the band (by now also featuring Neil Young) in frontier drag, in a pose that echoed both The Band and Workingman's Dead by the Grateful Dead.

Both Workingman's Dead (1969) and American Beauty (1970) marked a screeching change of direction for the Grateful Dead, and their folk and country influences emerged in a set of songs that celebrated, most clearly and famously in 'Truckin' ', their love of travelling through the American landscape, and a freedom of movement, both of the body and in the mind. Their particular offshoot, The New Riders of the Purple Sage, were another band enamoured of cowboy chic, most obviously on the cover of their third record Gypsy Cowboy, a relatively late 1972 release that could have been designed with John Ford in mind.

1967-1970 saw the birth pangs of a sort of anti-modernism in American rock, and a (re)discovery of the American past and landscape. (We had out own version over here with the 'getting it together in the country' shtick, most famously captured by Traffic on their first album Dear Mr. Fantasy, with the group moving to Berkshire to 'get their heads together'.) But the past is always 'another country', and 'nostalgia ain't what it used to be', and it took artists of the stature of Joni Mitchell and Leonard Cohen to produce bodies of work that celebrated the past without reinventing it. Johnny Cash too, miraculously created a late series of 'American music' that owed much to the past (and his own), while keeping his feet firmly on modern ground.

Americana: Some Prototypes

Part One

I'm currently digesting Luke Meddings' meditation on the interconnectivity of The Beatles, Rolling Stones and Beach Boys What They Heard, which mainly covers the years of 1963-8. Thinking about those years, my mind wandered tangentially onto the topic of so-called Americana, a word that wasn't really used in rock/pop music until, I estimate, around 2000, with the emergence of such artists as Ryan Adams. The late Gram Parsons was fishing around in the same synergistic pond some thirty years earlier, when he came up with his idea of 'cosmic American music', a combination of country music, R & B, soul, folk and rock, and 'Americana' is a similarly rather ill-defined stylistic and descriptive grab-bag. I should then, with this caveat in mind, make a few descriptive pointers before we go on to discuss a few of the groups and individuals who were producing examples of this slippery genre well before it gained a name that appears to have stuck. (Before Americana, we had 'country rock' and 'folk rock', two examples of the sort of nominative welding that became popular in the early 70s.)

Americana is, to state the obvious, a description of music that is essentially American in both form and content. So, remembering this, one word and concept that is inescapable is freedom, but, when we look at the current political landscape in the USA, we can see how ambiguous this core idea is, when it is applied to the various groups of American society - some groups seem to be more 'free' to think and act than others. One of the most important of these freedoms is that of freedom of movement, a principle that was once completely denied to one immigrant group, until it took a civil war to restore it to this very group. Free Movement became a secular cause and effect for the Beats in the 1950s, and this is reflected in the sheer amount of place names cited throughout the works of Bob Dylan and the Grateful Dead, to take just two examples of Beat-influenced artists. Sadly, the other core freedom principle that I have extrapolated is that of the God-given right of Americans to bear arms, i.e. GUNS.

Now, you'd have thought that the 'progressive' nature of, in particular, 'west coast psychedelia', would have made the toting of guns an anathema to the Beats' successors, the hippies, but in many ways the latter were as gun-obsessed as rappers are today. Look at The Charlatans, for example (the American version), posing as Wild West gunslingers in Nevada's Red Dog Saloon. (Dan Hicks went on to form one Americana prototype with his Hot Licks, a band that melded jazz onto folk and country.) San Francisco's premier two-guitar phenomenon Quicksilver Messenger Service didn't appear to be being ironical when, on the back cover of their second album Happy Trails, both Gary Duncan and Greg Elmore are pictured with in-yer-face rifle-toting poses. When the Grateful Dead upped sticks and moved to Marin County in 1968, leaving the meth - and smack - riddled streets of the Haight Ashbury, they were soon riding horses and mutating into farm hands, all tooled up to deal with horse rustling/rustlers. Dead offshoots, the New Riders of the Purple Sage, on the back cover of their third album Gypsy Cowboy (the title so says it all) present a complement to that of Happy Trails, even if the gun motif is played down (only one of 'em is tooled up, with a literal 'pistol in his pocket') - like so many of their hippie contemporaries, the New Riders' 'look' had one boot in the present and the other in a re-imagined Wild West, with some effective nostalgia ('Whiskey' and 'Sutter's Mill') and some regrettably back-to-basics attitudes ('Groupie' and 'She's No Angel' being the best/worse examples). Like a lot of the sixties/seventies 'counterculture', the freedoms it supposedly enabled were, on refection, exploited by those who were already free in everything but mind. Atavistic misogyny was just one countercultural feature that still deserves attention, as it was so little recognised and called out at the time.

