James Carter - 'I Wonder Where Our Love Has Gone'

Although you could put up a very strong case in its favour, even if James Carter weren’t the finest saxophonist of his generation, he’s undeniably the snappiest dresser. I saw him perform at the little local annual jazz festival in Souillac on the Lot/Dordogne border back in the year 2000 or 2001, whenever he was pushing his tribute to Django Reinhardt, Chasin’ The Gypsy. He was on top form and looked the business that night in either the loud checked suit on the back cover of the album or something equally lurid. My friend, who wasn’t then and probably still isn’t really into jazz, was knocked out by the saxophonist. Admittedly, James treated his audience to some fiery rhythm & blues à la Big Jay McNeely in his encore, but it was a testimony to his ability as a jazzman to preach to the unconverted.

My introduction to James Carter came with a promotional cassette copy of his marvellous third solo album, The Real Quietstorm – one of the finest jazz albums of the 1990s in my ‘umble. He sports another million-dollar suit on its cover (as well as a tie that would give Cab Calloway a run for his money), but more to the point the nine numbers confirm how equally comfortable he was and is with ballads and with up-tempo numbers, and with the baritone, tenor, alto and soprano saxes as well as the bass flute and the wonderful velvety bass clarinet, an instrument that’s reputedly very difficult to play (as well as afford). It sounds like a recipe for a slightly annoying showcase for his considerable talents, but never comes over thus. It’s simply that he was young and spirited and just so darn good on whatever he picks up to play.

Living in an age where anyone in the audience can record a performance on their phone, you are spoilt for choice of ‘JC in The House’ on YouTube: JC in the context of an organ trio, showing himself to be the inheritor of Eddie ‘Lockjaw’ Davis’s mantle; JC duelling tenors with his closest contemporary rival, Joshua Redman; JC with a big band; JC the lush balladeer. In the end, I plumped for the latter – and in particular two performances: one at the Marciac Jazz Festival in 2016 as part of an organ trio, which would have done quite nicely had it not been for the other: effectively a 7½-minute solo in which he turns his tenor into what Don Byas dubbed a ‘sexophone’. It’s lush rhapsodic stuff that makes your toes curl and the hairs on the back of your neck stand on edge. Not yet 30, it is a precocious and virtuoso performance. Commentators object to ‘all that popping and slapping crap,’ but what little there is could be put down to youthful exuberance. Without a certain element of show-boating, there wouldn’t be that magical moment just before the end when someone in the audience whistles and Carter responds instantaneously with a high note and a wry smirk.

It’s no accident that among the vintage saxophones Carter owns is one that once belonged to Don Byas. Even as a young tyro, Carter always respectfully acknowledged his debt to the elders. If he’s anyone’s heir apparent, it’s probably the man from Muskogee’s, although there’s more than a suggestion sometimes of Ben Webster, whom he played in Robert Altman’s 1996 film, Kansas City. Here he is then, performing with extraordinary élan ‘I Wonder Where Our Love Has Gone’, written by the jump-blues pianist and band leader Buddy Johnson, who also wrote the immortal ‘Since I Fell For You’. Because the spotlight is so much on Carter himself, it’s very difficult to identify who’s with him in the band, but given that it’s 1997, it could well be his regular band of Craig Taborn on piano, Jaribu Shahid on bass and Tami Tabbal on drums.

The Detroit-born saxophonist has matured nicely since his more exuberant youth. He has brought out umpteen albums under his own name and contributed to umpteen more – playing majestically, for example, on pianist Cyrus Chestnut’s eponymous album and, somewhat surprisingly, Madeleine Peyroux’s Dreamland. Like Chick Corea, he’s always ready to form genre-specific bands to focus on the different aspects of music that he loves: his Elektric Outlet, for example, probably helps to satisfy his ‘frustrated guitarist’ urge. His organ trio has released a Live From Newport Jazz album on Blue Note, still the jazz musician’s stamp of approval. With so much talent to spare, it’s hardly surprising that he’s not content to sit still and blow permutations on the same theme. The New York Times has described him as ‘one of the most charismatic and powerful soloists in jazz’, and it’s the power allied to the loving finesse of this performance that makes it in my book so outstanding. Whether he’s playing the huge, cumbersome bass sax (as he does on Chasin’ The Gypsy) or the baritone, tenor, alto or soprano saxophones, he does it with such confidence and panache that it’s hard not to agree with the Washington Post’s verdict that ‘to hear saxophonist James Carter is to be blown away.’

