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A MIKE TAYLOR DISCOVERY A Mike Taylor discovery. by Richard Williams on April 14, 2021. When the English jazz pianist and composer Mike Taylor walked into the sea and died in 1969, aged 30, he left behind two albums — Pendulum, by his quartet, and the self-explanatory Trio, recorded in 1966 and ’67 respectively — as a memorial to a talent silenced by the kind of LIVE AT THE VILLAGE VANGUARD Live at the Village Vanguard. by Richard Williams on February 7, 2021. Something Sonny Rollins said in an excellent interview in the March issue of Uncut magazine reminded me of how much I miss being in clubs. The thing with live music, Rollins told John Lewis, is that “everybody has a role — even the audience. BOB MARLEY’S LAST RIDE by Richard Williams on May 20, 2021. It’s 40 years this week since Jamaica came to a halt for the funeral of its most famous son. What follows is an expanded version of the reports I wrote on that extraordinary day for The Times and the French magazine Rock & Folk. They buried Bob Marley on 21 May 1981 at Nine Mile, the Jamaicanhamlet where
MANY ACCENTS, ONE VOICE Just about the first thing I discovered when I began a three-year term as artistic director of Berlin's historic jazz festival in 2015 was that I would be required to explain myself. More specifically, I would be asked to describe my "concept". This was a little disconcerting since I didn't really have one, at THE BAND AT THE ALBERT HALL The story of the Band is one of the most beautiful and tragic in the history of popular music. But at the Albert Hall on June 2, 1971, we only knew the half of it: the beautiful half. Rick Danko, Levon Helm, Garth Hudson, Richard Manuel and Robbie Robertson gave us one of thefinest
PUNKT.VRT.PLASTIK (WHAT?) When I first encountered Punkt.Vrt.Plastik two years ago in Berlin, I thought they were making the most intellectually challenging piano-trio music I'd ever heard. Their late-night concert, in a darkened auditorium, was an intense experience, highly rewarding but perhaps more impressive than enjoyable. At the Vortex last night, without changing any of the components ofSIMON PROFFITT
Supported by Ty Cerdd (Music Centre Wales), on whose label the CD was released this month, The Cwmwl Tystion Suite was given five concert performances — with live visuals by Simon Proffitt — in 2019, from which these recordings were taken. What Tomos Williams has done is subtly infiltrate contemporary jazz practices with textures drawn from BRYAN FERRY AT THE ALBERT HALL, 1974 by Richard Williams on February 8, 2020. My most powerful memory of Bryan Ferry’s debut as a solo artist at the Albert Hall, four and a half decades ago, is of a blonde woman sitting just along the row from me in the ringside seats. She was in her early thirties, I’d guess, tanned and expensively dressed and coiffed; she’d arrived by THEBLUEMOMENT.COMSTEPPING OUT WITH BOBBY PARKERBLUESWEATHERBLUEGRASSFILMR&B Summer’s here, more or less, and Joel Selvin’s new book, Hollywood Eden, is a good one to take to the beach, the park or the back garden.Subtitled “Electric Guitars, Fast Cars and the Myth of the California Paradise”, it’s the story of a group of white kids who poured out of the local high schools — Fairfax, University, Beverly Hills, Hawthorne and Roosevelt — intent on using the PETER HAMMILL IN LOCKDOWN Some time in the future, academics will pore over the ways people found to make music despite the restrictions imposed during the various lockdowns. But there are things that don't need the benefit of time to provide perspective. The knowledge that Peter Hammill's In Translation was created in cruel and unusual circumstances mayincrease his
A MIKE TAYLOR DISCOVERY A Mike Taylor discovery. by Richard Williams on April 14, 2021. When the English jazz pianist and composer Mike Taylor walked into the sea and died in 1969, aged 30, he left behind two albums — Pendulum, by his quartet, and the self-explanatory Trio, recorded in 1966 and ’67 respectively — as a memorial to a talent silenced by the kind of LIVE AT THE VILLAGE VANGUARD Live at the Village Vanguard. by Richard Williams on February 7, 2021. Something Sonny Rollins said in an excellent interview in the March issue of Uncut magazine reminded me of how much I miss being in clubs. The thing with live music, Rollins told John Lewis, is that “everybody has a role — even the audience. BOB MARLEY’S LAST RIDE by Richard Williams on May 20, 2021. It’s 40 years this week since Jamaica came to a halt for the funeral of its most famous son. What follows is an expanded version of the reports I wrote on that extraordinary day for The Times and the French magazine Rock & Folk. They buried Bob Marley on 21 May 1981 at Nine Mile, the Jamaicanhamlet where
MANY ACCENTS, ONE VOICE Just about the first thing I discovered when I began a three-year term as artistic director of Berlin's historic jazz festival in 2015 was that I would be required to explain myself. More specifically, I would be asked to describe my "concept". This was a little disconcerting since I didn't really have one, at THE BAND AT THE ALBERT HALL The story of the Band is one of the most beautiful and tragic in the history of popular music. But at the Albert Hall on June 2, 1971, we only knew the half of it: the beautiful half. Rick Danko, Levon Helm, Garth Hudson, Richard Manuel and Robbie Robertson gave us one of thefinest
PUNKT.VRT.PLASTIK (WHAT?) When I first encountered Punkt.Vrt.Plastik two years ago in Berlin, I thought they were making the most intellectually challenging piano-trio music I'd ever heard. Their late-night concert, in a darkened auditorium, was an intense experience, highly rewarding but perhaps more impressive than enjoyable. At the Vortex last night, without changing any of the components ofSIMON PROFFITT
Supported by Ty Cerdd (Music Centre Wales), on whose label the CD was released this month, The Cwmwl Tystion Suite was given five concert performances — with live visuals by Simon Proffitt — in 2019, from which these recordings were taken. What Tomos Williams has done is subtly infiltrate contemporary jazz practices with textures drawn from BRYAN FERRY AT THE ALBERT HALL, 1974 by Richard Williams on February 8, 2020. My most powerful memory of Bryan Ferry’s debut as a solo artist at the Albert Hall, four and a half decades ago, is of a blonde woman sitting just along the row from me in the ringside seats. She was in her early thirties, I’d guess, tanned and expensively dressed and coiffed; she’d arrived byABOUT THE AUTHOR
Since the late 1960s I've written about music for the Melody Maker, the (London) Times, the Independent on Sunday, the Guardian, Down Beat, Jazz Journal, Mojo, the TLS, Granta, Uncut and other publications. A list of the people I've most enjoyed interviewing during that time would include Marvin Gaye, Laura Nyro, Booker T.Jones, Miles Davis,
BLUES FOR BOB PORTER The name of Bob Porter started appearing on jazz albums at the end of the 1960s and then, with gathering frequency, through the succeeding decades. It soon became obvious that, whether as a record producer, a compiler of historical anthologies or a writer of liner notes, Porter--
DYAN BIRCH 1949-2020 Dyan Birch was something special. Her presence on a stage drew the eye and the ear. And now she's gone, leaving the memory of a soulful essence that was hers alone, however big or small the stage. She was a teenager working in Brian Epstein's NEMS record shop inHEMPHILL BID’NESS
The saxophonist and composer Julius Hemphill was born in 1938 in Fort Worth, Texas, where he attended the same high school at Ornette Coleman, who was eight years his senior and said to be his cousin. By the time he reached his early twenties Hemphill was in St Louis, Missouri, where he joined the Black GROUP SOUNDS FOUR & FIVE Group Sounds Five had acquired the habit of rehearsing three times a week, even though they landed on average no more than one gig a month, according to their drummer, Jon Hiseman, and Lowther and Dobson continued with them even after joining the Manfreds. The departure of their pianist, Ken McCarthy, turned them into Group Sounds Four, with BOB DYLAN IN SURBITON Bob Dylan in Surbiton. by Richard Williams on February 11, 2021. Here’s a building that deserves one of English Heritage’s blue plaques — if, that is, the story about Bob Dylan putting in an appearance at Surbiton Assembly Rooms in the first week of January 1963 can ever be verified. Mentioned 25 years ago in Clinton Heylin’s Bob Dylan THE LOST PROMISE OF JESSE BELVIN Sixty years ago last month, the singer Jesse Belvin was travelling with his wife Jo Ann from a show in Little Rock, Arkansas, where he had performed at the city's first integrated show, to his next engagement in Dallas, Texas, a journey of 300 miles. In the early hours of the morning they were outsideMANFRED MANN
Tom McGuinness remembers a Sunday night in 1965 when he, Manfred Mann and Mike Hugg visited the Green Man pub on Blackheath Hill to see a modern jazz outfit called Group Sounds Five. He thinks they must have had a motive, because the band’s two horn players — the trumpeter Henry Lowther and the saxophonist Lyn Dobson — soon became membersA RECORD SHOP LIFE
The history of the British music scene from the 1950s onwards can be told through the story of the nation's record shops, which is exactly what Garth Cartwright does in Going for a Song, his newly published survey of the retail outlets that drew fans and musicians to their specialist stock and thereby shaped GEORGE MARTIN’S DAY IN THE LIFE Forty five summers ago, George Martin granted me a long interview for the Melody Maker. It was a very enjoyable experience: he was most courteous of men, and his answers were full of fascinating detail, with the occasional gentle indiscretion. He spoke in some depth about his experience of working with the Beatles, all the way from THEBLUEMOMENT.COMSTEPPING OUT WITH BOBBY PARKERBLUESWEATHERBLUEGRASSFILMR&B Summer’s here, more or less, and Joel Selvin’s new book, Hollywood Eden, is a good one to take to the beach, the park or the back garden.Subtitled “Electric Guitars, Fast Cars and the Myth of the California Paradise”, it’s the story of a group of white kids who poured out of the local high schools — Fairfax, University, Beverly Hills, Hawthorne and Roosevelt — intent on using the PETER HAMMILL IN LOCKDOWN Some time in the future, academics will pore over the ways people found to make music despite the restrictions imposed during the various lockdowns. But there are things that don't need the benefit of time to provide perspective. The knowledge that Peter Hammill's In Translation was created in cruel and unusual circumstances mayincrease his
BOB MARLEY’S LAST RIDE It's 40 years this week since Jamaica came to a halt for the funeral of its most famous son. What follows is an expanded version of the reports I wrote on that extraordinary day for The Times and the French magazine Rock & Folk. They buried Bob Marley on 21 May 1981 at NineMile,
A MIKE TAYLOR DISCOVERY When the English jazz pianist and composer Mike Taylor walked into the sea and died in 1969, aged 30, he left behind two albums — Pendulum, by his quartet, and the self-explanatory Trio, recorded in 1966 and ’67 respectively — as a memorial to a talent silenced by the kind of problems experienced by too many creative souls in that era. Taylor’s gifts and instincts put him somewhere in LIVE AT THE VILLAGE VANGUARD A wonderful venue with a great atmosphere. I was fortunate enough to be in New York at Easter a few years ago. My companion & I were passing by the Village Vanguard and became engaged in conversation at the door, where we were encouraged to come in to listen to Teddy Charles who was playing that evening. PUNKT.VRT.PLASTIK (WHAT?) When I first encountered Punkt.Vrt.Plastik two years ago in Berlin, I thought they were making the most intellectually challenging piano-trio music I'd ever heard. Their late-night concert, in a darkened auditorium, was an intense experience, highly rewarding but perhaps more impressive than enjoyable. At the Vortex last night, without changing any of the components of BRYAN FERRY AT THE ALBERT HALL, 1974 My most powerful memory of Bryan Ferry's debut as a solo artist at the Albert Hall, four and a half decades ago, is of a blonde woman sitting just along the row from me in the ringside seats. She was in her early thirties, I'd guess, tanned and expensively dressed and coiffed; she'darrived by
MANFRED MANN
Tom McGuinness remembers a Sunday night in 1965 when he, Manfred Mann and Mike Hugg visited the Green Man pub on Blackheath Hill to see a modern jazz outfit called Group Sounds Five. DYAN BIRCH 1949-2020 Dyan Birch was something special. Her presence on a stage drew the eye and the ear. And now she's gone, leaving the memory of a soulful essence that was hers alone, however big or small the stage. She was a teenager working in Brian Epstein's NEMS record shop in GEORGE MARTIN’S DAY IN THE LIFE Forty five summers ago, George Martin granted me a long interview for the Melody Maker. It was a very enjoyable experience: he was most courteous of men, and his answers were full of fascinating detail, with the occasional gentle indiscretion. He spoke in some depth about his experience of working with the Beatles, all the way from THEBLUEMOMENT.COMSTEPPING OUT WITH BOBBY PARKERBLUESWEATHERBLUEGRASSFILMR&B Summer’s here, more or less, and Joel Selvin’s new book, Hollywood Eden, is a good one to take to the beach, the park or the back garden.Subtitled “Electric Guitars, Fast Cars and the Myth of the California Paradise”, it’s the story of a group of white kids who poured out of the local high schools — Fairfax, University, Beverly Hills, Hawthorne and Roosevelt — intent on using the PETER HAMMILL IN LOCKDOWN Some time in the future, academics will pore over the ways people found to make music despite the restrictions imposed during the various lockdowns. But there are things that don't need the benefit of time to provide perspective. The knowledge that Peter Hammill's In Translation was created in cruel and unusual circumstances mayincrease his
BOB MARLEY’S LAST RIDE It's 40 years this week since Jamaica came to a halt for the funeral of its most famous son. What follows is an expanded version of the reports I wrote on that extraordinary day for The Times and the French magazine Rock & Folk. They buried Bob Marley on 21 May 1981 at NineMile,
A MIKE TAYLOR DISCOVERY When the English jazz pianist and composer Mike Taylor walked into the sea and died in 1969, aged 30, he left behind two albums — Pendulum, by his quartet, and the self-explanatory Trio, recorded in 1966 and ’67 respectively — as a memorial to a talent silenced by the kind of problems experienced by too many creative souls in that era. Taylor’s gifts and instincts put him somewhere in LIVE AT THE VILLAGE VANGUARD A wonderful venue with a great atmosphere. I was fortunate enough to be in New York at Easter a few years ago. My companion & I were passing by the Village Vanguard and became engaged in conversation at the door, where we were encouraged to come in to listen to Teddy Charles who was playing that evening. PUNKT.VRT.PLASTIK (WHAT?) When I first encountered Punkt.Vrt.Plastik two years ago in Berlin, I thought they were making the most intellectually challenging piano-trio music I'd ever heard. Their late-night concert, in a darkened auditorium, was an intense experience, highly rewarding but perhaps more impressive than enjoyable. At the Vortex last night, without changing any of the components of BRYAN FERRY AT THE ALBERT HALL, 1974 My most powerful memory of Bryan Ferry's debut as a solo artist at the Albert Hall, four and a half decades ago, is of a blonde woman sitting just along the row from me in the ringside seats. She was in her early thirties, I'd guess, tanned and expensively dressed and coiffed; she'darrived by
MANFRED MANN
Tom McGuinness remembers a Sunday night in 1965 when he, Manfred Mann and Mike Hugg visited the Green Man pub on Blackheath Hill to see a modern jazz outfit called Group Sounds Five. DYAN BIRCH 1949-2020 Dyan Birch was something special. Her presence on a stage drew the eye and the ear. And now she's gone, leaving the memory of a soulful essence that was hers alone, however big or small the stage. She was a teenager working in Brian Epstein's NEMS record shop in GEORGE MARTIN’S DAY IN THE LIFE Forty five summers ago, George Martin granted me a long interview for the Melody Maker. It was a very enjoyable experience: he was most courteous of men, and his answers were full of fascinating detail, with the occasional gentle indiscretion. He spoke in some depth about his experience of working with the Beatles, all the way from MANY ACCENTS, ONE VOICE Just about the first thing I discovered when I began a three-year term as artistic director of Berlin's historic jazz festival in 2015 was that I would be required to explain myself. More specifically, I would be asked to describe my "concept". This was a little disconcerting since I didn't really have one, at LIVE AT THE VILLAGE VANGUARD A wonderful venue with a great atmosphere. I was fortunate enough to be in New York at Easter a few years ago. My companion & I were passing by the Village Vanguard and became engaged in conversation at the door, where we were encouraged to come in to listen to Teddy Charles who was playing that evening. THE BAND AT THE ALBERT HALL The story of the Band is one of the most beautiful and tragic in the history of popular music. But at the Albert Hall on June 2, 1971, we only knew the half of it: the beautiful half. Rick Danko, Levon Helm, Garth Hudson, Richard Manuel and Robbie Robertson gave us one of thefinest
THE NEWS FROM KEITH JARRETT It is a something of a consolation to hear this very sad news from you Richard, with your usual sensitive detail. I will never forget hearing the name Keith Jarrett from the mouth of Gordon Beck ( in a 1974 post gig conversation in the Seven Dials) who raved about him with such passion that the next day I went to the Holborn Record Library and took out the Bremen & Lausanne double album RE-READING BRIAN ENO’S DIARY Many of these new words suggest the dissolution of a certain quality of public discourse that we have taken for granted since the Enlightenment, which hinged on the possibility of reaching evidence-based concensus -- albeit even temporary -- about what constitutes reality. The post-modern scepticism of any distinction between ideologically derived value systems and evidence-driven GEORGE MARTIN’S DAY IN THE LIFE Forty five summers ago, George Martin granted me a long interview for the Melody Maker. It was a very enjoyable experience: he was most courteous of men, and his answers were full of fascinating detail, with the occasional gentle indiscretion. He spoke in some depth about his experience of working with the Beatles, all the way fromMANFRED MANN
Tom McGuinness remembers a Sunday night in 1965 when he, Manfred Mann and Mike Hugg visited the Green Man pub on Blackheath Hill to see a modern jazz outfit called Group Sounds Five. CECIL TAYLOR, HIMSELF A very fine and fitting piece as always. Much appreciated. And coming so soon after Buell Neidlinger’s passing. I confess to not embracing all (or most) of Cecil’s later work, it just seemed so unrelenting, maybe I should relisten, but the Looking Ahead and The World of Cecil Taylor albums breath and are really outstanding. LOVE DON’T LOVE NOBODY My favourite soul ballad, bar none, and the anecdote from the engineer about Thom Bell will stay with me. I’ve recently liberated my copies of “Black Music” magazine (1973 – 1978) from the loft and I’m pretty sure it was the review by Alan Lewis in May ’74 of “Mighty Love” that sent me scurrying excitedly to my local LP emporium.INSIDE DAVE TURNER
