The Gondwana Story: Retro and Future Jazz Sounds

A small jazz label doing adventurous work is as newsworthy as dog bites man, I know, but to the roll-call of the worthy independents ASC, Babel, Basho, Candid, Edition and F-Ire, can be added the name Gondwana, which came about when Manchester trumpeter Matthew Halsall sat in at Matt and Phred’s jazz club, and decided that the talent on display needed an outlet. 

Releases so far include four from Halsall, and three from saxophonist Nat Birchall. “When I first saw Nat play,” recalls Halsall, “he was playing ‘Journey in Satchidananda’, the Alice Coltrane tune, and I was [thinking], this guy’s exactly on the same wavelength as me.” The affinity between the two musicians is strong. They regularly appear on each other’s records and tend to draw on the same pool of players, including harpist Rachael Gladwin, bassist Gavin Barras, and pianist Adam Fairhall, giving the label an identifiable sound - the modal explorations of Miles and Trane reflected through Halsall and Birchall’s own deep feelings - and titles such as Birchall’s Sacred Dimension suggest a ready classification: Spiritual Jazz. 

Halsall has no problems with the term. “I studied at the Mahareshi Meditation School, so I did a lot of meditation and studied a lot of philosophy and Indian meditation, and I’ve also studied Buddhist meditation, and Nat’s partner teaches Yoga, and he’s into all sorts of spiritual philosophies. So it definitely is a part of who we are as individuals, and it’s become part of the sound of the label.”

And, bucking the trend of the jazz economy, the venture is gratifyingly successful. “We haven’t lost a penny yet,” says Halsall. “We’re in profit on every single record and we’ve had enough profit to continue making future releases. The first ones from Nat and me made enough to get our money back and make another record. And then each time we’ve made another record it’s made more money, so we’re getting more and more money each time. Apart from slowing down, it seems that sales are increasing on every release.” 

It helps that the music is immediately attractive: serene, quietly yearning, marked by restraint and space. Halsall’s latest, Fletcher Moss Park, embellishes with the textures of flute and harp and string quartet. If it sounds bucolic, it may be because the pieces were composed in nature’s bower: “I like to make music in different environments, so I’ll make music in the park, or in a nice pub somewhere. Wherever I take my laptop, I’ll make music there.”

Hence, the title of the album: much of the music was actually conceived in Fletcher Moss Park, Manchester’s most prominent botanical garden and wildlife habitat. But does he favour the nicely cultivated garden or the wilder bits?  

“Both,” says Halsall. “Some of it was written in the top bit where the cafe is, because I like a good cup of tea, so I sit in the cafe area looking down on the botanical gardens, and then I’ll also write down in the wilder bits further up.”

Halsall elaborates on his working methods.”I tend to not think about what I’m creating. I just go with my gut instincts. If I’m liking the sounds of the notes I’m playing on the piano, or on a laptop than I go with it. Each month I’ll have ten tracks that really stand out and they’re the ones that I’ll take into the studio. They’re just ideas at that stage, bare melodies, bass lines and chords. Luckily, there’s always about six that work.” 

If I have a criticism, it might be that the music offers a gloss on Miles’ Kind of Blue, and Kind of Blue is now more than half a century old. Halsall concedes the point and explains: “The artists I listen to, they always started in something that was either of the moment or [distilled from] past moments, and then they start to mould it into their own thing, expanding their influences and listening to new music. I’m still finding my way with various technologies and all sorts of new techniques with my trumpet. I want to make a stand-out record that people will look back to like they did with Miles’ electric, groundbreaking projects. But I’m not rushing to make the new sound because I want it to be really special when it comes out.” 

Halsall’s trio project, utilising trumpet, electronics, Rhodes keyboard, and drums, is more obviously bound for the outer limits, but has so far not been recorded. However, the latest release on Gondwana, marking a departure for the label, does offer a future sound of jazz, and a crackling, vital future sound of jazz too. 

The rhythms heard on Fanfares by GoGo Penguin didn’t exist fifty years ago. Demonstrating that the piano trio is the most forward-looking vehicle in jazz today, Chris Illingworth’s rippling arpeggios vie with unexpected and spooky noises that can be traced to Grant Russell’s bass more by elimination than anything. Remarkably, Russell emulates electronic textures with just a bow, reproducing the shock without the synthetics. Drummer Rob Turner can turn rhythm on a hairpin, dividing and then sub-dividing the beat into discrete parts for spontaneous counterpoint. He is a marvel. Esbjorn Svensson is a reference point, yes, in the invigorating use of diminuendo and crescendo, but Queens of the Stone Age are in there too (their showstopping cover of ’Song for the Deaf’ is not included, alas). 

