Kirsty McGee & The Hobopop Collective –The Deafening Sound of Stars

Kirsty McGee writes songs you seem to have heard before. You can often guess how the melody is going to land. She can be coolly formal, constructing songs that sound like forgotten pages from the Great American Songbook. This skill could become mechanical, but for the profound emotion Kirsty invests in these strangely familiar new-minted songs. 

She can be tender, passionate, gay and mordant by turn. You can tap your toe to the jaunty C&W opener, ‘Moving On’, and endorse its message of optimism, but don't be misled. Kirsty thrives on life’s ironies and paradoxes, but is motivated most by its possibilities. She is drawn to multitudinous America with its hopeful dreams and edgy burlesque, but are these just means of escape by a discontented provincial English lass? This transcendental urge aligns her spiritually, if not musically, to P.J. Harvey.

The Deafening Sound of Stars is an embarrassment of riches, with more lyrical depth than most. Try… “Someone said enchantment is a human right / Pretty soon you’re gonna get your fill” (‘Scorpion in a Mason Jar’). And what’s more she does it with jazz, or at least she has the good sense to surround herself with players who can do it with jazz. 

Each will have his or her favourites. Here are some of mine: ‘Copenhagen’, as bare and intimate as the scene it commemorates; ‘Second Tuesday’, a song bruised by grace; ‘Greedy Little Things’, which dismisses all those irksome annoyances of modern life with a shrug couched as a lullaby; ‘I Take You In My Arms’ is a wry acknowledgement of a failure of resistance whilst remaining undeceived (she will never reach a mass audience if she is this deflating about romance). The spare, economical production – with nicely judged embellishments like Nick Walters’ trumpet on the latter, or Clive Mellor’s harmonica on ‘Moving On’, or the collective ethereal tinkling of ‘The Deafening Sound of Stars’ (I suspect her musical saw is somewhere in the mix) – perfectly matches the intimacy of her aesthetic. 

The title track finally breaks open new channels of feeling and communication. This is the one where Kirsty's voyage of mind finds an answering trance-like response in the listener. That is, in any listener prepared to listen. Or is Kirsty being saved for a future time, when all creatures are this honest, sensitive and intelligent? 

kirstymcgee.com

Niño de Elche at Manchester Jazz Festival

El Niño de Elche has come to Manchester. This, according to De La Puríssima (Eva and I bumped into her in Tampopo last week), because a “visionary” at Instituto Cervantes recommended him (and De La Puríssima) to MJF programmer Steve Mead. This wouldn’t be the person from Instituto Cervantes who introduced the afternoon set by claiming that Elche was in Valencia. (“Alicante! Alicante! Elche is from Alicante,” corrected a voice in the audience from the seat next to mine.) 

Presumably in homage to the host city, Darío del Moral, the synth player (he later strapped on a bass), wore a t-shirt sporting Peter Saville’s monochrome art-work for Unknown Pleasures. We can argue about the play of dark and light forces in the music of el Niño de Elche, but there was a sense of occasion that no-one present will soon forget. The concert was both an exemplary exercise in catharsis and a brush with immortality. Most people were expecting the Gypsy Kings. 

An ominous drone that builds. Resonating guitar strings. The stocky figure of el Niño, already half sunk in trance, is swaying. Utterly mesmerising, and el Niño has yet to speak. He holds out a poetry book (Porción del Enemigo by Enrique Falcón, as el Niño later told Eva). What follows next is not a straightforward recitation, more like a call to prayer from a muezzin blessed with a golden voice. The hairs involuntarily rise on the back of my neck (Reem Kelani was the last singer to have this effect). Eva leans forward and offers a hasty translation: “Do not let your children play in the gardens of torturers.” 

(And now echoes of distant voices. The last words of M: “We should keep a closer watch on our children”; Kevin Coyne’s ‘In Silence’: “Don’t hurt them.”)   

It isn’t that el Niño de Elche sings protest songs, it’s more that he’s somehow receptive to the pain generated by evil acts throughout the world, and transmits the intensity and rage through the medium of a powerful voice trained in flamenco. Of course, the transmission of rage is what flamenco has always done, but this is duende on a cosmic scale. And because suffering has no words, so el Niño resorts to shrieks, gasps, moans and, finally, a sustained scream. His body is subject to a paroxysm of jerks, but his hand movements are graceful. This is telling, and somehow symbolic. He has something in common with Phil Minton, the great non-verbal articulator of the visceral, and, as we know, with Ian Curtis, who took the sins of the world on his skinny shoulders. 

But perhaps I’m not adequately conveying the charisma and humour of el Niño de Elche. One song, ‘Nadie’. – “Nobody knows me / Nobody has discovered me yet / Not even the artichoke of my shower” (this free translation comes from Eva) – has him chuckling away, taking the audience into his confidence and exposing the psychosis that lurks behind charisma and humour. In short, he’s a consummate actor as well. There was a comic note too, when Raúl Cantizano exchanged his axe for a Spanish guitar (at last, flamenco!) modified by two tiny fans whose whirling blades recreated flamenco’s rapid thrum by mechanical means. The song was ‘Canción de Corro del Niño Palestino’, where suffering quickly outstrips the power of words, and the laughter soon died.

I shall go and live in Madrid if only to hear again the passion and sincerity of el Niño’s performance. 

Jenny Hval & Susanna, Meshes of Voice

Jenny Hval & Susanna 

Meshes of Voice 

SusannaSonata 

www.susannasonata.com 

www.jennyhval.com 

www.susannamagical.com 

Apparently, Jenny Hval and Susanna’s Meshes of Voice is partly influenced by Maya Deren’s 1943 film Meshes of the Afternoon. This moved me to try listening to Voice with Meshes accompanying on youtube. Naturally with the sound down: as a silent, Meshes of the Afternoon has thrown the gauntlet to every budding electronics composer who spends too long in his bedroom. May I say that the soundtrack Jenny Hval and Susanna provide is definitive. Try playing part two – (the split is arbitrary, imposed by youtube – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fi9STrSihws) – alongside track seven of Voices, ‘Thirst That Resembles Me’. The result is the perfect pop video, as good in its way as Madness, but more profound and disturbing. 

