My first experience of
live jazz was at the Philharmonic Pub in Liverpool.
Among the red brick Georgian terraces of Hope Street in an era where the pubs shut at half past ten, there also lurked various basement clubs, like the Casablanca, where actors, poets and bands hung out once they'd come off stage or done a gig.
A couple of my mates from youth club started going down some nights, and I started going with them.
The only things other than the ads I remember were a series of short comic stories written in Scouse dialogue, and the jazz column.
Phrases like 'a real musician's musician' cropped up in Alan Graham's Merseymart column as well, and he used it with such frequency at the Phil that, as a bunch of under-age scallies with no knowledge of jazz, we thought it was hilarious.
In his column, Alan Graham's wrote about jazz in a way I couldn't read anywhere else.
And any local music fanzines, like the similarly named Mersey Sound – a serious sense of place and being at the centre of your own universe was always a matter of pride in Liverpool – might have had the occasional jazz column down the side of an interview with the latest next big thing, but that was your lot.
James Blood Ulmer released a record on Rough Trade, London's ultimate DIY label, and bands like the Pop Group were name-checking the likes of Don Cherry and Ornette Coleman, and mixing up John Coltrane and Roland Kirk in a cBristol club called the Dug Out.
It was from here which would eventually spring Massive Attack, Don Cherry's step-daughter Neneh Cherry, and, eventually, Portishead.
For the anally retentive, the Oberver's books were a pre-Wikipedia fact-checkers delight.
“I WANT A JAZZ EDUCATION!” I screamed. “HOW DO I GET A JAZZ EDUCATION?”
And my mate looked at me like I'd flipped, lent me a couple of tapes – one of which turned out to be Return to Forever by Chick Corea - and packed me off on what was the beginning of a quest for a jazz education that I've probably been on ever since.
At my nights at the Phil, inbetween Harold Salisbury's Free Parking and all the rest, I'd started noticing some of the posters on the wall.
But there were others, mainly for gigs at a place called the Bradford Hotel, which was a dark looking old-school hotel on the business end of the city centre, and which I knew from getting the bus from outside, because it was quite near the careers office.
This was brilliant.
Except, the next day, none of the papers were raving about what I'd just witnessed.
Keith Tippett had become particular favourite, and I'd seen him play a few times – in Edinburgh with Andy Sheppard, in Glasgow with Raymond MacDonald and George Burt, and, later, in London with Julie Tippetts, first at the Vortex, then at Cafe Oto with a much younger biggish band.
I could pick up records too by Harry Beckett and Annie Whitehead, even though Paladin had long gone.
That was to see Harry Beckett perform his Pictures of You album, which was either about to be or just had been released on Paladin Records.
It seemed to be doing it differently than the Face were doing it, this magazine called the Wire.
Much later on, I discovered that there'd been another magazine in the 1970s called Impetus, which was doing something similar with that generation of British based players.
And somewhere in the midst of all this, I heard John Coltrane's A Love Supreme for the first time in the bedroom of a tatty student flat with the lights off while my senses were heightened by a Class C narcotic in a deeply self-conscious fashion, as if I'd stumbled on the musical holy grail.
And that's great, because every Friday night there's a jazz gig in there, and with your dole card its only four quid to get in.
At that time, Courtney Pine was dressing like he seemed to think a jazz saxophonist should dress, in a big retro styled suit, like he was looking to Charlie Parker or John Coltrane from pictures in the magazines the same way his music was trying to do for his records.
And there was a lot of hype about Courtney Pine's first album, Journey to the Urge Within, some of which sounded great live when he played it, even though it was quite smooth.
It was because, like me, Courtney Pine was still getting his jazz education, and, maybe like Rip, Rig and Panic, he had no chops yet.
I went to see Art Blakey late incarnation of the Jazz Messengers, and stupidly went to the toilet during his drum solo.
In 1988 there was a mini season that opened with Don Cherry's Nu, which featured Brazilian percussionist Nana Vasconcelas in the band, and which seemed to be a step on from all that World Music which had opened out a few years before.
The next month Cecil Taylor played solo, and the month after that, an Indian group called Peshkar played, who were pretty much Shakti with Larry Coryell playing guitar instead of John McGlaughlin.
That's what's happened to most dedicated music magazines in Scotland, and that's a shame.
Fast forward again a few years to the 1990s, and in Edinburgh, in Tollcross, Henry's Cellar Bar has become Kulu's Jazz Cellar, where every weekend the place is packed with a young crowd filling up the tiny dance-floor while a whole array of hip hop acts and jazz funk bands play.
These jazz funk combos aren't like the old guys with moustaches who used to play the Phil.
