The Penguin Jazz Guide (176 page)

Ian Shaw says:
‘When the album was being mixed (at the studio where Bowie did “Let’s Dance”) the towers fell and producer Todd Barkan’s dear mum passed away. The world suddenly became a very grown-up place; loss and love shaped the record. We added Horace Silver’s “Peace” as a last-moment thing and Todd, over his morning bagel, muttered something about a world still turning. That same day, Mark Murphy turned up with some lilies and I asked if he’d sing a Bobby Bland tune with me. We did it in one take and gave him $300 in cash.’

Shaw is a grown-up singer with a big voice, a musicianly understanding, and a good deal of what psychologists now call ‘emotional intelligence’. He feels every word he sings, which means that he doesn’t emote spuriously, but simply lets the meaning of a lyric dictate its own appropriate weight.

Like Linn label-mate Claire Martin, he’s had to wait in line to break through in America, but soon showed that he had stuff to spare. With the release in 1998 of
A New York Minute
, with Cedar Walton and bassist David Williams providing a background that would make any singer sound good and Britain’s Iain Ballamy offering a second voice up front, Shaw came close to greatness. Though he’s flirted with soul, pop and supper club styles in the past, he folds all his expertise into a bullseye delivery in these songs. He doesn’t really swing in the manner of a Tormé descendant and tends to fashion his own tightrope relationship with the beat, which in the past has often seemed jerky. And he carried that wisdom over into
A World Still Turning.

It’s difficult for a non-musician to grasp why a singer like Shaw might want to keep putting out seemingly routine standards sets while nurturing the ambition to make an album
as engaged, passionate and musically rewarding as this one. The outstanding performance here is ‘Rockabye’, no relation to the Samuel Beckett play, though possibly inspired by it, which deals with the grief of a bereaved Gulf War mother. A stunning performance. He does a batch of songs that obviously meant something to him in earlier years: by Bowie, Elton John, even Gilbert O’Sullivan. He saves the now obligatory Radiohead cover for the end; ‘The Tourist’ is one of their better songs and this version adds a nice dimension to it. Alexander, Childs (with whom he duos on ‘I’m Glad There Is You’) and Bollenback are all in great form. Inviting in Mark Murphy for a guest spot was a high-risk strategy. Just as Shaw has stolen albums he has guested on in the past, so the master might well have pinched this one. All it does, though, is confirm that the Welshman – and his country’s stored vocal tradition – are now very much up there.

HOWARD RILEY
^&

Born 16 February 1943, Huddersfield, Yorkshire, England

Piano

At Lincoln Cathedral

Heliopause HPVP105 + enhanced CD

Riley (p solo). September 2001.

Howard Riley says:
‘I’d had one previous experience of playing in a cathedral, at Le Mans, and I was a bit worried about the reverb, so I spent only ten minutes with the piano before we recorded, and then slowed down my playing to take account of it. Everything was done in one take.’

On the face of it, this sounds like an ideal context for Riley: a fine Steinway piano and the magnificent acoustic of one of England’s most impressive church buildings. The reality is well up to expectation, a concentrated and very thoughtful solo recital which shows up even better on the Binaural Surround Sound Stereo tracks on CD2; the final cut, with video, requires a DTS decoder/surround amplifier or all you will hear is white noise.

Riley uses the cathedral acoustics as part of his performance, allowing slow decays and echo to generate another level of harmonic activity. He also exploits the extremes of his instrument, notably on the very beautiful ‘Timeless’, knowing that their effect will be considerably heightened in this environment. A single standard, ‘Round Midnight’, is played with unexpected plainness, allowing the richness of a much performed and therefore under-appreciated theme to shine through without extravagant variation of deconstruction. A marvellous set, for which promoter Rob Ayling, engineers Chris Thorpe and Dallas Simpson, and film-maker Steve Lee deserve a full share of credit.

