It don't mean a thing if it ain't challenging patriarchal norms

This column has touched before on the relations between jazz and politics, and we’re about to plunge headfirst back into those bracingly icy waters by drawing attention to a controversy that flared up this month and has continued to flicker fitfully ever since. As the focus of the Left has shifted from issues of class dialectics to issues of personal identity, so has the focus of jazz’s political debate increasingly centred around issues of identity and ownership. This was brought to the forefront as a result of comments made in the course of a conversation between two pianists on a Blue Note Jazz Cruise ship. The ivory ticklers in question were Ethan Iverson, primary composer for gymnastically virtuosic trio The Bad Plus, and Robert Glasper, much lionised bandleader famed for his ambivalence towards the existing status quo of tradition and his enthusiasm for cross-over experiments into funk and fusion. The conversation was published by Iverson on his blog, and one comment in particular attracted a great deal more attention than either participant had anticipated. 

The conversation had turned, as conversations with Glasper often do, to the relationship between the jazz tradition and other currents of contemporary black music. The talk then turned to other pianists, scurrilous allegations against Cecil Taylor and Richie Beirach, and some of the minutiae of performance practice, but not before Glasper had dropped the following bombshell – readers of a sensitive disposition may want to look away now:

“I’ve seen what that does to the audience, playing that groove. I love making the audience feel that way. Getting back to women: women love that. They don’t love a whole lot of soloing. When you hit that one groove and stay there, it’s like musical clitoris. You’re there, you stay on that groove, and the women’s eyes close and they start to sway, going into a trance.”

No sooner had the interview been posted then comments started to fly. Glasper was taken to task for sanctioning misogyny, perpetuating condescending stereotypes, objectifying women and denying them the right to any meaningful place within jazz, or even within the entire sphere of artistic endeavour, due to his apparent assertion they are primitive, elemental beings unable to transcend the immediate urgings of their physical bodies. Iverson was attacked for publishing his comments unedited, thus giving Glasper’s unacceptable views a platform. He attempted to defend himself on this charge, but only dug himself into a deeper hole by suggesting that his critics were indirectly responsible for the election of Donald Trump. His wife, the author Sarah Denning, also weighed in, though her input was muddied for some by her insistence on tying the issue to her perspectives on the world of women’s featherweight boxing, with which many readers may be unfamiliar. Iverson then recanted on his recantation but the damage was done and the furore of internet outrage continued.  Glasper has not taken the high road in his response. 

The issue is a fascinating one, laden with many layers of significance. While few would agree that Glasper’s comment deserves to go unchallenged in the public sphere in itself, there was also a lively debate over the level of significance it should be accorded. Some defended Iverson’s decision to publish it – others attacked it, on the grounds that publishing was an endorsement or at very least a perpetuation. It was pointed out that his blog had run interviews with over 40 male jazz musicians, but not a single female one.  There is the continuing issue of women’s representation in the musical world generally, and the jazz world in particular – who hasn’t encountered the expectation that the woman in the poster will inevitably be ‘the singer’, and the entire package of derogatory stereotypes that comes with that assumption? The Lincoln Centre has belatedly addressed these issues by starting to hold ‘blind’ auditions for posts in its orchestras – similar procedures in the classical world have seen the representation of women in US symphony orchestrago from 5% to 50% since the 1970s, graphically illustrating how wide the gap in opportunity had been. There are also wider issues of racial stereotyping and the portrayal of women in the hip-hop and R & B cultures that Glasper admires – and, historically, in the jazz world as well. Some educators demanded that Glasper’s work should be removed from studies curricula, although if every sexist or misogynist were treated accordingly the jazz archive would be slim indeed – the autobiography of Miles Davis is a prominent, but by no means unique, repository of hideously chauvinistic attitudes, and Art Taylor’s fascinating series of interviews published as Notes And Tones contains numerous examples of revered jazz authorities voicing challenging opinions. One factor that has been underplayed is that Glasper is talking about women in very similar terms to those that were once used to describe black culture in general and jazz music in particular. The 1933 OED defined jazz thus:

“To play jazz; to dance to jazz music, a type of music originating among American Negroes, characterized bya regular or forceful rhythm, often in common time, and a ‘swinging’ quality …

… to move in a grotesque or fantastic manner; to behave wildly; to have sexual intercourse” 

If the common package of negative stereotypes in early 20th Century American and European society included ideas that black people were ‘primitive’ and in touch with ‘elemental’ human urges but unable to attain higher cultural achievements, then Glasper’s view of women seems to coincide with this at many points. 

Beyond these ramifications, we can also glimpse the continuing unease at the way jazz has moved from being popular music of the dancehall to esoteric music of the concert auditorium. If the Bad Plus’s rigourously intellectual oeuvre exemplifies the latter position, then Glasper seems perpetually caught between the two. He seems to be regarded with suspicion by someof his jazz musician peers, but among young fans there’s no question as to who has the higher profile. The infamous interview is an interesting read and has a number of valid points about matters musical that have been completely overshadowed by what seems to have been an episode of crass boys-together boasting of a sort that will be familiar to anyone who’s spent time backstage. You can read it below and decide for yourselves what the appropriate response should be; and, if you’re minded, you can see Mr. Glasper in person when he visits Sussex as part of this year’s increasingly spectacular Love Supreme line-up.

https://ethaniverson.com/interview-with-robert-glasper/

Michelle Mercer writing for NPR

Jazz at Lincoln Center Adopts Blind Auditions

Sarah Deming’s blog post

United We Stand

 Sad tidings reach us that the Jazz At The Palmiera sessions in Hove are no more, having been abruptly terminated without notice. While it’s been heartening to see the abundance of new casual gigs springing up around town over the last couple of years, both players and aficionados alike will be wearily familiar with the precarious nature of these events, dependent as they are upon the landlord’s goodwill – a commodity that is all too often contingent upon the thirst of the patrons and their willingness to spend good money quenching it. Despite the best efforts of a hedonistic minority, jazz fans are no longer the big drinkers that they used to be in the rollicking days of prohibition, speakeasies and unrestrained gangsterism, and this has an impact on the economic viability of the back-room session. We can be thankful for the happy confluences of sympathetic landlords, popular venues and committed musicians that have resulted in several long-running casual gigs in towns across the South Coast, especially Brighton. 

    Of course jazz musicians are often free-wheeling types, well used to the peripatetic nature of the biz, and resilient enough to shrug their shoulders and move on in the face of adversity. The music industry is notorious for short-termism, casual employment, sketchy arrangements regarding pay and conditions, and other evils of an unregulated marketplace where the supply of labour exceeds the demand, and anyone who survives for any length of time learns to roll with the punches and read the small print of the contract, in the event that one is actually offered. There’s an informal network operating to let players know who the sharp operators are amongst agents, landlords and promoters, and it can be easy to forget that there’s a trade union for musicians as well, dedicated to promoting their interests within the industry. 

    The origin of the Musicians’ Union is tied in with the beginnings of the jazz age, but its relationship to jazz players themselves has never been straightforward. The story begins in the latter years of the 19th century, when rapid urbanisation and the birth of popular commercial entertainment – theatres and music halls – created a new class of professional musicians. Conditions seem to have been frankly horrific – confined to cramped, dirty pits, the players were usually at the mercy of managing directors – a class whose entrepreneurial thirst was seldom inhibited by human feelings – who saw them as a necessary but expensive evil, and tried to drive down costs at every opportunity, or would cancel at a whim or whenever poor ticket sales occurred. Contracts, paid rehearsals, and backstage riders were unknown, to say nothing of Arts Council funding. Such musician’s organisations as existed, descended from the old system of guilds and town waits, were more concerned with protectionist strategies to exclude non-members undercutting their rates and restricting the ability of foreigners to work in the UK than negotiating better conditions. Then as now, the contingent nature of the work, the unclear distinction between part-time and full-time, professional and amateur, and the over-supply of labour made collective bargaining difficult. A petition of 1469 complains of “rude countryfolk and workers at various crafts who have pretended to be minstrels”  – another of 1653 tried to insist that a minimum of four musiciansbe employed for “banquets, feasts, weddings, revels or other assemblies”. Job insecurity in the London theatres of the 1760s led to musicianstaking on more work than they could actually perform, then creating a system of deputies or ‘deps’ to cover the less well remunerated engagements, both a product of and a contribution to chaotic working conditions.  A letter to the Orchestral Association Gazette of 1875 complains of managers who have “not a note of music in their heads, yet they dictate what is and is not good in music”. These give us fascinating glimpses of how little some aspects of the musician’s life has changed. 