To be continued...

Americana: Some Prototypes

Part One

I'm currently digesting Luke Meddings' meditation on the interconnectivity of The Beatles, Rolling Stones and Beach Boys What They Heard, which mainly covers the years of 1963-8. Thinking about those years, my mind wandered tangentially onto the topic of so-called Americana, a word that wasn't really used in rock/pop music until, I estimate, around 2000, with the emergence of such artists as Ryan Adams. The late Gram Parsons was fishing around in the same synergistic pond some thirty years earlier, when he came up with his idea of 'cosmic American music', a combination of country music, R & B, soul, folk and rock, and 'Americana' is a similarly rather ill-defined stylistic and descriptive grab-bag. I should then, with this caveat in mind, make a few descriptive pointers before we go on to discuss a few of the groups and individuals who were producing examples of this slippery genre well before it gained a name that appears to have stuck. (Before Americana, we had 'country rock' and 'folk rock', two examples of the sort of nominative welding that became popular in the early 70s.)

Americana is, to state the obvious, a description of music that is essentially American in both form and content. So, remembering this, one word and concept that is inescapable is freedom, but, when we look at the current political landscape in the USA, we can see how ambiguous this core idea is, when it is applied to the various groups of American society - some groups seem to be more 'free' to think and act than others. One of the most important of these freedoms is that of freedom of movement, a principle that was once completely denied to one immigrant group, until it took a civil war to restore it to this very group. Free Movement became a secular cause and effect for the Beats in the 1950s, and this is reflected in the sheer amount of place names cited throughout the works of Bob Dylan and the Grateful Dead, to take just two examples of Beat-influenced artists. Sadly, the other core freedom principle that I have extrapolated is that of the God-given right of Americans to bear arms, i.e. GUNS.

Now, you'd have thought that the 'progressive' nature of, in particular, 'west coast psychedelia', would have made the toting of guns an anathema to the Beats' successors, the hippies, but in many ways the latter were as gun-obsessed as rappers are today. Look at The Charlatans, for example (the American version), posing as Wild West gunslingers in Nevada's Red Dog Saloon. (Dan Hicks went on to form one Americana prototype with his Hot Licks, a band that melded jazz onto folk and country.) San Francisco's premier two-guitar phenomenon Quicksilver Messenger Service didn't appear to be being ironical when, on the back cover of their second album Happy Trails, both Gary Duncan and Greg Elmore are pictured with in-yer-face rifle-toting poses. When the Grateful Dead upped sticks and moved to Marin County in 1968, leaving the meth - and smack - riddled streets of the Haight Ashbury, they were soon riding horses and mutating into farm hands, all tooled up to deal with horse rustling/rustlers. Dead offshoots, the New Riders of the Purple Sage, on the back cover of their third album Gypsy Cowboy (the title so says it all) present a complement to that of Happy Trails, even if the gun motif is played down (only one of 'em is tooled up, with a literal 'pistol in his pocket') - like so many of their hippie contemporaries, the New Riders' 'look' had one boot in the present and the other in a re-imagined Wild West, with some effective nostalgia ('Whiskey' and 'Sutter's Mill') and some regrettably back-to-basics attitudes ('Groupie' and 'She's No Angel' being the best/worse examples). Like a lot of the sixties/seventies 'counterculture', the freedoms it supposedly enabled were, on refection, exploited by those who were already free in everything but mind. Atavistic misogyny was just one countercultural feature that still deserves attention, as it was so little recognised and called out at the time.

To be continued...

Sheffield Notes and Sounds: Part Two

A shout-out now to the musicians who played on Monday night at the University Arms in Sheffield, a pleasantly old-fashioned pub, with screamingly vivid and gaudy carpeting and a large garden to boot. The upstairs room is a good size and ideal for this sort of music, although the lighting is rather harsh.