An ominous drone and the sight of a hooded figure on a garden path. A key issues from a mouth (Maya’s own: she is the director and plays every part except one). A door opens onto a domestic interior, a mysterious wind source ruffles Maya’s hair. The hooded figure, silhouetted, carrying a flower, ascends a staircase. Maya follows, is buffeted, recovers herself, at once awake and swooning, she is radiant. Above the protracted drone Hval suddenly breaks in: “There is a thirst that resembles me / Sparks do find us…” Susanna picks up the line in softer, more dulcet tones, and now the voices multiply, making the “mesh” real. “How do you know?”, “How do you spell it?” come the senseless questions, soothing and lulling enough to weave a spell of incantation, aiding the drift into a deeper, subconscious state. Just the kind of state expressed in Maya’s images, in fact. “This is a thirst to enter…” 

The shrouded woman has no face… The key turns into a knife… Maya, in a sinister pair of oculist’s glasses, hovers threateningly with the knife over a sleeping Maya in an armchair. A man appears, and, carrying a flower, he leads her upstairs… The ambient drone is pulsating now, and the choir of voices is cracked and fractured, but a single word can be heard above the clamour: “Dark-ness”. Maya slumps in the same armchair, blood trickling out of her mouth. 

Meshes of Voice offers a glimpse into a woman’s interior world. It’s sensuous and yearning, and more than a little disquieting, with recurring words (“honeydew”) that are lingered over and caressed and corrupted. 

It gains its force by its assimilation of two contrasting female types, which, extrapolated from the strange idiosyncrasies of Hval and Susannah, are universal enough to be archetypal. Jenny Hval bravely explored the far frontiers of sex and desire with her last, Innocence is Kinky, a compelling outburst of prime psycho-sexual Scandinavian freak rock. Whereas Susanna is the living embodiment of innocence. The charm of her 2006 covers album, Melody Mountain, lay partly in hearing jaded rock ’n’ roll anthems like ‘It’s a Long Way to the Top’ and ‘Crazy, Crazy Nights’ delivered with such freshwater purity. Her retreat from repressive desublimation (that is, the permissiveness that Hval embraced) culminated in her exploration of the courtly love songs of Henry Purcell in If Grief Could Wait. 

But surrealism is not surrealism if it doesn’t overturn all the old certainties, So here, Susanna surrenders low-key chamber music for sonic expansiveness, just as Hval trades angst for euphoria. Meshes of Voice is as personal as a dream, and, like a dream, everything is permitted, and self-censorship is evaded by a resort to mystery. 

Xylouris White, Goats

I’m getting behind on my album reviews. Here are a few of the most immense new releases to come my way… 

Xylouris White 

Goats 

(Other Music Recording Co.) 

www.othermusicrecordingco.com 

It’s the lute, but not as Julian Bream would recognise it. That is, George Xylouris comes from Crete, and plays with a madly uninhabited feel, full of Arabesque tonalities and Mediterranean fire, yet with an elegance that comes from long immersion in the culture (his father is famed lyra wildman Psarantonis). Jim White adds an unpredictable element on drums, and rattles around those unspooling lute lines like a goat in springtime on a Cretan mountaintop. And though the music is often beautiful (‘Psarandonis Syrto’) it never settles or stays still, so that serene harmonics might evolve into brooding unease (‘Suburb’), or, just as spontaneously, the duo might conjure up a rustic rumble of thunder (‘Chicken Song’). George’s vocalising on ‘Fandomas’ expresses an ancient sublimity that free jazz seldom achieves. 

Manchester Jazz Festival, final weekend - Kirsty Almeida, Riot Jazz, Iain Ballamy and Gareth Williams, Journal Intime

Kirsty Almeida & The Troubadours, Riot Jazz Brass Band 

Festival Pavilion Teepee, Saturday 3 August  

Kirsty Almeida and John Ellis 

On the debit side, I missed Kirsty’s longtime drummer Rick Weedon. Those tight funk rhythms, so expertly deployed by Bryan Hargreaves, have a way of closing possibilities rather than opening them up. 

On the plus side, every solo Arun Ghosh played on clarinet was a spellbinder. I recall the duo of Ghosh and John Ellis at the Royal Exchange a few years back, in which Ghosh explored the Asian folklore side of his heritage to sublime effect. The introduction to ‘You Make My Heart’, just Ghosh and Ellis, an incomparably sensitive accompanist, brought it all back. 

It surprises that this is the first public appearance of Almeida and Ghosh, despite both being active on the Manchester scene at the same time, and a week they spent making music on a course somewhere (unspecified, Take Five?). It’s a natural fit. Both share an aesthetic based on pure beauty, tinged with the exotic.      

All songs are Almeida originals, except for ‘Treat Me Like Your Mother’, which is by The Dead Weather, and rocks hard. Almeida plainly relishes this excursion into garage rock. Then there are old favourites like ‘Sweet Old Love’ and ‘If You Can’t Make Me Happy’ (which Arun’s clarinet moves closer to New Orleans), and a taste of songs from the new album, which, if the title track Moonbird is typical, is a real charmer. 

Tom Davies is suave in his adopted wildcard role, quietly edging towards anarchy with his free-form bottleneck technique and tapped melodies on the toy piano atop Ellis’ proper grand piano. An antique Spanish guitar is passed between Almeida and Ellis. Matt Owens, the heart of the band, is dependable and solid on bass. 

Kirsty, as ever, is seductive, intelligent, and generous-spirited. But the nerves of her adoring public were jangled by two grand screams. The first, on ‘Sweet Old Love’, possibly scored higher on the Richter Scale than the celebrated scream from ‘It Scares Me’. At such moments, the emotional punch is terrific, and the contrast with the trifling, eager-to-please side of her art couldn’t be greater (time to drop ‘Gather Round’, methinks). Without wanting to consign Almeida into a god-shaped hole, it strikes that at this stage in her career, and newly liberated from a major label, Almeida could productively cultivate her darker side. 

Riot Jazz Brass Band provide an energetic finale to the Saturday festivities, comprising three trumpets, three trombones, a reggae MC and dominating everything, musically and physically, a great big sousaphone. 

A marching band no less (if the impressively active drummer could be persuaded to downsize from full kit to portable snare), with the marching band propensity to mix diverse styles. There are echoes of mariachi, Hungarian gypsies, New Orleans second-line and the pasodoble from Spain. And that’s just one tune (the third of the evening, if memory serves), before they even begin to mash-up Guns n Roses (‘Living on a Prayer’) and Human League (‘Don’t You Want Me, Baby’). 

MC Chunky is a personable guide, offering freestyle, self-referential exhortations, ordering ten tequilas for all the band and later buying a pint for the man in the front row who missed out on the spare tequila. It sums up the evening really: less of a gig and more of a party. 