“No, Kulu,” I said back. “It's like Lothian Road.”
My favourite radio show is Jazz Record Requests on Radio 3.
But what my extended trip down memory lane is trying to get over, is how important it is for these things to be covered by the press at both a general or a specialist level.
ends
The Phil, as it was known,
was and still is situated on the corner of Hope
Street and Hardman Street, diagonally
across the road from the Philharmonic Concert Hall and a
stone's throw from what was then Liverpool College of Art. This
was where John Lennon learnt to rock and roll, while next
door to the Hall, the Everyman Theatre was
making waves in regional theatre.
Among the red brick Georgian terraces of Hope Street in an era where the pubs shut at half past ten, there also lurked various basement clubs, like the Casablanca, where actors, poets and bands hung out once they'd come off stage or done a gig.
This was Liverpool bohemia
writ large.
The Phil, or
the Philharmonic Dining Rooms to give it its formal name, was built
between 1898 and 1900, said by some local legends to have been at the
behest of a local millionaire wanting somewhere to house his actress
mistress. It consists of a large bar in a 'foyer' area, with two
rooms, the Brahms and Liszt flanking a large central room called the
Grande.
As classy as the
Victoriana of the Phil was, both inside and out, it was a big part of
the late 1970s, early 1980s Liverpool. This
was despite, and perhaps because of, its award winning marble
toilets.
On Monday and Tuesday
nights, in the Grande Room of the Phil, there was jazz on, featuring
the likes of Harold Salisbury's Free Parking and other groups I'd
never heard of.
As the name suggests, the
Grande was a big room with chairs laid out and a makeshift stage area
at one end of the room in front of a fireplace, where the bands
played.
A couple of my mates from youth club started going down some nights, and I started going with them.
I was intrigued, as much
by the names as anything, and other than seeing Glenn Miller and
Louis Armstrong on old black and white films on the telly, I knew
nothing about jazz.
As an artform, jazz seemed
to keep its distance, with a cliched and easily
satirised image of bearded men in suits blowing into
saxophones and trumpets like their lives depended on it, using their
instruments like weapons to keep the mainstream at bay.
But these were the early
days of Channel 4, when on a Friday night you
could watch two hour concerts in full by a cryptic but still
cool looking Miles Davis. This was the period when
he'd spend most of the show with his back on the audience,
barely touching his trumpet while his band played a funky stew that
was neither rock or jazz, but some weird hybrid which,
flattened out on the small screen, didn't seem to make much
sense.
This was the sort of
electric fusion that you'd get at the Phil on Monday and Tuesday
nights, played by what looked to my teenage self like middle aged men
with moustaches wielding electric keyboards
and fret-less basses which under-scored
sunny saxophone riffs that matched the sun shining through the Phil's
big windows perfectly.
In a Liverpool where
a post-punk wave of pseudo-psychedelic bands like Echo and the
Bunnymen and the Teardrop Explodes were all the rage with the hip
kids, the jazz gigs at the Phil didn't seem to fit at all.
You couldn't read about
the likes of Harold Salisbury's Free Parking and other acts that
played the Phil in the then all pervasive, all powerful music papers
at the time, and while I heard mention of people like Miles and
Stanley Clarke and Weather Report, I had no frame of reference and no
context for it at all.
The only place you could
read about the jazz at the Phil was in a column in a local free-sheet
called Merseymart.
As the name suggests,
Merseymart was a local version of Exchange and Mart, and was largely
made up of pages of classified ads from people selling fridge
freezers and other domestic goods, which, in a pre internet, pre
Gumtree age, was the only way of doing
these things.
The only things other than the ads I remember were a series of short comic stories written in Scouse dialogue, and the jazz column.
The column was written by
a man called Alan Graham, who I recognised
from his by-line photo as presumably being the
promoter who stood up at the end of the second set of the jazz
gigs at the Phil to introduce each member of the band in turn. After
that, while the band did their encore, a large wooden tray
would be passed around to collect money
like you would do in church.
As he introduced each
member of the band, Alan Graham would give
a brief sound-bite of appreciation, using phrases to describe the
likes of Harold Salisbury, who played soprano sax and flute, as 'a
real musician's musician' and such-like. Then he'd
announce the name of the band who'd be
playing next week.
Phrases like 'a real musician's musician' cropped up in Alan Graham's Merseymart column as well, and he used it with such frequency at the Phil that, as a bunch of under-age scallies with no knowledge of jazz, we thought it was hilarious.
But something stuck, and
even though Merseymart was desperately uncool, it was a lifeline, and
I started looking forward to it plopping through our letterbox every
Wednesday afternoon.