Techno and rock influences abound in a sound that is essentially simple, melodically-based and brimming with positive energy. How Manchester!  

Neglected Nuggets #3: The Northumbrian Small Pipes

This is the kind of thing I mean… 

http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/370672171350?ssPageName=STRK:MEWAX:IT&_trksid=p3984.m1438.l2649

A 1969 by Jack Armstrong & Patricia Jennings called The Northumbrian Small Pipes on Clock Tower, catalogue no. MIN 3073. Genuinely old, curious, rare, wonderful music, going for a song on eBay because nobody knows or cares. And why? Because the artistes are, well, elderly, and, what’s worse, are wearing kilts on the cover.   

But what’s not to love in this set devoted to the Northumbrian small pipes (friendlier and more approachable than their cousins, the Highland bagpipe) and so evocative of place, especially on tunes special to the locality like ‘Lads of Alnwick’ and ‘Bonny at Morn’. The legend on the label reads “Made in Newcastle Upon Tyne by G.L. Morton & Co. Limited”. 

Also in this category - that is, terminally unhip but wonderful nonetheless - one might include Brenda Wootton, Again, it’s a problem of image: if she were a beautiful vagabond, silhouetted against the sky whilst taking her whippets for a morning walk, she might command the cult following of Anne Briggs. Instead, the cultural reference is to Hattie Jacques as matron in Carry On Nurse. (Another notable folk singer of wide girth is Rosemary Hardman, but their contrasting personalities warn against generalising according to body type.) I would particularly commend Wootton’s work with Robert Bartlett as Crowdy Crawn. No Sing to Sing (Sentinel, SENS 1021) is a jewel - casual, homegrown, and inspired - and, credited as Brenda Wootton & Robert Bartlett, Tin in the Stream (Stockfisch, SF 7001) is nearly as good.Whereas Pamplemousse (Barclay, 920.475), alas, is one to avoid. 

Maybe (casting around for gainful employment to fill the hole left by journalism) I could offer my services as a professional Duendeist (someone, if you remember, in the business of the transmission of art) by recommending all these wonderful records known only to the coterie. Patrons who lead busy lives but would nevertheless like to advertise their esoteric musical taste, might like to try the Duende Deluxe service, in which dog-ears are given to sleeves and scuffmarks applied to vinyl to make records appear played and loved. Naturally, Duende Deluxe comes at an added cost. 

Tennessee Descending

I went to the theatre last night. I never learn. The last production of Tennessee Williams I went to see, Vieux Carre, a late effort, was so bad it left me concerned - why do actors put themselves through the nightly ordeal of ersatz anguish? - and mildly soiled. OK, so there was no gratuitous nudity and no exploitative rape in Orpheus Descending, but it was bad enough to make me realise that Vieux Carre was not a sad lapse from a great playwright in decline, but typical form. He was always rubbish. 

The plot: Val, a handsome youth with two treasured possessions - a snakeskin jacket and a guitar signed by Woody Guthrie and King Oliver (?) - sends the community of a backwater town in the Deep South into uproar when he shacks up with the store-owner’s wife, Lady. The store-owner is upstairs, slowly dying but mostly out of sight and out of mind. Subsidiary characters are stock Southern stereotypes: bigoted sheriff, religious maniac etc. Then there’s the free-spirited and wayward sex-kitten, a type only encountered in Tennessee Williams plays, a monstrous nurse and Lady’s ex-beau. “I have never told you this before,” shouted Lady from the top of the stairs. The ex-beau repeated “I didn’t know” often enough for several of us to suspect that he had forgotten his lines, and exited, never to be seen again.   

Not one member of the cast got the accent right, but the strain of it made natural dialogue impossible (not that natural dialogue was ever Tennessee Williams’ chief concern). Lady was supposedly an Italian emigre but Imogen Stubbs located her in Poland or somewhere else middle-European. 