 

Chet Baker & Stan Getz - 'Just Friends'

I’m fond of the word ‘raddled’: it’s almost an onomatopoeic way to describe Chet Baker’s shocking physical dilapidation that resulted from hard drugs and the jazz musician’s ruinous lifestyle. For a few years, before his 1950s poster-boy good looks had been indelibly defaced, he was even touted as the James Dean of jazz. In fact, both Chet Baker and Stan Getz, alumni of the so-called ‘cool school’ of American West Coast jazz, could have been poster boys for a ‘Don’t Do Drugs’ campaign. At least it didn’t show so much on the saxophonist’s face, although the effect of all those narcotics seems to have compromised his taste in shirts and ties.

Both Baker and Getz spent periods in a kind of self-imposed exile in Europe – which is where we find them in 1983, in Stockholm, the subject of a number from the same concert that I was very tempted to choose. In the end, on balance, I plumped for this version of a song that seems tailor-made for the trumpeter, if purely because… he plays and he sings! With Chesney Baker jr. you can’t really have one without the other. Although his trumpet playing won music press awards in the ‘50s when his star was in its ascendancy, it was often subsequently criticised for its lack of adventure and the slavish influence of early Miles Davis (before his trademark sound was forever pinched by the Harmon mute}. I wouldn’t go quite as far as one commentator who suggests that ‘the man was a trumpet’, but I do love his sound for its simplicity, its purity of tone and its air of bittersweet romance that complemented so beautifully his strange, haunting, androgynous voice. It was (once) the voice of an angel – but an angel on the verge of a fall. The (shamefully) anonymous writer of the fine sleeve notes for my boxed set of his American studio recordings from 1952-to 1955, the year when he took himself off to Europe and embarked on the road to ruin, puts it beautifully: ‘Chet Baker’s sound is the sigh of total despair.’

The despair in question was both that of others, especially women, who had any regular dealings with him, and his own. An apparent death wish within Baker jr., the son of a feckless, violent father, seemed to prevent him from curbing a promiscuous appetite for women, narcotics and the demon drink despite frequent reminders of the consequences. Photographer Bruce Weber’s beautiful elegiac documentary Let’s Get Lost paints an unforgettable portrait of someone as charming and as exasperating as he was downright mean. It’s hard to equate the plaintive beauty of the soundtrack with the stories told about him, but then isn’t that often the way with life’s most driven artists? It was ever thus. Jonathan Richman audaciously rhymed ‘Pablo Picasso’ and ‘asshole’ in the Modern Lovers’ quirky song about the Spanish Lothario. Baker managed royally to piss off fellow junky Gerry Mulligan, in whose ground-breaking piano-less quartet he first really rose to fame, and early appearances with Stan Getz were coloured by the mutual jealousy of two paranoid druggies. Having garnered acclaim and controversy in equal measure, and as if fleeing his demons, the so-called 'white Miles' set sail for Europe in 1955 at the age of 26. Like many an American jazz musician, Paris was Chet's first stop. He made a series of recordings there for Eddie Barclay’s eponymous label, but even though he continued to play and record it was downhill all the way. Based back and forth between Europe and the U.S., he was jailed twice, expelled from Germany and the U.K. for drugs-related reasons and beaten up so badly that he lost sufficient teeth to ruin his embouchure. After a spell on welfare and various comebacks, he fell to his death from his Amsterdam hotel in 1988. Or was he pushed? Hard drugs were found in his room, but his death was ruled an accident and remains a mystery – as does the conundrum of why so many talented artists end up destroying themselves.

So here are the two old adversaries back together again, performing a number that Baker would replay in a moving concert appearance at Ronnie Scott’s three years later in the company of Van Morrison and Elvis Costello. In Stockholm, support comes in the form of Getz’s regular drummer Victor Lewis, his occasional pianist Jim McNeely and celebrated bass player, George Mraz. Given Baker’s signature love of melody and mellow music, he often played the flugelhorn in later years, but here he reverts to the trumpet and a style that stayed simple and clear throughout the decades. He opens and closes the performance by singing verses of the song, the first time embellished by some fairly perfunctory scatting. While his voice is still fairly unique, it is by then as raddled by drugs and cigarettes as his facial features and redolent of a distinct world-weariness. Compare and contrast… his voice here with the truly extraordinary voice of this beautifully restored footage from nearly 20 years earlier of Baker singing Jules Styne and Sammy Cahn’s ‘Time After Time’. It’s like comparing Joni Mitchell’s original rendition of ‘Both Sides Now’ with the version she recorded on her year 2000 album of the same name – or Marianne Faithfull’s ‘As Time Goes By’ with just about anything on, say, Broken English. Cigarette packets should also carry a health warning for vocalists.