In his column, Alan Graham's wrote about jazz in a way I couldn't read anywhere else.
It wasn't necessarily
great writing in the way I thought the stuff I was reading in NME and
Sounds was,but it was informative, and he clearly knew his stuff.
He also gave you listings
at the end, telling you what jazz was on at the Phil and elsewhere –
like Chauffeur's, another basement club on Hope Street, which I went
to once – over the next couple of weeks.
This was more than any
other paper was doing.
Not just in the NME and
Sounds, which were all about hyping up non-existent regional
post-punk scenes, but locally as well.
I don't remember ever
reading about jazz in the Liverpool Echo, which was the city's
'proper' newspaper, and maybe they were reviewed in the Daily Post,
which was the Echo's morning equivalent, but we never got that, so I
don't know.
And any local music fanzines, like the similarly named Mersey Sound – a serious sense of place and being at the centre of your own universe was always a matter of pride in Liverpool – might have had the occasional jazz column down the side of an interview with the latest next big thing, but that was your lot.
Anything
that did appear seemed to be written, not from informed insider
knowledge by fans steeped in the music the way all
the post-punk indie-pop scenesters were. It was more written from
the point of view of a curious onlooker, who quite liked the novelty
of hearing something different to a bunch of boys with bad haircuts
playing guitars, but who, like me and my
mates at the Phil, had no frame of reference and didn't really get
it.
It was the same in the
clubs.
There were 'jazz nights',
but these were usually retro-styled party bands doing covers of 1940s
style dance-floor stompers for the cool kids who had maybe seen the
same Glenn Miller and Louis Armstrong movies as I had.
Things, however, were
changing.
Punk and post-punk had
briefly opened up a window where in terms of influences, anything
went.
Dub reggae, funk and now
even jazz was being thrown into a mix which would later sire Hip Hop,
and which we now took for granted.
James Blood Ulmer released a record on Rough Trade, London's ultimate DIY label, and bands like the Pop Group were name-checking the likes of Don Cherry and Ornette Coleman, and mixing up John Coltrane and Roland Kirk in a cBristol club called the Dug Out.
It was from here which would eventually spring Massive Attack, Don Cherry's step-daughter Neneh Cherry, and, eventually, Portishead.
When the Pop Group split
into various offshoots, I went to see Rip, Rig and Panic, who named
themselves after a Roland Kirk number, and who produced a manic stew
of free jazz skronk and piano work-outs, some of which included
vocals from Neneh Cherry.
I went to see them at a club called the Warehouse, and it was a revelation, although someone who knows about these things said that, compared to Don Cherry and the rest, they had no chops.
Another Pop
Group offshoot, Pigbag, took a horn-led riff called Papa's Got A
Brand New Pigbag into the charts.
Within a year or so, what
would soon be called the style press had
picked up on another trend.
In London, a new jazz
dance scene had started happening at a place called the Wag Club, and
more and more bands were incorporating jazz and latin rhythms into
their sound in a way that would eventually form a
part of what would become known as World Music.
There was the likes of
Dave Bitelli's Onward International, and Rough Trade released the
first single by a band called Weekend.
This was a trio that
featured vocalist Alison Statton from Young Marble Giants, who sang
with guitarists Spike and Simon Booth, along with a low key horn
section from people like trumpeter Harry Beckett and a saxophone
player called Larry Stabbins.
I knew Harry Beckett's
name because he'd played on Robert Wyatt's version of Caimanara, a
single that was released on Rough Trade, and which was
compiled along with Wyatt's other Rough
Trade singles on his Nothing Can stop us album.
Weekend's
sound on their first single, The View From Her Room, was a
wispy sort of cool that leant towards a
nouvelle vague image of coffee bars and French cigarettes. After
the abrasive clatter of early records on Rough Trade,
Weekend's chic pastoral approximations of
bossa nova beats and Astrid Gilberto style understatement was
tastefully infectious.
Weekend only made one
studio album, La Variete, which featured Larry Stabbins quite a lot.
In keeping with the 'idea'
of jazz as a style, Weekend also released a live album, which was
recorded at Ronnie Scott's and, as well as Stabbins, featured a
pianist called Keith Tippett.
The Face magazine ran
features on this alleged new scene, and, fired up by my adventures at
the Phil, I decided I wanted more than what the Merseymart could
offer.
One of my mates who I went
to the Phil with seemed to know about jazz.
He played saxophone in the
school band, and his family had a piano in the front room.