Just saw Inside Llewyn Davis and you are right — the scarf anachronism is glaring. Which is odd, since the rest of the production design appears meticulous — the shapeless corduroy jacket, the CBS studio scene with bored engineers and a John Hammond lookalike, the perfect cars and lifelike street scenes, the academic’s Upper West Side apartment (complete with African art and time THEBLUEMOMENT.COMSTEPPING OUT WITH BOBBY PARKERBLUESWEATHERBLUEGRASSFILMR&B Summer’s here, more or less, and Joel Selvin’s new book, Hollywood Eden, is a good one to take to the beach, the park or the back garden.Subtitled “Electric Guitars, Fast Cars and the Myth of the California Paradise”, it’s the story of a group of white kids who poured out of the local high schools — Fairfax, University, Beverly Hills, Hawthorne and Roosevelt — intent on using the PETER HAMMILL IN LOCKDOWN Some time in the future, academics will pore over the ways people found to make music despite the restrictions imposed during the various lockdowns. But there are things that don't need the benefit of time to provide perspective. The knowledge that Peter Hammill's In Translation was created in cruel and unusual circumstances mayincrease his
A MIKE TAYLOR DISCOVERY A Mike Taylor discovery. by Richard Williams on April 14, 2021. When the English jazz pianist and composer Mike Taylor walked into the sea and died in 1969, aged 30, he left behind two albums — Pendulum, by his quartet, and the self-explanatory Trio, recorded in 1966 and ’67 respectively — as a memorial to a talent silenced by the kind of MANY ACCENTS, ONE VOICE Just about the first thing I discovered when I began a three-year term as artistic director of Berlin's historic jazz festival in 2015 was that I would be required to explain myself. More specifically, I would be asked to describe my "concept". This was a little disconcerting since I didn't really have one, at LIVE AT THE VILLAGE VANGUARD Live at the Village Vanguard. by Richard Williams on February 7, 2021. Something Sonny Rollins said in an excellent interview in the March issue of Uncut magazine reminded me of how much I miss being in clubs. The thing with live music, Rollins told John Lewis, is that “everybody has a role — even the audience. PUNKT.VRT.PLASTIK (WHAT?) When I first encountered Punkt.Vrt.Plastik two years ago in Berlin, I thought they were making the most intellectually challenging piano-trio music I'd ever heard. Their late-night concert, in a darkened auditorium, was an intense experience, highly rewarding but perhaps more impressive than enjoyable. At the Vortex last night, without changing any of the components ofMANFRED MANN
Tom McGuinness remembers a Sunday night in 1965 when he, Manfred Mann and Mike Hugg visited the Green Man pub on Blackheath Hill to see a modern jazz outfit called Group Sounds Five. He thinks they must have had a motive, because the band’s two horn players — the trumpeter Henry Lowther and the saxophonist Lyn Dobson — soon became members BRYAN FERRY AT THE ALBERT HALL, 1974 by Richard Williams on February 8, 2020. My most powerful memory of Bryan Ferry’s debut as a solo artist at the Albert Hall, four and a half decades ago, is of a blonde woman sitting just along the row from me in the ringside seats. She was in her early thirties, I’d guess, tanned and expensively dressed and coiffed; she’d arrived by GEORGE MARTIN’S DAY IN THE LIFE Forty five summers ago, George Martin granted me a long interview for the Melody Maker. It was a very enjoyable experience: he was most courteous of men, and his answers were full of fascinating detail, with the occasional gentle indiscretion. He spoke in some depth about his experience of working with the Beatles, all the way fromINSIDE DAVE TURNER
Here he is in full comedy-folk guise, performing a song he wrote in the Sixties called “The Ballad of Cosmic Ray”, incorporating bits of “Freight Train” (with a reminder of his Dylan parody) and “Won’t You Come Home, Bill Bailey”, and some fantastic finger-picking. And here’s a complete 40-minute set of his full-frontal ribaldry THEBLUEMOMENT.COMSTEPPING OUT WITH BOBBY PARKERBLUESWEATHERBLUEGRASSFILMR&B Summer’s here, more or less, and Joel Selvin’s new book, Hollywood Eden, is a good one to take to the beach, the park or the back garden.Subtitled “Electric Guitars, Fast Cars and the Myth of the California Paradise”, it’s the story of a group of white kids who poured out of the local high schools — Fairfax, University, Beverly Hills, Hawthorne and Roosevelt — intent on using the PETER HAMMILL IN LOCKDOWN Some time in the future, academics will pore over the ways people found to make music despite the restrictions imposed during the various lockdowns. But there are things that don't need the benefit of time to provide perspective. The knowledge that Peter Hammill's In Translation was created in cruel and unusual circumstances mayincrease his
A MIKE TAYLOR DISCOVERY A Mike Taylor discovery. by Richard Williams on April 14, 2021. When the English jazz pianist and composer Mike Taylor walked into the sea and died in 1969, aged 30, he left behind two albums — Pendulum, by his quartet, and the self-explanatory Trio, recorded in 1966 and ’67 respectively — as a memorial to a talent silenced by the kind of MANY ACCENTS, ONE VOICE Just about the first thing I discovered when I began a three-year term as artistic director of Berlin's historic jazz festival in 2015 was that I would be required to explain myself. More specifically, I would be asked to describe my "concept". This was a little disconcerting since I didn't really have one, at LIVE AT THE VILLAGE VANGUARD Live at the Village Vanguard. by Richard Williams on February 7, 2021. Something Sonny Rollins said in an excellent interview in the March issue of Uncut magazine reminded me of how much I miss being in clubs. The thing with live music, Rollins told John Lewis, is that “everybody has a role — even the audience. PUNKT.VRT.PLASTIK (WHAT?) When I first encountered Punkt.Vrt.Plastik two years ago in Berlin, I thought they were making the most intellectually challenging piano-trio music I'd ever heard. Their late-night concert, in a darkened auditorium, was an intense experience, highly rewarding but perhaps more impressive than enjoyable. At the Vortex last night, without changing any of the components ofMANFRED MANN
Tom McGuinness remembers a Sunday night in 1965 when he, Manfred Mann and Mike Hugg visited the Green Man pub on Blackheath Hill to see a modern jazz outfit called Group Sounds Five. He thinks they must have had a motive, because the band’s two horn players — the trumpeter Henry Lowther and the saxophonist Lyn Dobson — soon became members BRYAN FERRY AT THE ALBERT HALL, 1974 by Richard Williams on February 8, 2020. My most powerful memory of Bryan Ferry’s debut as a solo artist at the Albert Hall, four and a half decades ago, is of a blonde woman sitting just along the row from me in the ringside seats. She was in her early thirties, I’d guess, tanned and expensively dressed and coiffed; she’d arrived by GEORGE MARTIN’S DAY IN THE LIFE Forty five summers ago, George Martin granted me a long interview for the Melody Maker. It was a very enjoyable experience: he was most courteous of men, and his answers were full of fascinating detail, with the occasional gentle indiscretion. He spoke in some depth about his experience of working with the Beatles, all the way fromINSIDE DAVE TURNER
Here he is in full comedy-folk guise, performing a song he wrote in the Sixties called “The Ballad of Cosmic Ray”, incorporating bits of “Freight Train” (with a reminder of his Dylan parody) and “Won’t You Come Home, Bill Bailey”, and some fantastic finger-picking. And here’s a complete 40-minute set of his full-frontal ribaldry MANY ACCENTS, ONE VOICE Just about the first thing I discovered when I began a three-year term as artistic director of Berlin's historic jazz festival in 2015 was that I would be required to explain myself. More specifically, I would be asked to describe my "concept". This was a little disconcerting since I didn't really have one, at LIVE AT THE VILLAGE VANGUARD Live at the Village Vanguard. by Richard Williams on February 7, 2021. Something Sonny Rollins said in an excellent interview in the March issue of Uncut magazine reminded me of how much I miss being in clubs. The thing with live music, Rollins told John Lewis, is that “everybody has a role — even the audience. COUNT BASIE IN HIS OWN WRITE Count Basie Through His Own Eyes concentrates on the man rather than the music, which is lightly sketched through an excellent selection of clips and interviews with associates, including the drummer Harold Jones and the arranger Quincy Jones, and the critics Gary Giddins and Will Friedwald. The man himself comes alive in his own words and in BOB MARLEY’S LAST RIDE It's 40 years this week since Jamaica came to a halt for the funeral of its most famous son. What follows is an expanded version of the reports I wrote on that extraordinary day for The Times and the French magazine Rock & Folk. They buried Bob Marley on 21 May 1981 at NineMile,
THE BAND AT THE ALBERT HALL The story of the Band is one of the most beautiful and tragic in the history of popular music. But at the Albert Hall on June 2, 1971, we only knew the half of it: the beautiful half. Rick Danko, Levon Helm, Garth Hudson, Richard Manuel and Robbie Robertson gave us one of thefinest
CECIL TAYLOR, HIMSELF A very fine and fitting piece as always. Much appreciated. And coming so soon after Buell Neidlinger’s passing. I confess to not embracing all (or most) of Cecil’s later work, it just seemed so unrelenting, maybe I should relisten, but the Looking Ahead and The World of Cecil Taylor albums breath and are really outstanding.TERRY ADAMS
Terry Adams on the cello. When I went in to see A Late Quartet, a new film by Yaron Silberman that includes a wonderful performance by Christopher Walken as an ageing cellist, I was already thinking about string quartets, and cellists in particular.A friend had just sent me a link to the YouTube clip of an event that took place 40 years ago this summer and which represented probably the first LOVE DON’T LOVE NOBODY The Spinners’ “Love Don’t Love Nobody” was one of the finest soul records of the 1970s, and still sounds to me like one of the greatest deep-soul ballads of all time. It was written by Charles Simmons and Joseph Jefferson, whose credits appeared on many Philadephia records of the era; the arrangement and production camefrom the
REMEMBERING LAURA NYRO Laura Nyro had missed her intended flight from New York to London, forcing her to take a plane that arrived at six o'clock in the morning. Now here she was, barely 12 hours later, warming up before recording a performance before an invited audience in a small auditorium at the BBC's Television Centre, for a series called InConcert. This
DICK TWARDZIK 30/4/31–21/10/55 Dick Twardzik 30/4/31–21/10/55. by Richard Williams on October 20, 2015. Tomorrow evening it will be exactly 60 years since the pianist and composer Dick Twardzik was found dead in his room at the Hôtel de la Madeleine on the Rue de Surène, in Paris’s 8th arrondissement. He was on tour in Europe with the Chet Baker Quartet, and the THEBLUEMOMENT.COMSTEPPING OUT WITH BOBBY PARKERBLUESWEATHERBLUEGRASSFILMR&B Summer’s here, more or less, and Joel Selvin’s new book, Hollywood Eden, is a good one to take to the beach, the park or the back garden.Subtitled “Electric Guitars, Fast Cars and the Myth of the California Paradise”, it’s the story of a group of white kids who poured out of the local high schools — Fairfax, University, Beverly Hills, Hawthorne and Roosevelt — intent on using the PETER HAMMILL IN LOCKDOWN Some time in the future, academics will pore over the ways people found to make music despite the restrictions imposed during the various lockdowns. But there are things that don't need the benefit of time to provide perspective. The knowledge that Peter Hammill's In Translation was created in cruel and unusual circumstances mayincrease his
A MIKE TAYLOR DISCOVERY A Mike Taylor discovery. by Richard Williams on April 14, 2021. When the English jazz pianist and composer Mike Taylor walked into the sea and died in 1969, aged 30, he left behind two albums — Pendulum, by his quartet, and the self-explanatory Trio, recorded in 1966 and ’67 respectively — as a memorial to a talent silenced by the kind of MANY ACCENTS, ONE VOICE Just about the first thing I discovered when I began a three-year term as artistic director of Berlin's historic jazz festival in 2015 was that I would be required to explain myself. More specifically, I would be asked to describe my "concept". This was a little disconcerting since I didn't really have one, at LIVE AT THE VILLAGE VANGUARD Live at the Village Vanguard. by Richard Williams on February 7, 2021. Something Sonny Rollins said in an excellent interview in the March issue of Uncut magazine reminded me of how much I miss being in clubs. The thing with live music, Rollins told John Lewis, is that “everybody has a role — even the audience. PUNKT.VRT.PLASTIK (WHAT?) When I first encountered Punkt.Vrt.Plastik two years ago in Berlin, I thought they were making the most intellectually challenging piano-trio music I'd ever heard. Their late-night concert, in a darkened auditorium, was an intense experience, highly rewarding but perhaps more impressive than enjoyable. At the Vortex last night, without changing any of the components ofMANFRED MANN
Tom McGuinness remembers a Sunday night in 1965 when he, Manfred Mann and Mike Hugg visited the Green Man pub on Blackheath Hill to see a modern jazz outfit called Group Sounds Five. He thinks they must have had a motive, because the band’s two horn players — the trumpeter Henry Lowther and the saxophonist Lyn Dobson — soon became members BRYAN FERRY AT THE ALBERT HALL, 1974 by Richard Williams on February 8, 2020. My most powerful memory of Bryan Ferry’s debut as a solo artist at the Albert Hall, four and a half decades ago, is of a blonde woman sitting just along the row from me in the ringside seats. She was in her early thirties, I’d guess, tanned and expensively dressed and coiffed; she’d arrived by GEORGE MARTIN’S DAY IN THE LIFE Forty five summers ago, George Martin granted me a long interview for the Melody Maker. It was a very enjoyable experience: he was most courteous of men, and his answers were full of fascinating detail, with the occasional gentle indiscretion. He spoke in some depth about his experience of working with the Beatles, all the way fromINSIDE DAVE TURNER
Here he is in full comedy-folk guise, performing a song he wrote in the Sixties called “The Ballad of Cosmic Ray”, incorporating bits of “Freight Train” (with a reminder of his Dylan parody) and “Won’t You Come Home, Bill Bailey”, and some fantastic finger-picking. And here’s a complete 40-minute set of his full-frontal ribaldry THEBLUEMOMENT.COMSTEPPING OUT WITH BOBBY PARKERBLUESWEATHERBLUEGRASSFILMR&B Summer’s here, more or less, and Joel Selvin’s new book, Hollywood Eden, is a good one to take to the beach, the park or the back garden.Subtitled “Electric Guitars, Fast Cars and the Myth of the California Paradise”, it’s the story of a group of white kids who poured out of the local high schools — Fairfax, University, Beverly Hills, Hawthorne and Roosevelt — intent on using the PETER HAMMILL IN LOCKDOWN Some time in the future, academics will pore over the ways people found to make music despite the restrictions imposed during the various lockdowns. But there are things that don't need the benefit of time to provide perspective. The knowledge that Peter Hammill's In Translation was created in cruel and unusual circumstances mayincrease his
A MIKE TAYLOR DISCOVERY A Mike Taylor discovery. by Richard Williams on April 14, 2021. When the English jazz pianist and composer Mike Taylor walked into the sea and died in 1969, aged 30, he left behind two albums — Pendulum, by his quartet, and the self-explanatory Trio, recorded in 1966 and ’67 respectively — as a memorial to a talent silenced by the kind of MANY ACCENTS, ONE VOICE Just about the first thing I discovered when I began a three-year term as artistic director of Berlin's historic jazz festival in 2015 was that I would be required to explain myself. More specifically, I would be asked to describe my "concept". This was a little disconcerting since I didn't really have one, at LIVE AT THE VILLAGE VANGUARD Live at the Village Vanguard. by Richard Williams on February 7, 2021. Something Sonny Rollins said in an excellent interview in the March issue of Uncut magazine reminded me of how much I miss being in clubs. The thing with live music, Rollins told John Lewis, is that “everybody has a role — even the audience. PUNKT.VRT.PLASTIK (WHAT?) When I first encountered Punkt.Vrt.Plastik two years ago in Berlin, I thought they were making the most intellectually challenging piano-trio music I'd ever heard. Their late-night concert, in a darkened auditorium, was an intense experience, highly rewarding but perhaps more impressive than enjoyable. At the Vortex last night, without changing any of the components ofMANFRED MANN
Tom McGuinness remembers a Sunday night in 1965 when he, Manfred Mann and Mike Hugg visited the Green Man pub on Blackheath Hill to see a modern jazz outfit called Group Sounds Five. He thinks they must have had a motive, because the band’s two horn players — the trumpeter Henry Lowther and the saxophonist Lyn Dobson — soon became members BRYAN FERRY AT THE ALBERT HALL, 1974 by Richard Williams on February 8, 2020. My most powerful memory of Bryan Ferry’s debut as a solo artist at the Albert Hall, four and a half decades ago, is of a blonde woman sitting just along the row from me in the ringside seats. She was in her early thirties, I’d guess, tanned and expensively dressed and coiffed; she’d arrived by GEORGE MARTIN’S DAY IN THE LIFE Forty five summers ago, George Martin granted me a long interview for the Melody Maker. It was a very enjoyable experience: he was most courteous of men, and his answers were full of fascinating detail, with the occasional gentle indiscretion. He spoke in some depth about his experience of working with the Beatles, all the way fromINSIDE DAVE TURNER
Here he is in full comedy-folk guise, performing a song he wrote in the Sixties called “The Ballad of Cosmic Ray”, incorporating bits of “Freight Train” (with a reminder of his Dylan parody) and “Won’t You Come Home, Bill Bailey”, and some fantastic finger-picking. And here’s a complete 40-minute set of his full-frontal ribaldry MANY ACCENTS, ONE VOICE Just about the first thing I discovered when I began a three-year term as artistic director of Berlin's historic jazz festival in 2015 was that I would be required to explain myself. More specifically, I would be asked to describe my "concept". This was a little disconcerting since I didn't really have one, at LIVE AT THE VILLAGE VANGUARD Live at the Village Vanguard. by Richard Williams on February 7, 2021. Something Sonny Rollins said in an excellent interview in the March issue of Uncut magazine reminded me of how much I miss being in clubs. The thing with live music, Rollins told John Lewis, is that “everybody has a role — even the audience. BOB MARLEY’S LAST RIDE It's 40 years this week since Jamaica came to a halt for the funeral of its most famous son. What follows is an expanded version of the reports I wrote on that extraordinary day for The Times and the French magazine Rock & Folk. They buried Bob Marley on 21 May 1981 at NineMile,
COUNT BASIE IN HIS OWN WRITE Count Basie Through His Own Eyes concentrates on the man rather than the music, which is lightly sketched through an excellent selection of clips and interviews with associates, including the drummer Harold Jones and the arranger Quincy Jones, and the critics Gary Giddins and Will Friedwald. The man himself comes alive in his own words and in THE BAND AT THE ALBERT HALL The story of the Band is one of the most beautiful and tragic in the history of popular music. But at the Albert Hall on June 2, 1971, we only knew the half of it: the beautiful half. Rick Danko, Levon Helm, Garth Hudson, Richard Manuel and Robbie Robertson gave us one of thefinest