The first trio was intriguingly called 'The Gathering...The Chewing" (shades of Maggie Nichols?), and played two 'sets', separated by a change of instrumentation, and all three players used their voices effectively to embellish the overall sound. Gillian Whiteley started off with a hurdy gurdy (I haven't seen this instrument in such a setting since Keiji Haino) before picking up the accordion (Gillian clearly doesn't run with the pack) and a viola (channelling John Cale at times, I thought). Geoff Bright excelled himself on the bass saxophone in the first half, playing with a fleetness I didn't think possible on such a huge reed instrument, which I reckon that I last seen in action many years ago, in an Anthony Braxton performance. For the second half, he switched to soprano, at the diametric opposite end of the saxophone family; the whole set being interspersed throughout by Geoff's most effective chanting and vocal dynamics in general. Double bassist Max Munday is, in a separate reality, a member of Sheffield rock group Reverend and the Makers, and is considerable younger than the others. He stuck to the bass for the whole performance, and was certainly the most kinetic musician of the night, regularly 'dancing' with his instrument, giving the great John Edwards a run for his money in the process. He also bought some younger members of the audience along for the ride.

The second trio, revelling in the rather punkish name Gorse, featured Sheffield veteran John Jasnoch, who I have previously known for his guitar work, but on this night, the strings he played were attached to a tamboura, a bass banjo and a mandolin, an eclectic and exotic mix which he embellished with pre-recorded tapes (thereby creating an ambience which reminded me at times of the work of AMM's guitarist Keith Rowe), and even a harmonica interlude for good measure. Adam Woolf, sitting in the middle of things literally and figuratively, started with a clarinet passage, proceeding on to bass recorder (these musicians certainly gave us a dose of Whitney Balliet's "Sound of Surprise"), tin whistle (last seen played by Spider Stacey of The Pogues) and a mini-tambourine. Pete White was similarly playful in his approach, combining his violin with an accordion (again!), some vocalese and various percussion.

This description fails to do justice to the sheer eclecticism on display on the night, and I do hope that Notes and Sounds continues to offer the same level of originality and fun that was displayed on Monday night. (I'm sure that I haven't fully itemised all of the 'little instruments' that were on display and that would even have given the great Alterations a run for their money.) Sheffield definitely deserves to receive more recognition for it's contribution to UK free improvisation.

Sheffield Notes and Sounds: Part One

I have written about the Sheffield improv 'scene', if I'm allowed to call it that, on previous occasions, and am pleased to say that I very much enjoyed a gig in the former Steel City on Monday night. A long-lasting live music club, organised by multi-instrumentalist John Jasnoch, and called 'Notes and Sounds' (appropriately non-specific), is now being held monthly at The University Arms, a student hangout in the middle of town. For such an important city, Sheffield has apparently always had problems forming an integrated free improvisation network, despite the efforts of such luminaries as Jasnoch and Martin Archer, so it was very encouraging to see that Notes & Sounds is up and running again, after the ravages imposed upon live performance by the Covid lockdown(s).

On Monday night there were two intriguing trios, playing music that very much put me in mind of AACM-type ebbs and flows. Five of the six improvisers used multiple instrumentation, and there was a considerable amount of vocalese, which I'm not usually keen on, but on this occasion really enjoyed (much more mellifluous than the likes of Phil Minton, but Adele has still got little to worry about). Like all of the best free improv, the music remains very difficult to describe and, thankfully, the players knew when to stop. (Like so many modern films, some improvisations can be excessively lengthy, reminding me of Miles Davis' alleged advice to John Coltrane about concluding, "just take the horn out of your mouth, man".) Amusingly, all six got together at the end, to play a very short violin sextet 'number', which put me in mind of Sun Ra's Strange Strings, in that several of them clearly were clearly unfamiliar with the instrument (additional shades of Ornette?) Who said improvisers lack a sense of humour?

Humour was an important feature of the so-called 'second generation' of free improvisation, so when Geoff Bright informed us that, in a previous performance, he was impelled to get on the floor and "bark like a dog", we got an idea that these were not people who were po-faced 'hair shirt' improvisers. Steve Beresford et al would have been proud. When I arrived, slightly late, some young female members of the audience were laughing, which can be an ambiguous sign. (Some improv can make people nervous, and, as Joni Mitchell said on People's Parties, "...laughing and crying, you know it's the same release".) There were a fair few youngish members of the 30 or so attendees, who seemed to be won over by the good natured humour of the players, and were quiet and respectful throughout. Or maybe they were just discombobulated? All in all, the players seemed to be pleased by both the size and the response of the audience, both of which are far from a given for this genre of music.

To be continued...