The situation was hokey, the emoting was intense but trite, Val had a nice torso (not on show for very long, alas), but no discernible musical (or acting) ability, the racist rednecks were straight from Hammer horror rent-a-mob (if nothing else, the play gives work to lots of actors). And cliches which had merely been stupefying in the first act tipped into full-scale bathos in the second, when the forgotten store-owner recovered enough to climb downstairs and shoot Lady. She was pregnant with Val’s baby, we learned, hard on the heels of another shock revelation: the store-owner was the cause of Lady’s father’s death. This, to underline three times in red that he was a bad man. Val was lynched off-stage, in deference to the strict rules of Greek legend rewrites and the tropes of Southern Gothic. 

Melodrama is a kind word for this combination of overripe emotion and implausibility. Pedro Almadovar might be able to do something with Orpheus Descending, but you know what? It would still be rubbish. 

A Good Night for Singing

“You don’t expect competence in a folk club, but you do expect sincerity. It should be a requirement” - Bill Leader, talking a performer at Ramsbottom Folk Club whose name I shan’t mention chiefly because Bill forgot to tell me, even if he knew himself. 

  

It was a good night for singing at Oddfellows. It was the crowd rather than any individual who shone on Monday last. When the spirit hits, the Oddfellows audience sound like one voice, raising fragile, loveable Ian Sidebotham to new heights, and reflecting his steadiness and sincerity. As a group, they can sing quietly, which the lone Donal Maguire can do very well, but is a rare accomplishment for a crowd. The combination sounds very rich, ranging from the deep-felt clean-cut articulation of the WAGs to the semi-spoken whispering of the lovely old man beside me. 

Sensing the way it was heading, the performers pitched towards the universal side of things. Ian Reynolds sang ‘Me and Bobbie McGee’, and Sidebotham offered  ‘The Circle Game’, which manages to condense all human experience in a catchy chorus (a youthful Joni Mitchell wrote it). Donal offered ‘How Can A Poor Man Stand Such Times’ and struck an empathetic chord, of course. John Howarth (pictured) responded with his two fail-proof singalongs, ‘Ee, When I Were A Lad’ and ‘They Don’t Write 'Em Like That Anymore’. The former is wryly nostalgic whilst assuming that life gets better for every successive generation (so funny and optimistic). The second mourns the passing of the singsong with its own singsong. 

At the end of the evening - you’re not going to believe this - Howarth replaced Oddfellows’ traditional leave-taking song ‘The Parting Glass’ with ‘Toddlin’ Whoam’. Beautiful bucolic Lancashire, for one week at least, superseded bitter-sweet tragic Ireland. Beautiful laconic John Howarth never wanders far from his roots and makes a virtue out of modesty. 

The Duendeist - A Job Description / Neglected Nugget #2: Morning Brings the Light

In English texts, the Spanish word ‘Duende’ always comes with the stock phrase - “this word is untranslatable in English,” which only goes to show that they haven’t tried. Here is a definition in Spanish, from a documentary about the late great flamenco singer Enrique Morente, extracted on youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hikNqOfvmos&feature=relmfu  : “duende es el misterio de la transmision del arte”. Or, in English, “duende is the mystery of the transmission of art.” 

It occurred to me that, minus the mystery, the business of the transmission of art has been my chief occupation. I’ve been a duendeist all my life without knowing it. It unifies all those diverse and seemingly random activities: the music journalism, the composing. editing the small arts magazine GRR, painting, selling records on a Camden Town stall, promoting Abner Burnett. If you’re lucky the underlying pattern of life reveals itself, at any point from middle age on. For me, it’s all encapsulated in the single word ‘duende’. 

I wonder if this self-knowledge will help at my next Job Centre interview. “What is your occupation, Mr Butler?” “I’m a duendeist.”…  

And the eBay trading is all of a piece, being at much concerned with spreading rare and good music as earning a livelihood. Naturally, duendeism can sometimes be a thankless task. Which brings me to my next neglected nugget, Morning Brings the Light (TRA 219, 1970) by John James. 

