Monday 18 March 2024

The Max Roach Group with Abbey Lincoln - 'Driva' Man'

I think the first revolutionary new compact disc that I ever bought was Max Roach's We Insist! Max Roach's Freedom Now Suite. It was cut-price in some second-hand emporium staffed by supercilious young men on the claustrophobic isle of Jersey. I was working on some training project that was draining me of the will to live, so it could have been a reward for getting through the week. I knew that Max Roach was probably one of the five greatest drummers in the annals of jazz, that he soloed far too much for my liking, but that he co-led a marvellous hard-bop quintet with the ill-starred Clifford Brown. So it was a strange choice in some respects, but maybe the cover intrigued me: three black civil rights protesters sitting warily at a bar surveyed by a white barman in a bleached white outfit with a black bow tie and the chilling look of someone who would shop any uppity 'coloured boys' to the Ku Klux Klan. Or maybe he was simply scared of the inevitable fracas to come.

The album was made in 1960, a time when, in the words of A. Philip Randolph, a revolution 'is unfurling in lunch counters, buses, libraries and schools... Masses of Negroes are marching onto the stage of history and demanding their freedom now!' Apart from being a musician who had served his apprenticeship in, among others, Charlie Parker's classic quintet of the late '40s, Max Roach was one of the most committed musicians of any genre to the cause of civil rights. This seemed to come as a surprise to Coleman Hawkins, who was recruited to play tenor sax on the album. Apparently, he was so intrigued by the suite that he would ask the leader, 'Did you really write this, Max?' Indeed he did, and in part with Oscar Brown jr., an archetypal politically active hipster of the time who was noted for putting (witty) words to such classic numbers as 'Afro Blue', 'Work Song', 'Watermelon Man' and Bobby Timmons' 'Dat Dere'.

Among the other notables featured on We Insist! were Michael Olatunji, the Nigerian percussionist, Booker Little, another brilliant but ill-starred trumpeter, and vocalist Abbey Lincoln, whom Roach would marry two years after the album's release. She, too, had never been a favourite of mine. On the records she made pre-1960, she seemed to lack an identifiable personality as a jazz vocalist. But here she sings throughout with the righteous rage and fire of a Nina Simone. 'I feel this,' she said of Freedom Now Suite, 'and I've also learned a lot from Max Roach in recent months about being me when I sing.'

So here she is being very much her on Belgian TV in 1964. It's a different group, but she, the consistently elegant Chicago-born tenor saxophonist, Clifford Jordan, and husband Max in particular are electrifying. There's no piano on the album, but here a pianist with the improbable name of Coleridge Perkinson starts things off conventionally before being rudely undercut by Roach's uncompromising opening outburst and Eddie Khan's mournful bowed bass. The effect is as unsettling as the bitter irony of Abbey Lincoln's quote from Cole Porter's 'Love For Sale', which seems almost to deride Jordan's lyrical obbligato that precedes it. And then we're into the song itself, or maybe 'chant' is the better word, with Lincoln singing with angry clarity to the sole accompaniment of her tambourine. 'Ain't but two things on my mind/Driva' Man and quittin' time...' At which point the band, and particularly Roach, take up the staccato beat and you realise, if you haven't already done so, that it's the rhythm of both the 'field holler' and the vicious lash of the 'cat o' nine tails'. Clifford Jordan then solos brilliantly over the same lacerating rhythm before ceding to Roach himself for what must be one of the simplest but most integral drum solos ever laid down. In the context of the number's theme, it serves as a stunning and chilling conclusion to a truly visceral number.

Listening to 'Driva' Man' over the years, I've often thought of the chain gang in Cool Hand Luke, overseen by the guard in Stetson hat and mirror shades. But his icy authority was nothing of course to the Driva' Man that Oscar Brown jr. wrote of: the brutal white overseer in slavery days, who would force women into sexual servitude and punish viciously any perceived indiscretion – and with double the ferocity in the case of an escapee brought back by one of the 'patrollers' that Abbey Lincoln sings of.

She and her husband stayed together until 1970, but both remained true to their artistic and political visions (even if Brown would leave the Communist party on deciding that he 'just to black to be red'). Abbey Lincoln managed to combine her civil rights activism and her music with an intermittent acting career (she had a role in Spike Lee's Mo' Better Blues, for example). She died in 2010 at 80, three years after her former husband, who married his lifelong pedagogic calling (he was professor of music for many years at the University of Massachusetts) to his ever-questing musical experimentations, including the writing of music for plays with the great American dramatist, Sam Shepard. One of the great elder statesmen of jazz, his career tailed off with the onset of dementia.  