In many ways, the saxophone sound of Stan Getz is the ideal foil for Baker’s mellow trumpet. Getz fleshes out the middle of the song with a typically clean, clear-as-a-bell solo, a sound that initially owed more to the mellow school of Lester Young than to the reedier, raspier school of Coleman Hawkins. It was fashioned in Woody Herman’s ‘Four Brothers’ saxophone section, where his famous solo on ‘Early Autumn’ served notice to the world of what was to come. By the time he eventually earned the nickname of ‘The Sound’, it had acquired slightly more of a metallic heft: the evolution of a featherweight into a middleweight, perhaps. Anyway, it's high time to watch the two skin-deep romantics in tandem…

Like Chet Baker, Stan Getz was a highly flawed human being, but his career followed a somewhat different trajectory. Despite the early acclaim for his work in big bands, the 1950s were not the happiest decade for the saxophonist. He was arrested and jailed for a robbery that could pay for his heroin habit, and his first marriage – to a fellow addict – ended with three displaced children and a divorce. Disenchanted with the American jazz scene, he moved to Copenhagen in 1958 for three years. However, his career really took off soon after his return: with the bossa nova craze that he helped to popularise with albums like Jazz Samba and Getz/Gilberto. Although it proved a passing phase, he went on to record some of his finest albums – often in the company of pianist Kenny Barron – towards the end of his career. Meanwhile, however, his addictions re-surfaced, there were a couple of illegal firearm incidents and his second marriage disintegrated. No wonder his fellow Woody Herman ‘Brother’, Zoot Sims, famously described Getz as ‘a nice bunch of guys’. He died in 1991, maybe unsurprisingly, of liver cancer. Damningly, when rumours circulated about a heart operation, his former collaborator, trombonist Bob Brookmeyer, questioned whether Getz had a heart to operate on.

It’s a funny thing: how often artists, musicians and film-makers whose work one reveres turn out to be shites. Here are two more: two troubled souls who purveyed some of the most romantic jazz in the history of the genre.

 

Sonny Rollins - 'Alfie's Theme'

The film Alfie was the epitome of Sixties cool. You could argue that this video of Sonny Rollins and band playing 'Alfie's Theme' in Norway isn't necessarily the coolest you could find on YouTube, but it's certainly one of the most unusual. It features the bizarre spectacle of Rufus Harley in full North African garb playing the bagpipes. Not surprisingly, Harley was probably the only piper known for his contributions to jazz music. You can't imagine too many record producers suggesting 'What we need on this one is some Scottish bagpipes. Someone give Rufus Harley a call.' The piper had the good sense to double on soprano sax. He harmonises with Rollins on his other instrument towards the end of this interpretation of one of the great tenor saxophonist's best known and loved numbers. Compare and contrast to Harley's bagpipe solo, which follows at around the 3½-minute mark Rollins' opening improvisation.

It's quite a brief, concise improvisation – which is one reason I chose this video. At the time of writing, Walter Theodore 'Sonny' Rollins is retired, which is hardly surprising in view of his 94 years. It's undeniable that he is the greatest living saxophonist, and there won't be many who would argue that he will probably go down as one of the five greatest and most influential horn-men in the annals of jazz. But he was more of an improviser than a tunesmith, given to long and winding improvisations of such an all-consuming nature that in one performance, he took a jump in mid-solo-flight, broke his heel and, like a beached leviathan, carried on blowing on his back. Depending on your appreciation and/or tolerance, they could be breathtaking or verging on plain boring – particularly in the context of a piano-or-guitar-less trio. After some of his great recordings of the '50s, both as a leader and as a cohort of Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk and others, he recorded Way Out West (in L.A.) in a trio format, introducing a technique called (I am informed) 'strolling', with which he solos over just bass and drums. Great for tenor sax students and enthusiasts, but just a little too cool for my tastes. I crave the warmth and harmony of a guitar or piano.