CECIL TAYLOR, HIMSELF A very fine and fitting piece as always. Much appreciated. And coming so soon after Buell Neidlinger’s passing. I confess to not embracing all (or most) of Cecil’s later work, it just seemed so unrelenting, maybe I should relisten, but the Looking Ahead and The World of Cecil Taylor albums breath and are really outstanding.TERRY ADAMS
Terry Adams on the cello. When I went in to see A Late Quartet, a new film by Yaron Silberman that includes a wonderful performance by Christopher Walken as an ageing cellist, I was already thinking about string quartets, and cellists in particular.A friend had just sent me a link to the YouTube clip of an event that took place 40 years ago this summer and which represented probably the first LOVE DON’T LOVE NOBODY The Spinners’ “Love Don’t Love Nobody” was one of the finest soul records of the 1970s, and still sounds to me like one of the greatest deep-soul ballads of all time. It was written by Charles Simmons and Joseph Jefferson, whose credits appeared on many Philadephia records of the era; the arrangement and production camefrom the
REMEMBERING LAURA NYRO Laura Nyro had missed her intended flight from New York to London, forcing her to take a plane that arrived at six o'clock in the morning. Now here she was, barely 12 hours later, warming up before recording a performance before an invited audience in a small auditorium at the BBC's Television Centre, for a series called InConcert. This
DICK TWARDZIK 30/4/31–21/10/55 Dick Twardzik 30/4/31–21/10/55. by Richard Williams on October 20, 2015. Tomorrow evening it will be exactly 60 years since the pianist and composer Dick Twardzik was found dead in his room at the Hôtel de la Madeleine on the Rue de Surène, in Paris’s 8th arrondissement. He was on tour in Europe with the Chet Baker Quartet, and the THEBLUEMOMENT.COMSTEPPING OUT WITH BOBBY PARKERBLUESWEATHERBLUEGRASSFILMR&B Summer’s here, more or less, and Joel Selvin’s new book, Hollywood Eden, is a good one to take to the beach, the park or the back garden.Subtitled “Electric Guitars, Fast Cars and the Myth of the California Paradise”, it’s the story of a group of white kids who poured out of the local high schools — Fairfax, University, Beverly Hills, Hawthorne and Roosevelt — intent on using the PETER HAMMILL IN LOCKDOWN Some time in the future, academics will pore over the ways people found to make music despite the restrictions imposed during the various lockdowns. But there are things that don't need the benefit of time to provide perspective. The knowledge that Peter Hammill's In Translation was created in cruel and unusual circumstances mayincrease his
A MIKE TAYLOR DISCOVERY A Mike Taylor discovery. by Richard Williams on April 14, 2021. When the English jazz pianist and composer Mike Taylor walked into the sea and died in 1969, aged 30, he left behind two albums — Pendulum, by his quartet, and the self-explanatory Trio, recorded in 1966 and ’67 respectively — as a memorial to a talent silenced by the kind of MANY ACCENTS, ONE VOICE Just about the first thing I discovered when I began a three-year term as artistic director of Berlin's historic jazz festival in 2015 was that I would be required to explain myself. More specifically, I would be asked to describe my "concept". This was a little disconcerting since I didn't really have one, atHIS TONGUE ON FIRE
His tongue on fire. by Richard Williams on May 24, 2021. Bob Dylan turns 80 today. I commissioned this ink drawing for an issue of Time Out celebrating Dylan’s arrival to play at Earl’s Court in 1978, his first London shows in a dozen years. Ralph BOB MARLEY’S LAST RIDE by Richard Williams on May 20, 2021. It’s 40 years this week since Jamaica came to a halt for the funeral of its most famous son. What follows is an expanded version of the reports I wrote on that extraordinary day for The Times and the French magazine Rock & Folk. They buried Bob Marley on 21 May 1981 at Nine Mile, the Jamaicanhamlet where
LIVE AT THE VILLAGE VANGUARD Live at the Village Vanguard. by Richard Williams on February 7, 2021. Something Sonny Rollins said in an excellent interview in the March issue of Uncut magazine reminded me of how much I miss being in clubs. The thing with live music, Rollins told John Lewis, is that “everybody has a role — even the audience.HEMPHILL BID’NESS
The saxophonist and composer Julius Hemphill was born in 1938 in Fort Worth, Texas, where he attended the same high school at Ornette Coleman, who was eight years his senior and said to be his cousin. By the time he reached his early twenties Hemphill was in St Louis, Missouri, where he joined the Black BRYAN FERRY AT THE ALBERT HALL, 1974 by Richard Williams on February 8, 2020. My most powerful memory of Bryan Ferry’s debut as a solo artist at the Albert Hall, four and a half decades ago, is of a blonde woman sitting just along the row from me in the ringside seats. She was in her early thirties, I’d guess, tanned and expensively dressed and coiffed; she’d arrived by DYAN BIRCH 1949-2020 Dyan Birch was something special. Her presence on a stage drew the eye and the ear. And now she's gone, leaving the memory of a soulful essence that was hers alone, however big or small the stage. She was a teenager working in Brian Epstein's NEMS record shop in THEBLUEMOMENT.COMSTEPPING OUT WITH BOBBY PARKERBLUESWEATHERBLUEGRASSFILMR&B Summer’s here, more or less, and Joel Selvin’s new book, Hollywood Eden, is a good one to take to the beach, the park or the back garden.Subtitled “Electric Guitars, Fast Cars and the Myth of the California Paradise”, it’s the story of a group of white kids who poured out of the local high schools — Fairfax, University, Beverly Hills, Hawthorne and Roosevelt — intent on using the PETER HAMMILL IN LOCKDOWN Some time in the future, academics will pore over the ways people found to make music despite the restrictions imposed during the various lockdowns. But there are things that don't need the benefit of time to provide perspective. The knowledge that Peter Hammill's In Translation was created in cruel and unusual circumstances mayincrease his
A MIKE TAYLOR DISCOVERY A Mike Taylor discovery. by Richard Williams on April 14, 2021. When the English jazz pianist and composer Mike Taylor walked into the sea and died in 1969, aged 30, he left behind two albums — Pendulum, by his quartet, and the self-explanatory Trio, recorded in 1966 and ’67 respectively — as a memorial to a talent silenced by the kind of MANY ACCENTS, ONE VOICE Just about the first thing I discovered when I began a three-year term as artistic director of Berlin's historic jazz festival in 2015 was that I would be required to explain myself. More specifically, I would be asked to describe my "concept". This was a little disconcerting since I didn't really have one, atHIS TONGUE ON FIRE
His tongue on fire. by Richard Williams on May 24, 2021. Bob Dylan turns 80 today. I commissioned this ink drawing for an issue of Time Out celebrating Dylan’s arrival to play at Earl’s Court in 1978, his first London shows in a dozen years. Ralph BOB MARLEY’S LAST RIDE by Richard Williams on May 20, 2021. It’s 40 years this week since Jamaica came to a halt for the funeral of its most famous son. What follows is an expanded version of the reports I wrote on that extraordinary day for The Times and the French magazine Rock & Folk. They buried Bob Marley on 21 May 1981 at Nine Mile, the Jamaicanhamlet where
LIVE AT THE VILLAGE VANGUARD Live at the Village Vanguard. by Richard Williams on February 7, 2021. Something Sonny Rollins said in an excellent interview in the March issue of Uncut magazine reminded me of how much I miss being in clubs. The thing with live music, Rollins told John Lewis, is that “everybody has a role — even the audience.HEMPHILL BID’NESS
The saxophonist and composer Julius Hemphill was born in 1938 in Fort Worth, Texas, where he attended the same high school at Ornette Coleman, who was eight years his senior and said to be his cousin. By the time he reached his early twenties Hemphill was in St Louis, Missouri, where he joined the Black BRYAN FERRY AT THE ALBERT HALL, 1974 by Richard Williams on February 8, 2020. My most powerful memory of Bryan Ferry’s debut as a solo artist at the Albert Hall, four and a half decades ago, is of a blonde woman sitting just along the row from me in the ringside seats. She was in her early thirties, I’d guess, tanned and expensively dressed and coiffed; she’d arrived by DYAN BIRCH 1949-2020 Dyan Birch was something special. Her presence on a stage drew the eye and the ear. And now she's gone, leaving the memory of a soulful essence that was hers alone, however big or small the stage. She was a teenager working in Brian Epstein's NEMS record shop in 2021 MAY | THEBLUEMOMENT.COM 6 posts published by Richard Williams during May 2021. By the time Wes Montgomery died of a heart attack in 1968, aged 45, he was most famous for a series of albums, supervised by the producer Creed Taylor, in which he used his jazz chops to turn pop hits — “Goin’ Out of My Head”, “Eleanor Rigby”, “California Dreaming”, “A Day in the Life” — into a form of high-quality LIVE AT THE VILLAGE VANGUARD Live at the Village Vanguard. by Richard Williams on February 7, 2021. Something Sonny Rollins said in an excellent interview in the March issue of Uncut magazine reminded me of how much I miss being in clubs. The thing with live music, Rollins told John Lewis, is that “everybody has a role — even the audience.THE UNEASY TRIO
It's possible that, like me, you think there are already quite enough jazz piano trio albums in your collection. Think again. Uneasy, the new recording by Vijay Iyer, Linda May Han Oh and Tyshawn Sorey, demands attention. The realignment of the piano-bass-drums hierarchy from "piano with rhythm accompaniment" to a full three-way conversation of equals THE BAND AT THE ALBERT HALL The story of the Band is one of the most beautiful and tragic in the history of popular music. But at the Albert Hall on June 2, 1971, we only knew the half of it: the beautiful half. Rick Danko, Levon Helm, Garth Hudson, Richard Manuel and Robbie Robertson gave us one of thefinest
COUNT BASIE IN HIS OWN WRITE Count Basie Through His Own Eyes concentrates on the man rather than the music, which is lightly sketched through an excellent selection of clips and interviews with associates, including the drummer Harold Jones and the arranger Quincy Jones, and the critics Gary Giddins and Will Friedwald. The man himself comes alive in his own words and in DYAN BIRCH 1949-2020 Dyan Birch was something special. Her presence on a stage drew the eye and the ear. And now she's gone, leaving the memory of a soulful essence that was hers alone, however big or small the stage. She was a teenager working in Brian Epstein's NEMS record shop in A MIKE TAYLOR DISCOVERY A Mike Taylor discovery. by Richard Williams on April 14, 2021. When the English jazz pianist and composer Mike Taylor walked into the sea and died in 1969, aged 30, he left behind two albums — Pendulum, by his quartet, and the self-explanatory Trio, recorded in 1966 and ’67 respectively — as a memorial to a talent silenced by the kind ofA RECORD SHOP LIFE
The history of the British music scene from the 1950s onwards can be told through the story of the nation's record shops, which is exactly what Garth Cartwright does in Going for a Song, his newly published survey of the retail outlets that drew fans and musicians to their specialist stock and thereby shaped GEORGE MARTIN’S DAY IN THE LIFE Forty five summers ago, George Martin granted me a long interview for the Melody Maker. It was a very enjoyable experience: he was most courteous of men, and his answers were full of fascinating detail, with the occasional gentle indiscretion. He spoke in some depth about his experience of working with the Beatles, all the way fromINSIDE DAVE TURNER
Just saw Inside Llewyn Davis and you are right — the scarf anachronism is glaring. Which is odd, since the rest of the production design appears meticulous — the shapeless corduroy jacket, the CBS studio scene with bored engineers and a John Hammond lookalike, the perfect cars and lifelike street scenes, the academic’s Upper West Side apartment (complete with African art and time THEBLUEMOMENT.COMSTEPPING OUT WITH BOBBY PARKERBLUESWEATHERBLUEGRASSFILMR&B Summer’s here, more or less, and Joel Selvin’s new book, Hollywood Eden, is a good one to take to the beach, the park or the back garden.Subtitled “Electric Guitars, Fast Cars and the Myth of the California Paradise”, it’s the story of a group of white kids who poured out of the local high schools — Fairfax, University, Beverly Hills, Hawthorne and Roosevelt — intent on using the PETER HAMMILL IN LOCKDOWN Some time in the future, academics will pore over the ways people found to make music despite the restrictions imposed during the various lockdowns. But there are things that don't need the benefit of time to provide perspective. The knowledge that Peter Hammill's In Translation was created in cruel and unusual circumstances mayincrease his
A MIKE TAYLOR DISCOVERY A Mike Taylor discovery. by Richard Williams on April 14, 2021. When the English jazz pianist and composer Mike Taylor walked into the sea and died in 1969, aged 30, he left behind two albums — Pendulum, by his quartet, and the self-explanatory Trio, recorded in 1966 and ’67 respectively — as a memorial to a talent silenced by the kind of MANY ACCENTS, ONE VOICE Just about the first thing I discovered when I began a three-year term as artistic director of Berlin's historic jazz festival in 2015 was that I would be required to explain myself. More specifically, I would be asked to describe my "concept". This was a little disconcerting since I didn't really have one, atHIS TONGUE ON FIRE
His tongue on fire. by Richard Williams on May 24, 2021. Bob Dylan turns 80 today. I commissioned this ink drawing for an issue of Time Out celebrating Dylan’s arrival to play at Earl’s Court in 1978, his first London shows in a dozen years. Ralph BOB MARLEY’S LAST RIDE by Richard Williams on May 20, 2021. It’s 40 years this week since Jamaica came to a halt for the funeral of its most famous son. What follows is an expanded version of the reports I wrote on that extraordinary day for The Times and the French magazine Rock & Folk. They buried Bob Marley on 21 May 1981 at Nine Mile, the Jamaicanhamlet where
LIVE AT THE VILLAGE VANGUARD Live at the Village Vanguard. by Richard Williams on February 7, 2021. Something Sonny Rollins said in an excellent interview in the March issue of Uncut magazine reminded me of how much I miss being in clubs. The thing with live music, Rollins told John Lewis, is that “everybody has a role — even the audience.HEMPHILL BID’NESS
The saxophonist and composer Julius Hemphill was born in 1938 in Fort Worth, Texas, where he attended the same high school at Ornette Coleman, who was eight years his senior and said to be his cousin. By the time he reached his early twenties Hemphill was in St Louis, Missouri, where he joined the Black BRYAN FERRY AT THE ALBERT HALL, 1974 by Richard Williams on February 8, 2020. My most powerful memory of Bryan Ferry’s debut as a solo artist at the Albert Hall, four and a half decades ago, is of a blonde woman sitting just along the row from me in the ringside seats. She was in her early thirties, I’d guess, tanned and expensively dressed and coiffed; she’d arrived by DYAN BIRCH 1949-2020 Dyan Birch was something special. Her presence on a stage drew the eye and the ear. And now she's gone, leaving the memory of a soulful essence that was hers alone, however big or small the stage. She was a teenager working in Brian Epstein's NEMS record shop in THEBLUEMOMENT.COMSTEPPING OUT WITH BOBBY PARKERBLUESWEATHERBLUEGRASSFILMR&B Summer’s here, more or less, and Joel Selvin’s new book, Hollywood Eden, is a good one to take to the beach, the park or the back garden.Subtitled “Electric Guitars, Fast Cars and the Myth of the California Paradise”, it’s the story of a group of white kids who poured out of the local high schools — Fairfax, University, Beverly Hills, Hawthorne and Roosevelt — intent on using the PETER HAMMILL IN LOCKDOWN Some time in the future, academics will pore over the ways people found to make music despite the restrictions imposed during the various lockdowns. But there are things that don't need the benefit of time to provide perspective. The knowledge that Peter Hammill's In Translation was created in cruel and unusual circumstances mayincrease his
A MIKE TAYLOR DISCOVERY A Mike Taylor discovery. by Richard Williams on April 14, 2021. When the English jazz pianist and composer Mike Taylor walked into the sea and died in 1969, aged 30, he left behind two albums — Pendulum, by his quartet, and the self-explanatory Trio, recorded in 1966 and ’67 respectively — as a memorial to a talent silenced by the kind of MANY ACCENTS, ONE VOICE Just about the first thing I discovered when I began a three-year term as artistic director of Berlin's historic jazz festival in 2015 was that I would be required to explain myself. More specifically, I would be asked to describe my "concept". This was a little disconcerting since I didn't really have one, atHIS TONGUE ON FIRE
His tongue on fire. by Richard Williams on May 24, 2021. Bob Dylan turns 80 today. I commissioned this ink drawing for an issue of Time Out celebrating Dylan’s arrival to play at Earl’s Court in 1978, his first London shows in a dozen years. Ralph BOB MARLEY’S LAST RIDE by Richard Williams on May 20, 2021. It’s 40 years this week since Jamaica came to a halt for the funeral of its most famous son. What follows is an expanded version of the reports I wrote on that extraordinary day for The Times and the French magazine Rock & Folk. They buried Bob Marley on 21 May 1981 at Nine Mile, the Jamaicanhamlet where
LIVE AT THE VILLAGE VANGUARD Live at the Village Vanguard. by Richard Williams on February 7, 2021. Something Sonny Rollins said in an excellent interview in the March issue of Uncut magazine reminded me of how much I miss being in clubs. The thing with live music, Rollins told John Lewis, is that “everybody has a role — even the audience.HEMPHILL BID’NESS
The saxophonist and composer Julius Hemphill was born in 1938 in Fort Worth, Texas, where he attended the same high school at Ornette Coleman, who was eight years his senior and said to be his cousin. By the time he reached his early twenties Hemphill was in St Louis, Missouri, where he joined the Black BRYAN FERRY AT THE ALBERT HALL, 1974 by Richard Williams on February 8, 2020. My most powerful memory of Bryan Ferry’s debut as a solo artist at the Albert Hall, four and a half decades ago, is of a blonde woman sitting just along the row from me in the ringside seats. She was in her early thirties, I’d guess, tanned and expensively dressed and coiffed; she’d arrived by DYAN BIRCH 1949-2020 Dyan Birch was something special. Her presence on a stage drew the eye and the ear. And now she's gone, leaving the memory of a soulful essence that was hers alone, however big or small the stage. She was a teenager working in Brian Epstein's NEMS record shop in 2021 MAY | THEBLUEMOMENT.COM 6 posts published by Richard Williams during May 2021. By the time Wes Montgomery died of a heart attack in 1968, aged 45, he was most famous for a series of albums, supervised by the producer Creed Taylor, in which he used his jazz chops to turn pop hits — “Goin’ Out of My Head”, “Eleanor Rigby”, “California Dreaming”, “A Day in the Life” — into a form of high-quality LIVE AT THE VILLAGE VANGUARD Live at the Village Vanguard. by Richard Williams on February 7, 2021. Something Sonny Rollins said in an excellent interview in the March issue of Uncut magazine reminded me of how much I miss being in clubs. The thing with live music, Rollins told John Lewis, is that “everybody has a role — even the audience.THE UNEASY TRIO