    Come the 20th century, serious attempts were underway to regulate and protect the burgeoning growth in musical employment. It’s estimated that while the UK’s population doubled between 1870 and 1930, the number of musicians increased sevenfold. All kinds of specialisms emerged – brass players were heavily in demand at ice rinks, apparently – but the real growth areas were down to two epoch-defining innovations – the cinema, and the arrival of popular dance music in the form of American jazz. Cinemas were the largest employers of musicians by the 1920s, but hot on their heels came the new wave of massive dance halls, such as the famous Hammersmith Palais and the Empire chain run by Sir Oswald Stoll, of which the Shepherd’s Bush and the Hackney branches are among the best-known survivors. The effect on musical employment was sudden and drastic; attendances at the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra concertsdropped to less than 100 in 1924, while 4,000 were at dances ‘the same night’. This created tensions which the newly-formed Musicians’ Union tried to resolve; a letter in the Musicians’ Journal of 1925 describes the incoming jazz musicians as “an entirely new breed – their demeanour crass, their comportment uncouth, their training inadequate or non-existent” . The writer was particularly incensed at the way the parvenus were suddenly making more money than ‘proper’ musicians were, so that “respectable baton musical directors are assessed at a fraction of the worth of jazz solo-saxophonists, or even jazz drummers”. So did jazz-trained players come to describe rock musicians in the 1960s, and rock musicians in turn decried DJs in much the same terms in the 1980s and 1990s.

    The union struggled with the jazz players because they were making good money, didn’t belong to the establishment, and saw no reason to join. A further blow came with the introduction of talkies into the cinema. Silent movies, of course, were not actually silent at all – they all relied on live music, from solo piano to full orchestras. Minutes of a 1929 Union meeting complain of “the American capitalists trying to install talking pictures on threat of the supply of pictures being cut off” but predicted confidently that their power would be thwarted as sound in cinema was an un-natural, passing fad which the public would soon reject. We can perceive a foretaste of the Union’s struggles with the impact of changing technology on musical employment, from backing tracks to file-sharing to streaming. 

     Though both jazz and the MU developed alongside each other, the essential nature of the jazz-player’s life has kept them at arm’s length from each other as often as not. The challenges facing musicians as workers in the capitalist system have changed in their particulars over the years, yet the nature of the problems – how to assert their right to fair terms and conditions, and how to safeguard their employment from the vagaries of the wider economy – has remained constant. How could the Union address them? Answers on a postcard, please, and don’t forget to keep coming to the gigs – that’s the surest way to aid their survival. 

All source material from:
‘Players Work Time – A History Of The British Musician’s Union’ by John Williamson and Martin Cloonan.

Comrade Swing

Look at the wider world today, both abroad and at home, and you find yourself inundated with depressing headlines recording a global situation in which chronic divisions are increasingly being exploited and exacerbated by a political realm in which the best seem to lack all conviction, while the worst are unfortunately fuller than ever of an opportunistically passionate intensity. It’s been a relief to set aside the newspaper, log off from Facebook and immerse yourself in the feast of music spread out for us courtesy of the South Coast Jazz Festival as it returned for a third year, bigger and better than ever before. While so many of our political leaders seem intent on building walls and fostering disunity as hard as they can, festival supremos Claire Martin and Julian Nicholas are setting an inspiring counter-example by reaching out to involve and include as many aspects of the local scene as possible. In addition to the twelve events scheduled at the Ropetackle in Shoreham, theytook the potentially risky decision to program an additional twelve events at The Verdict in Brighton. Many on the scene were alert to the possibility of the audience being disastrously split between such an array of choice, but happily enthusiasm and commitment won the day, with record crowds and consistent sell-out shows throughout.  The open-minded spirit of collaboration that saw SCJF link arms with the New Generation Jazz project to bring the outstanding youngsters Jam Experiment, and with Safe House Collective to bring Rachel Musson’s freewheeling experimentalists, and to sell out both shows, can serve as an inspiring example of how unity can deliver results where narrow partisanship cannot. There was a great representation of oustanding local talent as well, and all kinds of well-attended and inspiring workshops and forums – here’s looking forward to next year.

    A couple of months ago this column commended the writings of poet, jazz enthusiast and political and cultural arch-conservative Philip Larkin to your attention. In the interests of balance it seems right to spend a little time this month with the writings of Larkin’s near-contemporary Eric Hobsbawn. Like Larkin, Hobsbawn was renowned in a different area of intellectual attainment, in his case historical analysis – like him, he maintained from his youth a passionate interest in jazz, and like him he indulged this passion by writing reviews which he initially published under thepseudonym of ‘Francis Newton’. Both in their own ways pillars of the British intellectual establishment, the two men couldn’t have been more different in their political convictions. Larkin, writing for The Daily Telegraph, was determinedly provincial, politically reactionary, and his jazz writing was an extension of his rejection of modernism – Hobsbawn was an archetypically cosmopolitan Marxist intellectual, and his reviews were published in that house magazine of the British left wing, The New Statesman. His career as a jazz writer, starting like Larkin’s in that annus mirabilis of 1959, was far longer than Larkin’s, encompassing the revival of the 1980s – you can find an excellent selection of it in the Faber paperback The Jazz Scene. 

    As you would expect, there are marked contrasts between the two men. Hobsbawn was politically and socially committed to progress as he understood it, just as Larkin was committed to conservatism, and this informs his writing. Hobsbawn was aware of jazz as a cultural phenomenon within a social context, and this led him to examine aspects of the scene that Larkin wasn’t interested in. His breakdown of the economics of jazz business in the 1960s gives an informed opinion of a little-regarded but essential aspect of the underpinnings of the scene; his sociological analysis of typical British jazz fans of the era is equally fascinating and perhaps surprising (the most represented occupations are ‘engineers and electricians’ – what would a similar survey reveal today?). Hobsbawn saw jazz as a music of protest, and the musicians and fans as placed within a framework of class and racial struggle, but he was also a fan and, as a white Englishman and a non-musician, an outsider in the same way that Larkin was. His 1963 history of jazz shares some of the self-conscious earnestness in categorising the music into ‘schools’ and evaluating their relative importance that was typical of his generation, and some of his judgements seem eccentrically at odds with today’s accepted canon –  writing in 1960, he classed Miles Davis as ‘a player of surprisingly narrow technical and emotional range… even within that range most of his records are not very good” – though he conceded that ‘some of Kind Of Blue contains genuinely imperishable stuff’. He shared some of Larkin’s distrust of the “excessively long, loud and undisciplined doodling” of the avant-garde – though he was an early supporter of Ornette, he thought Coltrane to be ‘in urgent need of sub-editing’. As befits a major analytical thinker, his work is full of detailed socio-cultural insights that Larkin, the poet, lacks. Yet despite their differences, both men came from the same social and cultural milieu – just as Larkin’s pathway to jazz started at his local Hippodrome, Hobsbawn remains the man who “at the age of sixteen, lost his heart for good to the Ellington band at its most imperial, playing what was called a ‘breakfast dance’ in a suburban London ballroom to an uncomprehending audience” – one of a generation who became entranced by a music that seemed so vital and exciting in the context of pre-war England,  but which remained impenetrably ‘other’ – admired, cherished and critically evaluated, but never owned. For an insider’s view of jazz as it progressed through the UK in the later years of the 20th century, we shall have to turn to another major writer, Val Wilmer – but that can wait for another edition. In the meantime, keep your eyes on the listings and keep going to the gigs!