Many, many years ago, I watched a fascinating documentary that revealed just how devoted Rollins was to the art of improvisation. The full-length film focused on Rollins' two-year sabbatical when he effectively dropped out to spend his time practising on the Williamsburg bridge in New York for hours at a time. He re-surfaced in 1962 with an album he called The Bridge in the company of his perennial bassist Bob Cranshaw (seen on this video on electric bass), Monk's drummer of choice throughout the '60s, Ben Riley, and guitarist Jim Hall. You might find the film somewhere on YouTube, but this brief video tells the story. It marked me and not long after I found the album disguised as one of the I Grandi del Jazz reissues. Not surprisingly, therefore, I was very tempted to choose this 10-minute-long rendition of 'If Ever I Would Leave You' by the same band. Dressed up for telly in dinner jackets and propelled by the trendy bossa nova rhythm supplied by Messrs. Cranshaw and Riley, Rollins and Hall synchronise and solo beautifully, so it's all you could really wish for in a Sonny Rollins performance – but it is broken up rather jarringly by a few words from Jazz Casual's presenter, Ralph J. Gleason. And where are the bagpipes? So this one just shades it. It's introduced informatively by the Jazz Video Guy and the music starts just after the two-minute mark.

The concert took place in 1975, a year after The Cutting Edge, recorded in Montreux with virtually the same band, but with Stanley Cowell on piano and James Mtume on congas and with Rufus Harley only on the closing 'Swing Low, Sweet Chariot'. It was one of a series of albums recorded in that decade when Rollins in particular and jazz in general were at a low ebb. Without Miles Davis's taste for innovation, the great saxophonist scratched around for an audience, even flirting with disco on numbers like 'Disco Monk', as incongruous a notion as, say, Charlie Parker playing in David Letterman's show band. But by sticking to his guns, Rollins found that – like vinyl records – what goes around comes around again. The great improviser continued to solo and revelled in his latter-day role as an elder statesman. If you've still got the appetite for more, here he is as a spritely octogenarian (no longer, though, given to taking running jumps in mid-solo) playing with gusto one of his perennial favourites, 'Don't Stop the Carnival'.

My mother gave me the middle name Theodore because, for some strange reason, she was very taken with the big-game-slaying, warmongering American president, Theodore Roosevelt. I am very happy, though, sharing it with a jazz legend.

 

Cassandra Wilson - 'Harvest Moon'

Quite apart from a beautiful sultry voice that could turn raw molasses into honey, there are at least two ways at least in which Cassandra Wilson stands out from the crowd of female jazz singers: her quirky repertoire of songs, and the instrumentation she uses to back herself. On the album from which 'Harvest Moon' is taken, New Moon Daughter, one of a string of alluring albums she made for Blue Note around the turn of the last century, she tackles the song that many would associate with Billie Holiday, 'Strange Fruit', U2's 'Love Is Blindness', Son House's 'Death Letter', Hank Williams' 'I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry', and –for heaven's sake – the song that children of the Sixties would singalongaMonkees, 'Last Train To Clarksville'. In my prog-rock phase, I bought Glen Campbell's 'Wichita Lineman' as a guilty pleasure that I would never reveal to friends. Cassandra Wilson turns that Jim Webb song into something truly sublime on Belly Of The Sun.

Hitched to her voice, it's an unusual instrumentation, far more suited in my mind to her timbre and phrasing than earlier electric piano/guitar/bass/drums formats, that renders all these covers so singular and memorable. Her backing musicians use instruments like a banjo, National steel and resonator guitars, steel pans and all kinds of percussion supplements to a standard drum kit. They combine to give her music a flavour of jazz marinated in the blues and simmered in the indigenous music of her native deep South and the Caribbean.

So here's 'Harvest Moon', then, which has long been my favourite Neil Young song. Cassandra Wilson respects the melody – and anything quite so beautiful should really be sacrosanct – but breaks up the song with a long acoustic guitar intro and by slowing it down rhythmically. In the process, she makes it a little less of a love song and gives it more of the crepuscular ambience of a hot summer's evening. If the American feminist author Marge Piercy is right in titling one of her books The Moon Is Always Female, Cassandra Wilson's version contributes compelling evidence.

Were I not so much of a sentimental old fool, I might have picked her mesmerising version of Son House's poignant classic, 'Death Letter'. I'd certainly suggest it for anyone who likes their jazz is little less pretty and rather more visceral. Judging by the camera angle and the outfits on display, I'd suggest that the undated performance of the Neil Young number comes from the same Stuttgart venue in 1996. Which makes it therefore the year after New Moon Daughter was released, so the band is roughly that of the musicians used on the album. The solo bottleneck guitarist at the beginning is most likely Kevin Breit; the other guitarist, with the locks, is almost certainly Brandon Ross; the bass player appears to be Lonnie Plaxico; the percussionist is most likely Jeff Haynes and so the drummer ought to be ex-Lounge Lizard Dougie Bowne, only he appears to be black. I'm stumped. Answers please on a postcard after viewing...