He also had loads of
cassettes, on which he'd taped snatches of records he'd got from the
library – Woody Herman, Miles Davis, Charlie Parker – all these
exotic sounding names of people who might never be pop stars, but who
sure as hell were musicians
musicians.
But who they were,
where had they come from, and in what order they had
appeared on whatever scene they were part of, I had no idea.
I was clamouring for
context, and my mate also had various books published by the
Observer, which were wonderful little pocket guides of various
worldly artefacts, whether it was birds,
cathedrals or manned spaceflight.
For the anally retentive, the Oberver's books were a pre-Wikipedia fact-checkers delight.
And I remember flicking
through the Observer's Book of Jazz, which on each page had little
biographies of everyone from Duke Ellington through to Charlie
Parker, Miles Davis, John Coltrane and beyond.
And I remember going
through it while my mate was playing one of his low attention span
cassette tapes and not really getting
anything, and being so frustrated because I wanted to know, but
didn't know where to find out these things.
Only Merseymart, the
Observers Book of Jazz and now the Face seemed to have a clue.
“I WANT A JAZZ EDUCATION!” I screamed. “HOW DO I GET A JAZZ EDUCATION?”
And my mate looked at me like I'd flipped, lent me a couple of tapes – one of which turned out to be Return to Forever by Chick Corea - and packed me off on what was the beginning of a quest for a jazz education that I've probably been on ever since.
At my nights at the Phil, inbetween Harold Salisbury's Free Parking and all the rest, I'd started noticing some of the posters on the wall.
In those days posters was
the way you found out about things, whether they were fly-posted onto
makeshift red-brick would-be billboards in the cooler parts of town,
or else on the walls of record shops like Probe.
Probe was the meeting
place for all the local scenesters, and was a stone's throw from
Matthew Street, where the Beatles had made an old jazz club called
the Cavern world famous in the sixties, and where another club called
Eric's had done something similar with the new wave of cartoon
post-punk styled bands.
Eric's also had a jazz
night, and before he started putting stuff on at the Phil, Alan
Graham – who worked in an insurance office by day - had promoted
jazz at the Cavern in the pre Merseybeat era.
But in those days posters
were everywhere, and the Phil being a jazz pub, at least on Mondays
and Tuesdays, there were posters for other like-minded stuff that was
happening around town.
George Melly seemed to be
a regular on the posters, as did a band called Supercharge.
But there were others, mainly for gigs at a place called the Bradford Hotel, which was a dark looking old-school hotel on the business end of the city centre, and which I knew from getting the bus from outside, because it was quite near the careers office.
And these posters for gigs
at the Bradford Hotel, were for exotic sounding artists like Dudu
Pukwana, John Stevens, and other names that
weren't in the Observer's Book of Jazz.
Unless
you were a regular at these nights at the Bradford
Hotel, this was probably the only way of finding out about
them, because there was nowhere to read about them, even though jazz,
or an approximation of it in all its black polo necked glory, was now
the style mags favourite.
I never took a chance on
Dudu Pukwana or John Stevens, but after all those Monday and Tuesday
nights at the Phil, and still hungry for a jazz education, it was
inevitable I would move on to the hard stuff.
That came when I saw a
poster for a show at the Bradford Hotel by the Larry Stabbins
Quintet.
This was brilliant.
After Weekend had come to
an end, Simon Booth and Larry Stabbins had formed a new outfit called
Working Week.
This had come not only on
the back of the jazz dance wave, but on a wave of protest that had
grown up in the wake of Thatcherism, and which was given voice by
music that was both oppositional and multi-cultural in its range of
influences.
Working Week's first
single was dedicated to the people of Chile, and was called
Venceremos.
As well as Simon Booth and
Larry Stabbins, Venceremos also featured Harry Beckett on trumpet and
flugel horn, trombonist Annie Whitehead, Onward International
clarinettist Dave Bitelli and pianist Kim Burton.
Vocals were split between
Chilean singer Claudia Figueroa. Robert Wyatt and Tracey Thorn of
Everything But the Girl.
Everything But the Girl
were one of the bands who'd picked up on the whole nouveau jazz
thing, and had released a version of Cole Porter's Night and Day
played so it sounded like they were on the Parisian Left Bank circa
'68 by way of a bed-sit in Hull.
Venceremos was swas
released on Paladin Records, a Virgin backed jazz imprint run by jazz
DJ Paul Murphy, and was so cool that it was
released as a 'jazz dance special 12” edition' as well as the more
regular '7” bossa version.'
The second Working Week
single, Storm of Light, featured vocalist Julie Tippetts, the
creative and personal partner of pianist Keith Tippett.
The Face loved both
records, and Working Week were everywhere.