Forward To Victory

2016 has certainly been a year to remember – good for right-wing demagogues, but bad for europhiles, pollsters and political pundits, though their discomfiture pales to insignificance compared to the travails endured by the unhappy citizens of Syria and Yemen.  The Grim Reaper seems to have been unusually active amongst the denizens of the world’s artistic communities, and the jazz-playing cohort has not been immune to his unwelcome attentions. We’ll be entering the uncharted waters of 2017 without the leading lights of such veterans of the tradition as Rudy Van Gelder, Mose Allison, bassist Bob Cranshaw and Toots Thielemans to guide us, while the progressive edge has lost the inimitable voices of  Bobby Hutcherson, Paul Bley and Alphonse Mouzon, and the wider international community is diminished by the loss of Nana Vasconcelos and Gato Barbieri. Jazz was also well served by the contributions of Billy Paul, Earth Wind and Fire’s Maurice White, and of course the inimitable and multi-monikered artist best known as Prince.
    Closer to home, the sad loss of Bobby Wellins is to be lamented, even as his imperishable legacy of world-class music making is to be celebrated. Another local legend of the same generation,  Pete Burden, equally respected by all who heard his bop-inflected alto playing, also sadly left us shortly after Christmas.  It makes the survival of such genre-shaping innovators as Sonny Rollins and Wayne Shorter – the latter returning to London in November to perform at the EFG Jazz Festival – all the more to be treasured. Shorter of course has a famous association with another veteran, Herbie Hancock, and the latter’s confirmation as a headliner for the 2017 Love Supreme Festival, along with the king of smooth grooves, nifty fretwork and pencil moustaches George Benson, is a real coup for the festival as it celebrates its fifth year.  What aspect of his prodigiously long and varied career will Herbie be presenting? There was plenty of debate over the viability of a greenfield jazz festival when Love Supreme started back in 2013, so it’s a real pleasure to see it thriving. The Bandstand Stage will be returning as well with its customary mix of the best of local and up-and-coming artists – we look forward to news of more acts as it arrives, and send out a request for clear skies, warm winds and, much as we love the open, cross-over vibe of the booking policy, perhaps a little more ‘straight’ jazz on the bill this year. The challenge is to get jazz players and fans engaging with different aspects of the current music scene, re-contextualising jazz as a part of the mainstream without diluting the essence of the music so much that it loses its identity, and despite the naysayers Love Supreme continues to lead the field in having a good old go at doing exactly this. 
    Returning indoors for a look around, the Verdict continues to bring us a weekly dose of the very best of UK jazz, with ever more international artists beating a path to its door as its reputation continues to spread. Something else to celebrate is the extension of the Arts Council’s support for the New Generation Jazz programme, bringing the best of the UK’s new jazz artists to the Verdict once a month for a gig and a workshop – that’s now set to run all the way through 2017 and beyond, so prepare to be dazzled by the impetuous brilliance of youth on a regular basis. Heartening as well to see how the Verdict has now enfolded both the noble traditionalism of Small’s Jazz Club and the fearless experimentalism of Safe House Collective beneath its ever more splendidly accommodating wings – the key to survival is surely to reject factionalism and embrace as many aspects of the ever-diversifying legacy as possible. 
    2017 is already set for something of a theme of triumphant returns – let’s hear it for the South Coast Jazz Festival, back for the third year running and now spreading its welcome attentions away from its home-base in Shoreham’s Ropetackle Centre to bring a whole host of exciting events to Brighton including a great spread of local talent. It’s a real achievement for Julian Nicholas, Claire Martin and the team, and another welcome sign of the willingness of the Arts Council to support jazz after the demise of Jazz Services.
    Meanwhile for your quotidian needs there’s a host of grassroots gigs on offer as well on most nights of the week, from bar gigs to jam sessions – check the back pages of this publication for more details. Let’s not be tempted to rest on our laurels though – 2017 promises to deliver a hefty dose of political and economic uncertainty, and the arts will need continued support. There’s more diversity and vitality in the South Coast jazz scene than there has been for a long time – let’s not forget to mention the burgeoning scenes in Hastings, Margate and Rye as well, as some of our finest players seek refuge there from the increasingly unaffordable cost of London living  – but if we don’t use it, we’re going to lose it, so keep coming to the gigs!
 
South Coast Jazz Festival
16th – 29th January 2017

Love Supreme Festival
30th June – 2nd July 2017

 Rye Jazz Festival

Margate Jazz Festival

Deal Festival

New Generation Jazz

 The Verdict, Brighton
 

Larkin' About

The autumn touring schedule has made it impossible for me to attend a single one of the many amazing gigs that comprise the EFG London Jazz Festival, and all that I’ve had to console for missing (yet again) the priceless opportunity of seeing Wayne Shorter is the chance purchase of a copy of Philip Larkin’s All What Jazz: A Record Diary 1961–71, comprising record reviews that he wrote for the Daily Telegraph. Jazz critics, and critics in general, find themselves in an equivocal situation, trying to sustain their careers by gleaning crumbs dropped from the table of actual artists, with such creativity as they can muster entirely employed in assessing the creativity of others. Larkin is an exception – the writer of The Whitsun Weddings, who was offered and refused the post of Poet Laureate, has a claim to artistic stature in his field equal to those of the great musicians of the Golden Age whose seminal albums he reviewed – usually unkindly. 
    His personal reputation is rather another matter – there was a mixture of consternation, and probably some schadenfreude from vindicated modernists when Larkin’s personal correspondence revealed a morass of unpleasant opinions that were all firmly on the wrong side of what’s currently acceptable in those most fraught of contemporary subjects, racism and misogyny. At the very least, the epistolary light shone upon a man whose views were very typical of someone of his age, class and gender; his shortcomings in these areas were widely shared in the contemporary attitudes upon which so much effort has since been expended in our efforts to build a better society. Larkin’s writings on jazz give us an insight into how that music was received into unexpected areas of British society in the early years, and reveal a window into a very different world. 
    Larkin started reviewing in 1961, when he was nearly forty. In his youth he had been a passionate jazz fan and an amateur drummer – ‘few things have given me greater pleasure in life than listening to jazz’ declared this man who built his reputation upon an unsparingly incisive dismantling of the supposed joys of material existence. He discovered jazz in the first golden age of the 1930s, when Armstrong was contemporary and Basie, Goodman and Ellington were the avant-garde. The war and the American Federation Of Recording Musicians intervened, and like many of his generation he lost touch with jazz in the 1940s and early 50s;  but when he was offered the review column in the Telegraph he approached it as ‘a jazz lover, someone unquestionably on the wavelength of Congo Square…. though I knew jazz had been changing, I didn’t believe it could alter out of all recognition any more that the march or the waltz could’.  
    Larkin thus came into the era of Coltrane, Coleman, Miles and Cecil Taylor with expectations shaped by the era of Bix Beiderbecke and Muggsy Spanier and was utterly horrified by what he found. It’s standard practice now to present the development of jazz as an apostolic succession, so that echoes of King Oliver can be traced in Freddie Hubbard and Sidney Bechet in John Coltrane, and each new generation of musicians is careful to show due reverence for the past; this attitude was not always so prevalent. Larkin considered what he found as ‘modern jazz’ to be utterly alienated from its roots – claiming that ‘nearly every characteristic of the music had been neatly inverted’ in the progression from the hot, syncopated dance music of the pre-war era to what he saw as the enervated intellectualism of the modernists. 
    Of course, Larkin had a general dislike of Modernism in all the arts, which he saw as an artificial fixation with experimenting with form at the expense of content. His critique of modern jazz in particular was echoed by many jazz fans of his generation in the UK though, and displays a socio-cultural undertone. What attracted them to jazz was its ‘hot’ character – the vigourously upbeat mood, the simplicity of form, the primacy of rhythm over harmony, the wide, almost-human vibrato and tonal exaggeration of the soloists that set the music firmly apart from the European classical tradition. You could uncharitably describe it as a fetishisation of a supposedly primitive ‘other’ which appealed precisely because it had none of the restraints of ‘high’ culture, and which could be safely appropriated by a dominant elite – such as Oxford-educated Larkin would neatly embody. The haughty intellectualism of Miles, the audible rage of Shepp and the spiritual ambitions of Coltrane were a direct challenge to this attitude. Duncan Heining has described in his excellent Trad Dads and Free Fusioneers how older British fans felt alienated by the way that, as they saw it, the music that they loved had been turned against them. The overt black nationalism of the radical 1960s generation seemed to deliberately exclude them even further. Yet, like Larkin, they genuinely loved jazz as they understood it, and felt a deep connection with the music of their youth; it seems unfair to dismiss them entirely as privileged cultural appropriators. Larkin tried to swallow the modernist pill, and though he’s famous for his hatchet jobs, his reviews also contain many sympathetic and positive insights. He was also perceptive enough to realise that many of the qualities he looked for in jazz had migrated into rock and roll; and any artist today struggling with their grant application, or trying to wrangle a decent fee out of promoters, will surely recognise his prescience when he wrote “the jazz band in the night club declined, and jazz moved, ominously, into the culture belt… concert halls, university recital rooms and summer schools …. this was bound to make the re-establishment of an artist-audience nexus more difficult, for universities have long been recognised as the accepted stamping-ground for the subsidised acceptance of art rather than the real purchase of it”.
    The consequences of the cultural schism that opened up when the be-boppers stopped playing to the paying customers and set their sights upon a loftier cultural and artistic status are still not resolved, and Larkin’s writings give an insight into a perspective that is seldom heard today, but still contains a framing of issues that cannot be completely dismissed. Though how many today would agree with his assessment of Monk – “a not-very-successful comic, as his funny hats proclaimed; his faux naif elephant dance piano style, with its gawky intervals and absence of swing made doubly tedious by his limited repertoire” ? Or Coltrane – “metallic and passionless nullity giving way to exercises in gigantic absurdity, great boring excursions on not-especially-attractive themes upon which all possible changes were wrung, extended excursions of oriental tedium, long-winded and portentous demonstrations of religiosity” ? 
    The old grouch certainly had a way with words, though I’m not sure I can forgive him for his comments on bass solos – “arid stretches of thirty-two or even sixty-four bars when some fervent bassist, aware that his instrument was ‘set free’ by Jimmy Blanton, demonstrates its half-audible limitations while the rest of the band rest their lips. Why? The bass is not an elephantine guitar – to make it sound like one is to use the foundation stone for the cornice”. Is nothing sacred?