& See also
The Day Will Come
(1970; p. 375)

CHARLIE HUNTER

Born 23 May 1967, Rhode Island

Eight-string guitar

Songs From The Analog Playground

Blue Note 33550 2

Hunter; John Ellis (sax); Stephen Chopek (d); Chris Lovejoy (perc); Mos Def, Theryl de Clouet, Kurt Elling, Norah Jones (v). September 2001.

Charlie Hunter said (2001):
‘I’m trying to create a new language out of aspects of two different instruments, and build a harmony, counterpoint thing out of that. Lots of guitarists have tried the instrument, for a minute or two, but it’s specialized and it’s different, a new technique.’

Part of a community of jamming musicians who emerged from the Bay Area in the early ’90s, Hunter is a virtuoso guitarist playing an eight-string model, with bass- and lead-lines combined. His virtuosity is remarkable, and while he skirts close to pop and rock models (having made a Bob Marley cover album) and an improvising aesthetic closer to the Grateful Dead than to most post-bop situations, Hunter is an astonishing improviser, as a recent collaboration with Bobby Previte as Groundtruther has underlined. This developed out of a duo album with drummer Leon Parker, as part of Hunter’s Blue Note contract.

His ability to make his instrument sound like – and occasionally
remarkably
like – a Hammond B-3 ties him into the label’s history and the early records –
Bing … Bing … Bing
and
Ready … Set … Shango!
– seemed part of an attempt to shape a latter-day version of Blue Note’s commercially successful soul-jazz, with rock overtones.

Hunter isn’t just a Stanley Jordan-like novelty act. His improvising credentials are formidable and on
Songs From The Analog Playground
they are perfectly integrated into a whole performance. This is the moment we learned to love Norah Jones! There are some sublime moments here. The band sounds seasoned and strong, and has the flexibility to push these songs – stray memories from Charlie’s youth – out into new territory. That’s nowhere more evident than on things like ‘Mighty Mighty’, the old Earth, Wind & Fire tune, reworked by de Clouet, who also does a chillingly beautiful version of Willie Dixon’s ‘Spoonful’. Elling is more obviously a jazz singer. His vocal line on ‘Desert Way’ and ‘Close Your Eyes’ is exemplary. Mos Def is streetier but less convincing, and the real heartbreaker is Norah’s delightful alto on the Roxy Music swoon ‘More Than This’, which becomes quite majestic, with Charlie strumming like a string section underneath. She tops that with Nick Drake’s ‘Day Is Done’, which is near perfect. A gorgeous record.

JAMES EMERY

Born 21 December 1951, Youngstown, Ohio

Guitar

Transformations

Between The Lines btl 027

Emery; Franz Koglmann (flhn); Tony Coe (ts, cl); Peter Herbert (b); Klangforum Wien, Emilio Pomárico (cond). September 2001.

James Emery remembers:
‘Everything related to it remains in a kind of dream-state, from the writing and orchestration – eight months of nine-hour days – to the performance and recording in Vienna. Knowing that I had musicians who could play anything I wrote was liberating, and even though the project was completed in the gloom of 9/11, a most luminous recording was produced.’

An early James Emery record was called, delightfully,
Standing On A Whale Fishing For Minnows.
He always sounds as if he’s after bigger game than that; certainly, his musical imagination has foundations that are more solid. Emery’s big, splintery lines and driving chordal runs have been a key element of the String Trio Of New York since its inception, but he’s had a parallel career as a solo artist, almost always for European labels, and the results have been consistently impressive. In 2003, having already made one fine disc for Franz
Koglmann’s Between The Lines imprint, Emery delivered
Transformations
, a record on a scale very few musicians might conceive, let alone have the opportunity to document.

It opens with the titular eight-part suite, punctuated by short, meditative interludes by the three soloists. Any sense that this is the work of a jazz musician dangerously outside his comfort zone should be set aside. There is nothing blandly ‘symphonic’ about Emery’s writing. The forms make reference to a number of procedures familiar in modern composition – serialization, atonality, uncommon rhythms – but there is no mistaking that it is the work of a jazz musician, its movements limber and springy even when the orchestra is fully engaged, its destinations difficult to predict.