Whether this example of their collaborative work is 'cool' in the sense that has guided my choices throughout, I don't know. It's hard to stay cool and detached in the face of so much barely contained anger and allied emotions. There's a remarkable version of 'Triptych' from the same album and the same Belgian TV broadcast, but it's almost too much to take, with Roach's rapid-fire drumming and Lincoln's agonised screaming suggesting the mayhem of the South African Sharpeville massacres. Cool or not, this live version of 'Driva' Man' is surely one of the most clever and compelling performances you're ever likely to find on the net.

Wednesday 28 February 2024

Mélanie De Biasio - 'Afro Blue'

'Afro Blue' has become such a standard of modern jazz that there are scores of versions out there in the ether: from congalero Mongo Santamaria's original to John Coltrane's celebrated 1963 recording to a stunning version by the late Philadelphian guitarist Monnette Sudler on her album Meeting Of The Spirits. This version, though, live at the annual Marciac jazz festival in south-west France, is as cool as a cucumber in Ray-Bans and simply mesmerising.

I only caught up with Mélanie De Biasio a year or so ago. I thought she was French. She's actually the daughter of a Belgian mother and an Italian father, born in Charleroi, a former centre of Belgium's coal mining industry, but now seemingly a modern, progressive city (so it would be unfair of me to mention – if memory serves me well – that it was once the site of some notorious paedophile ring). Not exclusively a jazz singer, she has toured with the unclassifiable American singer Eels and is a fan of Portishead. There is indeed something about her vocal style that recalls Beth Gibbons, as well as that most minimal of vocalists, the late Mark Hollis, once lead singer of Talk Talk. In fact, her riveting and singular singing voice apparently evolved serendipitously from a pulmonary infection that affected her ability to sing for a year. Which just goes to show how a creative artist can overcome setbacks and turn defeat into victory.

With her flute and sylph-like physique, she comes across as a kind of Pan figure on stage. Her lightness of foot and sinuous arm movements are not affectations, but those of a trained dancer. She learnt ballet it seems from age 3. Her flute playing is a welcome addition to the backing of piano, keyboards and drums, and enhances the dreamlike quality of this performance. You don’t quite know where it’s going at first, as she wanders lonely as a cloud, almost searching for a melody on the flute. But then the keyboard drone and the beautiful brushed drumming lay down the sheet of sound which her breathy vocal cuts through. Then, imperceptibly and fabulously, the acoustic piano adds to the equation and things come to a more vigorous simmer. She adds quotes on the flute from Coltrane’s version of ‘My Favourite Things’ to the main theme, so that the two melodies cohere organically. And as it threatens to build to a climax, it all quietens down again, waking us gently from our reverie. I awoke from mine to mouth the word ‘wow’. And wow and wow again.


Mélanie De Biasio has sometimes been labelled the Belgian Billie Holiday. While there’s something reminiscent of the way the latter quietly explores the words and feeling of songs like ‘Good Morning Heartache’ and ‘I Cover The Waterfront’, there’s very little about the Belgian singer’s approach to a song that suggests any more than a passing influence. To my ears, her sound is informed far more by Talk Talk’s fragile and delicate Spirit Of Eden album, or Mark Hollis’ even more fragile solo work. It’s intimate, sensuous music that seems to be all about exploring the space between the notes. If it weren’t so straightforward and intelligible, it could be the musical equivalent perhaps of quantum physics.

Harriet Gibsone’s Guardian review of the singer’s 2014 album, No Deal, puts her finger on it when she writes of her ‘transcendent songs that seem to suspend time.’ In this wonderful performance, Mélanie De Biasio stretches the four and a half minutes of the recorded version of ‘Afro Blue’ on her album Lilies to almost double that length. I was so spellbound, so transfixed, I wouldn’t have quibbled if she and her band had spun it out to three times more.

Saturday 20 January 2024

Charlie Hunter & Leon Parker - 'Mean Streak'

How dey do dat? How do two such laid-back musicians sound at the very least like a trio? Well, I suppose it's what happens when the world's coolest jazz guitarist teams up with the coolest and most tasteful of drummers.