Autumn Leaves

Autumn is traditionally a time of announcements in the world of showbiz, to which jazz finds itself attached, often with a certain reluctance, in our late-stage capitalist society. Music biz executives return to their artfully dressed-down offices after their August holidays – promoters and agents re-group after the summer festival season – arts centres ponder their funding applications and launch their winter schedules. There’s some exciting autumn tours headed for Brighton – this month sees The Impossible Gentlemen return to The Old Market, with Mike Walker and Gwilym Simcock now joined in the frontline by multi-reedsman Iain Dixon; the welcome return masterminded by self-effacing supremo David Forman, who’s also managed to lure seldom-heard international star Jason Rebello to The Verdict for a one-off intimate show in November. Indefatigable guitar hero Nigel Price includes the same venue in his record-breaking 56-date tour, while the next month sees the debut of Laura Jurd’s eagerly anticipated new ensemble and transatlantic collaborations from Andrew Bain and Jay Phelps, among many other delights. This column has always promoted an ecumenical approach to jazz appreciation, so we’re pleased  to record the arrival of two new regular promotions under The Verdict roof – the free-improv crew behind Safe House, and the all-acoustic swing classicists of Smalls jazz bring their very different but, one hopes, not mutually exclusive interpretations of the tradition to our favourite basement. South Coast Jazz Festival gets busy as well, widening its remit to bring Incognito to The Old Market in December for kind of warm-up show for the 2017 main event. In the wider picture, the EFG London Jazz Festival has announced its line-up, Serious have announced a slew of autumn tours, Neil Cowley has enjoyed a surprise Spotify hit with his new release (more on this in next month’s column), and the planet’s most swinging Scientologist Chick Corea is celebrating his 75th birthday by performing no less than 177 gigs in 26 different ensembles with some 60 different musicians. 
    This September also marks an anniversary – it’s a year since New Generation Jazz was launched at the Verdict. The project was conceived by your columnist and trumpeter/bandleader Jack Kendon with the intention of providing a platform for the next generation of young jazz musicians to make themselves heard in Brighton, and equally to foster and encourage interest and engagement in the music amongst the burgeoning community of young musicians in the town. It’s hard for unknown players to get a gig outside London, as promoters are understandably unwilling to take a risk on someone that their regular punters won’t have heard of – as we’ve noted before, jazz audiences can tend towards conservatism in musical taste if not in general sociopolitical outlook. Equally, for young players, the jazz world can seem like an intimidatingly closed shop, its players remote an inaccessible and its practice too complex to pick up by ear alone. New Generation was fortunate to secure Arts Council funding to underwrite the gigs and provide extra promotion to reach beyond the usual audience, and also to draw upon the goodwill of the musicians involve to pair each gig with a free workshop to make their knowledge and enthusiasm accessible to our young musicians, with the hope of inspiring them to pursue their interest further and feed into the local scene.
    Inspired by the long-established success of Tomorrow’s Warriors as a breeding ground for new talent, we started the series last October with a storming gig from Warriors leader Gary Crosby, plus an inspirational workshop delivered with Empirical’s Nathaniel Facey to an audience of enraptured BIMM students – only slightly delayed when Gary’s satnav mysteriously re-routed him in the direction of Ditchling. Thanks to support from the local community, especially Andy Lavender and John Easterby at The Verdict, the profile has continued to grow, enjoying regular sell-outs and attracting fresh faces each time.  We’ve also had the pleasure of being able to feature some of our favourite bands at the Love Supreme festival thanks to our collaboration with organisers Neapolitan. We’ve brought workshops into local schools like Dorothy Stringer and BHASVIC as well as running open sessions at The Verdict. And we’ve had the privilege of working with some of the finest young players in the UK today, and the satisfaction of seeing sell-out crowds respond with the  same enthusiasm we’ve felt when we booked them. 
    Anyway, this month’s gig by the mighty Tom Green Septet is the last in the  current series – but the story’s not over. Thanks to continuing support from all our partners, and especially Arts Council England, we’ll be returning after an October break with another 14 months worth of gigs, to run right through to the end of 2017. We can’t wait for the next chapter to begin!

Sussex Jazz Magazine - Festivals of Britain

As the nation descends into a period of what even the most jubilant Brexiters would have to acknowledge as extensive uncertainty, further polluted by an unwelcome residue of extremely bad feelings stirred up during the dishonest and divisive Referendum campaigns, it’s a relief to turn your weary gaze away from the news and realise that summer is still continuing, albeit in it’s usual desultory fashion, bringing with it an abundance of wonderful music as bands head out on their summer tours and the festival season gathers pace. Fans of jazz-and-related-music who also have a taste for the outdoors are especially well catered for here in the South East as Love Supreme Festival re-appears on your doorstep for the fourth time in as many years.

  Theteen years of this millennium have seen an extraordinary growth in the independent music festival sector; it’sestimated that nearly 1000festivals dedicated to music and other various worldly pleasures are due to take place across the UK this year, more than 6 times as many as a decade ago. The Association Of Independent Festivals’ 6-year report from 2014 paints a buoyantly optimistic picture. Despite economic recession and the wettest run of summers since 1912, the UK’s festival sector has thrived, and estimated ticket spend at the Association’s 44-strong membership festivals alone totals 1.1 Billion GBP since 2010. As sales in recorded music continue to decline, and ‘life experiences’ come to be more sought after than material luxuries, more and more people choose to counterbalance the increasingly solitary timbre of modern life by attending communal events, and live music is at the heart of this trend. 

  Jazz Festivals have long been popular events, but the format has always been copied from the urban Arts Festival - Swanage, Brecon or the mighty London EFG are built around a series of discrete gig promotions, using existing venues, under the umbrella of the festival organisation. Love Supreme is unique in having used the greenfield, open-air one-ticket-for-the weekend format of the rock festival, and built it around a line-up of jazz-and-related-music artists. Director Ciro Romano has pointed to the success of open-air folk festCropredy as his inspiration to seek a similar niche market for his own favourite musical genre, and the festival’s continued return after four economically difficult years for the nation must surely vindicate his decision. 