Iain Ballamy and Gareth Williams 

Festival Pavilion Teepee, Sunday 4 August

Gareth Williams and Iain Ballamy

A balm to the soul. Iain Ballamy always possessed an attractive tone, but lyricism and beauty are qualities that tend to deepen with the best saxophonists. For those of us who haven’t been keeping up, or who missed Ballamy’s performance with Richard Illes’ Miniature Brass Emprium at last year’s MJF, this set may have been a revelation.  

He pointedly called the first tune ‘Tribute to Alan Skidmore’s Tribute to John Coltrane’, out of admiration for a jazzman who has strenuously laboured to sound exactly like someone else. But has Ballamy entirely escaped this fate himself? Later in the set he offers ‘Giant Steps’ with the explanation, “We’ve been tortured by this tune all our lives, so I don’t see why you shouldn’t be.” 

But if Coltrane casts a long shadow over proceedings (again), Ballamy has assimilated the gentler side of Coltrane, a Coltrane shorn of God-bothering neurosis. Ballamy’s flights are swooping glides rather freefalls into the abyss. He is an artist in total command of his means of expression. He knows what he wants to say and how to achieve it; he does so with minimum fuss and maximum sensitivity. Another name springs to mind: Ballamy might have the loveliest tone of any saxophonist since Stan Getz.  

Of course, qualities that are special to the artist come out in his playing: a certain teasing, twinkling wit underpins these pristine arpeggio flights. 

And this is a true meeting of equals. Gareth Williams’ piano is the perfect foil for Ballamy’s incredible loveliness. A heartstopping ‘I Fall in Love Too Easily’ recalls that Williams toured a Bill Evans Tribute. Bill Evans is to pianists what Trane is to saxophonists: the dominant influence that must be accommodated. He has the eloquence, the rich harmonic palette and the technique to sustain grace at unfeasibly fast tempi.  

‘All the Things You Are’ gets contrapuntal with Williams coming over all Bach as Ballamy stretches out, and then switches the roles, with Ballamy comping as Williams bounds ahead. ‘Floater’, a Ballamy original, is rather rapturous. The duo close the set with ‘Everybody’s Song But My Own’. It’s the song’s second appearance in a Festival with an ethos that encourages originality, vindicating Ballamy’s view that Kenny Wheeler’s composition is one of a handful of contemporary jazz standards. 

Journal Intime Plays Jimi Hendrix 

Festival Pavilion Teepee, Sunday 4 August

Journal Intime

On the face of it, it’s akin to re-arranging Led Zeppelin for kazoo, which actually has been done, and is a hoot. Journal Intime, however, transcend the charge of gimmickry by dint of formidable technique, boundless energy and a courageous sense of adventure. 

What one hears - the audacity of it is staggering - is the tumult of the Jimi Hendrix Experience (that’s the Mitch Mitchell and Noel Redding parts too), compressed into intermeshed parts for trumpet, bass saxophone and trombone. Hendrix’s electronically enhanced state-of-the-art, ‘out there’ music is here transcribed for a pocket brass ensemble operating in an acoustic medium. The increased physicality compensate for the lack of technology.   

The parts are all meshed together, so, if trumpeter Silvain Bardiau and trombonist Matthias Mahler are naturals to play the Hendrix role, and bass saxophonist Frederic Gastard is well-placed to carry the rhythm, that doesn’t prevent the latter from occasionally swooping an octave higher to essay a line of melody, whilst pumping and parping at the same time. Silvain Bardiau, the one player who operates in the top register, comes down from the skies, as it were, with an intensity that communicates pure exhilaration. 

At one point, during ‘Loverman’, Gastard was simultaneously slap-tonguing, circular breathing and singing through the bass saxophone. He seems to possess energy far above ordinary human capacity, but then  Bardiau and Mahler each perform miracles of transformation. 

But do they sound anything like Jimi Hendrix? Lester Young, you may recall, always stressed the necessity of knowing the lyrics when playing a song. Journal Intime pass the Lester Young test on ‘All Along the Watchtower’. And ‘Angel’ is virtually played straight. It compares well with the Gil Evans version (Hendrix and Evans had plans to work together when the guitarist died). 

‘1983… (A Merman I Should Turn To Be)’ is simply incredible, loyal to the other-worldliness of Jimi’s conception, and faithfully mirroring the complexities of the change from domestic deshabille to merman apotheosis. There’s some fishy goings-on with mouthpieces. Unbelievable!

Manchester Jazz Festival, Thursday 1 August - Antonio Serrano, Taiwa

Antonio Serrano: Harmonious

St Ann’s Church 

Antonio Serrano

Expectations are high for harmonica virtuoso and Madrid native Antonio Serrano, given his impressive CV – collaborations with symphony orchestras, Paco de Lucia, Pedro Almodovar etc – and I settle into the gallery of a packed St Ann’s Church undeterred that the artist is outside my range of sight. Jazz promoter Bob Jones is a neighbour (somehow I’ve bumped into lots of jazz promoters at this year’s MJF). 

For the opener ‘I Got Rhythm’, Serrano utilises that gizmo that plays back a phrase, which allows instant riffing from a second harp on the chorus. It’s highly effective. Serrano follows this with ‘Summertime’. 

‘Summertime’ is the most perfect song in the world and every version of it elicits a groan. Perhaps if a good song isn’t nailed by a definitive version early in life it’s doomed to become a cliche. Miles’ treatment a possible exception. ‘Porgy and Bess’, now. Cracking songs, and a neat story. So why is it never staged? 

Technically, songs played consecutively with applause between don’t count as a medley. Parental problems. Dad was miffed that I hadn’t removed the ‘promo only’ sticker from his CD birthday present. But it was Mel Torme! I mean, it was a wrench to part with. His words were, “I’ve heard better Gershwin medleys.” Talk about ingratitude!

I could be at home playing ‘Maple Leaf Rag’ now. It’s more fun to be a performer than a spectator. I said the same to Al Parry the other day. With his one-track mind, his inevitable response: “Are you talking about sex, Mike?” No, I was thinking about free jazz, actually. With some things it’s the other way around. Darts and cooking. 

Sonny Terry had a showpiece where he reproduced a fox chase, from dogs yapping to hunt to kill, all on solo harmonica. He was a force of nature, that man. Seamus Ennis did the same thing on uilleann pipes. I wonder which came first? It must be far easier to impersonate the sound of a steam locomotive on a harmonica than a piano. Yet Meade Lux Lewis managed it OK with 'Honky Tonk Train Blues'. 