The remaining tracks are for the three soloists plus bassist Peter Herbert, material much closer to the cool, ‘white line’ jazz associated with Koglmann and his label, but with four such distinctive voices at play the improvisations are not just structurally intriguing but timbrally gorgeous.

DAVE HOLLAND
^&

Born 1 October 1946, Wolverhampton, Staffordshire, England

Double bass, cello

Extended Play

ECM 038505-2 2CD

Holland; Robin Eubanks (tb); Chris Potter (ss, ts); Steve Nelson (vib); Billy Kilson (d). November 2001.

Dave Holland says:
‘This quintet had been together for several years and had made three studio recordings. I really wanted to document a live performance so we taped a four-day engagement at Birdland. Live, we often play longer versions of songs that allow more time for development and these versions of mostly previously recorded things gave me a chance to show how those songs had changed and developed.’

Holland’s first recording for ECM was
Music From Two Basses
, made in 1971 with Barre Phillips, something of a rarity now. Between then and the turn of the millennium he made a further 13 recordings, which together represent one of the finest bodies of modern jazz composition. Holland’s ’80s bands were the antithesis of what he had been doing 15 years before, whether with the SME or with Miles. Tightly arranged, with much of the drama enacted between bass and brass, they manage to steer a path between freedom and fixity of detail. Freedom seemed an element in composition rather than a goal in itself.
Prime Directive
and
Not For Nothin’
are majestic performances from a quintet which managed to accommodate occasional changes of personnel without strain while maintaining a highly consistent sound.

Extended Play
was the first live Holland disc on ECM: a pity, perhaps, because these groups almost always found an extra yard in performance, and they do so here at Birdland. Eubanks always sounds more unfettered and Nelson and Kilson vie with each other to keep up the pace. Some of the tracks are very long indeed: the opener lasts more than 20 minutes, though so rich in ideas is this performance of ‘The Balance’ that it could have been stretched to half as much again. ‘Free For All’ is the only makeweight, but ‘Claressence’ and the long closing ‘Metamorphos’ offer ample testimony to Dave’s continuing creativity and strong instincts as a leader. Potter was a valuable addition. Most double CDs could easily be edited down to just one, but it’s hard to see what could have been dropped from this. Even ‘Free For All’ stands the test of time.

& See also
Conference Of The Birds
(1972; p. 400)

TORD GUSTAVSEN

Born 5 October 1970, Oslo, Norway

Piano

Changing Places

ECM 016397

Gustavsen; Harald Johnsen (b); Jarle Vespestad (d). November 2001–June 2002.

Tord Gustavsen said (2003):
‘Ideas are sketched and written down, but the music really emerges by being played, and before we recorded
Changing Places
a lot of that stuff had been played enough to open up the possibilities and not so much that they were exhausted.’

Gustavsen is one of the second – or is it third? – generation of ECM masters. His style is all simplicity – aphoristic melodies, gently syncopating rhythms (he’s played a good share of traditional jazz), blues figures, rocking sequences. Somehow he puts this together into a style which is utterly captivating, and somewhat like Esbjörn Svensson has the capacity and vision to put his own personal language to the service of a settled group, which very quickly took on its own character. On
Changing Places
it helps that one of the modern masters of kit-drumming, Jarle Vespestad, is in the group, although he is obliged to play very differently from his normal power-packed style. The group work through 13 pieces that feel all alike yet are without any suspicion of routine or preset pattern-playing. A star of tomorrow.

CONRAD BAUER

Born 3 July 1943, Halle, Germany

Trombone

Between Heaven And Earth

Intakt CD 079

Bauer; Peter Kowald (b); Günter Sommer (d). December 2001.

Conrad Bauer said (2002):
‘Peter Kowald always says: if you want to break the rules, you have to know the rules. And because we were in the East, I felt that even more, like I wouldn’t be taken seriously as a “free” musician if I didn’t also know how to play like an American musician.’