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.

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.'

 

Pat Martino Trio with John Scofield - 'Sunny'

 

There are few things better in life than a good guitar/organ/drums trio. It's as far back to basics as the piano/bass/drums format but, generally speaking, there's less artifice and more groove. Wes Montgomery cut some great sides with Melvin Rhyne and Grant Green made records for Blue Note with 'Baby Face' Willette, 'Big' John Patton and Larry Young without the addition of his customary guest saxophonist. In his liner notes to his At Duc des Lombards live album, Christian Escoudé, the fine French guitarist, talks of 'that special sound that's born when the guitar gets together with the Hammon organ and the drums.' '

However, if there's one thing better in life, it's when two guitarists go at it hammer and plectrum in this format – particularly guitarists of the calibre of Pat Martino and John Scofield. This one's a 14-minute fret-board festival, with the two contemporaries trading scintillating licks and solos in styles that are both contrasting and complementary.

Not knowing my way around the mighty Hammond B3, I'm not really au fait with the bass-pedal business. Suffice to say that Joey DeFrancesco weighs in and adds plenty of heft to the proceedings, in more ways than one. The Philadelphian drummer, Byron Landham – who worked with another notable organist, Shirley Scott, in addition to his role as Joey DeFrancesco's drummer of choice – is near perfect for this type of soul-jazz, keeping it simple and driving the players along without ever drawing unnecessary attention to himself. Swing it, brother, swing!

Since this was recorded at the Umbria Jazz Festival in 2002, both Pat Martino and Joey DeFrancesco have shuffled off to a celestial Smalls Paradise. The organist, who played with Van Morrison and a host of golden others, went way too soon: a heart attack carried him off in 2022 in his early 50s. Well, you know what they say about cholesterol. Pat Martino died a year earlier. George Benson tells a tale of feeling like the new whiz-kid in the big city – until he wanders into Smalls and hears a young Martino. 'If this is a sample of what New York is like, I'm getting out of here!' Pat Martino made it to 77, but had a tough time of it latterly (with a chronic respiratory problem, which stopped him performing). In his middle years, however, he had to re-learn how to play the guitar from scratch after surgery removed part of his brain following a near-fatal cerebral haemorrhage left him with total amnesia. He has talked and written eloquently and fascinatingly about his musical re-education and the challenge of focusing on the present rather than the past. The mind-boggling result of that daunting re-education is here for all to stay.

But enough already about illness, death and other morbid matters. Let's focus on the music, because these 14 minutes fly by in a whirl of sheer joyful excitement. For a start, there's the number they chose: 'Sunny' was written by the country-soul singer-songwriter, Bobby Hebb, who penned the one smash hit for which he will be ever remembered as a kind of cathartic antidote, some have suggested, to the murder of JFK, swiftly followed by that of his brother. Apparently, he took comfort by immersing himself in one of my favourite big band jazz albums, Gerald Wilson's You Better Believe It! It's an upbeat, up-tempo record, but it's hard to see the link with the unapologetic pop of 'Sunny'. The song has subsequently served jazz artists like Billy Taylor, in addition to the ever-wonderful Georgie Fame and, mirabile dictu, the never-wonderful Boney M.! When it came out in 1966, 'Sunny' created sufficient furore in the UK and US charts to earn Hebb a slot touring with The Beatles that year.

The dapper Martino kicks things off by stating the theme in a scratchy, funky style before taking the first solo. It's swift, agile and as clean as his jacket. 'Great tone, great articulation,' as George Benson suggests. He gets a wry smile of admiration from Scofield when a lightning-tempo vamp makes you wonder whether the needle's stuck. 'Sco' then takes the baton, and his trademark slightly 'bent' electric sound draws a reciprocal glance of admiration from Martino. Good as the two solos are, things really start to smoke when DeFrancesco lets rips on the Hammond. Spurred on by Landham's relentless on-the-money drumming, Pat Martino then takes over again, playing a stylistic combination of Wes Montgomery's block chords and Grant Green's single-note picking. From the ten-minute mark, the two guitarists trade licks in the way that used to thrill me as a youth, listening and playing along on lead tennis racquet to John Cipollina and Gary Duncan of Quicksilver Messenger Service live at the Fillmore. Like a pair of gun slingers, the two jazz guitarists shoot it out on stage until the big climactic wind-down. Where did those 14 minutes just go?