Which is why, when I saw a
poster for the Larry Stabbins Quintet, I thought I'd go along and
hear some light latin based jazz dance bossa nova with a campaigning
political edge.
I couldn't be more wrong.
Because, in the dark and
tiny basement of the Bradford Hotel, the Larry Stabbins Quintet
blared out one of the most intense displays of free jazz I have ever
heard.
As I remember it, of the
other four people tucked into the corner of the room on the same
level as the small audience sat on the fixed benches around the bar,
there was a drummer, a percussionist, a bassist and one other, either
a trumpeter or a second sax player.
At least two of these were
dressed in extravagant African robes, and with hats that could have
been poached from Sun Ra's Arkestra.
Again, as I remember it,
the sound the Larry Stabbins Quintet made
at such close proximity was a relentless barrage of horns and drums
that seemed to stomp all over my expected notions of right-on latin
work-outs.
It was like nothing I had
ever heard before, and after a few minutes I remember my jaw dropping
in shock at exactly how wrong I'd got it.
By the end of all this I
was both exhausted and elated.
My jazz education had just
moved up a grade.
Except, the next day, none of the papers were raving about what I'd just witnessed.
There were no reviews, not
even in Merseymart, and nor were there any howls of outage at such a
glorious cacophony.
I had no idea who the rest
of the Larry Stabbins Quintet were, and I still don't.
I suspect one of them may
have been Louis Moholo, but only because I've got an album by
Stabbins and Moholo with Keith Tippett that was recorded around the
same time as I saw the Larry Stabbins Quintet, and I couldn't swear
to it.
Neither, as it turned out
much much later, could Larry Stabbins.
I'd started thinking about
this when I saw Stabbins play with Jerry Dammers' Spatial AKA
Orchestra, and after I'd started listening in earnest to that
generation of British based jazz players who I'd first discovered
through listening to Weekend.
Keith Tippett had become particular favourite, and I'd seen him play a few times – in Edinburgh with Andy Sheppard, in Glasgow with Raymond MacDonald and George Burt, and, later, in London with Julie Tippetts, first at the Vortex, then at Cafe Oto with a much younger biggish band.
I could pick up records too by Harry Beckett and Annie Whitehead, even though Paladin had long gone.
But other than the Working
Week records, Larry Stabbins didn't seem to have the same profile.
As part of my jazz
education, I contacted Larry Stabbins on social media, and asked him
if he remembered playing the Bradford Hotel in Liverpool in 1984 with
the Larry Stabbins Quintet, and if so, who were the rest of the band,
and was it ever recorded or released?
To his credit, after 18
months, after I'd completely forgotten about sending my random
request, Larry got back to me.
He said that the woman
who'd been the secretary of the jazz club who'd put the gig on had
ended up becoming his wife, and that they'd both been racking their
brains to try and remember who was in the band.
Larry suggested a few
names it might have been, and I suggested a few others, but neither
myself, Larry or the promoter who became his
wife could come up with anything definitive.
Now, I still have every
message from my brief correspondence with Larry Stabbins, and I can
access it in an instant.
But what a shame that
there's no record of that gig by the Larry Stabbins Quintet at the
Bradford Hotel in Liverpool.
Not only is there no
recording, but because there is no archive, and no review of it
written down anywhere, not in the Face or NME, and possibly
not even a listing in Merseymart, that gig has been wiped from the
annals.
And it's the same for all
those names on the posters for the Bradford Hotel on the wall of the
Phil, and even for all those gigs by Harold Salisbury's Free Parking
at the Phil itself.
It's like they never
happened.
I only went along to one
other Bradford Hotel gig.
That was to see Harry Beckett perform his Pictures of You album, which was either about to be or just had been released on Paladin Records.
The gig was in a different
room, which was upstairs, and was much brighter.
The room was also big
enough to accommodate a local youth jazz
orchestra, who accompanied Harry Beckett on
the performance, fleshing out his compositions' already lovely
musical reflections.
By this time I'd picked up
a copy of a magazine in WH Smiths called The Wire.
I'd seen the Wire before,
but had never bought a copy, because I'd never heard of anyone who
was in it.
But this particular copy
had a picture of Annie Whitehead on the cover, and inside there were
pieces on Whitehead, on Harry Beckett, and
on Paladin Records as well.
And I thought, at last,
here's something that isn't the Observer's Book of Jazz, but is about
things that are happening now.
It seemed to be doing it differently than the Face were doing it, this magazine called the Wire.
It wasn't
written by curious onlookers, but by people who seemed to know what
they were talking about in the way that Alan Graham did.