  Not everyone has been entirely happy, of course. For some, the festival line-up hasn’t been sufficiently, authentically jazz for their taste - and the ambience of a large tent on a sunny day, and the level of amplification required, hasn’t always suited every artist. Some modern jazz is quite an indoor kind of sound, and the staging requirements can be quite different from those of other, less complex but perhaps more robust musical forms. The addition of the Bandstand stage has proved enormously popular with audiences and musicians alike, providing a gateway through which the local musical community can access the festival, participate, contribute and take the opportunity to check out some of their international peers; but the expenses-only deal offered to performers in the first year was predictably, and rightly, the subject of debate. The festival has taken on board the criticism; acoustic plans have been drawn up and budgets allocated, but any event of this size and ambition will always need to be alert to possibilities of improvement. 

  Of course, what constitutes ‘real’ jazz is a subject of endless controversy, as the music itself encompasses so much in it’s legacy, from it’s disreputable roots to the popular dance bands and crooners of the thirties, and from the hip angularity of be-bop, the thunder and flash of fusion, and the esoteric artistic endeavours of the avant-garde.  Fortunately, the welcome return of the South Coast Jazz Festival, and the Brighton Alternative Jazz Festival demonstrate that jazz can survive, even in it’s most uncompromisingly free-improv incarnation, as long as there’s an audience, a dedicated promoter and their team, and the continuing availability of deserved funding from the taxpayer - let us hope that recent political developments do not jeopardise this important source of artistic nourishment.

  Love Supreme is, of course, an entirely commercially funded festival, and the pressures upon these events are enormous.  According to research carried out, improbably enough, by delivery company ParcelHero, “A mid-size festival can run on a financial knife-edge, with one quarter of ticket prices typically taken up by VAT and royalty fees to songwriters. The logistical costs are big too: water, electricity, waste management, while security must police the event. The cost of powering alone for a 10,000 capacity festival for a weekend can be 100,000 GBP - policing the Isle Of Wight festival costs nearly 1 Million GBP.”  Mid-size festivals typically need to sell 80% of tickets to cover costs, and 80% of tickets are sold on the strength of the headline acts, so it’s perhaps no surprise that even the irrepressibly optimistic Association of Independent Festivals notes ruefully that the fees charged by headline acts have risen by up to 400% between 2004 and 2014. Asjazz fans arerelatively small in number, though correspondingly great in passionate devotion, a balance must be struck between the demands of art and commerce if the event is to thrive. 

  And thrive it has - after all, it’s a simple matter of friendly, generally well-behaved people enjoying good music in beautiful surroundings. As you would hope, there’s a real appreciation of quality and high musical standards that is common to all the artists, however stylistically disparate. There’s also some more unexpected aspects - Love Supreme features more female headline artists across all it’s stages than most others, and there’s a far higher proportion of people from the BAME community, both as performers and punters, than is usual at a UK greenfield festival. This year, the Bandstand now runs on Friday as well, and also is responsible for programming theFriday Arena line-up; over the weekend, we’ll be hosting everything from the hip-hop inflections of Sumo Chief and J-Felix, the driving bop of Peter Fraize or Chris Coull’s Brownie Speaks, the epic big band explorations of Terry Pack’s Trees, the latin-flavoured delicacy of Paul Richards‘ Trio, the retro swing of Harry’s Tricks and Grimaldi Quartet, the high-octane salsa of Duende, the gnarly fusionof Vels Trio,  the afrobeat to dub-jazz of Ezra Collective and the horn-heavy Barnacles, the varied vocal delights of the Kendon/Ryall, Maira Chiara and Leeming/Dankworth bands, and the concluding fury of Simon Spillet - not to mention my own efforts with the wonderful musicians who have consented to join me in the Eddie Myer 5tet. It’s a snapshot of how varied the output of today’s jazz-loving musicians can be, and how much talent resides in our area. In an age increasingly characterised by hostility and division, let’s reach out across our different stylistic affiliations and discover what unites us! All we need now is the weather to hold.

Love Supreme

Association of Independent Festivals Six Year Report (2014)

ParcelHero - The Real Cost of Delivering Festivals

Guardian Culture - The Future of Festivals

Hot Fun in the Summertime

Summer approaches, and let’s hope the sun shines reasonably consistently and that the organisers of the returning Love Supreme don’t have occasion to rue the bold decision to stage their Jazz-and-related-music festival in the great outdoors. May is a busy time for gig goers in Brighton as the town hosts the two entirely unrelated events of the unashamedly highbrow Brighton Festival on the one hand and the avowedly populist Great Escape on the other. This column has had occasion to explore the curious position in which jazz often finds itself, being somehow too populist to attract the kudos, and much of the funding, that attaches to Art with a capital A, yet not actually popular enough to pack the cheap seats. There are continuing signs of a renewed interest in jazz as a progressive music emerging from scenes of young players in London and Berlin, but no representation of anything near the form gets booked at Great Escape, although featured artists such as Eska and Laura Mvula have it in their backgrounds (and backing bands), and while the Brighton Festival put on the mighty Phronesis, triumphantly stepping up to play the Corn Exchange after their last show at the intimate Komedia Bar in 2010(really that long ago?), jazz remains peripheral rather than central to it’s programming. 

  We often return to the subject of live performance because it is there, as muchas through the increasingly financially challenged recording industry, that players can find the opportunity to pursue their musical visions and develop their careers. It’s a pleasure therefore to have a bagful of positive news to deliver on that front. The South Coast Jazz Festival was another across-the-board success; next Love Supreme returns with another strong line-up, unembarrassedly mixing representatives from across the broad spectrum of whatever it is that people think they mean by ‘real’ jazz with popular entertainers championing a broadly urban vision of feel good soul, and incidentally attracting a more ethnically diverse crowd than is usual at a green-field music event. While purists may still have their reservations, such genre-crossing events can surely only help in the effort to break jazz free of it’s perceived special-interest status and lure in new audiences. As a flamboyant example of the sort of crossover that can be possible, headline act Kamasi Washington has managed to take his cosmic dashiki-clad post-Pharoah Sanders extravaganza round the world, from jazz clubs to bookings in front of rock festival audiences at Coachella and Glastonbury, while playing some very fine tenor sax along the way.  Filling in the gap at the more defiantly uncommercial end of things is the equally welcome return of the Brighton Alternative Jazz Festival in September - and there’s a fundraiser at the Verdict on July 7th to put in your diary as well. It’s good to see that Brighton’s only purpose-built jazz club is now hosting events by both the Smalls and Safe House promoters; old-time swing and free improv may seem worlds apart but share links to the same tradition, if not exactly the same audiences, and consolidation of the diverse strands of the scene can only lead to greater strength. Meanwhile, the grassroots continues to thrive, with a new Wednesday night gig at the Palmeira a promising addition to the scene. 

 Festivals are welcome summer visitors, of course, but the continuation and progression of a music scene relies upon it’s network of local players, and local promoters and landlords prepared to host them. In this context, recent comments made by MP Caroline Lucas provide a source of hope that the uncertainty that has increasingly affected venues across the country is at last receiving some official recognition. Speaking to a BHC policy panel she declared ““The live music scene is the lifeblood of Brighton and Hove. People come from far and wide to enjoy gigs at venues across the city. I’ll continue to work with the Performers All Party Group in Parliament in calling on the Government to protect pre-existing venues from being closed down because of complaints from residents in newly built accommodation.We need to find a solution which both protects venues from unnecessary closure and allows people to live in homes that aren’t affected by high noise levels.” These sentiments echo those made by the triumphantly incoming Mayor of London, Sadiq Kahn, who has pledged to support the arts and the night-time as a ‘core priority’, and has made particular reference to the 35% of venues closed, often due to development pressure, under his predecessor. Let’s hope that the jazz community can position itself to reap the benefit of this offer of support.