 

Having graduated summa cum laude from the Miles Davis School of tough electric jazz in the first half of the '80s, John Scofield is thankfully still with us. Looking rather more grizzled these days, he tours half the year as a self-proclaimed 'road dog' and sits in with a bewildering range of musicians (often anchored by the brilliant drummer, Bill Stewart). He has made a ridiculous number of albums, both in his own name and those of significant others, including my personal favourite, That's What I Say, his tribute to Ray Charles – which is indicative of his musical breadth. Inside Scofield, a film narrated by the master guitarist himself came out at the back end of 2022. It's on my wish-list, along with what promises to be a fascinating 'brain mystery', Martino Unstrung.

Charles Mingus - 'Peggy's Blue Skylight'

Charles Mingus is a legend in this household. So much so that my daughter – not I, mark you – named the larger of our two cats Mingus. The jazz titan was a large character in every sense of the word. One commentator talks of having seen him live twice: 'He had an aura about him, like he was 50 feet tall, a force of nature.' There was something very apt, too, in the fact that, after starting off on the trombone and cello, he settled on the double bass. He also played another outsized instrument well enough to justify an entire solo album: Mingus Plays Piano.

A big man with big appetites, Mingus had a prickly personality to say the least. He had a fearsome temper: one of the most notorious of several incidents throughout his career was his response to heckling at the Five Spot club in New York by smashing his double bass, said to be worth around $20,000 – which makes Pete Townshend's guitar wrecks seem like child's play. In Thomas Reichman's 1968 documentary, he is seen firing a rifle at the ceiling of the apartment from which he is to be evicted. Perhaps most notoriously of all, in a fit of pique he punched his favourite trumpet player, Jimmy Knepper. He broke Knepper's tooth, which ruined the trombonist's embouchure. Like Miles Davis and Frank Zappa, though, two other 'difficult' personalities, Mingus inspired considerable loyalty. Significantly, Jimmy Knepper would go on to lead the tribute band, Mingus Dynasty, after the death of his former troubled leader.

Blessed or cursed with an ego commensurate with his temper, Mingus was also keenly aware of jazz history and his place in it. Some of his compositions referenced giants like Jelly Roll Morton, Fats Waller, Charlie Parker, Lester Young and Duke Ellington. Before moving from Los Angeles to New York as a young man to seek fame and reputation, he would sometimes call himself 'Baron' Mingus, more than a tacit nod to the duke who influenced him more than any other. He played briefly with Ellington and earned the distinction of being one of the few musicians fired by the Duke himself – for violent conduct. He would go on to make Money Jungle with his idol and frequently performed the Duke's virtual theme-song, 'Take the A-Train'. It's generally acknowledged that if Duke Ellington was the greatest jazz composer of them all, Mingus and Monk and possibly Wayne Shorter ran him close.

There's a lot of choice on YouTube, as befits someone so revered. Too much choice. In the end it boiled down to one between this version of 'Peggy's Blue Skylight' and an elongated version of the song for which Mingus is arguably best known, 'Goodbye Pork Pie Hat', his elegy to Lester Young originally recorded on what, for me, is still the finest of his top-notch albums, Mingus Ah Um. The former video features what Mingus' almost ever-present drummer, Dannie Richmond, dubbed the 'First Band In Jazz', while the latter features what was in his opinion 'something like the Second Band.' It's recorded at the Montreux Jazz Festival in 1975, with the 'second' band of Mingus, Richmond, pianist Don Pullen, tenor saxophonist George Adams and trumpeter Jack Walrath. Responsible for the celebrated pair of Changes albums for Atlantic in 1974, the band here is augmented by baritone saxophonist Gerry Mulligan and, six years after sitting in with Les McCann and Eddie Harris at the same festival, trumpeter Benny Bailey.