Why was Larry Adler a figure of fun whereas Toots Thielemans enjoyed critical credibility? The context. Adler emerged at the fag-end of vaudeville, whereas Thielemans was proper jazz. I could never work out if he (Adler) was any good. Dr Johnson. “Surprised to find it done at all.” I could never work out if Jacques Loussier was any good either. He hammered that Swing Bach thing into the ground. Whereas John Kirby swung the classics and he was wonderful. No-one knows him. ‘Who is Sylvia?’ A Desert Island Disc. 

This brought me to the surface just in time for a vastly enjoyable, multi-layered, multiple harmonica ‘Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desire’. ‘Danny Boy’ was one too much, and I made my exit. 

Taiwa: A Tribute to Moses Molelekwa 

Festival Pavilion Teepee 

Al MacSween

A band formed to celebrate unsung South African composer Moses Molelekwa has the effect of alerting to unsung homegrown talents Al MacSween, a superb piano-player, and multi-instrumentalist Richard Ormerod, who did the arrangements tonight. 

The frontline was completed by Claude Deppa on trumpet and Tony Kofi on alto and soprano saxophone. There were mutterings about the non-appearance of Dennis Rollins, but Kofi made an acceptable replacement. 

Tony Kofi

The opening ‘Biko’s Dream’ announced the agenda: township jazz mediated by a fine intelligence. It emerged that Moses Molelekwa wasn’t the only South African musician to die too young. There was music too by Kula Kwendi (a new name to me). Indeed, “South African musician” and “die too young” are words that occur tragically frequently in the same sentence. 

Claude Deppa

This adds a sombre undertow to the celebration. This dance music is not just for dancing, and the exultation is not only exultation. Compare the contrasting styles of Deppa and Kofi. The trumpeter sings with almost childlike simplicity, and his clear ringing tones announce a mischievous spirit. Kofi is made of sterner stuff. Impassioned and urgent, his method is to barrage with a tirade of notes, all aimed at spiritual ascension. His solo during ‘Blues for Hugh’ contained a precis of ‘Love Supreme’. It was odd that John Coltrane should cast such a long shadow over an evening of South African music. MacSween’s piano too, is sometimes a ringer for McCoy Tyner’s.

Rhythm is the thing, of course, and drummer Joost Hendricks and conga-player Sam Bell interacted marvellously, creating a carpet of beats, while Kenny Higgins was as steady as a rock on bass. 

Shirley Collins 2009 Interview

Shirley Collins’ half century as a heroine of English folk music is an incredible record. That wistful, pure voice is the sweetest sound to have emerged from the sixties Folk Revival, and, during her recording career (1959-1978), she anticipated most of the really worthwhile developments in homegrown roots music. The occasion was the eve of Folk Roots New Routes, a five-day festival at Southbank Centre, curated by Collins. The story was for Metro (London edition). Dateline 18.3.08

SC: Is that Mike?

MB: Yeah.

SC: Hello, how are you?

MB: Pretty good, thanks. not bad. I tell you, I’m doing this from home.

SC: Right.

MB: I’d rather do it from home than the office. But sometimes the reception is very poor when I come to do the transcription. Let’s see. Can I ask... (sorry about this, it’s a bit unprofessional really), I’ll ask you a sample question, see if you come through OK, and if you do, all’s well and fine. If not, I might have to decamp to the office, which about a ten minutes cycle ride.

SC: Alright. Let’s hope it works.

MB: well Shirley, how did you get the offer of the Folk Roots New Routes Festival. How did you get the gig?

SC: Well about eighteen months ago I gave a talk at the Purcell Rooms. It’s more than a talk, it’s a show, America Over the Water, which is based on my book, America Over the Water, which tells of the field trip I made in 1959 in the Deep South with Alan Lomax, the American folk song collector. I’ve written a show about it, with an actor and with music and with pictures. And they just liked it so much at the Purcell Room, that James [Beith?], who’s the booker, offered me this whole series, which is fantastic.

MB: Excellent. It’s a sort of Meltdown thing, is it?

SC: It is a sort of Meltdown thing, yes. Yes it is. It’s a generic title now isn’t it for...?

MB: You following on from Morrissey and Elvis Costello and Robert Wyatt, I think.

SC: Fantastic. Oh, and Patti Smith, of course.

MB: Let’s not forget Patti.

SC: Yes, I’m in great company.

MB: Shirley, I’ll see if it’s playing back OK, and I’ll ring you right back.

SC: OK. Bye.

...

SC: Is everything OK?

MB: Yeah, you’re coming through loud and clear. So, let me see. The festival is named after the album you made in 1964 with...

SC: With Davy Graham, yes.

MB: The title seems to indicate that you were aware of the importance of what you were doing at the time. That’s an album which begs the word ‘seminal’.

SC: That’s right. And it still holds up when you hear it today.

MB: I think so.

SC:DIt still sounds fresh to me. I mean, when I made the album with davy we weren’t aware that we were making a seminal album. We just did it. Although Davy was experimental anyway, with his influences of North African music and Indian music. It just worked somehow. I mean, it shouldn’t, on the face of it. Align that with English music and American mountain music, and it shouldn’t have worked. Although, in a way, the modes are the same. And in Davy’s hands, of course, he was a genius. It did work. It caused a lot of fuss at the time. Some people liked it, and some people didn’t. But it’s held its own over the years. It just seemed an appropriate title for the Meltdown series, because it’s music that’s going back to its roots but also looking forward as well, with some of the musicians I’ve chose.

MB: Yeah, it’s really appropriate. But Davy and nnot many of the sixties generation are playing. So is the emphasis very much on the emerging generation?

SC: No it’s not. It seems to be an equal share between older singers that I like, but not big names. I mean, they’re big names in the folk world, and I’ve got people like Linda Thompson on. And well established people like John Kirkpatrick, who is just the greatest of all the people who are doing folk music in the country as far as I’m concerned. But he doesn’t get to play big venues often, you know. And I think it’s about time he appeared on a bigger stage. He’s such a wonderful musician. I don’t know if you know him.

MB: I do indeed. He’s great.

SC: He is great. He’s great in his own right. And people like Martin Wyndham-Read. Again, a beautiful singer, but doesn’t appear on big stages. I just like their music better than I like the music of a lot of other people. So with The Close of Play concert, I actually have chosen people I love, people whose music I love. And I’m thrilled to bits that we’ve got Ned Oldham coming over from Virginia. Now he’s Bonnie Prince Billy’s brother.