It's possible that, like me, you think there are already quite enough jazz piano trio albums in your collection. Think again. Uneasy, the new recording by Vijay Iyer, Linda May Han Oh and Tyshawn Sorey, demands attention. The realignment of the piano-bass-drums hierarchy from "piano with rhythm accompaniment" to a full three-way conversation of equals THE BAND AT THE ALBERT HALL The story of the Band is one of the most beautiful and tragic in the history of popular music. But at the Albert Hall on June 2, 1971, we only knew the half of it: the beautiful half. Rick Danko, Levon Helm, Garth Hudson, Richard Manuel and Robbie Robertson gave us one of thefinest
COUNT BASIE IN HIS OWN WRITE Count Basie Through His Own Eyes concentrates on the man rather than the music, which is lightly sketched through an excellent selection of clips and interviews with associates, including the drummer Harold Jones and the arranger Quincy Jones, and the critics Gary Giddins and Will Friedwald. The man himself comes alive in his own words and in DYAN BIRCH 1949-2020 Dyan Birch was something special. Her presence on a stage drew the eye and the ear. And now she's gone, leaving the memory of a soulful essence that was hers alone, however big or small the stage. She was a teenager working in Brian Epstein's NEMS record shop in A MIKE TAYLOR DISCOVERY A Mike Taylor discovery. by Richard Williams on April 14, 2021. When the English jazz pianist and composer Mike Taylor walked into the sea and died in 1969, aged 30, he left behind two albums — Pendulum, by his quartet, and the self-explanatory Trio, recorded in 1966 and ’67 respectively — as a memorial to a talent silenced by the kind ofA RECORD SHOP LIFE
The history of the British music scene from the 1950s onwards can be told through the story of the nation's record shops, which is exactly what Garth Cartwright does in Going for a Song, his newly published survey of the retail outlets that drew fans and musicians to their specialist stock and thereby shaped GEORGE MARTIN’S DAY IN THE LIFE Forty five summers ago, George Martin granted me a long interview for the Melody Maker. It was a very enjoyable experience: he was most courteous of men, and his answers were full of fascinating detail, with the occasional gentle indiscretion. He spoke in some depth about his experience of working with the Beatles, all the way fromINSIDE DAVE TURNER
Just saw Inside Llewyn Davis and you are right — the scarf anachronism is glaring. Which is odd, since the rest of the production design appears meticulous — the shapeless corduroy jacket, the CBS studio scene with bored engineers and a John Hammond lookalike, the perfect cars and lifelike street scenes, the academic’s Upper West Side apartment (complete with African art and time THEBLUEMOMENT.COMSTEPPING OUT WITH BOBBY PARKERBLUESWEATHERBLUEGRASSFILMR&B Summer’s here, more or less, and Joel Selvin’s new book, Hollywood Eden, is a good one to take to the beach, the park or the back garden.Subtitled “Electric Guitars, Fast Cars and the Myth of the California Paradise”, it’s the story of a group of white kids who poured out of the local high schools — Fairfax, University, Beverly Hills, Hawthorne and Roosevelt — intent on using the PETER HAMMILL IN LOCKDOWN Some time in the future, academics will pore over the ways people found to make music despite the restrictions imposed during the various lockdowns. But there are things that don't need the benefit of time to provide perspective. The knowledge that Peter Hammill's In Translation was created in cruel and unusual circumstances mayincrease his
A MIKE TAYLOR DISCOVERY A Mike Taylor discovery. by Richard Williams on April 14, 2021. When the English jazz pianist and composer Mike Taylor walked into the sea and died in 1969, aged 30, he left behind two albums — Pendulum, by his quartet, and the self-explanatory Trio, recorded in 1966 and ’67 respectively — as a memorial to a talent silenced by the kind of MANY ACCENTS, ONE VOICE Just about the first thing I discovered when I began a three-year term as artistic director of Berlin's historic jazz festival in 2015 was that I would be required to explain myself. More specifically, I would be asked to describe my "concept". This was a little disconcerting since I didn't really have one, atHIS TONGUE ON FIRE
His tongue on fire. by Richard Williams on May 24, 2021. Bob Dylan turns 80 today. I commissioned this ink drawing for an issue of Time Out celebrating Dylan’s arrival to play at Earl’s Court in 1978, his first London shows in a dozen years. Ralph BOB MARLEY’S LAST RIDE by Richard Williams on May 20, 2021. It’s 40 years this week since Jamaica came to a halt for the funeral of its most famous son. What follows is an expanded version of the reports I wrote on that extraordinary day for The Times and the French magazine Rock & Folk. They buried Bob Marley on 21 May 1981 at Nine Mile, the Jamaicanhamlet where
LIVE AT THE VILLAGE VANGUARD Live at the Village Vanguard. by Richard Williams on February 7, 2021. Something Sonny Rollins said in an excellent interview in the March issue of Uncut magazine reminded me of how much I miss being in clubs. The thing with live music, Rollins told John Lewis, is that “everybody has a role — even the audience.HEMPHILL BID’NESS
The saxophonist and composer Julius Hemphill was born in 1938 in Fort Worth, Texas, where he attended the same high school at Ornette Coleman, who was eight years his senior and said to be his cousin. By the time he reached his early twenties Hemphill was in St Louis, Missouri, where he joined the Black BRYAN FERRY AT THE ALBERT HALL, 1974 by Richard Williams on February 8, 2020. My most powerful memory of Bryan Ferry’s debut as a solo artist at the Albert Hall, four and a half decades ago, is of a blonde woman sitting just along the row from me in the ringside seats. She was in her early thirties, I’d guess, tanned and expensively dressed and coiffed; she’d arrived by DYAN BIRCH 1949-2020 Dyan Birch was something special. Her presence on a stage drew the eye and the ear. And now she's gone, leaving the memory of a soulful essence that was hers alone, however big or small the stage. She was a teenager working in Brian Epstein's NEMS record shop in THEBLUEMOMENT.COMSTEPPING OUT WITH BOBBY PARKERBLUESWEATHERBLUEGRASSFILMR&B Summer’s here, more or less, and Joel Selvin’s new book, Hollywood Eden, is a good one to take to the beach, the park or the back garden.Subtitled “Electric Guitars, Fast Cars and the Myth of the California Paradise”, it’s the story of a group of white kids who poured out of the local high schools — Fairfax, University, Beverly Hills, Hawthorne and Roosevelt — intent on using the PETER HAMMILL IN LOCKDOWN Some time in the future, academics will pore over the ways people found to make music despite the restrictions imposed during the various lockdowns. But there are things that don't need the benefit of time to provide perspective. The knowledge that Peter Hammill's In Translation was created in cruel and unusual circumstances mayincrease his
A MIKE TAYLOR DISCOVERY A Mike Taylor discovery. by Richard Williams on April 14, 2021. When the English jazz pianist and composer Mike Taylor walked into the sea and died in 1969, aged 30, he left behind two albums — Pendulum, by his quartet, and the self-explanatory Trio, recorded in 1966 and ’67 respectively — as a memorial to a talent silenced by the kind of MANY ACCENTS, ONE VOICE Just about the first thing I discovered when I began a three-year term as artistic director of Berlin's historic jazz festival in 2015 was that I would be required to explain myself. More specifically, I would be asked to describe my "concept". This was a little disconcerting since I didn't really have one, atHIS TONGUE ON FIRE
His tongue on fire. by Richard Williams on May 24, 2021. Bob Dylan turns 80 today. I commissioned this ink drawing for an issue of Time Out celebrating Dylan’s arrival to play at Earl’s Court in 1978, his first London shows in a dozen years. Ralph BOB MARLEY’S LAST RIDE by Richard Williams on May 20, 2021. It’s 40 years this week since Jamaica came to a halt for the funeral of its most famous son. What follows is an expanded version of the reports I wrote on that extraordinary day for The Times and the French magazine Rock & Folk. They buried Bob Marley on 21 May 1981 at Nine Mile, the Jamaicanhamlet where
LIVE AT THE VILLAGE VANGUARD Live at the Village Vanguard. by Richard Williams on February 7, 2021. Something Sonny Rollins said in an excellent interview in the March issue of Uncut magazine reminded me of how much I miss being in clubs. The thing with live music, Rollins told John Lewis, is that “everybody has a role — even the audience.HEMPHILL BID’NESS
The saxophonist and composer Julius Hemphill was born in 1938 in Fort Worth, Texas, where he attended the same high school at Ornette Coleman, who was eight years his senior and said to be his cousin. By the time he reached his early twenties Hemphill was in St Louis, Missouri, where he joined the Black BRYAN FERRY AT THE ALBERT HALL, 1974 by Richard Williams on February 8, 2020. My most powerful memory of Bryan Ferry’s debut as a solo artist at the Albert Hall, four and a half decades ago, is of a blonde woman sitting just along the row from me in the ringside seats. She was in her early thirties, I’d guess, tanned and expensively dressed and coiffed; she’d arrived by DYAN BIRCH 1949-2020 Dyan Birch was something special. Her presence on a stage drew the eye and the ear. And now she's gone, leaving the memory of a soulful essence that was hers alone, however big or small the stage. She was a teenager working in Brian Epstein's NEMS record shop in 2021 MAY | THEBLUEMOMENT.COM 6 posts published by Richard Williams during May 2021. By the time Wes Montgomery died of a heart attack in 1968, aged 45, he was most famous for a series of albums, supervised by the producer Creed Taylor, in which he used his jazz chops to turn pop hits — “Goin’ Out of My Head”, “Eleanor Rigby”, “California Dreaming”, “A Day in the Life” — into a form of high-quality LIVE AT THE VILLAGE VANGUARD Live at the Village Vanguard. by Richard Williams on February 7, 2021. Something Sonny Rollins said in an excellent interview in the March issue of Uncut magazine reminded me of how much I miss being in clubs. The thing with live music, Rollins told John Lewis, is that “everybody has a role — even the audience.THE UNEASY TRIO
It's possible that, like me, you think there are already quite enough jazz piano trio albums in your collection. Think again. Uneasy, the new recording by Vijay Iyer, Linda May Han Oh and Tyshawn Sorey, demands attention. The realignment of the piano-bass-drums hierarchy from "piano with rhythm accompaniment" to a full three-way conversation of equals THE BAND AT THE ALBERT HALL The story of the Band is one of the most beautiful and tragic in the history of popular music. But at the Albert Hall on June 2, 1971, we only knew the half of it: the beautiful half. Rick Danko, Levon Helm, Garth Hudson, Richard Manuel and Robbie Robertson gave us one of thefinest
COUNT BASIE IN HIS OWN WRITE Count Basie Through His Own Eyes concentrates on the man rather than the music, which is lightly sketched through an excellent selection of clips and interviews with associates, including the drummer Harold Jones and the arranger Quincy Jones, and the critics Gary Giddins and Will Friedwald. The man himself comes alive in his own words and in DYAN BIRCH 1949-2020 Dyan Birch was something special. Her presence on a stage drew the eye and the ear. And now she's gone, leaving the memory of a soulful essence that was hers alone, however big or small the stage. She was a teenager working in Brian Epstein's NEMS record shop in A MIKE TAYLOR DISCOVERY A Mike Taylor discovery. by Richard Williams on April 14, 2021. When the English jazz pianist and composer Mike Taylor walked into the sea and died in 1969, aged 30, he left behind two albums — Pendulum, by his quartet, and the self-explanatory Trio, recorded in 1966 and ’67 respectively — as a memorial to a talent silenced by the kind ofA RECORD SHOP LIFE
The history of the British music scene from the 1950s onwards can be told through the story of the nation's record shops, which is exactly what Garth Cartwright does in Going for a Song, his newly published survey of the retail outlets that drew fans and musicians to their specialist stock and thereby shaped GEORGE MARTIN’S DAY IN THE LIFE Forty five summers ago, George Martin granted me a long interview for the Melody Maker. It was a very enjoyable experience: he was most courteous of men, and his answers were full of fascinating detail, with the occasional gentle indiscretion. He spoke in some depth about his experience of working with the Beatles, all the way fromINSIDE DAVE TURNER
Just saw Inside Llewyn Davis and you are right — the scarf anachronism is glaring. Which is odd, since the rest of the production design appears meticulous — the shapeless corduroy jacket, the CBS studio scene with bored engineers and a John Hammond lookalike, the perfect cars and lifelike street scenes, the academic’s Upper West Side apartment (complete with African art and time THEBLUEMOMENT.COMSTEPPING OUT WITH BOBBY PARKERBLUESWEATHERBLUEGRASSFILMR&B Summer’s here, more or less, and Joel Selvin’s new book, Hollywood Eden, is a good one to take to the beach, the park or the back garden.Subtitled “Electric Guitars, Fast Cars and the Myth of the California Paradise”, it’s the story of a group of white kids who poured out of the local high schools — Fairfax, University, Beverly Hills, Hawthorne and Roosevelt — intent on using the PETER HAMMILL IN LOCKDOWN Some time in the future, academics will pore over the ways people found to make music despite the restrictions imposed during the various lockdowns. But there are things that don't need the benefit of time to provide perspective. The knowledge that Peter Hammill's In Translation was created in cruel and unusual circumstances mayincrease his
A MIKE TAYLOR DISCOVERY A Mike Taylor discovery. by Richard Williams on April 14, 2021. When the English jazz pianist and composer Mike Taylor walked into the sea and died in 1969, aged 30, he left behind two albums — Pendulum, by his quartet, and the self-explanatory Trio, recorded in 1966 and ’67 respectively — as a memorial to a talent silenced by the kind of MANY ACCENTS, ONE VOICE Just about the first thing I discovered when I began a three-year term as artistic director of Berlin's historic jazz festival in 2015 was that I would be required to explain myself. More specifically, I would be asked to describe my "concept". This was a little disconcerting since I didn't really have one, atHIS TONGUE ON FIRE
His tongue on fire. by Richard Williams on May 24, 2021. Bob Dylan turns 80 today. I commissioned this ink drawing for an issue of Time Out celebrating Dylan’s arrival to play at Earl’s Court in 1978, his first London shows in a dozen years. Ralph BOB MARLEY’S LAST RIDE by Richard Williams on May 20, 2021. It’s 40 years this week since Jamaica came to a halt for the funeral of its most famous son. What follows is an expanded version of the reports I wrote on that extraordinary day for The Times and the French magazine Rock & Folk. They buried Bob Marley on 21 May 1981 at Nine Mile, the Jamaicanhamlet where
LIVE AT THE VILLAGE VANGUARD Live at the Village Vanguard. by Richard Williams on February 7, 2021. Something Sonny Rollins said in an excellent interview in the March issue of Uncut magazine reminded me of how much I miss being in clubs. The thing with live music, Rollins told John Lewis, is that “everybody has a role — even the audience.HEMPHILL BID’NESS
The saxophonist and composer Julius Hemphill was born in 1938 in Fort Worth, Texas, where he attended the same high school at Ornette Coleman, who was eight years his senior and said to be his cousin. By the time he reached his early twenties Hemphill was in St Louis, Missouri, where he joined the Black BRYAN FERRY AT THE ALBERT HALL, 1974 by Richard Williams on February 8, 2020. My most powerful memory of Bryan Ferry’s debut as a solo artist at the Albert Hall, four and a half decades ago, is of a blonde woman sitting just along the row from me in the ringside seats. She was in her early thirties, I’d guess, tanned and expensively dressed and coiffed; she’d arrived by DYAN BIRCH 1949-2020 Dyan Birch was something special. Her presence on a stage drew the eye and the ear. And now she's gone, leaving the memory of a soulful essence that was hers alone, however big or small the stage. She was a teenager working in Brian Epstein's NEMS record shop in THEBLUEMOMENT.COMSTEPPING OUT WITH BOBBY PARKERBLUESWEATHERBLUEGRASSFILMR&B Summer’s here, more or less, and Joel Selvin’s new book, Hollywood Eden, is a good one to take to the beach, the park or the back garden.Subtitled “Electric Guitars, Fast Cars and the Myth of the California Paradise”, it’s the story of a group of white kids who poured out of the local high schools — Fairfax, University, Beverly Hills, Hawthorne and Roosevelt — intent on using the PETER HAMMILL IN LOCKDOWN Some time in the future, academics will pore over the ways people found to make music despite the restrictions imposed during the various lockdowns. But there are things that don't need the benefit of time to provide perspective. The knowledge that Peter Hammill's In Translation was created in cruel and unusual circumstances mayincrease his
A MIKE TAYLOR DISCOVERY A Mike Taylor discovery. by Richard Williams on April 14, 2021. When the English jazz pianist and composer Mike Taylor walked into the sea and died in 1969, aged 30, he left behind two albums — Pendulum, by his quartet, and the self-explanatory Trio, recorded in 1966 and ’67 respectively — as a memorial to a talent silenced by the kind of MANY ACCENTS, ONE VOICE Just about the first thing I discovered when I began a three-year term as artistic director of Berlin's historic jazz festival in 2015 was that I would be required to explain myself. More specifically, I would be asked to describe my "concept". This was a little disconcerting since I didn't really have one, atHIS TONGUE ON FIRE
His tongue on fire. by Richard Williams on May 24, 2021. Bob Dylan turns 80 today. I commissioned this ink drawing for an issue of Time Out celebrating Dylan’s arrival to play at Earl’s Court in 1978, his first London shows in a dozen years. Ralph BOB MARLEY’S LAST RIDE by Richard Williams on May 20, 2021. It’s 40 years this week since Jamaica came to a halt for the funeral of its most famous son. What follows is an expanded version of the reports I wrote on that extraordinary day for The Times and the French magazine Rock & Folk. They buried Bob Marley on 21 May 1981 at Nine Mile, the Jamaicanhamlet where
LIVE AT THE VILLAGE VANGUARD Live at the Village Vanguard. by Richard Williams on February 7, 2021. Something Sonny Rollins said in an excellent interview in the March issue of Uncut magazine reminded me of how much I miss being in clubs. The thing with live music, Rollins told John Lewis, is that “everybody has a role — even the audience.HEMPHILL BID’NESS