Spontaneous Music Ensemble: From the Vaults Part One

I wasn't aware of this release until I saw it in the racks of Ray's Jazz Shop the other month, and finally bought a copy this week, even though it was apparently released in February last year. It's two discs of unreleased 1966 recordings by The Spontaneous Music Ensemble called Question and Answer. Obviously of historical importance for fans of free improvisation like myself, I'm pleased to report that it's also a great listen, with some impressive playing by John Stevens, Paul Rutherford and Trevor Watts (the original founders of the SME), and by the Australian double bassist Bruce Cale, who was in the band for a few months in that year, appearing on their first LP Challenge.

Challenge was recorded in March 1966, and Question and Answer three months later, with most of the material captured from a live recording in The Prince Albert pub in Greenwich, south London. Given its obscure provenance, it's not a bad sound, although Cale is obviously disadvantaged. The second disc includes four numbers from an unnamed London studio, and is noteworthy for featuring the tracks that were to appear on the SME's proposed second album Peaceful Farewell, which never saw the light of day unfortunately. If only for this, these recordings are immensely important for historians of UK free improvisation. Contemporary recordings include Springboard (June '66) by Stevens, Watts, trumpeter Ian Carr and bassist Jeff Clyne (who also features on two tracks of Challenge), and an important radio appearance on 'Jazz Scene', which can be heard on YouTube. The Emanem Records archival release, Withdrawal also features SME studio material from September/October 1966, and I would recommend interested readers have a look at the John Stevens discography on Wiki, which outlines the band's complicated recording history.

It is also, for me at least, great to hear the gig being presented by the late Charles Fox, whose fantastic radio show, 'Jazz Today' introduced me to the SME back in 1973, the second half of which I usually caught on return from school. Only 'Little Red Head' and 'Day of Reckoning' make it from Challenge, and 'Judy's Smile' (for Watt's wife) appeared, in three parts, on Amalgam's classic 1969 Prayer for Peace. The title of the release comes from a Q & A session that took place after the Greenwich gig, and it's quite moving to hear the voices of the band, in boisterous and effusive moods, two of which, Rutherford and Stevens, have long passed.

To be continued...

Spontaneous Music Ensemble: From the Vaults    Part Two

It’s great to hear so much from both Trevor Watts and Paul Rutherford on Question and Answer 1966. Of course, Watts is still playing, well into his eighties now, but Rutherford passed far too early, and his solos here demonstrate what a talent he had. The set still follows the old ‘formula’ of bebop ‘routines’ at this stage, with recognisable tunes/themes and solos, and it’s amusing to hear one of the audience implicitly criticising the group, in the Q & A section, for being so “conventional”; by the autumn, however, both Evan Parker, Barry Guy and Derek Bailey had joined the SME, and things rapidly became less imitative. The March 1967 material featured on Withdrawal is essentially free improvisation, and Stevens was soon calling it “group music” and solos and arrangements became a thing of the past, with the emphasis on interactive listening and empathy between improvisers.

The music here is still in thrall to American jazz modernists - Watts channels Albert Ayler, with the astringency of Art Pepper and, in particular, Eric Dolphy (’You Can Be Happy’ is very Dolphy-esque). The studio version of ‘Judy’s Smile’ has Ornette Coleman written all over it. However, the hints of what was soon to come can be heard on the collective improvisations on ‘Little Red Head’. A track on Challenge, the latter is another wifely dedication, this time to Mrs. Stevens, demonstrating that this was clearly a very uxorious band! The track’s slow, staccato movements remind me very much of later Steven’s pieces that were designed to encourage active listening between the musicians. Another Challenge number, the following composition, Watt’s programmatic ‘Day of Reckoning’, is a sort of Pithecanthopus Erectus-like ambitious barn stormer, with a Jackie McLean-informed alto solo. Cale even gets a chance to have a ‘Mingus moment’. High praise indeed, and the audience seemed to love it. (It’s great to hear how well the music was received, given when it was made.)

‘Unknown Title’ actually turns out to be Challenge’s ‘Club 66′ (named after The Little Theatre Club, which had opened on the third of January that year). However, ‘Themeless Improvisation’ is another pointer towards the future, as the retrospectively-given title indicates. It’s a bit ragged and tentative, understandably, and it reminds me slightly of Tristano’s March1949 free improvisation numbers, ‘Intuition’ and ‘Digression’ for this very reason. As Samuel Johnson said, “It is not done well, but you are surprised to find it done at all” (although Lichfield’s finest wit, but no potential #MeToo advocate, was referring to hearing a female preacher).