MB: My researches hadn’t gone so deep actually, but that’s interesting. And then there’s the connection with Alasdair Roberts who did an album with Will Oldham.

SC: Alasdair is just lovely.

MB: Yeah, in fact... Let me tell you. I was kinda bounced into this piece just yesterday - I’m officially a freelancer. Didn’t give me that much time to prepare. But they did set up an interview with Alasdair that very afternoon, so I spoke to him yesterday.

SC: Oh good.

MB: He’s a very deep chap isn’t he?

SC: He certainly is, yes. I’m quite superficial.

MB: It’s just that he made me feel a glib, shallow journalist.

SC: I know. He slightly has that effect on me as well. He sent me a book that I found almost impenetrable. But don’t put that in the article. The point about him is that he has his own way of interpreting traditional music. I wasn’t ever sure how successful it was. I liked it and I liked him, but I think with his new album, The Amber Gatherers, which is all his own songs. They’re so absolutely beautiful. What somebody in Mojo said about it (which I can just ssee it, it’s on the programme now), it says ‘The whole album seems like some beguilingly beautiful charm against modern evils’. And I think that really hit the spot. But I have a lot of time for Alasdair anyway, so I really wanted him on. And I’m glad he’s on. And he’s sharing his concert with a new singer, Ian King, who is just making his debut album. What’s lovely about something like this is that you can give somebody new, who’s just starting out, an opportunity as well. So he’s supporting Alasdair. It’s incumbent on us older singers anyway to encourage the young, and help them out when you can, because I know how tough it is to get started.

MB: It begs the question, is folk music a pursuit for the young rather than the oldsters?

SC: Well it is. When you look at it, it was always the music of both young and old because it was passed on from older singers to the younger ones, who in their turn become old, you can’t help it, and the music just gets passed down through generations. But I think what’s lovely about the young singers is they’re so talented a lot of them. They’re really fine musicians as well, and they just bring a lot of energy and a new life to the songs, and it’s really important that they are encouraged.

MB: Do you see something of the youthful Anne Briggs in Lisa Knapp or, I don’t know, the youthful Robin Williamson in Alasdair?

SC: There’s a couple of tracks on Alasdair’s album, it does sound a bit like Robin Williamson. Riddle Me This sounds a bit like an Incredible String Band song, for instance. Close your eyes and you can almost see Robin there. But he’s not copied that. I think it must be come sort of Celtic thing that comes through perhaps... It may be that he hasn’t even heard the Incredible String Band. He’s not as whimsical as they are, or they were. He’s a strange combination is Alasdair. He really feels connected to the earth and to life, and he’s down to earth as well. There’s something quite magical about him, I think.

MB: Medical?

SC: Magical, not medical (laughs).

MB: Sorry. Oh dear. It’s all coming back. He said ‘archetypes’, and I said ‘architecture?’

SC: This is going to be a fascinating article (laughs).

MB: I said to him that you represented the bucolic, English, Copper Family tradition and did he represent some dour, dark Scots alternative? He demolished the argument in one line: Love, Death & The Lady.

SC: Yes. the Copper tradition is... What never quite gets said is that there’s such a dark heart at the centre of English music. I mean it goes back centuries and it’s not all sweetness and light. There’s some very, very heavy stuff going on. The traditional ballads, to deal with all the big subjects, and in a very straightforward way. He’s quite right.

MB: He’s right, but do the Coppers represent an alternative strand? Bearing in mind that you called your talk A Most Sunshiny Day? Pleasant and Delightful, and all that.

SC: ‘A most sunshiny day’ is a quote from one of the Copper songs. And the lines are, ‘There’s many a dark and cloudy morning turns out to be a most sunshiny day’. And it comes right at the end of the show. It’s a plea really to the young singers to make sure they listen to the proper traditional singers, in order to carry the true tradition on. Not just a version of it but the real thing. And I do feel optimistic about it, so there’s that little optimistic line in there.

So that’s why that’s there. Although the talk gets quite heavy as well. It deals with the first World War and it deals with how impoverished people were, the working classes in the countryside, and yet they managed to... They still had this spirit to keep this beautiful music going. I think it’s a huge achievement. But they didn’t necessarily do it consciously. It was just there as part of their lives. And I think the country would be a bit better off if it was stll part of people’s lives. I think music is so superficial these days. And this music just isn’t. And when you listen to... I’m doing the gypsy talk as well, talking about the gypsy music. It’s just stunning stuff. And again it is mostly old singers, the field recordings, because that’s how it was when the music was being recorded in the field. They sing some of the ancient ballads. They sing ancient carols, and they sing songs about what’s happening to them, and what’s happening in the countryside. The English tradition and the gypsy tradition exist side by side and share as well. The songs would have been given from one to the other, and then back again as they travelled to the work.

MB: I guess an important event was when Topic released Voice of the People a few years ago. That brought all that source material back into circulation.

SC: It did. Absolutely. I can understand if a lot of people find that difficult to listen to, because it is unaccompanied, and it is largely older voices, but if you listen past that, what you get from the songs is the truth of them, and the experience of the singers. The whole of their lives are in those songs. I just think that it’s a miracle. I just love the stuff.

MB: The siixties counterpart, was it called Folk Song of Great Britain?, that Topic again issued. I’ve got some of those too. There seems to be a shift of emphasis. Whereas in the old collection the singers represented an archetype - the farm labourer, the fisherman - listening to The Voice of the People the character of the individual singers comes across, and there’s more importance placed on the biographies of the individual singers.

SC: That’s true, and I think that’s the right way to go. Whenever I sang a song that I learned from the old singers I always said where I got it from. I always mentioned their names, because I figured that a lot of these people had really hard lives, coming from the labouring classes as they did, they had had such tough lives, and they had hadd their stuff neglected and despised for so long, and they’ve been exploited all their lives, you know. The least we can do is to honour them, I think, even by just remembering their names and where the stuff comes from. It’s just so important to me.

MB: So are a lot of songs that we know as ‘trad’, if people can be botherred to look, they have names attached.

SC: That’s right. If people can be bothered to look. That’s what I try and do, to encourage people to bother to find out. And you find out such fascinating things about the people as well. It suddenly comes alive, because it’s not come from a book or, ‘I don’t know where this came from, I just sing it’. There so many stories to be found out about the people and their lives as well, which is why I’ve written the talks really. It just brings it to life. It’s not just a dry history, it’s a living history.