Dark Magus

Today, April 30th, is International Jazz day. Of course for our dedicated readers, every day deserves that title - and no doubt many of you will already be physically and spiritually exhausted from celebrating Duke Ellington’s birthday the day before. If you feel minded to indulge in a little more celebration, however, the Miles Davis biopic starring Don Cheadle is currently still playing at the Komedia Picturehouse, and whether or not you actually go to see it you must surely agree that it can only serve to bolster the profile of jazz-and-related-music across the public arena.

 Jazz music seems to have entered into a fruitful alliance with arthouse cinema, with theAntonio Sanchez soundtrackedBirdman, the jazz-as-sports-movie drumathon Whiplash, and a biopic of Chet Baker starring Ethan Hawke all gaining varying degrees of cinema release last year. Of course jazz has already a long-established relationship with highbrow movies - Davis’ pivotal collaboration with Louis Malle in the unforgettable Lift To The Scaffold (1958) marked an artistic high point for both men, Frank Sinatra excelled in The Man With The Golden Arm (1955) and laid down a corrosive archetype of the druggie musician at the same time, and Duke Ellington’s contributions to Otto Preminger’s Anatomy Of A Murder (1959), both musically and in an acting role, helped cement the alliance. Perhaps inevitably, the relationship faded out in a welter of smoky cliches involving breathy saxophones over moody shots of rainy mean streets, and jazz has been noticeably absent from the movie mainstream for many years, though Bertrand Tavernier’s 1986 hommage Round Midnight and John Altman’s 1996 Kansas City deserve honourable mention. A widely-released biopic of one of the music’s greatest stars can only be good news for jazz - but there is perhaps an unintended irony in the fact that the movie is set at a point in Davis’s career when what little music he was making would barely have been identified as jazz by many listeners, and his own feelings towards the tradition seem to have been ambivalent. 

  It’s sometimes hard to remember, in these post-Marsalis, Lincoln-Centered days, how divided and at odds with itself the jazz community was in the mid 70s. Radical shifts in the cultural zeitgeist had moved the youth audience towards a host of different musical forms, from prog rock to funk. At the same time, the simultaneously iconic and iconoclastic career paths of John Coltrane and Ornette Coleman had lumbered jazz with the onerous burden of having to constantly assert it’s forward-looking progressive credentials - everyone was looking for the New Thing, and a generation of master hard-bop musicians, schooled to virtuoso levels in swinging explorations of the blues and great American songbook, were left without a gig, struggling to assimilate the politically-charged avant-garde or awkwardly trying to embrace unfamiliar rock rhythms and electric instruments. 

  Miles famously refused to look back. His 50s quintets established a high water mark of all the jazz values currently now returned to fashion - how many of the repertoire standards are in the book because he started playing them? - and his 60s bands set the template for post-bop chromaticism, even foreshadowing the contemporary attachment to straight, unswung quaver feel. Come the 1970s though, he’d abandoned swing time, acoustic instruments, the standard repertoire, even chord changes, in a search for what he thought of as the true happening sound of the era. Abandoning the tight control that had typified his 50s bands, he gathered a team of younger players into the studio, sketched out the vaguest of musical goals , and set the tapes rolling. The heavily edited results were released with a groovy Matti Klarwein cover as Bitches Brew, and somehow became a massive seller - doubly surprising as the record, though undoubtedly exciting and original, is definitely not an easy listen, and was totally out of step with the sound of the subsequently emerging generation of fusion players.  Miles followed up with a stream of increasingly peculiar-sounding records - Agharta, Live-Evil, Get Up With It, On The Corner, Big Fun - and bitterly berated commercial black radio for ignoring them. His autobiography records his disappointment when On The Corner didn’t take off amongst the Sly Stone and James Brown fans he thought it would attract. Listening to it now, it seems obvious that this record of fifteen-minute, virtually freeform jam sessions over heavy two-note ostinatos, crudely recorded and edited, and awash with heavy handed effects and all sorts of bitonality, would be a total turn off for an audience moving towards the slick, funky pop-fusion of artists like George Benson, The Crusaders or Grover Washington - all players whose musical values of concise, immaculately arranged rhythm tracks and soulful renditions of bop language were ironically much closer in intent if not in execution to the Miles bands of the 1950s. Bitches Brew is often touted as the album that created the fusion movement, on the strength of it’s personnel, but it’s ominous murky ramblings are acoustically and artistically miles away from the polished, gleaming precision of a Weather Report album. 

 Critics of the time were equally ambivalent - my 1978 copy of Rolling Stone Record Guide speaks cuttingly of ‘aimless soporific noodling’.As the decade progressed Davis seemed to be chasing trends rather than setting them, and what’s worse, getting it wrong; pianist/composer Donald Fagen, a longtime jazz aficionado if not exactly a practitioner, whose band Steely Dan were exemplars of super-tight studio perfectionism,  remarked of Bitches Brew, with customary acidity, "To me it was just silly, and out of tune, and bad. I couldn't listen to it. It sounded like Davis was trying for a funk record, and just picked the wrong guys. They didn't understand how to play funk. They weren't steady enough." 

  Artistic reputations and hindsight exist in a complex relationship, however. By the 1990s the explosion of digital sampling technology and the cut-and-paste ethos spreading out from hip-hop had lead to a widespread plundering and re-evaluation of the era’s back catalogue. In this context, music made by editing together strangely matched bits of audio over repetitive beats was now both cutting-edge and widely acceptable, and Miles’ 70s oeuvre suddenly seemed to be years ahead of it’s time. Inspired amateurism was back in vogue, and now it was the super-slick fusion kings who seemed corny and dated. Such diverse dernier cri trendsetters as Bill Laswell and Thom Yorke came out in favour, and a torrent of reissues and unreleased material followed. 

  Despite this rehabilitation, it’s noticeable that jazz today has returned to many of the values championed by Miles’ classic quintets of the 50s and 60s, while the effect of his 70s explorations is far harder to detect. Was he exploring a blind alley, or a wormhole to the future? It’ll be interesting to see if the movie leads to yet another re-appreciation of one of the music’s most compelling yet enigmatic figures.

It Might As Well Be...

Spring arrives, bringing it’s customary seasonal quickening, and the jazz fan’s thoughts naturally turn towards music festivals. The South Coast Jazz Festivalbraved the dead of winter to achieve another triumph with high sales, plenty of local engagement and some gratifying press attention - congratulations are due once again to the unstoppable, camera-friendly team of Julian Nicholas and Claire Martin for their perseverance in making this into a reality. Closer to the beating heart of the city, we can look forward to more from Terry Seabrook’s season at the Nightingale Rooms and Chris Coull’s promising new Wednesday night venture at the Palmeira joining the thriving regular scene. The year-long festival of outrageous new talent that isNew Generation Jazz has started to draw record audiences to the thriving Verdict club.  Kemp Town Carnival is rumoured to be re-floating after a troubled period, and we can hope that it’s jazz stage will have survived it’s passage across the troubled waters of financial insecurity. Let’s also hope that transcendental multi-media personality Daniel Spicer returns with another spectacular bonanza of international quality free improv to follow on from 2015’sAlternative Jazz Festival, where only the box office could be accused of selling out. Add to this the fourth return of the mighty juggernaut that is Love Supreme, with it’s unique mix of fashionably tipped cutting-edge jazz-and-related-musics and family friendly funk and soul classics, and you’ve surely got something to please even the most dogmatically partisan fan of whatever they’ve chosen to understand by the contentious catch-all definition of jazz. 

 This column has touched repeatedly,  perhaps contentiously or maybe only cantankerously on the (to our mind) wholly unnecessary conflict that can sometimes be seen erupting across our already battle-scarred social media whenever the subject of ‘real’ jazz is brought up. While it’s now universally agreed that Charlie Parker, whatever his personal shortcomings, definitely always played real jazz even when encumbered by string sections, this was by no means apparent to all his contemporaries; go back to the journalists of the swing era to see how many of them found Bebop to be a desecration of the all values they thought central to jazz, by polluting it with elements stolen from 20th century symphonic highbrows like Stravinsky. 