Described on the sleeve as “a shy unassuming Welshman”, James was/is the arch exponent of a style that flourished briefly in the early seventies, when acoustic, ragtime-tinged guitar accompanied sensitive self-penned songs, and, for a while at least, the world seemed a more gentle and romantic place. Morning Brings the Light is the classic of the genre, and can be guaranteed to warm the cockles of the sternest heart. It scarcely registers that James’ voice is on the weak side. Oddly, his vocals got more frail as his instrumental virtuosity grew. He finally became another Stefan Grossman, but I liked him much better as another Ralph McTell. Morning Brings the Light is his masterpiece. Its eponymous successor, with a Hipgnosis cover, is only marginally less good. Significantly, the only non-originals were some Scott Joplin rags transcribed for guitar (this before The Sting inspired a Scott Joplin revival). He was already flexing his fingers for guitarist distinction.

And no-one was buying! Even offering the two together as a job lot for £10! And I actually have five surplus copies of Morning Brings the Light, courtesy of the Ian Chappell collection! Looking on the bright side, it solves my Christmas present problem this year.      

Mike Walker and Stuart McCallum

The Sandbar, Oct 16, 2012 

Mike Walker’s journey from fire-breathing guitar virtuoso to inner-directed exquisite melodist is fascinating, and perhaps can be better gauged in an intimate pub gig like this (the Sandbar is virtually my local!) than the concert halls he plays with jazz supergroup The Impossible Gentlemen. Here his partner is Stuart McCallum, with whom Walker meshes intuitively (he was once his pupil). He also embraces McCallum’s electronic box of wonders. 

The music is characterised by focus and restraint, and largely improvised. ‘Where Do We Go’ by Bill Frisell sets the tone with its space, spontaneity and beauty. Walker has gone far beyond “look-at-my-fingers-they’re still attached-to-my-hand” dazzle. Technique now is a means to an end. There are some  standards - ‘Black Narcissus’ and ‘All the Things You Are’ - but these are re-imagined and re-sculpted into fresh shapes.   

The third tune, an extempore excursion, goes from whirling dervish to intense ballad. Walker’s modus operandi is evident: weep and dig deep. Yet it’s McCallum who largely sets the terms for the first set. The fourth tune is based around a drifty motif, which loops electronically and is overlaid with a counter-melody by McCallum as Walker obsessively hammers percussive harmonics. Then he crafts a solo with a biting, skewed melody. Anything McCallum can achieve by synthetic means, Walker can replicate with nylon and blood. McCallum proposes chilled-out bliss; Walker offers sublimated yearning. 

Well, don’t say synthetic, say rather electro-acoustic, which fits the music to a tee. Other pairs of opposites spring to mind: bitter-sweet, yin-yang, introspective, and, well, introspective. Anything but aggressive. And how at odds with the braying noise of the drinkers next door (a thin partition cannot keep the noise out) and how at odds with the world itself. The journey is spiritual and selfless. 

Walker prevails in the second set. There’s less electronics, the tunes are more composition-based and less improvised, and some even come from the Impossible Gentlemen’s repertoire (was that ‘Wallenda’s Last Stand’?). A new, untitled piece, known only as ‘The French One’ possibly because of its distant, unconscious echoes of Django. The familiar melody of ‘All The Things You Are’ only gradually reveals itself, broken down by patterns, and devices and odd textures. 

I interviewed Mike Walker once but so many years ago he’s obviously forgotten the face (a subsequent interview, conducted around the time The Impossible Gentlemen played Bridgewater Hall, was over the telephone). So when I approach uncertainly, at the end of the night, he says, “Come on, I know you want to say something. Out with it!” “Thank you for the music,” I say, “it was balm for the soul.” “You don’t have to say more than that,” replies Mike. “It’s all I hope to do.” 

Oddfellows: Monday Night at Nine (15.10.12)

I was at Oddfellows last night (being something of a regular). Another good night, despite the absence of John Howarth and a few of the other stalwarts. Rioghnach Connolly - young in physical years, but of course age has no meaning for a voice like hers - dropped in, and Donal Maguire was there too. Personally, I think Donal Maguire is the finest Irish traditional singer in the land. 

Anyway, a girl from the next room, that part of the bar that serves as an active shrine to Manchester City FC, listened at the door for a while and then asked if anyone knew the song about the nightingales. She meant 'The Nightingales Sing', which the group promptly struck up, and Donal, who knew the words, carried the song with the girl aiding on the chorus. 

It was a beautiful instance of two worlds colliding. Then, perhaps overdoing it, she asked if we knew the one about the mother knifing her baby in the neck. 

"You mean Brookside," said the Oddie next to me, and instantly the established order reasserted itself.