MB: I guess the link in your case ws the Copper family. Bob Copper, perhaps?

SC: Yes it was Bob. Because when I was 16, and I lived in Hastings. My grandad was a gardener on a big estate there, and I listened to lots of... There were folk music programmes were on the radio at that time. Country Magazine and As I Roved Out. Both of which programmes had millions of people listening to them. And they played field recordings of the British Isles on them. And I just loved this music. And it was the music I was hearing at home as well from my grandad and my mum and my aunt. And when I was 15 I decided I wanted to be a folk singer and I actually sent a letter to the BBC to tell them. Idiotic as it sounds, it’s a great stroke of luck because - and this is back in nineteen-fifty-something - the BBC were then recording folk music. They had several collectors who were going out in the countryside and were recording what was left of the music. Someone at the BBC handed my letter to Bob Copper, who was recording in Suffollk and Surrey. And when Bob came down to Hastings to record the fishermen in the old town, he had this letter in his pocket and he just came up and knocked on the door, and there he was one day. He recorded one or two songs from my mum and from granddad. And then he asked me, because I had written the letter, and I said, well I’ve got to really impress this bloke, and I sang a Scottish ballad that I’d learned, and I think I tried to sing it in a Scottish accent (laughs). Bob luckily saw past this bit of flim-flam. He understood. He always had a great sense of humour, and he had teenage children of his own. Just a couple of years before he died Bob actually gave me his worksheet for that day, a copy of it, in which it said ‘Shirley Collins. Occupation: schoolgirl’.

It was lovely because it started a lifelong friendship with Bob, a friendship I kept up over the years, right until he died. An incredibly vaulable part of my life. So what started out as one of those silly things to do - to write to the BBC - turned out to be a great blessing.

MB: I was going to ask your opinion of Vaughan Williams and Percy Grainger, those guys. Did they emasculate the music when they made it suitable for singing in middle-class parlours?

SC: Well in a way they did. It is strange. I mean, I love Vaughan Williams and, of course, he collected so much stuff in Suffolk and Surrey, and he adapted a lot of the folk tunes from hymn tunes, because he was compiling the New English Hymnal at the time. And of course his greatest hymn, the Bunyan hymn, To Be a Pilgrim, he set to a tune that he had recorded in Sussex from a Mrs Verral. In the Hymn Book it says, ‘Tune: Monks Gate’, and Monks Gate was the name of the village that she lived in.

But he had such an ear for this music as well, and then he was able to re-interpret it in his bigger things, like Dives and Lazarus, and The Lark Ascending and the Greensleeves Suite. I don’t think you can fault Vaughan Williams. He did understand it. But Percy Grainger and Sharp, in their arrangements... Percy Grainger, for me, he did lighten it too much. He didn’t seem to understand that this is really quite profound music, with profoundly beautiful melodies, and he just did things like In An English Country Garden and stuff. A bit too slight for me. And people like Benjamin Britten didn’t understand traditional music. They can’t do the right thing with it. While Sharp collected this stuff, and thank god he did, otherwise so much would be gone because the generation that was wiped out in the First World War was carrying those songs, and a lot them would have died with them. So what Sharp did was absolultely invaluable. But in a way it felt like he was collecting for the middle classes. And when you hear a Sharp arrangement it is drawing-room stuff. It has very little to do with the people it came from. But his work was invaluable.

MB: Is this a state of affairs - if it doesn’t sound too grand, which I guess it does - but a state of affairs you were trying to rectify when you made Anthems in Eden with classical guys like Christopher Hogwood and David Munrow?

SC: Well I mean it’s robust music. And early music instruments are robust, and just slightly off-key sometimes. It just felt truer to me than piano or string arrangements, or flute. I can’t bear flute with folk song. It’s just the kiss of death, I think. I just love early music as well, you see. It’s another great passion of mine. And I just love the sound of those instruments. And I always thought English folksong should be accompanied by something more appropriate. Those seemed to me to be the right instruments. And, of course, my sister Dolly was absolutely so thrilled to be able to score for those instruments as well, and musicians like David Munrow. It was such a wonderful thing for her to be able to do. And for me to be able to sing with them as well.

MB: It’s such a distinctive sound: your singing, Dolly’s arrangements. Those were wonderful albums.

SC: Oh thank you.

MB: And I suppose that side of your interest is represented by Catherine Bott in the Purcell Rooms recital.

SC: Yes it is. Catherine and I have been friends for a long, long time, and at one point in the eighties at one of the early Meltdown things at the Royal Festival Hall, Jim Lloyd who used to introduce Folk on 2, he decided to give Anthems in Eden a new airing, and Dolly played and because I couldn’t sing at that point, Catherine sang the songs. And she understands them so beautifully. Although she’s a classically trained singer she can par herself down to just singing the songs as simply as they should be sung. But absolutely beautifully. I was just so thrilled when she accepted. She’s pretty famous and I just think it’s lovely for her to take this little step aside from her career and do this. But as I say, she’s done it, just as an act of friendship really. And she loves singing the songs anyway. I’m looking forward to that evening enormously.

MB: That should be good.

SC: And she’s got a little flute organ as well, and she has a wonderful accompanist. That’s all working out...

MB: They’re Dolly’s arrangements.

SC: They’re Dolly’s arrangements, yes.

MB: That should be good. I was going to ask too about your own experiences in the States. I must catch up with the book. But I have some of those Southern Folk Heritage records. It must have been absolutely extraordinary to hear the congregation belting out Jesus On The Mainlline, what was it, in Mississippi, in 1959?

SC: It was. The whole experience was remarkable and fascinating. You just get to hear so much contrasting music as well. Because while you’ve got the black congregations, as you say, belting out that stuff, and it’s really powerful. On the other hand you’ve got the white Baptist singers up in the mountains singing their hymns, which were based on the Scottish lining hymns. Their music comes across as so powerful, but so mournful and almost tormented,. And then other white religious singers, like the Sacred Harp singers. They were doing everythiing through a so-fa version and then they would launch out into the words, and that’s such a big sound as well. It gives me goosebumps still when I hear it.

MB: People are just catching up with that music now, post Oh Brother Where Art Thou, but to have been there in 1959...