  Nowadays the musical descendants of Armstrong andEllington are so numerous and diverse that it’s really impossible to like them all equally, and equally unnecessary to expend energy on attacking the forms you dislike. It’s so much easier to define what isn’t jazz, but lets’ try and pin it down anyway, just for fun-  it’s an awareness of the Afro-American tradition, even if you can only follow it in your own way- it’s a sense of freedom and adventure - it’s a dedication to music, and to your instrument, if you’re a player, or to the art of listening, whether you are one or not. And it’s an identification with a community, or a family, however you like to think of it. Let’s leave the last word to the eloquent Mr Walter Blanding, tenorist with the Jazz at the Lincoln Centre Orchestra, captured on vid addressing a class of high school kids as they alternate between rapt attention and inconsequential mucking about, and dispensing a philosophy that is a relevant for listeners as it is for players.. “Jazz is ... about how to work together with a group of people, even if they think differently from you ... you can say, here we are, we’re all different, but we’re going to work together in harmony, we’re going to make an idea become a reality... we can take pride in saying that each one of us is different and we can still come together... that’s what jazz is about....” . 

The Palmeira

The Nightingale Room Jazz

The Verdict

New Generation Jazz

Walter Blanding Speaks

 

Emporor's New Clothes

I recently had the good fortune to participate in a recording session with Mark Edwards, noted keyboard supremo, studio whiz and mysterious mastermind behind the uncategoriseable and irrepressible Cloggz project. During the downtime he shared his reminiscences of playing with the Tommy Chase Quartet. It reminded me that, although you don’t hear so much about his high-powered, hard-swinging outfit these days, Mr Chase deserves a chapter of his own in the history of British jazz-and-related-musics. 

  This column has previously explored, albeit superficially, the changing fortunes of jazz in that mysterious period of the mid 80s when it suddenly found itself fashionable again. Perhaps punk and it’s offshoots had come to seem like rather dreary old hat, and the wider public discovered an appetite for a slicker, more glamourous vision of the zeitgeist that found it’s musical evocation through embracing such previously shunned cultural tropes as saxophones, conga drums and extended chords played on the Fender Rhodes. In the more commercial arena, the public’s engagement with jazz wasn’t much deeper than that - artists like Sade, Curiosity Killed the Cat et al employed jazzy devices as a sort of garnish on what remained basically pop-soul. One imagines the older, radically committed jazz generation balking at the dilution of their musical and political identities, but a younger crowd of players took advantage of the newly prevailing winds to launch careers that have lasted in some cases to this day - Courtney Pine is perhaps the best known example of someone who’s appeared on Top of The Pops and emerged with his jazz credentials untarnished. 

  Tommy Chase rode this wave, but also stood distinct from it, in that his quartet dealt exclusively in hard bop of the old school, complete with upright bass, acoustic piano, and a total dedication to swing. His belief in the music was unshakeable; he saw no reason why a 1950s style jazz quartet couldn’t be as commercially viablea part of the contemporary music scene as anything else; and for a while, he got a lot of people to agree with him, partly it seems through sheer force of character. The band appeared in the press, played sell-out gigs in regular, non-jazz venues around the country, made records with hot young producers and even got some of those records into the charts. What’s all the more remarkable is that they did it without diluting the leader’s maniacally unswerving dedication to the artistic verities codified by Blue Note Records thirty years previously. Some of our most celebrated current torchbearers of the tradition passed through the band - notables such as Alan Barnes and Andy Cleyndert. It didn’t seem to be stretching a point too far to see a lineage stretching back to the Jazz Couriers of 60s Soho, or even across the Atlantic to the Jazz Messengers and the irascible Mr Blakey himself. 

  Tommy was undoubtedly assisted by the wider public’s continuing willingness to buy into the Mod aesthetic in it’s various forms. 198 was the year of an ambitious, swinging-Londonmovie adaptation of Colin McInnes’ seminal youth-culture novel, Absolute Beginners - the book’s un-named protagonist is a streetwise London teen who combines a disaffected attitude and a hustler’s irreverent ambition with a love of Italian suits and the Modern Jazz Quartet. The fact that he lives in a Notting Hill of cheap rents and impoverished immigrants makes him seem today even more like a creature from a fabulous distant past, but the cultural gap was narrower then, and figures as diverse and influential as David Bowie and the Modfather himself, Paul Weller, adopted aspects of the cultural package that the book and it’s spectacularly unsuccessful film adaptation tried to embody. 

  Presentation was everything; Tommy was not only evangelical about his ( at the time still-unreissued) 60s Blue Note platters, but about the dictates of Mod fashion, which led to him prescribing every aspect of his musicians’ appearance from socks to haircuts. Not only did the band rehearse with military regularity - they rehearsed in suits and ties. This may seem a bit much today - Mr Chase by all accounts was an extremely difficult man to deal with, whose emulation of the methods and self-belief of the Jazz Greats extended to include some of their most challenging character traits. But on a professional level it was pure showmanship; and it seems an inescapable fact that this kind of showmanship is rather absent for the scene today, and the scene seems the poorer for it. Today’s players often opt for a non-committal jeans-and-suit-jacket look, like academics on sabbatical (which to an extent is what many of them are), or at worst embody the unfortunate paradigm of unkempt men in wrinkled casual wear hunched morosely over their instruments which has done so much to alienate the uncommitted public from the music. This is in stark contrast to previous generations - Miles in particular believed that a radical musical vision was best presented in snazzy threads. We’re not suggesting that a wholesale return to the Dark Magus’ shell-suit-and-hair-weave look of later years would be an effective cure; but a re-examination of the legacy of the Tommy Chase Quartet is surely overdue - both for the music itself, and for it’s leader’s belief that jazz had as much right to a place in the mainstream as anything else. 

New Grass

As the Sussex Jazz Magazine enters it’s third year, it’s gratifying to see how the scene thatinspired it’s inception is still busy enough to keep it supplied with copy. 2015 was a great year for jazz-and-related-musics in the Sussex area, and 2016 promises a range of delights to come.

 Sadly but inevitably, the chill winds of economic unviability have taken their toll to some extent. The popular In Session Wednesday nights at the Verdict have been discontinued, though the search is on for a more financially self-sufficient formula to enable them to be re-established. The Park View’s excellent series of gigs have also come to an end, as have the Friday night late sessions at the Brunswick. Still, where one door closes another opens, and the newly refurbished Nightingale Room in Grand Central has lent it’s luxurious surroundings to a series of gigs promoted by the tireless Terry Seabrook.  As far as the grassroots goes, the good news far outweighs the bad. Notable among the many continuing casual pub sessions is the Bristol Bar’s Thursday slot, which has recently featured Simon Spillet and John Donaldson as well as showcasing a plethora of local players; Tuesday’s Brunswick Jam, which continues to pack the house, and the same night’s Three Little Bops at the Mesmerist presenting a mix of local and London players; and the Hand In Hand and the Bee’s Mouth sessions, both vying for the title of the South east’s smallest music venues. Add to this the continuing popularity of the Gypsy Jazz format which keeps establishing itself in a range of venues across town, and Brighton is still acity where there’s a free-admission jazz gig or two happening virtually every night of the week - see the gig listings at the end of this publication for proof.  Small’s Jazz at the Caxton keeps the flame of mainstream alive with it’s consistently high-quality seasons of unplugged gigs.  Over in Lewes, the Snowdrop’s Monday nights have been keeping up their high standard. 

In addition, the Swing juggernaught continues to keep rolling on, with nights like White Mink demonstrating Brightonians’ endless appetite for dressing up to have Roaring 20s-themed fun, while providing gainful employment for many jazz players. 