Part of the answer to the conundrum is Hunter's custom-made eight-string Novak guitar, which allows him to pick out his remarkably phat bass lines while playing the melody simultaneously. Apparently Ralph Novak's guitar has special frets and separate signals for the guitar and bass elements. But it still has to be played, and the video allows us to study Hunter's remarkable technique, playing the bass lines with his thumb and fretting with the index finger of his left hand, while he plays the single notes and chords with the other four fingers of his right hand and frets with the other three free fingers of his left hand. That's the literal description, but it doesn't quite explain how his brain copes with the two disciplines at the same time, something which I suppose piano players have to do all the time, but which my scrambled brain finds hard to comprehend. My daughter would call it a brain-fff... (Shut yo mouth!).

The other part of the answer lies with Leon Parker, who is a rare creature in that he is a drummer and percussionist at one and the same time – rather more like a Latin-jazz drummer in that respect, someone like the esteemed Horacio 'El Negro' Hernández. Here he starts off their communion on congas before switching seamlessly to the kit drum, which he plays as if wanting to tickle its tom-tom rather than bash the living hell out of it. The left-hand rimshots combined with the right-hand cymbal-work when they start to really take off at around the minute-and-a-half mark is discretion itself. Soon after four minutes, with the guitarist comping the bejayzus out of his Novax, Parker launches into one of the most musical drum solos you'll ever hear this side of... I must stop beating on about Joe Morello's solo in 'Take Five'.


This meeting of Charlie Hunter and Leon Parker dates from a live appearance in 1999 on Aqui y Ajazz, a bilingual English/Spanish web/TV magazine curated, if that's the appropriate word, by singer Chiqui Rodriguez and dedicated to promoting jazz and other genres all over the world.

The pair of them only made one album as a duo – in the same year as this performance was recorded – but my, it's a good one: the appropriately entitled Duo is a mini monument to good taste. Parker stayed with the guitarist for Hunter's eponymous follow-up with a bigger group (for most of the tracks). But two albums together is probably the limit for a restless musician like Hunter. A native of the San Francisco area, his mother repaired guitars for a living, which presumably had an effect on young Charlie. He studied at Berkeley and took guitar lessons from the semi-legendary Joe Satriani. After honing his technique by busking in Paris, Hunter teamed up back home with his friend Michael Franti, aka Spearhead, in Franti's polemic group, The Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy, responsible for such gems as 'Television, The Drug of The Nation'.

He began his jazz career proper with Charlie Hunter Trio in 1993 before being snapped up by Blue Note for seven albums that concluded with Songs from the Analog Playground in 2001, which saw him collaborate with other Blue Note artists like Norah Jones and Kurt Elling. With more than 50 albums on his c.v., mainly under his own name and partly in joint ventures like T.J. Kirk, Groundtruther, Victoria Victoria, Hunter's latest project has seen him teaming up once more with the great jazz singer, Kurt Elling, as SuperBlue. Charlie Hunter certainly doesn't stand still.

By contrast, Leon Parker's discography is more like his drumming: less is more. He started playing the drums at age three, but unlike so many drummers he didn't seem to be bitten by the urge to make the kit bigger and better. Instead, he scaled things down to the extent of playing sets on just a bass drum, snare drum and cymbal. Had he been a prog-rocker, he'd have been laughed off stage. While Charlie Hunter was honing his craft on the streets of Paris, Leon Parker and his flautist wife spent 1989 playing throughout Spain and Portugal, so I guess you wouldn't want to carry around anything much more cumbersome than a cymbal.

Whatever the differences in approach, the two of them work beautifully together. Charlie Hunter said that what he looked for in a drummer was a 'perfect blend of the visceral and the intellectual,' and Leon Parker would seem to supply that in spades. It's a shame they only made two albums together, but perhaps they would have lost with over-familiarity that freshness and sparkle so evident here. The guitarist always quotes Joe Pass as his biggest influence on guitar, but what he and his drummer achieve on 'Mean Streak' and indeed the whole of Duo is something in the spirit of Kenny Burrell's after-hours masterpiece, Midnight Blue. When it comes to cool, you can't get much cooler than that.

Friday 15 December 2023

Art Blakey & The Jazz Messengers - 'A Night in Tunisia'

So far, I haven't shone my spotlight on a single drummer. It's not that I don't like drummers – they tend to be vital to the proceedings – but I don't like drum solos. Unlike children, a drummer should be seen and heard, yes, but not to the point where he or she dominates proceedings. The best drummers, in my book, are those who don't draw attention to themselves but just keep things ticking along unobtrusively: jazz drummers like Jack DeJohnette, Elvin Jones and Leon Parker; reggae-maestro Sly Dunbar, Afrobeat's co-creator Tony Allen, and the Brazilian stalwart of Azymuth, Ivan 'Mamao' Conti; funk-soul drummers Clyde Stubblefield, Earl Palmer and Al Jackson; Ringo Starr and Charlie Watts. All are ensconced in my own private Room of Fame. And the most musical drum solo in the whole wonderful world of jazz is still, I contend, Joe Morello's solo on Dave Brubeck's 'Take Five'.