But this would be damning the album with faint praise - I wish I could have heard its contents while writing ‘Beyond Jazz’, as it not only features great playing, but it is an essential time capsule, and as important a missing link in the UK free improv story as the discovery of Ornette Coleman’s Live at the Hillcrest Club 1958 was for that of American free jazz.

Spontaneous Music Ensemble: From the Vaults    Part Two

It’s great to hear so much from both Trevor Watts and Paul Rutherford on Question and Answer 1966. Of course, Watts is still playing, well into his eighties now, but Rutherford passed far too early, and his solos here demonstrate what a talent he had. The set still follows the old ‘formula’ of bebop ‘routines’ at this stage, with recognisable tunes/themes and solos, and it’s amusing to hear one of the audience implicitly criticising the group, in the Q & A section, for being so “conventional”; by the autumn, however, both Evan Parker, Barry Guy and Derek Bailey had joined the SME, and things rapidly became less imitative. The March 1967 material featured on Withdrawal is essentially free improvisation, and Stevens was soon calling it “group music” and solos and arrangements became a thing of the past, with the emphasis on interactive listening and empathy between improvisers.

The music here is still in thrall to American jazz modernists - Watts channels Albert Ayler, with the astringency of Art Pepper and, in particular, Eric Dolphy (’You Can Be Happy’ is very Dolphy-esque). The studio version of ‘Judy’s Smile’ has Ornette Coleman written all over it. However, the hints of what was soon to come can be heard on the collective improvisations on ‘Little Red Head’. A track on Challenge, the latter is another wifely dedication, this time to Mrs. Stevens, demonstrating that this was clearly a very uxorious band! The track’s slow, staccato movements remind me very much of later Steven’s pieces that were designed to encourage active listening between the musicians. Another Challenge number, the following composition, Watt’s programmatic ‘Day of Reckoning’, is a sort of Pithecanthopus Erectus-like ambitious barn stormer, with a Jackie McLean-informed alto solo. Cale even gets a chance to have a ‘Mingus moment’. High praise indeed, and the audience seemed to love it. (It’s great to hear how well the music was received, given when it was made.)

‘Unknown Title’ actually turns out to be Challenge’s ‘Club 66′ (named after The Little Theatre Club, which had opened on the third of January that year). However, ‘Themeless Improvisation’ is another pointer towards the future, as the retrospectively-given title indicates. It’s a bit ragged and tentative, understandably, and it reminds me slightly of Tristano’s March1949 free improvisation numbers, ‘Intuition’ and ‘Digression’ for this very reason. As Samuel Johnson said, “It is not done well, but you are surprised to find it done at all” (although Lichfield’s finest wit, but no potential #MeToo advocate, was referring to hearing a female preacher).

But this would be damning the album with faint praise - I wish I could have heard its contents while writing ‘Beyond Jazz’, as it not only features great playing, but it is an essential time capsule, and as important a missing link in the UK free improv story as the discovery of Ornette Coleman’s Live at the Hillcrest Club 1958 was for that of American free jazz.

Spontaneous Music Ensemble: From the Vaults Part One

I wasn't aware of this release until I saw it in the racks of Ray's Jazz Shop the other month, and finally bought a copy this week, even though it was apparently released in February last year. It's two discs of unreleased 1966 recordings by The Spontaneous Music Ensemble called Question and Answer. Obviously of historical importance for fans of free improvisation like myself, I'm pleased to report that it's also a great listen, with some impressive playing by John Stevens, Paul Rutherford and Trevor Watts (the original founders of the SME), and by the Australian double bassist Bruce Cale, who was in the band for a few months in that year, appearing on their first LP Challenge.

Challenge was recorded in March 1966, and Question and Answer three months later, with most of the material captured from a live recording in The Prince Albert pub in Greenwich, south London. Given its obscure provenance, it's not a bad sound, although Cale is obviously disadvantaged. The second disc includes four numbers from an unnamed London studio, and is noteworthy for featuring the tracks that were to appear on the SME's proposed second album Peaceful Farewell, which never saw the light of day unfortunately. If only for this, these recordings are immensely important for historians of UK free improvisation. Contemporary recordings include Springboard (June '66) by Stevens, Watts, trumpeter Ian Carr and bassist Jeff Clyne (who also features on two tracks of Challenge), and an important radio appearance on 'Jazz Scene', which can be heard on YouTube. The Emanem Records archival release, Withdrawal also features SME studio material from September/October 1966, and I would recommend interested readers have a look at the John Stevens discography on Wiki, which outlines the band's complicated recording history.