 Pulling back the camera for a reveal of the bigger picture, 2015 saw no less than three jazz festivals touching down in the area. Love Supreme returned for the third year, bigger and better than ever as the promoters continue to refine the cutting-edge-plus-commercial formula (and their luck with the weather continues to hold). Atopposite ends of the musical spectrum, two new festivals also. appeared - Dan Spicer’s Alternative Jazz Festival at the Old Market provided two nights of Improv at it’s most defiantly uncommercial, which paradoxically and gratifyingly sold out completely. Over at the Ropetackle in Shoreham, Claire Martin and Julian Nicholas presented a programme of classic British jazz at the South Coast Jazz festival, again to sell-out audiences. These three events did a fair job of covering the whole spectrum of jazz-and-related-musics as it stands in the UK today, but in case anyone felt they were missing something out, the Brighton Jazz Club was on hand to present Marius Neset and John Taylor in what was sadly to be one of his last appearances, and further gigs by such diverse acts as Polar Bear, The Impossible Gentlemen, Courtney Pine, Louis Moholo, Snarky Puppy and Bill Laurence demonstrate how local promoter’s willingness to take a risk on jazz is more often then not rewarded.

  Brighton’s dedicated jazz club, the Verdict, continues to thrive and attract an ever-increasing range of top British andinternational talent. This tiny space has increasingly grown it’s reputation amongst players as a great space to perform in, and names such as Andy Sheppard, Tommy Smith, Julian Argüelles and Michale Janisch are choosing to include it on their busy international itineraries. Special mention as well goes to the New Generation Jazz project running there on the last Friday of every month, with Arts Council assistance enabling a host of bright, up-and-coming UK musicians to put on a series of gigs and free workshops that are set to continue up till September. 

  Let’s end with a wish-list. It would be nice to see a return of the Alternative jazz Festival, and a continuation of sunny skies for Love Supreme. An increasing focus on education, bringing jazz-and-related-musics into the city’s many schools and colleges, is as essential component in maintaining thecontinuation of the scene. Finally, there’s no live music scene without an audience - the simplest, and best, way to ensure the music you love continues to thrive is to get out and see it any chance you get!

What's in a Name?

Love Supreme returns to Firle Place this weekend for it’s second attempt at presenting a high-production greenfield festival programmed entirely with Jazz-and -related-musics. One can only admire their courage. Glastonbury Festival introduced a Jazz Stage once upon a time, but that was long long ago in the distant 80s, when Jazz and World Music (of which more later) enjoyed a brief surge of commercial visibility. Since 2010 it’s been renamed “West Holts”. Now we hear thatJazzFm have reduced their broadcasting to DAB in the London are only, while the venerable Jazz Services have just announced that they will cease to be a National Portfolio Organisation from 2015, effectively ending their existence as a subsidised body. You can sign a petition opposing this: HERE . Neither of these unwelcome changes indicate a widespread media support for Jazz, whatever people understand by the label. The greenfield festival market is a notoriously crowded and treacherous one, the Jazz audience demographic not traditionally associated with the rigours of the campsite and the chemical toilet, and the very definition of Jazz is the subject of furious and often ill-tempered debate. It’s the last issue that this article will attempt to address.

  Last year’s Love Supreme attracted many glowing reviews, but complete unanimity of opinion is no more attainable or desirable in music than anywhere else.  Journalist Daniel Spicer wrote a spectacularly splenetic article for The Wire in which he accused the event’s organisers of blasphemy, on the grounds that they were betraying the very spirit of Jazz as epitomised by John Coltrane. Spicer at least nailed his colours to the mast - for him, Jazz means“ the walls of Jericho thunder of hard bop, the deep trance dream of modal Jazz or even the superhuman sports jams of fusion.” As all these musical forms were abundantly represented at Love Supreme, it is apparent that Spicer didn’t actually attend the festival himself or speak to anyone who did before penning his attack, but no matter - his particular ire was reserved for the headliners, Jools Holland and Bryan Ferry, because they weren’t Jazz enough for his liking, though he also seemed irritated by his own assumption that the festival’s clientele would be entirely middle class, which is a curious attitude for a contributor the The Wire, not a publication noted for it’s demotic appeal. 

  Are the Jools Holland Orchestra jazz? Is Bryan Ferry, even in an incarnation assisted by Alan Barnes and the Cole Porter songbook? Or is the spirit of jazz best epitomised by “a mind blowing double bill of The Anthony Braxton Quintet followed by Cecil Taylor, Bill Dixon and Tony Oxley” at the Festival Hall, which is Daniel Spicer’s notion of what it should be? Many people have thedefinite notion that the word “Jazz” means something, and that must include you or you wouldn’t be reading this magazine. And it’s certainly easier to agree on what it’s not - it would be perverse to insist that Metallica were a jazz act, though they do feature solo improvisations, polyrhythms and natty facial hair.  However, as fast as you may try to define key attributes of jazz- like swing time, conscious awareness of the tradition, saxophones, blues licks and harmony, syncopation- you become inconveniently aware that there are artists and performances that incorporate none of these elements yet still are classed as jazz. How can a single genre include Hiromi, Evan Parker and Ken Peplowski and still hold together in any meaningful way? Then there’s a whole political dimension as to what does or does not qualify, somewhat beyond the scope of this piece, though interested readers are directed to wrathful trumpet maestro Nicholas Peyton’s “Why Jazz Isn’t Hip Any More” series on his blog as a starting point. Petyon would like us to refer to his chosen metier as ‘Post-Modern New Orleans Music”, and we can only wish him luck with this ambition.  

  To the music commissioner for an advertising firm trawling through library music catalogues, “Jazz” has definite but limited connotations, which mostwould understand, probably best epitomised by Miles’ “Kind Of Blue”- abstract, mellow, cool, saxophones, ride cymbals and pianos, well suited to selling premium products. To the indie-rock purist, “Jazz” just means the enemy - a byword for aggravating, elitist musical self-indulgence. To an older generation, “Jazz” meant dance music, and to a still older one, a crude and vulgar form with a dangerously anarchic undercurrent. To Wire readers, “Jazz” implies a questing, challenging musical form divorced from the pressures of commercial conformity, but to JazzFm it implies a slick, conservative sound implying a lifestyle probably out of reach of many of it’s actual practitioners. Let’s see if the dictionaries can help; the OED declares it to be “a type of music of black American origin characterised by improvisation, syncopation, and usually a regular or forceful rhythm, emerging at the beginning of the 20th century” and Webster’s seems to go along, pronouncing it, with an old-time charm, to be “American music developed especially from ragtime and blues and characterized by propulsive syncopated rhythms, polyphonic ensemble playing, varying degrees of improvisation, and often deliberate distortions of pitch and timbre”, though in it’s more slapdash moments it simply alleges that it’s “a type of American music with lively rhythms and melodies that are often made up by musicians as they play”.  Macmillan feebly offers that it’s “a type of music that developed in the late 19th century in which there is a strong lively beat and the players often improvise” , and provides a laughable musical link to back up it’s claim. Collins falls into step by providing thatit’s “a kind of music of African-American origin, characterised by syncopated rhythms, solo and group improvisation, and a variety of harmonic idioms and instrumental techniques”, but goes on to admit that “it exists in a number of styles” which one may feel is the least it could say. 

  It’s pretty well established that there can be demonstrated to be a distinct, apostolic tradition of Jazz music, deriving from those early African-American musicians of the New Orleans days that continue to excite people as diverse as Acker Bilk and Nicholas Peyton, and that any music that is created with some kind of awareness of that tradition, however much the musicians themselves may attempt to deny it, can be classed as a part of Jazz. ABarry Guy record typically shares more elements with Penderecki than it does with Paul Chambers , while Dave Holland’s Prism may sound closer to prog rock than Prez and Neil Cowley’s trio sound as close to his previous employer Adele as it does to Ahmad Jahmal. All three can be identified as belonging to the Jazz tradition in part because of the history of the people playing, and the kind of music they have listened to and absorbed. And all three demonstrate how creative artists can use the freedom implicit in any understanding of Jazz to push and pull the form into a variety of new shapes. There’s room for all this, as there is for the classic format of acoustic quartets playing swinging versions of the Great American Songbook. In it’s classic period in the middle of the 20th century, Jazz was a populist, commercial enterprise; it now extends into the farthest, most forbidding reaches of Art Music. It’s all valid. Those who see their favoured version of Jazz as the only true one, and everything else as a distortion or dilution, should lighten up. The greatest Jazz musicians always kept open ears and minds. We don’t have to dig it all equally, but we should recognise that in this era of funding cuts the music we love has to adapt and expand to survive.