The guest trumpeter actually gets two solos, the first un-muted and the second muted. Both seem to earn the admiration of the sometimes stern and even irascible Gerry Mulligan, whose expressions are a veritable picture. There's a nice restrained solo from pianist Don Pullen, who had a propensity for firing off wild atonal scurries across the keyboard in the manner of Cecil Taylor. And there's a splendid moment around the 10-minute mark when Adams and Walrath approach the microphone seemingly for the finale, only to step back again when the leader muscles in for a solo on the double bass. Back off fellas, it's my turn!

It's a strong contender. Nevertheless, there's something a little ragged about the proceedings, perhaps because of the presence of the two 'outsiders'. So I keep coming back to the 1964 performance of 'Peggy's Blue Skylight'. It's actually played by a quintet and not a sextet as labelled: trumpeter Johnny Coles, who accompanied the 'First Band in Jazz' on its extensive European tour that year, actually suffered a stomach rupture on stage just a couple of days previously as an after-effect of a recent operation. So he had to sit out the gig – at the American Hospital in Neuilly. A great shame for the trumpeter and rather a shame for us, the audience. As it is, it's almost perfect in every way: it's a tight, beautifully self-contained rendition that says all that it needs to say at just under six minutes. There's not a discernible bum note throughout and a pair of exceptional solos in Jaki Byard's on the piano and Eric Dolphy's on the alto sax.

There's a wonderful shot of Dolphy looking very thoughtful in his shades during Byard's solo. It's a poignant close-up, too, as Dolphy would die later that year while still in Europe at the age of just 36, as a result of uraemia and/or undiagnosed diabetes. His death would have a considerable impact on Mingus' ever-fragile state of mind. Personally, I much prefer Dolphy on flute or bass clarinet; I find his alto sax tone to be sharp and strident, harsher even than Jackie McLean's. While the warmth of Johnny Coles' trumpet is missed in the ensemble passages, his alto does however work nicely in tandem with Clifford Jordan's throaty tenor, and his solo is a thing of what Thelonious Monk might have called 'ugly beauty'. It's not smooth and elegant in the manner of Benny Carter or Johnny Hodges or Paul Desmond, perhaps, but – as one commentator puts it very astutely – it's 'like a message in mirror image from another world.'

The leader himself, the so-called 'Angry Man of Jazz', looks happy, relaxed and remarkably slender. Jaki Byard described Mingus as a 'foodaholic'. He was given to periodic dieting and he told an interviewer in 1964 (apparently while ordering a second steak) that he 'lost ninety pounds in weight through exercise and less eating.' His bass playing here is both nimble and suitably hefty.

This appears to be a live performance in some kind of recording studio. There are several albums that resulted from the European tour, and 'Peggy's Blue Skylight' appears on most of them. It was originally scheduled to be part of Atlantic's Oh Yeah, on which Mingus plays piano throughout, but that version was pulled from the album and had to wait for the expanded deluxe CD reissue. So although it was a staple of Mingus' live performances, the number's not as well known by the record-buying public as, say, 'Pork Pie Hat' or 'Moanin'' or 'Better Git It In Your Soul'.

There's an interesting if slightly shambolic version of the last named, by the way, recorded at the Antibes jazz festival in 1960, with Mingus on piano, Dannie Richmond in a natty light-coloured suit beating hell out of the drums, and a blank black screen for the first three minutes. From the same festival, there's a version of 'I'll Remember April' with some great footage of Bud Powell guesting on piano. He plays fluently if a little repetitively, but it's more about Powell than Mingus. There is, too, a fabulous performance of 'Flowers For A Lady' recorded at the Umbria Jazz Festival in 1974, with a blistering tenor solo by George Adams and Don Pullen doing his full-on Cecil Taylor bit, but sadly it looks as if the camera lens has a cataract.

Not quite five years later, not long after an abortive collaboration with Joni Mitchell on a musical version of T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets that would metamorphose into the singer's Mingus tribute album, and mere months after a standing ovation and a presidential embrace from Jimmy Carter at an all-star concert at the White House reduced him to tears, Mingus died in Mexico of Lou Gehrig's disease, an invalid in a wheelchair.

According to the writer Toby Litt, Mingus' controversial autobiography, Beneath The Underdog, was 'that of a profoundly troubled, often bitter man who never feels loved enough but constantly undermines those loves offered to him.' A creative genius, then, by any other description. Not something you could call our cat.