It is also, for me at least, great to hear the gig being presented by the late Charles Fox, whose fantastic radio show, 'Jazz Today' introduced me to the SME back in 1973, the second half of which I usually caught on return from school. Only 'Little Red Head' and 'Day of Reckoning' make it from Challenge, and 'Judy's Smile' (for Watt's wife) appeared, in three parts, on Amalgam's classic 1969 Prayer for Peace. The title of the release comes from a Q & A session that took place after the Greenwich gig, and it's quite moving to hear the voices of the band, in boisterous and effusive moods, two of which, Rutherford and Stevens, have long passed.

To be continued...

"Age Cannot Wither Them..."? Alexander Hawkins/Joe McPhee Quartet

I have just started my next book project, but this time it's not about free improvisation, jazz or indeed about music at all. It aims to be a history of Crouch End, where we've lived for 30 years, and it will have a vaguely pycho-geographical bent: local histories are ten a penny round our way, so I intend to take a slightly different tack. There are thus liable to be less blogs over the next few months, but I'd like to make a few observations about a gig I attended on Tuesday, which gave me pause to consider the topic of age in live performances (hence the Shakespeare crypto-reference in the title, half-inched from 'Anthony and Cleopatra').

We went to see the Alexander Hawkins Decoy trio, his Hammond organ-driven thing with John Edwards and Steve Noble, a 'supergroup' that I'd not got round to seeing previously. Playing across two sets at Cafe Oto, they were joined by Joe McPhee on tenor saxophone. I can't pretend to be a big fan of this particular keyboard, but have grooved to Fats Waller, the Blue Note Jimmy's, and, especially, to Larry Young and Sun Ra's contributions to making the instrument sing and shout. It seemed that I wasn't the only one interested in this trio plus one - Oto was packed to the rafters with an audience of various ages and appearances, far from the more homogenous groups that tend to attend the 'free-er' gigs at this venue.

This is one of our most tensile rhythm sections, and it gave me a bit of a jolt to realise that Edwards is now 58 years old, and Noble 62. In my mind's eye, they are both still part of a younger generation ('Generation Three', in improv terms?) I still remember Noble appearing on the very last Incus vinyl record in 1987, Incus 52, which seemed to be both the end and the start of something. Hawkins is now 42, and it seems fortuitous, for this blog's theme, that Tuesday was coincidently his birthday! It's safe to say that all three are occupying points of the middle-aged curve, but they are lagging behind the hugely experienced McPhee, who began performing in the 1950s, and is now aged 82, giving him 20 years on Noble and 40 on Hawkins!

Now, all this shouldn't matter, as the title of this piece suggests, but the fact is that it does, unfortunately. I've never especially been a great fan of the reeds player, but I felt that, on this occasion at least, McPhee slowed the group down, and his performance was lacklustre, his slow pace dragging the overall sound down, eschewing any brisk passages, despite the presence of one of THE great rhythm sections of our time. Hawkins' solo features and assertive comping raised the pace and the game, channelling both Young and Ra at times, with even a bit of Georgie Fame and Graham Bond added to the mix.

Joe McPhee directly contributed to Werner Uehlinger starting Hat Hut Records back in 1974, and seems to have become something of an eminence grise for the UK improv scene over the past decade, but his showing the other night reminded me of the way that reeds players, even the greatest, can run into difficulties once they pass the 60 mark (an somewhat arbitrary mark, I freely admit). I'm thinking of John Gilmore, who I saw twice in 1990, at the Mean Fiddler and Hackney Empire, who could only manage a couple of (wonderful) solos, before retreating behind a 'space drum'; Anthony Braxton and Charles Gayle now play as much piano as they do saxophone.

Time can do brutal things to musicians, but particularly to saxophonists: while Cecil Taylor remained a monster at the keyboard right up to his death in his eighties, players like McPhee can be diminished by the sheer stamina involved in playing Adolphe Saxe's invention. Sonny Rollins, now our most venerable jazz great, is surely the exception here? (Roscoe Mitchell also demands attention.) Like race and gender, age/ageism is one of the music's least explored aspects, but remains one of its ineluctable and unavoidable existential issues.