And even though the NME
released a jazz compilation called Night People as part of its series
of mail order only cassettes, they still didn't really write about it
the way the Wire did, which took
both itself and its subjects seriously.
Much later on, I discovered that there'd been another magazine in the 1970s called Impetus, which was doing something similar with that generation of British based players.
There were interviews in
Impetus with Keith Tippett and articles on Henry Cow and even This
Heat, and through finding all that, and through that copy of the Wire
with Annie Whitehead on the cover, and through going to see Larry
Stabbins and Harry Beckett, my jazz education was getting better, and
I began to be able to start joining the dots between all these
things.
And somewhere in the midst of all this, I heard John Coltrane's A Love Supreme for the first time in the bedroom of a tatty student flat with the lights off while my senses were heightened by a Class C narcotic in a deeply self-conscious fashion, as if I'd stumbled on the musical holy grail.
Not
long after that I read what P.J. O'Rourke said about smoking
marijuana, which was something along the lines of how he briefly
understood modern jazz and then fell
asleep, but at least he was writing about
it.
Fast forward now a couple
of years, and I'm living in Edinburgh, just across the road from the
Queen's Hall.
And that's great, because every Friday night there's a jazz gig in there, and with your dole card its only four quid to get in.
I'm
a bit cautious at first, because my jazz education's reached
something of an impasse since I moved away.
The first Queens Hall show
I went to was by
a sax player called Charlie Rouse, who I knew nothing about, and if
I'm honest I still don't, although I remember reading somewhere that
he played with Thelonius Monk.
And it was
nice, because there were tables in the
middle of the hall, and if you went with
the atmosphere while you were
sitting there, you could imagine it's
the sort of jazz club you always imagined jazz clubs should be like.
The next jazz gig at the
Queens Hall I went to was by Courtney Pine.
It was
very different to the Charlie Rouse show, because Courtney Pine is
22, and the papers and the Sunday magazines are talking him up as the
next big thing, and suddenly there's a new new wave of jazz musicians
coming up on the back of him.
At that time, Courtney Pine was dressing like he seemed to think a jazz saxophonist should dress, in a big retro styled suit, like he was looking to Charlie Parker or John Coltrane from pictures in the magazines the same way his music was trying to do for his records.
And there was a lot of hype about Courtney Pine's first album, Journey to the Urge Within, some of which sounded great live when he played it, even though it was quite smooth.
There was a track on the
album I liked called Children of the Ghetto, which I realised much
later had been written and released by the Liverpool soul band, The
Real Thing.
Courtney Pine started off
well at the Queens Hall, and everyone wanted him to do well, because
they'd probably read about this new wave jazz revival type thing, and
they liked all the media hype, because that's what the media are good
at when it suits them.
But for me at least, about
half way through the night, Courtney Pine seemed to run out of ideas,
and I got a bit bored, even though I didn't understand why.
A few weeks later, I went
back to the Queens Hall, this time to see Wayne Shorter.
As soon as Wayne Shorter
started playing, I understood why I got bored watching Courtney Pine.
It was because, like me, Courtney Pine was still getting his jazz education, and, maybe like Rip, Rig and Panic, he had no chops yet.
Sure, he could play, and
he had the confidence and the attitude and the hype, all of that, but
he wasn't quite ready yet to take on the world, or at least the
Queens Hall bit of it, in the way that Wayne Shorter did.
But
again, there didn't seem to be anywhere I could read about any
of this that I was aware of, certainly not in Scotland.
There would be the
occasional piece in the paper on Loose Tubes, or whatever new kids on
the block were riding the wave of this media hyped up new jazz
revival, but that was all.
There were plenty of
Queens Hall shows I missed, by Dollar Brand or Carla Bley, and they'd
be interviewed for the Herald or the Scotsman by great writers like
Rob Adams, who's still doing it today, or Kenny Mathieson, both of
whom helped with my jazz education.
I went to see Art Blakey late incarnation of the Jazz Messengers, and stupidly went to the toilet during his drum solo.
There were others I saw,
like Marilyn Crispell with – I think – Lol Coxhill playing solo
as support, and then later there was Keith Tippett and Andy Sheppard,
and Stan Tracey's Hexad, and James Blood Ulmer playing
with a trio.
In 1988 there was a mini season that opened with Don Cherry's Nu, which featured Brazilian percussionist Nana Vasconcelas in the band, and which seemed to be a step on from all that World Music which had opened out a few years before.
The next month Cecil Taylor played solo, and the month after that, an Indian group called Peshkar played, who were pretty much Shakti with Larry Coryell playing guitar instead of John McGlaughlin.