You can't really say that Art Blakey was unobtrusive. He usually sat on a pedestal above the Jazz Messengers just to underline symbolically that they were his messengers. He also brought out an LP called The Big Beat, and his sure was big. There's no denying his importance, though. He was a great drummer and his Jazz Messengers were the equivalent of a Swiss finishing school for young ladies. So many future stars honed their skills under his direction that a list of alumni would go on forever. There's no denying either his ability to swing and to propel his quintets and sextets – or trios for that matter: he was one of Thelonious Monk's most sympathetic percussionists (perhaps because he started out as a self-taught pianist). Propel them he certainly did: with power and polyrhythm. I was lucky enough to catch him live at the North Sea Jazz Festival in 1985, albeit with a permutation of the Messengers that wasn't the most star-studded. He wasn't a big man, but my oh my he could make that kit resonate and he could keep going like a Duracell bunny. Much of the Messengers' repertoire was mid-to-up-tempo. If they threw in the odd ballad, one got the feeling it was because it was expected.

Because he helmed the Messengers for so long – from 1954, when Horace Silver co-founded the Messengers as a kind of musical co-operative, to 1990, mere months before his death – there are lots of live performances captured on video, with a wide range of combos. Ultimately, it was a very close call between this wonderful version of Dizzy Gillespie's '(A) Night in Tunisia' (or Tooneezya, as its composer would call it) and 'The Summit', a beautifully compact, near perfect performance, with great solos from three of what was arguably Blakey's finest formation, Wayne Shorter, Lee Morgan and pianist Bobby Timmons. Recorded live in Tokyo in 1961, it encapsulates what the Messengers were all about: quintessential 'hard bop' that featured tight but elastic unison playing, sparkling solos and an impeccable rhythm section.

Even though this 1958 performance live in Belgium has (the eminently capable saxophonist and very fine composer) Benny Golson in place of Wayne Shorter, I opted for this one because it more clearly and obviously illustrates just what a great drummer Blakey was. Egged on by Morgan and Timmons on cowbells, Blakey positively punishes his kit, both drums and cymbals, to the point where right at the end his ride cymbal just buckles under the onslaught. But don't let that give you the wrong impression: this is a piece, like Juan Tizol and Duke Ellington's 'Caravan', where the rhythm is fundamental to its whole ambience and character. It's a complex polyrhythm that Blakey lays down right from the start and his extended solo is a natural extension of that pattern, not something like so many drum solos tacked on as a chance to demonstrate what you can do. But great goshamighty, what Art Blakey can do on a fairly basic kit is quite astonishing. At one point, as his sticks cross, his arms become a veritable blur.

Benny Golson's solo demonstrates the pleasing and distinctive tone he got from his tenor, while Lee Morgan's is living proof that he was one of the most agile and fluid of all premier trumpeters. He made it look so easy. Pianist Bobby Timmons just does what's necessary here. Critics tend to point out the limitations of his soul-jazz piano style, but I've always loved his overt gospel influence. He also composed what was arguably Blakey's best-known number, 'Moanin'' (as well as 'Dat Dere' and 'This Here' for Cannonball Adderley's group). There are several versions of this available, including a 14-minute one from the same concert in Belgium – but the length suggests a little too much time allocated to the drums and Jymie Merritt's double bass. Enough said.

The classic Shorter/Morgan/Timmons/Merritt permutation broke up in 1961, to be replaced by what I would suggest was his second-finest outfit, the sextet of Shorter, trumpeter Freddie Hubbard, trombonist Curtis Fuller, pianist Cedar Walton and Reggie Workman on bass. No one outstayed his welcome in Art Blakey's finishing school. Changing the line-up and keeping it young and fresh 'keeps the mind active,' the leader suggested. In any case, no doubt most Messengers were keen to get cracking on their own careers. No doubt, too, that Blakey – like so band leaders – could be a hard task-master and a committed penny-pincher.