SC: It’s a unique experience, and of course we discovered Mississippi Fred McDowell, the bluesman, which was... I can still see Fred. He’d been picking cotton all day, and we’d been recording some older musicians in a clearing where their tumbledown shacks were, and Fred came after work, and he just walked into the clearing carrying a guitar in his dusty old dungarees, and just sat down and started playing just unbelievably beautiful blues. We spent three days with Fred and his wife, and the people there, recording blues and spirituals from Fred, and children’s games, and music from other people that dates back to the Civil War: the fife and drum bands, the black musicians played. It was just... When I think about it, it just seems like a miracle that we found the people we did. I can talk about it endlessly (laughs).

MB: Ever since I noticed your name on those records, I wondered if, after the tape stopped rolling, did you sit around swapping songs?

SC: I did up in Virginia, and especially in the Ozark Mountains. There was a place we went through called Timbo, which was just almost as if the pioneers were still... Well, the pioneering spirit still existed there. In one house, the house of Oscar and his wife Ollie Gilbert, the men and the women were separated. The men all went off into one room, and I was sent off to join the women. When food was served the men ate first and the women ate when they were finished. It was quite extraordinary. But it worked in my favour because Ollie had an absolute fund of Ozark balld songs, and of course they’re all songs from the British Isles, that were taken over by the settlers. And I recorded Ollie for a whole afternoon and we did it. We did swap songs. And she was often amazed that I knew her songs, but in different versions, you know. We got on absolutely like a house on fire. She was just wonderful. She was in her sixties then, I guess. It was a great time. But Oscar... Oscar was a fine singer too, and a fiddle player. But he had murdered seven people in his lifetime.

MB: What!

SC: Over women and whiskey. Yes! And he was out of jail again, and had quietened down, I guess, because he’’d gone blind. Surprisingly, because he was a big and wild and aggressive man, but when he sang, he was so gentle. These gentle songs. Although he was singing a gentle song about Cole Younger and the James Boys, who were atrocious outlaws.

MB: it’s interesting that when you got back from that trip... Did it have the effect of reinforcing your English roots? There’s not a trace of Americana anywhere.

SC: You’re absolutely right. I did obviously have one or two American songs that I still loved and still wanted to sing. Because I love the Appalachian music. It is beautiful stuff. So with Davy, for instance, I sang Pretty Saro, which is from Tennessee, I think, and I sang Boll Weevil Blues, which we recorded from Vera Hall. So there was still part of me that hadn’t quite let that go, but after that, it was English all the way. And as it went further on I tried really to concentrate on the songs of Southern England. Because that’s where I’m from, and I understand them. Besides, when I was a young singer in the sixties and seventies, Scottish and irish music were just overwhelming everything else. It was a real struggle to be an English singer. But it was what I was, and it’s what I am, so I had to do it.

MB: Again, that situation is reversing now, I guess through the work of the Carthys, Martin and Eliza.

SC: Absolutely.

MB: What else? There’s so much. I’m never going to be able to use a fraction of this.

SC: I’m sorry. There’s an awful lot.

MB: There is, isn’t there? Well I suppose the obvious question, which you must be tired of people asking you, is will you ever start singing again?

SC: No, I don’t think so. I did actually lose my voice, and couldn’t sing, and still can’t really sing very well. I love the music too much to want to sing it badly. But what I can do is talk about it and... Especially with the talks. They’re about three topics that I really love. Are you going to be able to come to any of it?

MB: Well I’m based in Manchester. I’m strongly considering timing a visit around this. It sounds too good to miss.

SC: The America Over the Water talk is particularly good. I know we did a good show. There’s so much music in it, and so many wonderful pictures, and the story is just incredible really. If you did want to, you must let me know because I could certainly get you a complimentary.

MB: I might hold you to that. Thanks, Shirley. OK, we might as well call a halt, as we can go on for a couple of days and nights, and I’ve got a maximum of 450 words and Alasdair to fit in too. I’ve got my work cut out. But no, what a great thing. Well done and the best of luck with it.

SC: Thank you so much. It’s very nice, Mike. I just hope you get your piece done. I don’t envy you taking this lot down, I must say.

MB: The phrase, ‘embarrassment of riches’ comes to mind somehow.

SC: Anyway if it brings a few more people to the show, that will be fantastic. I really do think this is going to be a lovely week, and I think it’s going to be a bit of an eye-opener, or an ear-opener.

MB: That’s right. Again in that great folk tradition, you’re cutting across the generations.

SC: Not only that, but also to bring some people in who don’t get enough of a hearing. I know Eliza’s wonderful, but she’s so ubiquitous at the moment. You could hear her seven nights a week it seems to me, and other people are as good. I know Close of Play is going to be the most brilliant evening.

MB: You do well... Without wishing to appear condescending, but you do well to keep up because there’s such a tidal wave of emerging talent, isn’t there?

SC: (laughs) That’s true. I’m not sure I quite keep up, but I do my best. I love this music. It’s the thng that runs my life, so...

MB: And it’s in a fairly healthy condition right now.

SC: It is. It’s great, yes.

MB: Probably the best since your generation in the sixties.

SC: I think so. There’s just lots of vitality at the moment. That’s wonderful.

MB: Right, Shirley.

SC: Thank you so much, Mick. Erm, Mike. I really do appreciate it.

MB: I enjoyed our talk Shirley...

New Records

AfroCubism (World Circuit) 

Kouyate-Neerman: Kangaba (No Format) 

If you remember your Buena Vista Social Club lore, the plan was to record an African-Cuban supergroup in Havana, but the African musicians failed to arrive and, rather than waste studio time, the decision was taken to record classic Cuban songs instead. Fourteen years later, the original idea is realised in AfroCubism, a Mali-Cuba exchange featuring Kassy Mady Diabate and Toumani Diabate jamming with Eliades Ochoa (the singer of Chan Chan) and his band, Grupo Patria. The results sometimes turn out pure Cuba (Al Viaven De Mi Carreta) and sometimes pure Mali (Karamo), with the musicians finding common ground on a simmering rumba (Djelimady). Here's proof of the adaptability and eternal charm of the kora, which adds rippling colour to any musical situation. There's lots to enjoy, but it's not quite as genre-busting as Kangaba, a collaboration between Mali balafon-player Lansine Kouyate and French vibraphonist David Neerman. The two instruments have a similar tonal register and a similar mesmerising force, enhanced by some incongruous but highly effective rock beats. The partnership clicks due to the controlled restraint of the players. 

Al Andaluz Project: Al-Maraya (Galileo) 

A reference-point might be Varttina, but instead of Finnish folk music, these trilling femmes are reinventing medieval music from Valencia. This was a period when Muslims, Jews and Christians co-existed in peace and the music reflects the healthy cross-fertilisation: Latin chants co-mingle with Moorish melodies as the music sweeps along with rattling grandeur. It's too sparkling (and too digital) to be authentic, and, moreover, the voices have a whiff of the conservatoire about them. Nevertheless, an essential cornerstone for any collection of medieval Spanish music. But if that's your thing, go for Jordi Savall first.