The saxophonist and composer Julius Hemphill was born in 1938 in Fort Worth, Texas, where he attended the same high school at Ornette Coleman, who was eight years his senior and said to be his cousin. By the time he reached his early twenties Hemphill was in St Louis, Missouri, where he joined the Black BRYAN FERRY AT THE ALBERT HALL, 1974 by Richard Williams on February 8, 2020. My most powerful memory of Bryan Ferry’s debut as a solo artist at the Albert Hall, four and a half decades ago, is of a blonde woman sitting just along the row from me in the ringside seats. She was in her early thirties, I’d guess, tanned and expensively dressed and coiffed; she’d arrived by DYAN BIRCH 1949-2020 Dyan Birch was something special. Her presence on a stage drew the eye and the ear. And now she's gone, leaving the memory of a soulful essence that was hers alone, however big or small the stage. She was a teenager working in Brian Epstein's NEMS record shop in 2021 MAY | THEBLUEMOMENT.COM 6 posts published by Richard Williams during May 2021. By the time Wes Montgomery died of a heart attack in 1968, aged 45, he was most famous for a series of albums, supervised by the producer Creed Taylor, in which he used his jazz chops to turn pop hits — “Goin’ Out of My Head”, “Eleanor Rigby”, “California Dreaming”, “A Day in the Life” — into a form of high-quality LIVE AT THE VILLAGE VANGUARD Live at the Village Vanguard. by Richard Williams on February 7, 2021. Something Sonny Rollins said in an excellent interview in the March issue of Uncut magazine reminded me of how much I miss being in clubs. The thing with live music, Rollins told John Lewis, is that “everybody has a role — even the audience.THE UNEASY TRIO
It's possible that, like me, you think there are already quite enough jazz piano trio albums in your collection. Think again. Uneasy, the new recording by Vijay Iyer, Linda May Han Oh and Tyshawn Sorey, demands attention. The realignment of the piano-bass-drums hierarchy from "piano with rhythm accompaniment" to a full three-way conversation of equals THE BAND AT THE ALBERT HALL The story of the Band is one of the most beautiful and tragic in the history of popular music. But at the Albert Hall on June 2, 1971, we only knew the half of it: the beautiful half. Rick Danko, Levon Helm, Garth Hudson, Richard Manuel and Robbie Robertson gave us one of thefinest
COUNT BASIE IN HIS OWN WRITE Count Basie Through His Own Eyes concentrates on the man rather than the music, which is lightly sketched through an excellent selection of clips and interviews with associates, including the drummer Harold Jones and the arranger Quincy Jones, and the critics Gary Giddins and Will Friedwald. The man himself comes alive in his own words and in DYAN BIRCH 1949-2020 Dyan Birch was something special. Her presence on a stage drew the eye and the ear. And now she's gone, leaving the memory of a soulful essence that was hers alone, however big or small the stage. She was a teenager working in Brian Epstein's NEMS record shop in A MIKE TAYLOR DISCOVERY A Mike Taylor discovery. by Richard Williams on April 14, 2021. When the English jazz pianist and composer Mike Taylor walked into the sea and died in 1969, aged 30, he left behind two albums — Pendulum, by his quartet, and the self-explanatory Trio, recorded in 1966 and ’67 respectively — as a memorial to a talent silenced by the kind ofA RECORD SHOP LIFE
The history of the British music scene from the 1950s onwards can be told through the story of the nation's record shops, which is exactly what Garth Cartwright does in Going for a Song, his newly published survey of the retail outlets that drew fans and musicians to their specialist stock and thereby shaped GEORGE MARTIN’S DAY IN THE LIFE Forty five summers ago, George Martin granted me a long interview for the Melody Maker. It was a very enjoyable experience: he was most courteous of men, and his answers were full of fascinating detail, with the occasional gentle indiscretion. He spoke in some depth about his experience of working with the Beatles, all the way fromINSIDE DAVE TURNER
Just saw Inside Llewyn Davis and you are right — the scarf anachronism is glaring. Which is odd, since the rest of the production design appears meticulous — the shapeless corduroy jacket, the CBS studio scene with bored engineers and a John Hammond lookalike, the perfect cars and lifelike street scenes, the academic’s Upper West Side apartment (complete with African art and time THEBLUEMOMENT.COMSTEPPING OUT WITH BOBBY PARKERBLUESWEATHERBLUEGRASSFILMR&B A peal of church bells is a familiar sound to most, yet full of strangeness. Listening to the baffling patterns created when a simple descending figure breaks up and reforms into a kind of Escher-like musical geometry, you might find yourself wondering if herein lies the true origin of the systems music of Steve Reich and Philip Glass. PETER HAMMILL IN LOCKDOWN Some time in the future, academics will pore over the ways people found to make music despite the restrictions imposed during the various lockdowns. But there are things that don't need the benefit of time to provide perspective. The knowledge that Peter Hammill's In Translation was created in cruel and unusual circumstances mayincrease his
A MIKE TAYLOR DISCOVERY A Mike Taylor discovery. by Richard Williams on April 14, 2021. When the English jazz pianist and composer Mike Taylor walked into the sea and died in 1969, aged 30, he left behind two albums — Pendulum, by his quartet, and the self-explanatory Trio, recorded in 1966 and ’67 respectively — as a memorial to a talent silenced by the kind of MANY ACCENTS, ONE VOICE Just about the first thing I discovered when I began a three-year term as artistic director of Berlin's historic jazz festival in 2015 was that I would be required to explain myself. More specifically, I would be asked to describe my "concept". This was a little disconcerting since I didn't really have one, at PUNKT.VRT.PLASTIK (WHAT?) When I first encountered Punkt.Vrt.Plastik two years ago in Berlin, I thought they were making the most intellectually challenging piano-trio music I'd ever heard. Their late-night concert, in a darkened auditorium, was an intense experience, highly rewarding but perhaps more impressive than enjoyable. At the Vortex last night, without changing any of the components of BRYAN FERRY AT THE ALBERT HALL, 1974 Bryan Ferry at the Albert Hall, 1974. by Richard Williams on February 8, 2020. My most powerful memory of Bryan Ferry’s debut as a solo artist at the Albert Hall, four and a half decades ago, is of a blonde woman sitting just along the row from me in the ringside seats. She was in her early thirties, I’d guess, tanned and expensively THE LOST PROMISE OF JESSE BELVIN Sixty years ago last month, the singer Jesse Belvin was travelling with his wife Jo Ann from a show in Little Rock, Arkansas, where he had performed at the city's first integrated show, to his next engagement in Dallas, Texas, a journey of 300 miles. In the early hours of the morning they were outside GEORGE MARTIN’S DAY IN THE LIFE Forty five summers ago, George Martin granted me a long interview for the Melody Maker. It was a very enjoyable experience: he was most courteous of men, and his answers were full of fascinating detail, with the occasional gentle indiscretion. He spoke in some depth about his experience of working with the Beatles, all the way from REMEMBERING LAURA NYRO Laura Nyro had missed her intended flight from New York to London, forcing her to take a plane that arrived at six o'clock in the morning. Now here she was, barely 12 hours later, warming up before recording a performance before an invited audience in a small auditorium at the BBC's Television Centre, for a series called InConcert. This
INSIDE DAVE TURNER
Here he is in full comedy-folk guise, performing a song he wrote in the Sixties called “The Ballad of Cosmic Ray”, incorporating bits of “Freight Train” (with a reminder of his Dylan parody) and “Won’t You Come Home, Bill Bailey”, and some fantastic finger-picking. And here’s a complete 40-minute set of his full-frontal ribaldry THEBLUEMOMENT.COMSTEPPING OUT WITH BOBBY PARKERBLUESWEATHERBLUEGRASSFILMR&B A peal of church bells is a familiar sound to most, yet full of strangeness. Listening to the baffling patterns created when a simple descending figure breaks up and reforms into a kind of Escher-like musical geometry, you might find yourself wondering if herein lies the true origin of the systems music of Steve Reich and Philip Glass. PETER HAMMILL IN LOCKDOWN Some time in the future, academics will pore over the ways people found to make music despite the restrictions imposed during the various lockdowns. But there are things that don't need the benefit of time to provide perspective. The knowledge that Peter Hammill's In Translation was created in cruel and unusual circumstances mayincrease his
A MIKE TAYLOR DISCOVERY A Mike Taylor discovery. by Richard Williams on April 14, 2021. When the English jazz pianist and composer Mike Taylor walked into the sea and died in 1969, aged 30, he left behind two albums — Pendulum, by his quartet, and the self-explanatory Trio, recorded in 1966 and ’67 respectively — as a memorial to a talent silenced by the kind of MANY ACCENTS, ONE VOICE Just about the first thing I discovered when I began a three-year term as artistic director of Berlin's historic jazz festival in 2015 was that I would be required to explain myself. More specifically, I would be asked to describe my "concept". This was a little disconcerting since I didn't really have one, at PUNKT.VRT.PLASTIK (WHAT?) When I first encountered Punkt.Vrt.Plastik two years ago in Berlin, I thought they were making the most intellectually challenging piano-trio music I'd ever heard. Their late-night concert, in a darkened auditorium, was an intense experience, highly rewarding but perhaps more impressive than enjoyable. At the Vortex last night, without changing any of the components of BRYAN FERRY AT THE ALBERT HALL, 1974 Bryan Ferry at the Albert Hall, 1974. by Richard Williams on February 8, 2020. My most powerful memory of Bryan Ferry’s debut as a solo artist at the Albert Hall, four and a half decades ago, is of a blonde woman sitting just along the row from me in the ringside seats. She was in her early thirties, I’d guess, tanned and expensively THE LOST PROMISE OF JESSE BELVIN Sixty years ago last month, the singer Jesse Belvin was travelling with his wife Jo Ann from a show in Little Rock, Arkansas, where he had performed at the city's first integrated show, to his next engagement in Dallas, Texas, a journey of 300 miles. In the early hours of the morning they were outside GEORGE MARTIN’S DAY IN THE LIFE Forty five summers ago, George Martin granted me a long interview for the Melody Maker. It was a very enjoyable experience: he was most courteous of men, and his answers were full of fascinating detail, with the occasional gentle indiscretion. He spoke in some depth about his experience of working with the Beatles, all the way from REMEMBERING LAURA NYRO Laura Nyro had missed her intended flight from New York to London, forcing her to take a plane that arrived at six o'clock in the morning. Now here she was, barely 12 hours later, warming up before recording a performance before an invited audience in a small auditorium at the BBC's Television Centre, for a series called InConcert. This
INSIDE DAVE TURNER
Here he is in full comedy-folk guise, performing a song he wrote in the Sixties called “The Ballad of Cosmic Ray”, incorporating bits of “Freight Train” (with a reminder of his Dylan parody) and “Won’t You Come Home, Bill Bailey”, and some fantastic finger-picking. And here’s a complete 40-minute set of his full-frontal ribaldryABOUT THE AUTHOR
Since the late 1960s I've written about music for the Melody Maker, the (London) Times, the Independent on Sunday, the Guardian, Down Beat, Jazz Journal, Mojo, the TLS, Granta, Uncut and other publications. A list of the people I've most enjoyed interviewing during that time would include Marvin Gaye, Laura Nyro, Booker T.Jones, Miles Davis,
LIVE AT THE VILLAGE VANGUARD The Village Vanguard, the legendary club on Seventh Avenue South where John Coltrane, Bill Evans and many others made historic recordings, is currently programming a series of livestreamed gigs. You pay $10 and you can either watch the performance live or at any time in the following 24 hours. It’s a way of staying close to the practitionersANDREW WOODHEAD
A peal of church bells is a familiar sound to most, yet full of strangeness. Listening to the baffling patterns created when a simple descending figure breaks up and reforms into a kind of Escher-like musical geometry, you might find yourself wondering if herein lies the true origin of the systems music of Steve Reich and Philip Glass. RON RUBIN | THEBLUEMOMENT.COM Ron Rubin 1933-2020. Among many distinctions, the bassist Ron Rubin, whose death on April 14 was announced in the Hampstead and Highgate Gazette, was playing with a trad jazz band led by the banjoist Ralph “Bags” Watmough on the opening night of the Cavern Club in his native Liverpool in 1957.He went on to a long career in the mainstream and modern idioms, with the bands of Humphrey COUNT BASIE IN HIS OWN WRITE Count Basie Through His Own Eyes concentrates on the man rather than the music, which is lightly sketched through an excellent selection of clips and interviews with associates, including the drummer Harold Jones and the arranger Quincy Jones, and the critics Gary Giddins and Will Friedwald. The man himself comes alive in his own words and in THE BAND AT THE ALBERT HALL The story of the Band is one of the most beautiful and tragic in the history of popular music. But at the Albert Hall on June 2, 1971, we only knew the half of it: the beautiful half. Rick Danko, Levon Helm, Garth Hudson, Richard Manuel and Robbie Robertson gave us one of thefinest
DYAN BIRCH 1949-2020 Dyan Birch was something special. Her presence on a stage drew the eye and the ear. And now she's gone, leaving the memory of a soulful essence that was hers alone, however big or small the stage. She was a teenager working in Brian Epstein's NEMS record shop in REMEMBERING LAURA NYRO Laura Nyro had missed her intended flight from New York to London, forcing her to take a plane that arrived at six o'clock in the morning. Now here she was, barely 12 hours later, warming up before recording a performance before an invited audience in a small auditorium at the BBC's Television Centre, for a series called InConcert. This
CECIL TAYLOR, HIMSELF A very fine and fitting piece as always. Much appreciated. And coming so soon after Buell Neidlinger’s passing. I confess to not embracing all (or most) of Cecil’s later work, it just seemed so unrelenting, maybe I should relisten, but the Looking Ahead and The World of Cecil Taylor albums breath and are really outstanding. DICK TWARDZIK 30/4/31–21/10/55 Dick Twardzik 30/4/31–21/10/55. by Richard Williams on October 20, 2015. Tomorrow evening it will be exactly 60 years since the pianist and composer Dick Twardzik was found dead in his room at the Hôtel de la Madeleine on the Rue de Surène, in Paris’s 8th arrondissement. He was on tour in Europe with the Chet Baker Quartet, and the THEBLUEMOMENT.COMSTEPPING OUT WITH BOBBY PARKERBLUESWEATHERBLUEGRASSFILMR&B A peal of church bells is a familiar sound to most, yet full of strangeness. Listening to the baffling patterns created when a simple descending figure breaks up and reforms into a kind of Escher-like musical geometry, you might find yourself wondering if herein lies the true origin of the systems music of Steve Reich and Philip Glass. PETER HAMMILL IN LOCKDOWN Some time in the future, academics will pore over the ways people found to make music despite the restrictions imposed during the various lockdowns. But there are things that don't need the benefit of time to provide perspective. The knowledge that Peter Hammill's In Translation was created in cruel and unusual circumstances mayincrease his
A MIKE TAYLOR DISCOVERY When the English jazz pianist and composer Mike Taylor walked into the sea and died in 1969, aged 30, he left behind two albums — Pendulum, by his quartet, and the self-explanatory Trio, recorded in 1966 and ’67 respectively — as a memorial to a talent silenced by the kind of problems experienced by too many creative souls in that era. Taylor’s gifts and instincts put him somewhere in PUNKT.VRT.PLASTIK (WHAT?) When I first encountered Punkt.Vrt.Plastik two years ago in Berlin, I thought they were making the most intellectually challenging piano-trio music I'd ever heard. Their late-night concert, in a darkened auditorium, was an intense experience, highly rewarding but perhaps more impressive than enjoyable. At the Vortex last night, without changing any of the components of RE-READING BRIAN ENO’S DIARY Many of these new words suggest the dissolution of a certain quality of public discourse that we have taken for granted since the Enlightenment, which hinged on the possibility of reaching evidence-based concensus -- albeit even temporary -- about what constitutes reality. The post-modern scepticism of any distinction between ideologically derived value systems and evidence-driven RON RUBIN | THEBLUEMOMENT.COM Ron Rubin 1933-2020. Among many distinctions, the bassist Ron Rubin, whose death on April 14 was announced in the Hampstead and Highgate Gazette, was playing with a trad jazz band led by the banjoist Ralph “Bags” Watmough on the opening night of the Cavern Club in his native Liverpool in 1957.He went on to a long career in the mainstream and modern idioms, with the bands of Humphrey BRYAN FERRY AT THE ALBERT HALL, 1974 My most powerful memory of Bryan Ferry's debut as a solo artist at the Albert Hall, four and a half decades ago, is of a blonde woman sitting just along the row from me in the ringside seats. She was in her early thirties, I'd guess, tanned and expensively dressed and coiffed; she'darrived by
DYAN BIRCH 1949-2020 Dyan Birch was something special. Her presence on a stage drew the eye and the ear. And now she's gone, leaving the memory of a soulful essence that was hers alone, however big or small the stage. She was a teenager working in Brian Epstein's NEMS record shop in THE NEWS FROM KEITH JARRETT It is a something of a consolation to hear this very sad news from you Richard, with your usual sensitive detail. I will never forget hearing the name Keith Jarrett from the mouth of Gordon Beck ( in a 1974 post gig conversation in the Seven Dials) who raved about him with such passion that the next day I went to the Holborn Record Library and took out the Bremen & Lausanne double album REMEMBERING LAURA NYRO Laura Nyro had missed her intended flight from New York to London, forcing her to take a plane that arrived at six o'clock in the morning. Now here she was, barely 12 hours later, warming up before recording a performance before an invited audience in a small auditorium at the BBC's Television Centre, for a series called InConcert. This
THEBLUEMOMENT.COMSTEPPING OUT WITH BOBBY PARKERBLUESWEATHERBLUEGRASSFILMR&B A peal of church bells is a familiar sound to most, yet full of strangeness. Listening to the baffling patterns created when a simple descending figure breaks up and reforms into a kind of Escher-like musical geometry, you might find yourself wondering if herein lies the true origin of the systems music of Steve Reich and Philip Glass. PETER HAMMILL IN LOCKDOWN Some time in the future, academics will pore over the ways people found to make music despite the restrictions imposed during the various lockdowns. But there are things that don't need the benefit of time to provide perspective. The knowledge that Peter Hammill's In Translation was created in cruel and unusual circumstances mayincrease his