My
jazz education was coming on fine, but apart from Rob Adams
and Kenny Mathieson, but
it stil felt like there was still nowhere I could read about
it all.
There was no dedicated
jazz or new music publication that I was aware of in Scotland, just
as there still isn't one now.
The major record label big
bucks backing for things like Paladin Records was long gone by now,
and I suppose it was the same for any kind of Scotland wide
publication for what was already a niche market, and which simply
couldn't survive without the advertising.
That's what's happened to most dedicated music magazines in Scotland, and that's a shame.
Because I don't know if
any of those Queens Hall gigs were recorded or reviewed, but if they
weren't, and if there's no record of them in the way there isn't of
the Larry Stabbins Quintet or any of the other Bradford Hotel
gigs, or if there's no kind of academic
archive somewhere, then that's those gigs lost forever.
At
least I still have the posters for the shows by Don Cherry,
Cecil Taylor and Peshkar, and they're works of art in their own
right, but if no-one can hear them or read about them, that's a
tragedy.
Conversely,
it's also a brilliant piece of myth-making, in
which, through the lack of any kind of
record, may be making the gigs I saw at the Phil,
the Bradford Hotel and the Queen's Hall sound better or worse
than they actually were.
That's what happens when
you write things down.
It's
never quite how it was.
But
that's okay.
Print the myth.
Fast forward again a few years to the 1990s, and in Edinburgh, in Tollcross, Henry's Cellar Bar has become Kulu's Jazz Cellar, where every weekend the place is packed with a young crowd filling up the tiny dance-floor while a whole array of hip hop acts and jazz funk bands play.
These jazz funk combos aren't like the old guys with moustaches who used to play the Phil.
These are a new breed
who've come up from the grassroots of Edinburgh's club scenes, and
are playing without any kind of hype.
Kulu, who
runs the place, is a long haired guy from Hong Kong, who DJs
and loves his jazz with a passion.
Kulu liked the mythology
of jazz as well.
That's probably why he
started the club in a tiny basement like Henry's.
On the wall of Henry's
Kulu put up some of the few reviews the acts who play Henry's have
had.
They weren't
big profiles or anything, just little reviews in the Evening
News of all places, but Kulu likes them
a lot.
There
were a couple of reviews up on the
wall that I'd written, and I was
down at Henry's a lot now, because Kulu gave me a gold
coloured pass in the shape of a credit card, which meant
I could get in any night for free.
Kulu turned
to me one night when he was looking at the reviews on the wall. “All
the funky writers come to Henrys,” he says. “It's like Greenwich
Village.”
“No, Kulu,” I said back. “It's like Lothian Road.”
But I got his point.
The reviews mattered to
him.
They
were an acknowledgement that Kulu and everyone who played at
Henry's had made something happen, and that there was a record of it,
and by going down there as one of Kulu's 'funky writers', I was
bearing witness to it somehow.
Things changed, and I
don't know what happened, but I think Kulu maybe fell out with Henry,
who the club was named after, and who ran the restaurant upstairs
that used the same toilets as the club, and Kulu opened up in a place
in the West End that used to be some kind of strip club or something.
I never went there, but it
didn't seem to last, and I heard that Kulu moved back to Hong Kong.
The last tine I saw Kulu
was when for some reason I found myself in Waterstone's flicking
through the Time Out guide to Hong Kong, and there was a picture of
Kulu in full flow behind the decks at some nightclub or other, one of
Hong Kong's top DJs.
Such, it seems, is the
power of the press.
Back in Henry's, without
Kulu, a more formal set of promotions were set up, and Harry Beckett
played there with Raymond MacDonald and George Burt's Quartet.
A few years earlier,
there'd been a mad weekend at Theatre Workshop in Stockbridge, with
the likes of Derek Bailey and Evan Parker playing.
And for me, that had set
the tone for a lot of things to come, especially since the Friday
nights at the Queens Hall had dried up.
Much later I started going
to GIOFest, which brought the likes of Julie Tippetts – who I
hadn't heard since Working Week – to Glasgow, and by this time
things had really started opening out in experimental music, not just
in Scotland, but all over.
In
Scotland at least, these festivals started getting decent press
coverage, or as much as there could be in an increasingly cash
strapped print media.
A few weeks ago I passed
over a 35 year old poetry magazine called New Departures to Niall
Greig Fulton, one of the programmers at Edinburgh International Film
Festival.
There was a season of
Tom's work as a poet and playwright at the Festival, which also took
stock of Tom's role as a jazz pianist and fan by curating a concert
by Tommy Smith, which featured actor Tam Dean Burn reading Tom's
poetry over it.