These days, Cassandra Wilson has become a bit of an elder stateswoman of her genre. Neither age nor custom have staled her infinite variety, however, but she's come a long way since that young, thrusting tyro from Jackson, Mississippi, whose love of the music she shared with her father took her via New Orleans to New York, where she met another young tyro, alto saxophonist Steve Coleman. With him, she formed the influential M-Base collective that fused funk with jazz and most of what was in between. I first heard her via a stunning version of 'Baubles, Bangles And Beads' from her third studio album, Blue Skies of 1988. Then came her run of Blue Note albums that included her splendid tribute to one of her biggest influences, Miles Davis, Traveling Miles.

She once lived with her son, I've discovered, in the same apartment in Sugar Hill, Harlem, where once dwelt Count Basie, Lena Horne and the boxer, Joe Louis. Under such circumstances, I think I would have posted a notice on the front door: Please wipe your feet thoroughly to avoid eliminating traces of illustrious predecessors.

In her time, she has won two Grammys, Time magazine's nomination as 'America's best singer', honorary doctorates, a lead role in Wynton Marsalis' Pulitzer-Prize-winning Blood on the Fields, and a National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Fellowship. At nearly 70 at time of writing, she could retire after a highly fulfilling career. Being a true artist, she won't. As a commentator on 'Harvest Moon' puts it, 'This is not a simple cover, this is much more than that, it's art...'

Quadro Nuevo - 'Song For Peace'

We could all do with a peace in our lives, a commodity forever in short supply. Fortunately, there's always music to soothe the troubled brow. 'We are well aware that the everyday lives of many people are anything but carefree,' Quadro Nuevo's spokesman suggests. 'Nevertheless – or precisely because of this – even in times of crisis and war, music can offer a positive alternative world.' The long-lasting German group play some very peaceful jazz: it's often calm and meditative and very beautiful in the way of much jazz that you might label 'Nordic'. Cool, without being as icy-cool as some Scandinavian jazz or the music of Manfred Eicher's Munich-based ECM label.

The 'positive alternative world' they offer has often been sparked by travel. Quadro Nuevo have been touring the globe since their inception in 1996. 2022's gorgeous Odyssee – A Journey Into The Light, for example, was the product of extensive reading into Greek mythology and a follow-up Homeric voyage in a sailing ship around the volcanic Aeolian Islands north of Sicily. The core regulars – saxophonist Mulo Francel, bassist D.D. Lowka, accordionist Andreas Hinterseher and pianist Chris Gall – were joined on their musical Odyssey by four other lotus eaters, with whom they created a coherent suite of exquisitely atmospheric world jazz. It was the kind of uplifting music which they have consolidated on Happy Deluxe, their new album, inspired by a trip to Brazil.

Here, though, is the band live in the studio in one of their more reflective moods. The number is taken from Odyssee's predecessor, the more ruminative December. The New York-born Tim Collins introduces the piece on vibraphone, a most welcome addition to the band's musical armoury. Philipp Schiepek adds guitar and D.D. Lowka switches from bass to the udu. Mulo Francel's lovely woody clarinet works beautifully in conjunction with Andreas Hinterseher's curious hybrid of an instrument, the vibrandoneon. A cross between the melodica and the South American bandoneon, it was apparently invented in Italy during the 19th century. So it would seem that you blow, finger and squeeze. It's difficult to distinguish the result from a traditional bandoneon, but see what you think.

I chanced upon Quadro Nuevo via a German guitarist, Paulo Morello, one of the 'lotus eaters' on the voyage around the Aeolian islands. He visits these parts regularly to run jazz guitar workshops in a chateau owned by some dear German friends. I've sat in on a number of intimate concerts in their vaulted cave that he's given after hours in tandem with a fine German jazz singer, Jutta Glaser. And so it was an easy leap from Paulo to Quadro Nuevo, his intermittent cohorts.

Almost 30 years after the group was founded by childhood friends, Mulo Francel and D.D. Lowka, Quadro Nuevo seem to be going from strength to strength. They have won several jazz and critical awards and assimilated a wealth of influences to create a music that's identifiably their own. It's a music that arises, as they put it on their website, 'from the longing for shared experiences, for light, for freedom, for a world that sounds different from our consumer-oriented digital age.'

'Song For Peace' speaks volumes. Wunderschön, indeed!