Jaga Jazzist - 'Day/Another Day'

If I were to reveal that 'I Could Have Killed Him in the Sauna' came a close second to my chosen one, you could take a pretty good stab as to the provenance of this approximately ten-piece group. They certainly were a dectet at the time of their first album to be issued outside their native Norway: 2002's A Livingroom Hush, which came out on Ninja Tune to some serious critical acclaim. The NME, for example, called it 'a brilliant record reminiscent of Tortoise in their evening wear.' The Independent on Sunday considered it 'a cohesive mixture of Herbie Hancock's 1970s keyboards excursions, Tortoise and Stereolab's post-rock guitar blues.' Most concisely and memorably, Sleaze Nation likened the group's music to 'Charles Mingus with Aphex Twin up his arse.' BBC listeners named it 'Jazz Albumof the Year'.

The group themselves cite John Coltrane, Robert Wyatt, Soft Machine and Talk Talk among other influences. All of which suggests how tricky – and probably pointless – it is to label their quirky, distinctive brand of music. Based on my own listening, since finding the follow-up to Livingroom, the brilliant The Stix, going for a solitary euro in a sale way back in the noughties, I would plump for 'prog-jazz'. Without taking up an entire side of an LP or engaging in the wearisome, self-indulgent longueurs of Yes, Van der Graaf Generator and others of that kidney, it's music that eschews conventional structures for something that stretches and evolves even within the framework of a single four-minute number, creating tension as it switches time signatures and builds up to premature climaxes before subsiding into passages of serene beauty: a kind of sonic sketch, perhaps, of the dramatic Norwegian coastline. There's more than a hint of Frank Zappa at his most symphonic on albums like The Grand Wazoo or numbers like 'Son of Mr. Green Genes'. The instrumentation is similarly idiosyncratic: vibes, marimba, alto flute, baritone sax, trombone, trumpet, tuba, for example, harmonise with guitars and electronic keyboards. It's music, in other words, that's bursting with ideas and creativity.

Most of Jaga Jazzist's repertoire seems to be composed by the brothers Horntveth: exuberant drummer and 'gentle giant' Martin, and especially multi-instrumentalist Lars, whose solo album Pooka is as good if not better than The Stix. 'Day' is Martin's piece, while 'Another Day' is Lars's, as is the wonderfully entitled 'I Could Have Killed Him in the Sauna' – and all three numbers appear on The Stix.

One of the most impressive and surprising thing about the live performances on YouTube is just how well they translate the intricacy of the studio sound to the context of a concert: a close but not literal translation, just different enough to allow for the unexpected. Like Zappa's live performances, there's room for a certain amount of improvisation, but only within a tight and well-rehearsed framework. There's a heart-stopping moment around the 1 minute 50 seconds mark, for example, where everything appears to have stopped abruptly, as if someone has played a bum note so startling that they want to abandon ship and begin again, only for the music to shift suddenly up a gear into one of their trademark soaring crescendos, which seems visibly to pump adrenaline into the whole crew, before subsiding once more. Then, a single trumpet blast splits the two numbers and a flute carries the melody of 'Another Day', before the trumpet again shifts direction with the nearest thing to a conventional jazz solo. After a couple of sublime key changes, we end not with a bang but with a trumpet's whimper. Et voilà! Seven exhilarating minutes of gorgeous melodic passages married to urgent, infectious rhythm.

I lost touch with the band after finding A Livingroom Hush for a similar knock-down price. I caught up with them again not long after Live With Britten Sinfonia came out in 2013, but found that a full orchestra rather swamped what I had found so unique and compelling about their music. Studio albums either side of it have apparently been more rock-oriented, emphasising the progressive elements at the expense of the jazz. In an interview, Martin Horntveth explained that the band toured a lot after releasing Livingroom and some of the original members quit the band around 2005 when they decided to take a break from the routine. Sister Line on tuba and a few of the other long-timers are still with them, playing music that Martin describes as 'complex, sometimes corny, sometimes beautiful, but most of all fun-to-play.' Fun to play and fun to watch.