All those years behind the drums certainly didn't help Art Blakey's hearing – as one can imagine after watching this particular performance. It seems that he was quite deaf by the end of his career, but refused to wear a hearing aid because it supposedly threw his timing off and so relied on instinct and good vibrations. Former band members, though, claimed that his deafness was somewhat selective: he could hear bum notes and mistakes quite well enough in the best draconian James Brown manner, but didn't tend to hear complaints about the money he paid his Messengers.

Monday 20 November 2023

Errol Garner - 'Ain't Misbehavin''

The other evening, I went to see a concert pianist at the theatre in Brive play a repertoire mainly of pieces by the Brazilian composer, Heitor Villa-Lobos, and the Spanish composer, Manuel De Falla. Originally from Martinique, Wilhelm Latchoumia is based in France and teaches piano here and in Switzerland. He has accompanied various orchestras, won prestigious awards and toured around the world. He studied his instrument over many years and his technique was breathtaking to behold from my seat close to the stage. For the final piece by Villa-Lobos, 'Rudepoêma', he used sheet music for the first time, in the form of a kind of electronic tablet, which flashed up page after page of musical notation at the touch of a finger. I found the idea of following the notes on the screen with the speed at which his fingers were picking out complex patterns of notes quite simply mind-boggling.

The point is that Errol Garner, the popular Pittsburgh jazz pianist, famous among other things for 'Misty' (as requested by the psychopathic killer in Clint Eastwood's film) and the big-selling Concert By The Sea, had an equally extraordinary technique, but he couldn't read a note of music. He was entirely self-taught, which I find equally mind-boggling. How dey do dat? When answering questions why he had never learnt to read music, Garner replied famously and brilliantly, 'People don't come to watch me read.' Or words to that effect.

People certainly came to see him and/or bought his records. In terms of the affection he inspired in the public, he could probably be compared to Louis Armstrong and Fats Waller. In fact, while trying to find an authentically live video by the latter, I veered off onto this wonderful version of Waller's 'Honeysuckle Rose'. The affable (and famously silent) pianist, who usually performed solo or as here in trio format, takes the standard at a breakneck tempo right from the off. I love the introductory flourishes, typical of his mischievous habit of keeping both audience and band mates guessing what he was about to play, where he manages to confound his bass player and his drummer with false starts and misleading embellishments – so much so that his perennial bassist Eddie Calhoun just opens his hands at one point in a gesture of perplexity. Not that this stopped him and drummer Kelly Martin from slipping seamlessly into their stride at just the right moment. 'Stride' being the operative word here. Garner developed his own instantly recognisable style, but if it was rooted in anything it was probably the stride style of the 1930s associated with the likes of Fats Waller, Willie 'The Lion' Smith, James P. Johnson and, to a lesser extent, his fellow Pittsburghian, Earl Hines. Anyone wanting to understand what stride was all about just needs to focus intently on what Garner does for about a minute from the 3:05 mark on this video.

As for that signature style, most lovers of jazz piano can recognise Garner within a few seconds, but trying to describe what he does is, certainly for a non-playing dumbkopf like me, rather more difficult. As evident here, he could do extraordinary things in terms of tempo: the idea that you can slow down the left hand while speeding up the right or vice versa, for example, utterly confounds my innate lack of co-ordination. Apparently, he would enhance the rhythmic tension he could create by his right hand playing slightly behind the steady beat of his left by accelerating and decelerating the right-hand beat, a device nicknamed the 'Russian Dragon'. I couldn't tell you why. Technicalities aside, one thing was quite sure: Errol Garner could swing like a baaad mother... (shut yo mouth!) with apparent effortless ease. As the pianist modestly contended, 'Mine is just a gift I was born with.'


Allegedly, the great Art Tatum warned the young Canadian pretender to his throne, Oscar Peterson, to 'watch out for the small man.' Garner sure was small; at 5 feet two inches he was taller than the little French giant, Michel Petrucciani, but the eagle-eyed will have noticed that the piano stool he sits on here has been elevated by phone books or something similar. Small but radiant. The great bass player, Ray Brown, called him 'the happy man'. He seemed to play with a constant smile on his face, which inevitably brought smiles to the faces of his audience. As Woody Allen, one of his famous admirers, suggests: 'Everything Garner plays becomes optimistic and pleasurable.' An astonishing technique rooted in rhythm and melody along with a genial personality, it's not surprising that he was such a crowd-pleaser. Brian Priestley, co-author of Jazz: The Essential Companion, put it very nicely: 'He merely found the way to people's hearts and never lost it.'