A MIKE TAYLOR DISCOVERY When the English jazz pianist and composer Mike Taylor walked into the sea and died in 1969, aged 30, he left behind two albums — Pendulum, by his quartet, and the self-explanatory Trio, recorded in 1966 and ’67 respectively — as a memorial to a talent silenced by the kind of problems experienced by too many creative souls in that era. Taylor’s gifts and instincts put him somewhere in PUNKT.VRT.PLASTIK (WHAT?) When I first encountered Punkt.Vrt.Plastik two years ago in Berlin, I thought they were making the most intellectually challenging piano-trio music I'd ever heard. Their late-night concert, in a darkened auditorium, was an intense experience, highly rewarding but perhaps more impressive than enjoyable. At the Vortex last night, without changing any of the components of RE-READING BRIAN ENO’S DIARY Many of these new words suggest the dissolution of a certain quality of public discourse that we have taken for granted since the Enlightenment, which hinged on the possibility of reaching evidence-based concensus -- albeit even temporary -- about what constitutes reality. The post-modern scepticism of any distinction between ideologically derived value systems and evidence-driven RON RUBIN | THEBLUEMOMENT.COM Ron Rubin 1933-2020. Among many distinctions, the bassist Ron Rubin, whose death on April 14 was announced in the Hampstead and Highgate Gazette, was playing with a trad jazz band led by the banjoist Ralph “Bags” Watmough on the opening night of the Cavern Club in his native Liverpool in 1957.He went on to a long career in the mainstream and modern idioms, with the bands of Humphrey BRYAN FERRY AT THE ALBERT HALL, 1974 My most powerful memory of Bryan Ferry's debut as a solo artist at the Albert Hall, four and a half decades ago, is of a blonde woman sitting just along the row from me in the ringside seats. She was in her early thirties, I'd guess, tanned and expensively dressed and coiffed; she'darrived by
DYAN BIRCH 1949-2020 Dyan Birch was something special. Her presence on a stage drew the eye and the ear. And now she's gone, leaving the memory of a soulful essence that was hers alone, however big or small the stage. She was a teenager working in Brian Epstein's NEMS record shop in THE NEWS FROM KEITH JARRETT It is a something of a consolation to hear this very sad news from you Richard, with your usual sensitive detail. I will never forget hearing the name Keith Jarrett from the mouth of Gordon Beck ( in a 1974 post gig conversation in the Seven Dials) who raved about him with such passion that the next day I went to the Holborn Record Library and took out the Bremen & Lausanne double album REMEMBERING LAURA NYRO Laura Nyro had missed her intended flight from New York to London, forcing her to take a plane that arrived at six o'clock in the morning. Now here she was, barely 12 hours later, warming up before recording a performance before an invited audience in a small auditorium at the BBC's Television Centre, for a series called InConcert. This
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Since the late 1960s I've written about music for the Melody Maker, the (London) Times, the Independent on Sunday, the Guardian, Down Beat, Jazz Journal, Mojo, the TLS, Granta, Uncut and other publications. A list of the people I've most enjoyed interviewing during that time would include Marvin Gaye, Laura Nyro, Booker T.Jones, Miles Davis,
THE BELLS, THE BELLS… A peal of church bells is a familiar sound to most, yet full of strangeness. Listening to the baffling patterns created when a simple descending figure breaks up and reforms into a kind of Escher-like musical geometry, you might find yourself wondering if herein lies the true origin of the systems music of Steve Reich 2021 JUNE | THEBLUEMOMENT.COM A peal of church bells is a familiar sound to most, yet full of strangeness. Listening to the baffling patterns created when a simple descending figure breaks up and reforms into a kind of Escher-like musical geometry, you might find yourself wondering if herein lies the true origin of the systems music of Steve Reich and Philip Glass.ANDREW WOODHEAD
A peal of church bells is a familiar sound to most, yet full of strangeness. Listening to the baffling patterns created when a simple descending figure breaks up and reforms into a kind of Escher-like musical geometry, you might find yourself wondering if herein lies the true origin of the systems music of Steve Reich and Philip Glass. LIVE AT THE VILLAGE VANGUARD A wonderful venue with a great atmosphere. I was fortunate enough to be in New York at Easter a few years ago. My companion & I were passing by the Village Vanguard and became engaged in conversation at the door, where we were encouraged to come in to listen to Teddy Charles who was playing that evening. MANY ACCENTS, ONE VOICE Just about the first thing I discovered when I began a three-year term as artistic director of Berlin's historic jazz festival in 2015 was that I would be required to explain myself. More specifically, I would be asked to describe my "concept". This was a little disconcerting since I didn't really have one, at THE BAND AT THE ALBERT HALL The story of the Band is one of the most beautiful and tragic in the history of popular music. But at the Albert Hall on June 2, 1971, we only knew the half of it: the beautiful half. Rick Danko, Levon Helm, Garth Hudson, Richard Manuel and Robbie Robertson gave us one of thefinest
COUNT BASIE IN HIS OWN WRITE Jeremy Marre made so many great documentaries about music and musicians that a full retrospective would probably fill a 24-hour TV channel for the rest of the year, from Roots Rock Reggae in 1977 and Rhythm of Resistance (which inspired Paul Simon to write and record Graceland) two years later to profiles of Roy Orbison, REVISITING ERIC BURDON The memory of hearing Eric Burdon sing “House of the Rising Sun” with the Animals at the Odeon, Nottingham one summer night in 1964 — a week or two before it was released as a single — is as clear as yesterday. In some ways it was the precursor of a new kind of rock music. But to Burdon, as he explains in a new biographical documentary shown on BBC4 this weekend, it meant something GEORGE MARTIN’S DAY IN THE LIFE Forty five summers ago, George Martin granted me a long interview for the Melody Maker. It was a very enjoyable experience: he was most courteous of men, and his answers were full of fascinating detail, with the occasional gentle indiscretion. He spoke in some depth about his experience of working with the Beatles, all the way fromSkip to content
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A BLOG ABOUT MUSIC BY RICHARD WILLIAMS* About the author
Jun 4
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THE BELLS, THE BELLS… A peal of church bells is a familiar sound to most, yet full of strangeness. Listening to the baffling patterns created when a simple descending figure breaks up and reforms into a kind of Escher-like musical geometry, you might find yourself wondering if herein lies the true origin of the systems music of Steve Reich and Philip Glass. The 30-year-old Sheffield-born pianist and composer Andrew Woodhead takes that sound not just as the inspiration but as the practical basis for _Pendulums_, a new album-length work subtitled “Music for bell-ringers, improvisers and electronics”. The result is a quite stunning achievement in which jazz yet again proves its unique ability to create a constructive interaction with all sorts of outside formsof music.
The bells of St Paul’s, Birmingham — installed 15 years ago in the 18th century church, not far from where Woodhead studied at the Royal Birmingham Conservatoire — are the first things we hear in _Pendulums_, and the last. Eight bellringers are joined by two trumpets, two alto saxophones, two baritone saxophones and Woodhead’s electronic manipulation of the church bells and of various field recordings, including bicycle bells and the chimes of an ice-cream van. This film of a 10-minute section called “Changes” gives a view of the way in which the composer integrates his three basic building blocks, creating something more than just a sound-bed for the improvising soloists. Sometimes he transfers the characteristics of bell-ringing to the wind instruments, as at the beginning of “Tolls/Waves”, where the horns sound unison notes that evolve into a phasing pattern. I particularly love the way Woodhead uses the four reed instruments to soften the metallic timbre of the church bells and the trumpets, and how he brings out the bells’ overtones to create a universe of sound. There’s quite a lot of free jazz practice here (a reminder that one of Albert Ayler’s most famous works was called “Bells”), notably in the sparring over a simple ostinato transferred from bells to saxophones on “Partials II”, but there’s also an saxophone-chorale introduction to a piece called “Plain Hunt IV” that recalls the Anglican hymnal (and the enigma of Thelonious Monk’s “Abide with Me”). “Plain Hunt II” begins by processing the ice-cream van chimes into the sound of a spectral church organ before the horns take over with a passage of overlapping long tones, another example of how imaginatively Woodhead is transferring techniques from one set of musical tools to another. Towards the end of this piece the gentle hissing and sizzling of electronics is underscored by the tolling of a single bell: placed at the very heart of this compelling 68-minute suite, it’s a moment of beautiful simplicity. * _Andrew Woodhead’s _Pendulums_ is released on June 11 on the composer’s own Leker label (www.andrewwoodheadmusic.com). Concert performances of the work are scheduled for 14 October 2021 at St Paul’s, Birmingham and 16 October 2021 at St Clement Danes Church, London WC2._ _The photograph of Woodhead conducting the recording isby Guri Bosh._
May 24
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HIS TONGUE ON FIRE
Bob Dylan turns 80 today. I commissioned this ink drawing for an issue of _Time Out_ celebrating Dylan’s arrival to play at Earl’s Court in 1978, his first London shows in a dozen years. Ralph Steadman chose to make his image out of Bob’s words. When I left the editorship a few months later, the staff very kindly acquired the original from Ralph and gave it to me as a leaving present. As you might imagine, it’s a precious possession, although not quite as precious as all the songs Bob has placed in the common memory over the past six decades. Many happy returns to him.May 20
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BOB MARLEY’S LAST RIDE _IT’S 40 YEARS THIS WEEK SINCE JAMAICA CAME TO A HALT FOR THE FUNERAL OF ITS MOST FAMOUS SON. WHAT FOLLOWS IS AN EXPANDED VERSION OF THE REPORTS I WROTE ON THAT EXTRAORDINARY DAY FOR THE TIMES AND THE FRENCH MAGAZINE ROCK & FOLK._ They buried Bob Marley on 21 May 1981 at Nine Mile, the Jamaican hamlet where, 36 years earlier, he had been born. His heavy bronze coffin was carried to the top of the highest hill in the village and placed in a temporary mausoleum which had been painted in the colours of red, green and gold. Alongside Marley’s embalmed corpse, the casket contained his red Gibson Les Paul guitar, a Bible opened at Psalm 23, and a stalk of ganja placed there by his widow, Rita, at the end of the formal funeral ceremony. In London 10 days earlier, a few hours after his death was announced, I’d gone to the Island studios in an old church on Basing Street in Notting Hill. I knew the members of Aswad were scheduled to be there, cutting tracks for a new album in the very basement room where Bob had finished off _Catch A Fire_, his breakthrough album, in 1972. But it was late, and the musicians had gone home after watching the tributes hastily assembled by the British television networks. The only people left in the building were the caretaker and a member of Aswad’s road crew, both Jamaicans. “A sad day,” I said to them, unable to think of anything more profound or perceptive. They raised their eyes, and the roadie paused in the middle of rollinga spliff.
“Jah give,” he said, “and Jah take away.” And that was the mood in Kingston the following week, when Marley’s body arrived on a flight from Miami. There was no reason to grieve, the Rastas told anyone who asked. Death meant nothing. And Bob hadn’t really gone. He was still among us. ——–ooo0ooo——– Since Jamaica was at that time almost certainly the only country in the world whose prime minister had once tried his hand at the production of pop records, it was perhaps not surprising that the announcement of the country’s national budget was postponed by several days in order to accommodate what amounted to a state funeral. It was necessary to send out invitations, to construct the mausoleum, and to organise the security at the National Arena, where the main ceremony would be held. And the prime minister, Edward Seaga, had to prepare the euology he would deliver during the service. On the day before the funeral, the coffin was placed in the National Arena, a large gymnasium-like building. The lid was opened and members of the public were allowed to file past, taking a last look and delivering their final homage. Marley’s head was once more covered with dreadlocks; but this was a wig to cover his bald skull, his own locks having been lost during his treatment for cancer in hospitals in New York, Miami and Mexico, and finally in the Bavarian clinic of DrJosef Issels.
In Jamaica, everyone claimed to have been Bob’s personal friend and everyone wanted to pay their last respects. The cab driver who picked me up at Norman Manley Airport knew immediately why I was there. When I asked him if he’d known Bob, he replied: “Sure I knew him. He smoked the ‘erb of life.” And he passed his spliff over his shoulder to his friend sitting in the back seat, a policeman. In a single day, an estimated 100,000 people queued up to pass before Marley’s coffin, some of them returning two or three times. Many couldn’t get in and at times, when the crowd threatened to become unruly, the police used tear gas to thin them out. The day of the funeral began with a service for family and close friends at the Ethiopian Orthodox Church of the Holy Trinity on Maxfield Street, presided over by His Eminence Abouna Yesehaq, Archbishop of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church in the Western Hemisphere, who had baptised Marley into membership of his church in New York the previous November. This was just after his triumphal concerts at Madison Square Garden, when his cancer had already been diagnosed. Bob’s baptismal name was Berhane Selassie — “Light of theTrinity”.
At the end of the hour-long service the coffin was transported to the National Arena, where 6,000 members of the congregation were assembled under the eyes of television cameras and reporters from around the world. Above the entrance to the hall, a huge banner proclaimed: “Funeral Service of the Honourable Robert Nesta Marley, OM”. The Order of Merit had been conferred on him by Seaga a few weeks beforehis death.
The casket was carried into the hall on the shoulders of a score of white-jacketed guards of the Jamaican Defence Force. Inside as well as out, a public address system blasted out Bob’s records, while in the surrounding avenues the hawkers of badges and posters worked the large crowd who had arrived without invitations and were prepared to listen to the ceremony over the loudspeakers. “Babylon system is a vampire,” Bob’s voice wailed above the heads of the young soldiers who had rested their rifles against the temporary barriers. The coffin was deposited on a table in the middle of the broad stage and covered with two flags, the green, gold and black of Jamaica and the green, gold and red of Ethiopia. The stage decor was the work of Neville Garrick, the graphic designer who had become the art director of Tuff Gong, Marley’s record label, and the creator of all the Wailers’ sleeve art from _Rastaman Vibration_ to _Uprising_. The rows of temporary seating on the arena floor were reserved for invited guests, but the balconies were open to the public and filled up quickly. Among the spectators were many small figures in the neat uniforms of Jamaican schoolchildren, given the day off from their lessons. On the floor, the rows were marked with signs: Family, Government, Press, Twelve Tribes of Israel, Musicians. Photographers swiftly surrounded the seats reserved for the family as Cedella Booker, Bob’s mother, took her place, followed by his widow and some of his children, including his sons Ziggy, Stevie, Robert Jr and Julian, and his daughters Cedella and Stephanie. Applause saluted the dignified entry of Michael Manley, the former prime minister, whose pro-Cuba policies had provoked the disastrous enmity of the United States and the International Monetary Fund, and who had been deposed by Seaga at a general election six months earlier. The warmth of the welcome indicated that the Rastafarians, in particular, still saw Manley as the friend of the poor and the oppressed, and the contrast was obvious with the polite but tepid reception accorded to Seaga, who hurried to his seat practically engulfed by a crowd ofuniformed guards.
Rumours of the presence of Diana Ross, Stevie Wonder and Roberta Flack turned out to be false. But the governor-general of Jamaica, Sir Florizel Glasspole, ON, GCMG, CD, the Queen of England’s representative, arrived from his official residence, the palatial King’s House, to provide an appropriate symbol of the island’s colonial history, a living reminder of the origins of most of those present, whose ancestors had been brought from Africa four centuries earlier to form the world’s only entirely slavery-based economy. The formal guard of the Ethiopian Church, elderly men and women in white robes striped with the Rasta colours, took their places around the coffin. The stage was soon filled with the elders of the church, in robes of varied and vivid design. On the right of the platform a riser had been prepared for the church choir and for the United Africa Band, a group comprised of several percussionists, a bass guitarist and an organist, directed by Brother Cedric Brooks, the saxophonist more often found at the head of the band of Count Ossie, known as the Mystic Revelation of Rastafari. On the left, another riser was covered with amplifiers, keyboards and the drums, all stencilled with the legend “Bob Marley and the Wailers”. A voice came over the PA. “Brothers and sisters, this is a funeral service for Bob Marley. Please don’t forget that. The selling of all merchandise must stop now.” In the row in front of me, the producer Harry J, accompanied by his protegée, the singer Sheila Hilton, was in the middle of a conversation with a neighbouring Rasta wearing a red, green and gold tam o’shanter. “There has to be revolution to get a solution,” the Rasta said. Harry J, immaculate in his glossy silk suit, didn’t seem to be in agreement. (I had last seen Harry J outside his studio nine years earlier, during the _Catch A Fire_ sessions, when he had taken a silver Smith & Wesson revolver out of the glove compartment of his Oldsmobile and tucked it into his shoulder holster before heading inside. I wondered if he was wearing it to the funeral, but didn’t ask.) A little while after the scheduled hour of 11 o’clock, the service began with a hymn, “O God Our Help in Ages Past”, led by Cedric Brooks and accompanied by his drummers. As the old Anglican melody died away, His Eminence Abouna Yesehaq, standing beneath a parasol held by an acolyte, read passages from the Anaphora of St John, Son of Thunder and from the Anaphora of St Mary in Geez and Amharic, the ancient tongues of Ethiopia. “Jah!” came the answering salutation from some members of the audience, clad in the raiment of the Twelve Tribes. “Rastafari!” The Governor General stepped forward to read the first lesson, taken from the First Epistle of St Paul to the Corinthians, chapter 15, verses 20-38: “The last enemy that shall be destroyed is death.” The congregation sang another hymn, coincidentally a favourite of the late Elvis Presley: “Then sings my soul, my Saviour God, to Thee / How great Thou art, how great Thou art.” Michael Manley, in his guise as Leader of the Opposition, read from St Paul’s First Epistle to the Thessalonians, chapter three, verses 7-13: “Therefore, brethren, we were comforted over you in all our affliction and distress by your faith / For now we live, if ye stand fast in theLord.”