If anyone knew Tom, you'll
know he was as Jazz as it gets, and there are all these stories about
Tom in the 60s hanging out with Alex Trocchi and RD Laing and doing
the poetry reading with Allen Ginsberg at the Royal Albert Hall, all
of that.
In the magazine, as well
as reproducing part of Stan Tracey's score for Under Milk Wood,
underneath a poem by Tom McGrath was a darkly exposed black and white
photograph of McGrath playing the piano.
Next to him, also lost in
music, was Lol Coxhill, the bald soprano, as poet and jazz fan Jeff
Nuttall described him in his impressionistic biography of the same
name, playing his sax.
Where the picture was taken, what the occasion was and what they were playing we'll never know, because to the best of my knowledge, the moment was never captured in words.
Where the picture was taken, what the occasion was and what they were playing we'll never know, because to the best of my knowledge, the moment was never captured in words.
Someone said to me once
that a jazz record was a contradiction in terms – that once it's
played live that should be it.
But I disagree.
I think they need to be
preserved.
My favourite radio show is Jazz Record Requests on Radio 3.
At the moment it's
presented by Alyn Shipton, with an avuncular warmth reading out
requests which occasionally includes ones sent to hi by Robert Wyatt,
no less.
Every request Alyn Shipton
plays has a story attached to it.
It could be something
about a marriage, or an anniversary or just a a memory.
And through the music,
those memories become real somehow in a way that matters, the same
way for Kulu when he was running Henry's those reviews on his wall
mattered.
Today, there are national magazines like Jazz Wise, and the Wire has grown out of being solely a jazz magazine to become one of the most expansive publications on music that there is.
Today, there are national magazines like Jazz Wise, and the Wire has grown out of being solely a jazz magazine to become one of the most expansive publications on music that there is.
While it maintains an
international focus, writers from Scotland include David Keenan and,
more recently, Stewart Smith.
Above all, the pages of
the Wire are enlivened by the ever wise, ever forensic and ever
considered Brian Morton, who is now sole editor of the Penguin Guide
to Jazz Recordings.
Elsewhere, as well as
writing for the Wire, Stewart Smith writes about jazz in both the
List magazine and online magazine the Quietus.
Both of these are columns
which somehow sit incongruously alongside everything around it, much
as Alan Graham's jazz column did in Merseymart thirty-five years ago.
As jazz changes shape,
these writers and others are out there with it, documenting,
archiving, and, most importantly, bringing the music they write about
to vivid life by way of words.
Over the next couple of
weeks at the Edinburgh Jazz Festival, I know that Rob Adams will be
reviewing for the Herald with a sense of calm and wisdom which
similarly brings all this to life.
All of these and others
keep the faith in a world where newspaper budgets are being cut just
as pages are, while dedicated magazines are on a constant financial
knife-edge trying to survive.
But what my extended trip down memory lane is trying to get over, is how important it is for these things to be covered by the press at both a general or a specialist level.
Because if they're not,
then they get lost.
But imagine if some of the
things I've been talking about didn't get lost.
Imagine a magazine that
knew who else was in the the Larry Stabbins Quintet, or that Harold
Salisbury's Free Parking were still playing out in Preston and other
parts of north west England.
If there was
some kind of publication like that, then perhaps Larry Stabbins might
not have retired so he could see the world.
And maybe,
after Alan Graham passed away in the early 1990s, the Phil might not
have stopped its Monday and Tuesday jazz nights and put a quiz night
on in its place instead.
Closer
to home, imagine what a dedicated and fully resourced jazz and
new music publication, whether in print or online, could do in
Scotland.
Imagine being able to read
about the plethora of activity that's going on, not just at the
various jazz festivals,
but everywhere else besides.
There
are the three gigs a night over at the Jazz
Bar, the regular Playtime sessions
at the Outhouse, the female fronted Bitches Brew, or the
long-standing Click Clack Club, which still keeps the Henry's flame
burning.
Imagine a publication that
can have a six page in-depth overview of GIOFest, Glasgow Improvisers
Orchestra's annual gathering of the musical clans, followed by an
overview of Tony Bevan's series of Saturday afternoon gigs at the Old
Hairdresser's in Glasgow.
Imagine all the gigs that
have now been lost or forgotten that could have been captured
somehow, and a record of an event preserved.
Imagine all of that
sitting alongside the Observer's Book of Jazz and Merseymart, and
Impetus and the Wire, and imagine that happening here and now.
Now that's what I call a
jazz education.
Originally presented as part of a panel session on press and media as part of the Continental
Drift conference as part of Edinburgh Jazz Festival on Saturday July 15th 2017
ends
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