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.

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.

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.