Next, to the delight of the Rastafarians on the floor and in the balcony, it was the turn of Allan “Skill” Cole, Jamaica’s finest footballer and one of the dead man’s closest friends. His appearance barely tolerated by the elders of the Ethiopian Church, Cole had been scheduled to read from Psalm 68, which bears the subtitle “To the chief Musician, a Psalm or Song of David.” Instead, ignoring the text prepared for him by the elders, he announced that he intended to deliver passages from Corinthians and Isaiah particularly dear to Rasta hearts. Mutterings and shufflings among the church dignitaries on the platform were countered by the sounds of delighted approval from those clad, like Cole, in the robes of the Twelve Tribes. Their mood turned to riotous glee as the footballer refused to heed furious requests to leave the platform, instead continuing with his reading and finishing off by returning to his seat in triumph. The Archbishop recovered himself in time to read the Beatitudes — “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven” — and to lead the Lord’s Prayer before Edward Seaga, once a producer of ska records, made his appearance at the lectern to deliver his eulogy, which was memorable only for his closing benediction: “May his soul rest,” said the man in the business suit, “in the arms of Jah Rastafari.” Even the Twelve Tribes, otherwise opposed to Seaga’s worldview in every particular, could scarce forbear to cheer this unusually explicit acknowledgement of their existence within Jamaican society. When the time came for the Archbishop to deliver his address, he took the opportunity to take his revenge on the seditious “Skill” Cole in the form of a direct message to the Rastas in the hall. Why advocate repatriation to Africa, he said, when it would profit them more to seek a better life in Jamaica? “Jah!” they shouted in defiant response to his words. “Rastafari!” The most extraordinary moment of the ceremony, the most beautiful and the most African, came when the Wailers mounted the stage. The members of the Marley’s old band took over as Junior Murvin directed the guitarist Al Anderson, the bass and drums duo of Aston “Family Man” Barrett and his brother Carlie, and Alvin “Seeco” Patterson, the veteran percussionist. Ibo, Third World’s keyboards player, took the place of Tyrone Downie, who had arrived that morning wearing the robes of the Twelve Tribes but had been mysteriously denied entrance to the Arena. The I-Threes (Rita Marley, Judy Mowatt and Marcia Griffith) sang “Rastaman Chant” to a ponderous and mournful rhythm, before the Wailers struck up “Natural Mystic”. It was during this song, while the crowd was getting to its feet and moving towards the edge of the stage to join what had suddenly been transformed from a solemn obsequy to a celebration of the dead man’s spirit, that Ziggy and Stevie Marley could be seen, dancing among the musicians. Respectively aged eight and six, identically dressed in maroon suits and white shoes, they performed joyous imitations of their late father’s skanking stage dance, and the resemblance was such that the crowd gasped at the sight. When the mixing engineer superimposed a recording of Bob’s voice above the band’s heavyweight dub rhythm, accompanied by waves of cheering from a concert audience, the effect was hallucinatory. It was Cedella Booker, Bob’s mother, who closed the performance. Accompanied by two other women singers, she delivered “Amen” — a song first recorded by Curtis Mayfield and the Impressions, whose music had inspired the Wailers’ earliest efforts — in a powerful gospel voice, the crowd swaying to the rhythm. When she finished, the musicians put down their instruments, lifted the coffin on to their shoulders and carried it from the stage, followed by the family and other mourners through the hall and out into the roadway where, after the crowd had been moved aside, it was placed in a flatbed hearse, ready to begin the 50-mile journey back to where Bob Marley’s lifehad begun.
——–ooo0ooo——– As the cortège left Kingston, it passed in front of the house at 56 Hope Road, which Chris Blackwell had given to Marley to be the Wailers’ hometown headquarters. Inside the house, a wall still bore the holes from the bullets that had narrowly failed to kill Bob during what appeared to be a politically motivated attack by a gunman in 1976, while Jamaica was under martial law. Then the hearse passed the Alpha Catholic Boys’ School on South Camp Road, where many of Jamaica’s finest musicians — Don Drummond, Joe Harriott, Tommy McCook, Vin Gordon, Rico Rodriguez — had learned to play, under the direction of Ruben Delgado, an inspiring teacher. The current generation of pupils now stood outside to sing “No Woman, No Cry” as the procession headed towards Marcus Garvey Drive and out of the city on the road to Spanish Town. Crossing the parish of St Catherine to the town of Bog Walk, where the road splits right towards Port Maria and left to Ocho Rios, the cars turned north-west through Linstead and Moneague, with the 1,000ft peak of Mount Friendship to the east, taking the left fork past Claremont into the parish of St Ann, skirting the northern foothills of the Dry Harbour Mountains and on through Brown’s Town. As they approached each settlement, the passengers could see that people had come out of their houses and schools and farms and workshops to stand by the roadside. Near Cotton Piece the open-backed hearse broke down and the coffin had to be put into a replacement van. Finally, in mid-afternoon, the dead man and his mourners arrived at Nine Mile, a hamlet set at the end of a single-track road among gentle, verdantred-clay hills.
A helicopter buzzed overhead, carrying a film crew, their cameras trained on slopes covered with white-robed figures. Rastas from all over the island had set off early to be in place when the procession arrived. Policeman cradling machine-guns were prepared for trouble yet, despite the crush as the coffin was removed from the hearse and carried up to the small temporary mausoleum, disorder was minimal. Nine Mile turned out to be little more than a scattering of shanties, with one or two bars and a small single-storey stone building consecrated, according to a hand-written sign, to the use of the Holy Baptist Church of the Fire of God of the Americas. This was a place where workers in the sugar plantations set in the flatlands towards the sea had been allowed to build their modest homes and cultivate their own subsistence crops. It was here, on 6 February 1945, that Cedella Booker had brought a son into the world and that, only a few paces away from the mausoleum, in a two-room shack measuring about 20ft by 5ft, Bob and Rita Marley had returned for a year or two at the end of the ’60s, and here that they nurtured their own first child. After a brief ceremony of interment, the convoy departed, followed by the police. Only the Rastas remained, wandering to and fro around the village and across the hills. For the last time, Junior Murvin and Neville Garrick climbed the little mound up to the mausoleum, picking their way through empty Red Stripe cans, the music they had helped to send around the world now throbbing from a dozen portable cassetteplayers.
As the light began to fail, the vendors of ice creams and soft drinks began to pack up. The thump of the helicopter’s rotors receded as it wheeled away and headed south, back to Kingston. The white-robed members of the Twelve Tribes melted into the gathering dusk. Bob hadcome home.
May 17
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MANY ACCENTS, ONE VOICE Just about the first thing I discovered when I began a three-year term as artistic director of Berlin’s historic jazz festival in 2015 was that I would be required to explain myself. More specifically, I would be asked to describe my “concept”. This was a little disconcerting since I didn’t really have one, at least not in any worked-out form. What I came up with, thinking on my feet, was a definition applicable to the kind of festival I wanted to make. “Jazz,” I told my inquisitors, “is any music that couldn’t exist if jazz hadn’texisted.”
I’ve never been quite sure whether I invented that aphorism simply out of expediency, in order to cover myself and to explain some of the music I wanted to present, in which the elements of traditional forms of jazz were sometimes attentuated or modified almost to invisibility. Eventually I decided that I believed it enough to feel comfortable about using it whenever it was necessary to justify something. In my first year, the best example was provided by Divan of the Continents, a 22-piece band jointly led by Cymin Samawatie, a singer born in Berlin to Iranian parents, and Ketan Bhatti, a drummer born in India. Both graduates of jazz courses at Berlin’s University of the Arts (the UdK), together they had devised an ambitious project to bring together a large ensemble of locally based musicians from various ethnic backgrounds, from the principal viola-player of the Berlin Philharmonic and an English free-jazz trombonist to virtuosos of the sheng, the oud, the ney, the kanun and the koto. The aim was to work at creating music which honoured the essence of each player’s respective genre while (and this is the important bit) aiming for something genuinely new. What it would not be was an example of musical tourism. It wouldn’t be obviously “jazz”, either. But you could even see this as being a modern version of jazz’s origin story, in which elements of African and European musics came together to form a hybrid that took on a life of its own. Since the music was complex, it seemed right to arrange for them to have three days of rehearsals in the small concert hall at the UdK’s Jazz Institute, open to students and the public. Then, on the festival’s closing night, they gave a performance in the 1,000-seater hall of the Berliner Festspiele, leading off a bill completed by Louis Moholo-Moholo’s Four Blokes and Ambrose Akinmusire’s quartet with the singer Theo Bleckmann. It was, I think, a success: the audience gave every appearance of being intrigued, particularly by the settings of poetry sung by Samawatie and two other female singers. Now Samawatie and Bhatti have made an album of that music, and other pieces, with an ensemble of similar size and instrumentation, containing about half the original personnel. In the meantime, the project been retitled: the album is called _Trickster Orchestra_. But the concept is the same, and the time spent in preparation has resulted in something rather extraordinary: a music in which the sheng of Wu Wei and the viola of Martin Stegner have equal weight, in which the double bass of Ralf Schwarz can emerge with a walking 4/4 line and the various items of tuned percussion can set up rhythm patterns reminiscent of Steve Reich. The words of the songs range from Psalm 130 to the Sufi poet Rumi and the contemporary poet Efe Duvan, and are sung in Farsi, Hebrew, Arabic and Turkish. The lyricism is always poised and sometimes swooning, but the serenity can be punctured by a fusillade of drums, subtly coloured by electronics. It’s not a mosaic, but it is a kaleidoscope. Each musician retains her or his own tuning and vocabulary. The various tones, textures and idiomatic accents are overlapped, juxtaposed and filtered through each other, creating something much more interesting than a flavourless fusion. I think it would have interested the founder of Berlin’s jazz festival, the late Joachim-Ernst Berendt, a man with a strong belief in the potential value of opening jazz up to new relationships with the music of other cultures. _Trickster Orchestra_ is an impressive example of where that kind of thinking has led, giving musicians of high skill and inquiring minds the chance to find newpaths.
* Trickster Orchestra _by Cymin Samawatie and Ketan Bhatti is out now on the ECM label. The photograph of Bassem Alhouri (kanun), Naoko Kikuchi (koto) and Ralf Schwarz (bass) is from their 2015 concert in Berlin and was taken by Camille Blake._May 10
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WES MONTGOMERY AND FRIENDS By the time Wes Montgomery died of a heart attack in 1968, aged 45, he was most famous for a series of albums, supervised by the producer Creed Taylor, in which he used his jazz chops to turn pop hits — “Goin’ Out of My Head”, “Eleanor Rigby”, “California Dreaming”, “A Day in the Life” — into a form of high-quality, lightly funky easy-listening music. In his earlier years, however, he had raised the bar for jazz guitar — and that Wes Montgomery was the one who visited Europe three years before his death. His touring itinerary included a season at Ronnie Scott’s, where he met some of the musicians who would accompany him to Germany for a TV broadcast commissioned by Norddeutsche Rundfunk, the Hamburg-based station that was, and is, part of the ARD national public broadcasting network. Playing in NDR’s studios in front of an audience, Montgomery led an eight -piece line-up including one fellow American, the tenor saxophonist Johnny Griffin. The six European musicians were the Austrian altoist Hans Koller, the French-Algerian pianist Martial Solal, the French bassist Michel Gaudry, and three Brits: Ronnie Scott on tenor, Ronnie Ross on baritone and Ronnie Stephenson on drums. The music they played on April 30, 1965 in NDR’s _Jazz Workshop_ series has just been released for the first time, and it’s a fine example of multinational mainstream-modern jazz. The four-piece reed section breezes through the solid, tightly-voiced arrangements of Montgomery’s “West Coast Blues”, “Four on Six” and “Twisted Blues”, Ross’s “Last of the Wine” and “Blue Grass”, Griffin’s “The Leopard Walks” and Solal’s fascinating “Opening 2”. There are special features for Wes on a quartet bossa nova version of “Here’s that Rainy Day”, and an electrifying Griffin on “Blue Monk”. It’s a very satisfying hour, and a welcome discovery. But there’s also a second disc, a Blu-Ray video recording of the rehearsal in the studio two days earlier, in which the musicians are getting comfortable with the charts while the TV director works out his camera shots. And it contains five minutes that are absolutelyremarkable.
Between the rehearsals of “Blue Grass” and “Blue Monk”, Solal runs through an intricate trio arrangement of “On Green Dolphin Street” with Gaudry and Stephenson. As they begin, the other musicians slowly gather round, listening intently. Scott peers over Stephenson’s shoulder, following the chart on the drummer’s music stand. Montgomery stays his chair, cradling his fat-bodied Gibson guitar, but is paying serious attention. So is Griffin, who prowls round to stand behind the pianist. It’s a breathtaking performance. Typically of Solal, it mixes angular modernity with perfectly integrated hints of the history of jazz piano, from stride to bebop. It’s audacious and witty and wonderful, and the bassist and drummer do brilliantly to keep pace. By the time it’s over, you’re thinking that Solal is the inheritor to Art Tatum’s breathtaking virtuosity. And the other musicians are thinking something similar. You can see it in their body language. And you can hear it when, as the last note dies, Griffin walks round beside Solal, leans into him and says: “Ridiculous!” And as he walks away and he and Scott cross paths, you can see them shaking their heads in admiration. It’s a beautiful thing to see musicians reacting spontaneously in an informal setting. More than half a century later, we can share their sense of delight and discovery. All these men — in their stylish polo shirts and cardigans and narrow slacks and neat haircuts, with their mastery of a complex musical language — are now gone, except one. That one is Martial Solal, who played with Sidney Bechet and Django Reinhardt and wrote the music for Godard’s _À bout de souffle_, now 93 years old and, as he has continued to prove through the years, an authentic genius ofjazz.
* _Wes Montgomery’s _The NDR Hamburg Studio Recordings_, produced by Stefan Gerdes, Axel Dürr and Joachim Becker,_ _is on the Jazzline Classics/NDR Kultur label._May 7
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PETER HAMMILL IN LOCKDOWN Some time in the future, academics will pore over the ways people found to make music despite the restrictions imposed during the various lockdowns. But there are things that don’t need the benefit of time to provide perspective. The knowledge that Peter Hammill’s _In Translation_ was created in cruel and unusual circumstances may increase his listeners’ admiration, but its quality transcends suchconsiderations.
Coming 50 years after the release of his first solo release, _Fool’s Mate_, in the summer of 1971, this is Hammill’s covers album, with a difference. Only three of the songs — “The Folks Who Live on the Hill”, “This Nearly Was Mine” and “I (Who Have Nothing)” — are likely to be well known to the Anglophone audience. The remainder are either Italian pop songs or melodies by classical composers with lyrics translated by Hammill. It’s the measure of the strength of his artistic character that the whole thing has the unity of a songcycle.
Working in his Wiltshire studio, he weaves his own guitars and keyboards together with samples to create orchestrations that are full of interesting textures — complementary and contrasting — while retaining a sense of economy and intimacy, finding common ground between material plucked from seemingly divergent sources. Perhaps the best way of putting it is that he creates a emotional microclimate within which songs as different as “The Folks Who Live on the Hill” and Gustav Mahler’s “Lost to the World” can thrivetogether.
Hammill’s vocal style, with its clear diction, complete absence of blues inflections and occasional use of a pronounced vibrato, has always emphasised the closeness of his music’s spirit to that of European art song, from the Weimar cabaret music of Kurt Weill to the chanson of Jacques Brel, filtered through the sensibility of British musicians who served their apprenticeships in the second half of the 1960s. You can hear this tendency at its most declamatory on “Ballad for My Death”, whose melody is by the tango master Astor Piazzolla but could easily be by Brel. Hammill dials back the drama on other songs, such as Fabrizio de Andre’s “Hotel Supramonte” and Gabriel Fauré’s “After a Dream”, that might have been submerged by similar treatment. “The Folks” and “This Nearly” are songs he grew up with, so he’s not going to poke fun at their 1950s sentiments. He takes them seriously, delivering them in his ardent English semi-croon, relishing their shapely contours and allowing listeners to make up their own minds about what the lyrics represent. “I (Who Have Nothing)” comes with drama built in: you either sing it that way or you don’t sing it at all, and Hammill’s version adds a shadow second vocal to emphasise what he calls the song’s “somewhat creepy nature”, as well as the hallucinatory sound of a mellotron (I think) and a paranoid electric guitar. Perhaps the most striking arrangement of all is provided for Piero Ciampi’s “Il Vino”, a late-night drinking song that sways to synthesised strings, a cheap organ and glockenspiel. Its finale reminded Hammill of Nino Rota and thus of a “Fellini-esque aesthetic” which, he thinks, suffuses the whole project. _In Translation_ is an exceptional album: warm, approachable, and betraying no sense of the isolation in which it was created. Rather the reverse, as Hammill suggests when, in his notes, he remarks that, as well as the coronovirus, he had Brexit on his mind while he was making it. “Now the free travel around Europe which has been such a feature, pleasure and education in my adult life has ended,” he writes, “and all the benefits of cultural exchange are gone with it. I wouldn’t have been able to approach or understand many of these songs without that experience and to lose it is piteous.” It’s hard to believe that one day, when our corner of the world has come to its senses, those borders will not be open again. * _Peter Hammill’s _In Translation _is released today on the Fie! label: http://www.sofasound.com_. _The photograph is from the album cover and was taken by James Sharrock._May 4
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MARIANNE & JOAN
In 1965, when she was 18 years old, Marianne Faithfull was cast as Ophelia in Tony Richardson’s _Hamlet_, a Roundhouse production swiftly transferred to film. Two years later Bill Gaskill directed her in Chekhov’s_ Three Sisters_ at the Royal Court, alongside Glenda Jackson: “Marriane (sic) Faithfull looked Irina most plausibly,” Philip Hope-Wallace wrote in the _Guardian_, “even if she could still get more out of the words.” Today, in her maturity, Faithfull knows that the best lines can be allowed to speak for themselves. Lines like Keats’ “The sedge has withered from the lake/And no birds sing”, for example, and Tennyson’s “The mirror crack’d from side to side.” They’re heard on her new album, _She Walks in Beauty_, in which she recites verses from the Romantic poets over backdrops created by the Australian musician Warren Ellis. I’ve no idea whether, following her recovery from a bout of Covid-19 which put her in intensive care for three weeks, she has plans to make any more albums. If not, _She Walks in Beauty_ would make a fitting capstone to a career that began in 1964 when, at a party for the singer Adrienne Posta, Andrew Loog Oldham spotted a convent schoolgirl who was already in thrall to the poetry she reads here. The album adheres to a single mood, tending towards the ethereal: drifting ambient soundscapes sparingly garnished by Ellis’s violin, Vincent Ségal’s cello, Nick Cave’s piano and, on two pieces, Brian Eno’s treatments. Faithfull’s delivery of the verses is respectful and measured: her deep contralto has the grain of experience, grounding the poetics. About half the tracks received their voice tracks after her recovery, which might explain why one or two of them are more deliberate than the rest, although not obviouslyor disturbingly so.
