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!

 

Dizzy Gillespie & the United Nation Orchestra - 'Tin Tin Deo'

For years I thought it was the United Nations (plural) Orchestra – and I can imagine that there are some who might have thought it was a musical venture of that well-intended organisation that fails to stop wars – but no, and even Wikipedia gets it wrong. It is indeed United Nation singular: searching for a name to call his conglomerate of international musicians, on scanning the diversity of stars Dizzy apparently exclaimed 'Man, this is a United Nation!'

I was intending to forego a video of the orchestra in action till I turned my attention to Latin jazz for a subsequent tome. But hey, it's high time that I turned the spotlight on big band jazz and who knows what the future holds. There's no time like the present, as the maxim teaches us. And anyway, if this ain't jazz, what is? 'Tin Tin Deo' was one of Dizzy's standards, going back to a time in the late '40s when he first experimented with the marriage of big band jazz, bebop and Afro-Cuban rhythms as 'Cubop' in the company of the legendary percussionist and the song's composer, Chano Pozo. Here, a lovely simmering arrangement emphasises its latent drama.

The United Nation Orchestra was arguably the final flowering of a big band c.v. that began in the trumpet sections of Cab Calloway's and Earl Hines' orchestras and then Billy Eckstine's assembly of young proto-boppers, and blossomed in the many permutations of his own big band, which he managed to reassemble periodically during the subsequent decades when he spent most of his time gigging and recording with smaller but economically more viable outfits. When living in Sheffield, I very nearly got to see his mighty big band. They were scheduled to play on the other side of the Pennines, in Manchester. I might have died and gone to heaven had Dizzy not beaten me to it. The great trumpeter, he of the upturned trumpet and the improbable bullfrog neck and cheeks, died in January 1993, a few short months after the intended concert.  

I'm still not fully over the disappointment. Few things in life are more exciting than a big band in full swing – except maybe a big band with added Latin percussion. When Dizzy inaugurated his behemoth in 1946 under the musical direction of John Lewis, future founder of the Modern Jazz Quartet, he and Charlie Parker were still joined at the hip in the view of cognoscenti as the two prime bebop revolutionaries. As such, his big band tended to play in his image with the kind of slightly disjointed exuberance that comes with so many new ideas pressing to be heard. It could sound a little ragged and certainly wasn't slick like the Count Basie Band, but the joyful exaltation of numbers like the signature 'Things To Come', compressed into well under the three minutes allowed by the 78rpm format, probably prompted the critic Ralph Gleason to call Dizzy's outfit 'as exciting a musical group as anything I've ever heard.'

By 1990, when this performance was filmed, John Birks 'Dizzy' Gillespie was a father figure and mentor for the younger players who followed in his footsteps. His Afro-Latin jazz orchestra had lost none of its early visceral excitement, but was perhaps a little more drilled and disciplined in its approach. As a trumpeter, Dizzy tended to leave the theatrics latterly to his protégé Jon Faddis and the Cuban high-note maestro, Arturo Sandoval. Here he demonstrates clearly in his three brief, subtle solos that he was still a master musician. The spirit of Cuba still moves his ageing limbs and, as always, he exudes a boyish sense of fun and enthusiasm. His clowning got him fired by Cab Calloway, but he was more often a thinking person's clown – as is evident in the title and content of his memoir, To Be Or Not To Bop.

As you watch this, you can easily spot the Cuban percussionist in the flat cap, Giovanni Hidalgo; beside him (in a green shirt), the great Brazilian percussionist and former Miles Davis sideman, Airto Moreira; the alto-sax soloist in the Panama hat is Paquito d'Rivera, who took over as leader of the orchestra after its founder's death; there's the young Panamanian pianist, Danilo Perez; and a comment suggests that the trombone soloist is the Puerto Rican, William Cepeda, who has played with Tito Puente, Eddie Palmieri, Donald Byrd and many other notables. The drummer is most likely Ignacio Berrao. And seated to d'Rivera's left is surely Mr. Gillespie's long-term 'worthy constituent', saxophonist and flautist, James Moody, whom I once saw play by candlelight at the Concord Club in Brighton, the day after the hurricane of 1987 shut down the electricity – and what a witty, droll fellow he was: a perfect foil in other words for his boss.

There are innumerable examples of Dizzy in action on YouTube, either in a small-group of big-band context. By way of complete contrast, for example, there's an unusual 1966 duet performance of 'Tin Tin Deo' with bass player Chris White, from the BBC's Jazz 625 series. Further back in time, there's the precious historic footage of Charlie Parker and Dizzy together (with its rather excruciating prelude) performing the bebop classic, 'Hot House'. Of all the big band footage, I'm drawn to Dizzy's 1970 guest appearance with the European big band co-led by the expatriate bebop master drummer, Kenny Clarke, and the Belgian pianist Francy Boland, whose USP in some respects was having two drummers, Kenny Clarke and Kenny Clare. You couldn't make it up! They perform a rousing version of the Afro-Cuban anthem that Dizzy co-wrote with Chano Pozo and Gil Fuller, 'Manteca'. It features Ronnie Scott on tenor sax and this one I am leaving for my Latin Jazz volume.

So how do you sum up Dizzy Gillespie? With difficulty. You could watch the film, A Night in Havana, which reveals more about the trumpeter's long-lasting love affair with the music of Cuba and shows why he was such an endearing and much-loved character. You could point to his role as a jazz ambassador throughout the world and official recognition in the form of gongs from the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences, the U.S. President and France's Order of Arts and Letters. You could quote innumerable assessments like (Director of the Institute of Jazz Studies at Rutgers University) Dan Morgenstern's that he was 'one of the true giants of 20^th Century American music'. Or you could fall back on a comment that a CAPITAL LETTER enthusiast who forgot his apostrophe left on YouTube: 'DIZZY! ONE OF GODS GREATEST CREATIONS EVER'. (The full-stop is mine.)

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.