Among the pieces I particularly enjoyed are Byron’s title piece , Keats’ “La Belle Dame Sans Merci”, Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “Ozymandias” and Wordsworth’s “Surprised by Joy”. I was amused, too, that she borrows a tactic perfected by her old admirer Bob Dylan with “Desolation Row” and “Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands”: the trick of leaving the collection’s epic performance until last. In this case it’s the 12 minutes of Tennyson’s “The Lady of Shalott”, which she gives in the 20-stanza version published in 1832, 10 years before the author revised the ending to suit Victorian sensibilities. (It’s a shame her script — repeated in the accompanying booklet — gave her “Through the squally east wind keenly/Blew…” rather than “Though…”, but the blemish isfleeting.)
It’s worth adding that ownership of the special edition of _She Walks in Beauty_ is much enhanced by the inclusion of reproductions of a dozen watercolours — including the cover illustration — by the English artist Colin Self, any one of which I’d be happy to have hanging on the wall. As a collateral benefit, Faithfull’s album sent me back to _Baptism: A Journey Through Our Time_, a 1968 release in which Joan Baez read and sang poetry over music by the composer Peter Schickele. Conceived by Maynard Solomon, the co-founder of Vanguard Records, it was an ambitious project in which Schickele created bespoke settings for verses from poets ranging from anonymous medieval Chinese and Japanese writers through John Donne, William Blake and Walt Whitman to Arthus Rimbaud, Wilfred Owen, Henry Treece, James Joyce, Federico García Lorca, Jacques Prévert, Countee Cullen and Yevgeny Yevtushenko. The album is bookended by Treece’s “Old Welsh Song”, a fragment sung by Baez, backed by a harmonium. Much more of a mosaic of miniatures than Faithfull’s album, the mood of the programme is defined by a hatred of war and bloodshed, beginning with Whitman’s “I Saw the Vision of Armies” , read to softly rolling tom-toms and cymbals, and the Chinese verse “Minister of War”, punctuated by a distorted guitar and a clashing gong-like effects. A hovering unison cello and bass line wanders disconsolately behind Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s translation of Prévert’s “Song in the Blood” , glockenspiel and celeste accompany the sung version of Joyce’s early “Of the Dark Past”, a jaunty string quartet matches the vivacity of a fragment from the same writer’s _Portrait of the Artist as aYoung Man_.
If the flute and harp embroidering Rimbaud’s “Childhood” are a bit twee, his “Evil” gets a cinematic soundtrack whose opening sounds of strife thin out as they give way to pathos. The flute, viola and celeste colouring Kenneth Rexroth’s translations of Japanese haiku are appropriately exquisite, and Schickele gives Baez a lovely melody for e.e. cummings’ “All in green went my love riding”. Wilfred Owen’s “The Parable of the Old Man and the Young”, with its devastating payoff, is wisely left unaccompanied. Baez was 27 at the time of this recording. Sometimes her delivery could be a little over-reverent, but mostly she found the right tone, nowhere more powerfully than on the two short poems at the heart of the album: Blake’s “London” , with its appalled visions of the corruption of the flesh and the spirit, and Norman Rosten’s “In Guernica” , where a simple, almost photographic description deepens into tragedy through a single word: “In Guernica the dead children / Were laid out in order on the sidewalk / In their white starched dresses / In their pitiful white dresses.” Both pieces employ the tolling of tuned percussion over strange drones. By 1968, Baez had sold a lot of albums. Her two _In Concert_ albums had made the Billboard top 10 in 1962-63, and in a year later _Joan Baez 5_ reached the UK top three. _Baptism_ made it no higher than No 84 in the US and failed to register at all in Britain Somehow, though, partly for its sense of adventure and partly for “London” and “In Guernica”, it’s the one that’s stayed with me.Apr 28
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‘COLOUR ME GONE, BABY…’ The death of the film director Monte Hellman this month, at the age of 91, occurred exactly 50 years after the full screenplay to_ Two-Lane Blacktop, _ his best known picture, was published in the April 1971 issue of _Esquire_ magazine. Its appearance preceded by three months the release of a film that starred James Taylor and Dennis Wilson as two hot-rod racers engaged in a cross-country contest between their ’55 Chevy and a Pontiac GTO with a fantasist played by Warren Oates at the wheel, their three lives complicated by the presence of a footloose hippie chick played by the 18-year-old Laurie Bird, in the first of her three films. By the time the film was premiered, the published screenplay — by the novelist Rudy Wurlitzer and the actor Will Corry — had been stripped as effectively as the primer-grey Chevy. Quite a lot of it disappeared in the shooting. Some of it was replaced by improvised dialogue: “The wheels didn’t grab off the start” became “The tires didn’t bite out of the hole.” Even more was removed in the eventual studio-enforced final cut from three and a quarter hours to 100 minutes. No bad thing, perhaps, since it removed a lot of car talk; what remains is quite enough. Far from being, as _Esquire_ claimed, “the movie of the year”, _Two-Lane Blacktop_ was a flop. Most film critics hated it. In particular, they hated Taylor and Wilson. I thought, and still think, that they were perfect for Hellman’s vision of an existentialist road movie peopled by damaged characters — none of them given a name — set in an America undergoing a cultural upheaval so profound that people could hardly communicate with each other. Look at it now and you see a couple of performances of considerable sensitivity by two musicians who had never acted before. The ill-fated Bird provides the perfect complement, while Oates is magnificent as a character caught in nervy bemusement between two eras, his use of already dated argot — including the phrase I’ve used for the headline of this piece — perfectly judged. Other highlights include one “H. D. Stanton” as a gay hitchhiker who weeps when the GTO driver rejects his advances (apparently Harry Dean initially objected to his character’s sexual orientation). Wurlitzer himself plays a fellow with a ’32 Ford in an early drag-strip sequence shot in Santa Fe, while James Mitchum, lookalike son of Robert, can also be glimpsed in one of the racing scenes. The unresolved ending was something else the critics detested, but it’s exactly the one the film demands. I bought the April 1971 _Esquire_ when it came out and have hung on to it ever since. It’s amusing to leaf through it now and find a counter-cultural screenplay sharing the issue with a lavish colour feature on golf-course architects, Malcolm Muggeridge’s review of _The Female Eunuch_, a survey of men’s two-tone shoes for the spring season, and ads for Johnny Carson’s “Carson-eze” polyester/wool blend slacks and Flying Dutchman pipe tobacco (“Lead women around bythe nose!”).
A few years ago I also bought a Universal Pictures DVD of the film; its extras include Hellman and Gary Kurtz, one of the film’s co-producers, giving a fascinating off-screen commentary as the film rolls. Among the things they tell us is that although Jack Deerson was credited as the director of photography, he was hired merely to satisfy the union, which had refused a card to Gregory Sandor, who was actually responsible for the brilliant cinematography. Only when two cameras were required was Deerson summoned from the hotel rooms in which he spent the vast majority of the shoot, which ranged from California through Arizona, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Tennessee and North Carolina. A much-requested DVD release of Hellman’s three-hour version was scuppered, they say, by the studio’s refusal to negotiate the rights to the extra music originally included. Oh, yes. A last thing. Three ’55 Chevys were built: the first for interior shots, with camera platforms built in; the second with roll bars for stunt work, such as the sequence in which the car ends up in a field; and the third as a full-blown race car. I wonder where thatlast one is now?**
* _Here’s the Two-Lane Blacktop trailer: https://youtu.be/Q4onX6ZDsZ0_ _And here’s an obituary of Monte Hellman by Ronald Bergan: https://www.theguardian.com/film/2021/apr/27/monte-hellman-obituary_** _The answer:
https://www.hemmings.com/stories/2014/11/26/two-lane-blacktop-1955-chevy-two-door-sedan-heads-to-auction_Apr 26
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BLUES FOR BOB PORTER The name of Bob Porter started appearing on jazz albums at the end of the 1960s and then, with gathering frequency, through the succeeding decades. It soon became obvious that, whether as a record producer, a compiler of historical anthologies or a writer of liner notes, Porter — who died last week at the age of 80 — was most interested in the kinds of jazz that stayed close to old verities: a powerful swing, the feeling of the blues, a warmth of expression, a direct engagement with the audience’s emotions. Porter did a lot of his work for Bob Weinstock’s Prestige label, but when the Savoy label was bought by Arista he supervised a reissue programme that included a series of double albums called _The Roots of Rock ‘n’ Roll_, two of which you can see two of them above. What Porter located was a sweet spot where jazz and R&B fed each other in hits like Paul Willliams’ “The Hucklebuck” and Big Maybelle’s “Candy” . He supervised anthologies of Miles Davis for Prestige and John Coltrane for Atlantic (for whom he also put together the seven volumes of _Atlantic Rhythm and Blues 1947-1974_), won a Grammy for a 1979 anthology of Charlie Parker’s Savoy sessions, and produced new albums by Jimmy McGriff, Gene Ammons, Red Rodney, Hank Crawford, Charles Earland and many others. For the last 20 years he was a regular on WBGO, the public-service radio station broadcasting from Newark, New Jersey His particular take on jazz was summed up in his only book: _Soul Jazz: Jazz in the Black Community 1945-75_, the story of musicians who earned their living mostly in dance halls and clubs of black America and whose recordings were primarily aimed at the listeners they found there. The book starts with the last of the commercially viable popular-oriented black big bands, such as those led by Buddy Johnson and Erskine Hawkins, and advances chronologically via Louis Jordan, Lionel Hampton, Arnett Cobb, Jack McDuff and Lou Donaldson all the way through to Grant Green and Grover Washington Jr. Producers like Teddy Reig and Bob Shad take their place in the narrative, along with record-company bosses as different as Roulette’s Morris Levy, Savoy’s Herman Lubinsky and Verve’s Norman Granz, and radio disc jockeys from Alan Freed (a jazz fan before he helped invent rock and roll) to Frankie Crocker, a hero of disco whose closing theme — at the end of shows full of Kool & the Gang, the Commodores and Earth, Wind & Fire — was King Pleasure’s “Moody’s Mood for Love”. Porter only wrote his book, he said, because no one else had, and it was a story that needed to be told. If _Soul Jazz_ were a night out, it would be an organ-tenor-guitar-drums quartet playing to an audience of working people in a lounge on the South Side of Chicago: the kind of meat-and-potatoes jazz you could find on the albums Porter supervised. Swing, blues, warmth, engagement, informality, a complete lack of pretension: the recipe for a kind of basic nourishment that might be harder to find today. * _Bob Porter’s _Soul Jazz _was published in 2016 by Xlibris._Apr 20
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WOMAN AT HER TYPEWRITER _Mom was my greatest champion right from the very beginning. Except for drugs, I shared every event with her. Boyfriends, famous friends, triumph, and regret. My mother subscribed to _Rolling Stone_ for an entire decade, complaining that I was not on the cover again. Watching me fade from the limelight seemed harder on her than it was for me. She didn’t understand that careers must be pliable. If an act insists on not changing and making the music audience come to them, they can end up an oldies act. I always wanted my music to be a place un-aging. The real danger of early success is that our parents, our children, our friends also reap what we sow. I had watched the trajectory of every member of my family change as they chased the fairy light of my success._ _I weathered the storms of humility, the people who did not offer backstage passes anymore, or the people who did not even know my name anymore, and I kept on working. Mom told me I should just quit.Finally, I asked:_
_“And do what, Mom? This… this is what I am.”_ Here is the tone and texture of _Last Chance Texaco_, Rickie Lee Jones’s new memoir. Subtitled “Chronicles of a Troubadour”, it’s one of the most remarkable I’ve read from a musician, a first-person commentary on the life and early career of this extraordinary artist, full of romance and adventure, misadventure and indiscipline, anecdote and reflection — just the stuff we want from those free spirits who live the life so that we don’t have to, inviting us to stand and watch in fascination, half admiring and halfappalled.
If you want to know what prompted Steve Gadd to devise that drop-dead-laconic snare-drum lick on “Chuck E’s in Love”, or precisely how her first producers, Lenny Waronker and Russ Titelman, teased and moulded the songs that made up _Pirates_ into a classic album, this is not the book that you might have hoped for. Most of the albums after those first two don’t even get a mention. She does tell you how some of the songs came into being (“Last Chance Texaco” itself resulted from a first meeting with Tom Waits, dancing together under a streetlight on Doheny Drive, before she drove away in her yellow Chevy Vega). But there’s rather more to her autobiography than a recital of facts. The fact that we’re 260 pages into a 360-page book before we even get to signing with Warner Bros for the debut album that made her an overnight sensation at the age of 24 indicates that the emphasis of the narrative is firmly on her childhood and adolescence. This works because her early life was so peripatetic and picaresque, travelling with her perennially malfunctioning family through Oklahoma, Arizona, California and Washington State, sometimes enrolling at three new schools a year, running away and coming back and running away again and eventually staying away but without being able to sever the bonds to her father, the child of a vaudeville performer, and his wife, who had been brought up in an orphanage. They were a couple who “had learnt as kids to avoid government, big institutions and authority” and who “used cash to avoid declaring income and… avoided obligations beyond next month’s rent.” We know where that less than stable background got her, but the journey to her destination makes for compelling and sometimes distressing reading. She’s good on how music took a hold of her, most significantly through the Beatles (“I fantasised all the ways I could meet Beatle Paul… In melodramatic scenarios I abandoned my hopes and dreams for the sake of Paul who would eventually come find me as I lay dying and realise how much he loved me”) and, later, through seeing Laura Nyro on TV: “(She) seemed to send a message to me that day that said, ‘Come you young girls who are not like the others because you love Broadway as much as rock ‘n’ roll.'” Other influences: an English teacher who got her writing poetry in one of her several high schools, and picking up a book at her sister’s house — Dick Fariña’s _Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up To Me_ — that “told me I was not the first to go for this bohemian life of hitchhiking, pranksters, pot smokers, rebellion and free love.” There are vivid descriptions of her early experiences as a performer, including her first gig with her first band, playing to an audience of deaf people, her first professional engagement as, briefly, the only white member of Little Caesar and the Romans, famous for their doo-wop hit, “Those Oldies But Goodies (Remind Me of You)”, and the fraught appearance on _Saturday Night Live_ that made a hit of “Chuck E” and a star of Rickie Lee in 1979. Her lovers — from the famous, including Waits, Lowell George and her heroin buddy Dr John, who shot up with her after being assured that she’d tried it once before, to the lesser known — are given due and intimate consideration. As with her treatment of family members, she’s both generous and unsparing. “We stayed in character throughout our entire romance,” she writes of Waits, “and our characters were sometimes cruel and selfish.” She is wry and realistic about his disciples: “Was I going to be another ghost, sitting around in Tom Waits’s peripheral vision, hoping he looked directly at me?” It led her to a conclusion about the problematic relationship between performer and listener: “I don’t want to have sex with someone who has mistaken me for my song.” The book sent me back to the albums — the first two, of course, then the great covers collections of _Pop Pop_, _Girl at Her Volcano_ and _It’s Like This_, and _Traffic from Paradise_ and a later favourite, _The Sermon on Exposition Boulevard_ — and to the memories of one of the finest concerts I’ve ever attended, at the Dominion Theatre in London in 1992, and one of the most hair-raising, at the Jazz Café in 2007. Most of all, without being unnecessarily literal-minded, it gave me a much clearer idea of the life went into the making of songs like “Coolsville”, “Traces of the Western Slopes”, “The Horses”, “Stewart’s Coat” and “The Evening of My Best Day”: one in which, as she says, “most of the dangerous choices I made were in fact lesser evils.” By the time she came to read _On the Road_, it was a disappointment. She’d already lived the story herself. On the journey from the three-year-old lapping up applause for her performance as a snowflake in a children’s ballet to a recovered addict with a Grammy on her mantelpiece, via deportation from Canada as a teenaged hippie officially described as being “in danger of leading a lewd and lascivious life”, she’d learnt that “fame brings no solace, no love, and no warmth” and that money can cut you off. “You may say, ‘So what?’ and ‘I’ll take it if you don’t want it,'” she writes. “I _do_ want it, fame and money and all that goes with it. It’s just that they weren’t what I thought they would be.” * _Rickie Lee Jones’s _Last Chance Texaco_ is published by Grove Press. The photograph is from the album _It’s Like This_, released in 2000, and was taken by Lee Cantelon._← Older Entries
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ABOUT THEBLUEMOMENT
The title of this blog is taken from my book The Blue Moment, published by Faber & Faber in 2009, in which I tried to look at how Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue had influenced half a century of modern music, from La Monte Young and Terry Riley through James Brown, John Cale and Brian Eno to Arve Henriksen and the Necks.PAGES
* About the author
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* African music
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* Chanson
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* Dance
* Disco
* Documentary film
* Doo-wop
* Fiction
* Film
* Folk music
* Folk-rock
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* Jazz & poetry
* Jazz-rock
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* Minimalism
* Mod
* Mod culture
* Music autobiography* New Wave
* Photography
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* Pop
* Pop music
* R&B
* record shops
* Reggae
* Rock and roll
* Rock music
* Rock Steady
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* Ska
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* Tango
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