Gilad Atzmon & The Orient House Ensemble: The Tide Has Changed (World Village) 

It’s the tenth anniversary of Gilad Atzmon’s Orient House Ensemble and the familiar elements are in place: the rugged intensity of Atzmon’s saxophone, fully assimilated influences from the Middle-East and the Americas, and political radicalism sublimated into expressive music. The mature Atzmon is more likely to channel his passion into heartwrenching beauty than inchoate rage. With Bolero At Sunrise he opts for  pure grace. London to Gaza racks up the intensity until the mood shifts from delicacy to dread. Similarly, In The Back Seat of a Yellow Cab displays a brooding kind of lyricism and We Lament insists on the redemptive power of pure beauty. Atzmon’s mordant humour is kept in check, and only surfaces on the cabaret-styled Dry Fear, and the bonkers klezmer We Laugh, the bookends of the album. Mainly, Tide is a showcase for Gilad Atzmon the balladeer, as profound as anyone in jazz history, and as serious as life itself.

Avalon Trio: Forlana (Marquetry Records) 

The trouble with Arcadia is that it can be so boring. Avalon Trio incorporate themes from Delius, Vaughan Williams and Gerald Finzi, yet undercut the bliss with intermittent bursts of anger. Tony Woods is at least as plaintive as Jan Garbarek on soprano saxophone, yet his sweet tone breaks into a harsh rasp in places. The Trio - completed by the lyrical yet driving Pete Churchill on piano and Rob Millett on percussion - rescue beautiful tunes from the dusty museum of English song, and replace stiltedness with spontaneity. The prevailing tone is exultant and melodious - Eclogue (Finzi) is supremely beautiful, and Linden Lea (V. Williams) springs to life - yet real emotional urgency is conveyed by Churchill’s Last Love (the originals are as compelling as the covers) and Brigg Fair swings with some force. Some minor cavils: flute on folksy material raises feyness to dangerous levels (as on the track, Forlana), and there’s too much refined tabla-pattering (Millett is more confident behind a kit). On the whole though, Avalon Trio manage to create freshness from moment to moment in the splendour of the aurian wood. (Aurian means golden.)

Chris Barber: Memories of My Trip (Proper) 

Chris Barber never deviated from his own vision of New Orleans jazz, but he went sideways from time to time, as this two-disc anthology makes clear. His personal commitment and generosity is everywhere apparent, whether giving a hand-up to struggling young musicians (Keith Emerson) or rediscovering former members of the Louis Armstrong All Stars (Edmund Hall). Barber, the godfather of the trad boom, brought blues musicians to the UK at his own expense (Muddy Waters and Brownie McGhee are featured) and, by giving floorspace to his banjo-player Lonnie Donegan, he sired the skiffle revolution and influenced the first generation of rock musicians (there are notable contributions from Rory Gallagher and Van Morrison). Overall, the collection possesses a ragged charm (with live recordings of varying fidelity) and is unabashedly celebratory. Mainstays singer Ottilie Patterson and trumpet player Pat Halcox emerge well. And the pieces that bookend Disc One are genuinely affecting  - Memories of My Trip, a fond tribute from Brownie McGhee, and Another Sad One, the swansong of guitarist John Slaughter. Barber himself is a hearty rather than profound trombonist, but what a fantastic bandleader! 

Alan Barnes & Scott Hamilton: Hi-Ya (Woodville) 

Alan Barnes, Altrincham's most famous jazz son, has done more to restore beauty and swing to contemporary jazz than any other UK saxophonist. Here he gets together with his US counterpart, Scott Hamilton, to celebrate the music of Johnny Hodges, Duke Ellington's great muse and interpreter. Elegance, stoked by fire, and emotion tempered by cool were Hodges' stock-in-trade. Here, Barnes and Hamilton offer a mainstream masterclass with insouciant ease. Such impeccable swing! Such a delicate way with melody! The lovely ballad Candy, delivered like a smoky rhapsody, oozes romance in the time-honoured Hodges style. Ellington's autobiography, Music Is My Mistress, contains this description of Hodges: "His tonal charisma is difficult to describe, but he always referred to it as 'the kitchen'. If someone else played something in his style, he would say: 'All right, come out of the kitchen.' " Barnes and Hamilton, as master chefs of the first order, are right at home in the kitchen.  

Django Bates: Django Bates' Beloved Bird (Lost Marble) 

The wayward but brilliant pianist Bates maintains his reputation for, ah, waywardness and brilliance with a collection of pieces inspired by Charlie Parker. Bates' interpretation of bebop is not so much straightahead as wide-open. The jaggedly angular Scrapple From The Apple, for example, now comes with free-floating meters and mercurial mood shifts. Star Eyes starts off-centre and veers into complete abstraction, with intermittent moments of clarity when the luminous tune resurfaces. The harmonic structure of Ah-Leu-Cha is probed at great length (nineteen minutes!) with the concentration of a Glenn Gould poring over a Goldberg Variation, while the famous motif of Now's The Time becomes a rhythmic springboard for bracing improvisation. Only the south-of-the-border My Little Suede Shoes resists radical reinvention. Bassist Petter Eldh and drummer Peter Bruun navigate the weather-changes of pace with confidence, skill, empathy and imagination. In fact, all four principals - Parker, Bates, Eldh and Bruun - come out enriched by the exchange.

Eric Bibb: Troubadour Live with Staffan Astner (Telarc) 

Eric Bibb is one of your satisfied-and-tickled-too bluesmen, as opposed to the broke-and-hungry-ragged-and-dirty-too kind. He’s consistent cheerful and gentle, whether proclaiming the benefits of clean running water (Shavin’ Talk) or, a recurrent theme, extolling the love of a good woman (Thanks For The Joy, et al). His wholesomeness and dignity make him an ideal role model and exemplary human being, but do we really need (another) Bibb live album? The answer is a qualified yes. The intimacy of a tiny Swiss venue brings out Bibb’s most sympathetic qualities. If guest gospel group Psalm 4 raise the general level of piety, lead guitarist Staffan Astner counteracts with some gritty hot licks. Two studio tracks are included as a bonus: Put Your Love First, a duet with Troy Cassar Daley, and If You Were Not My Woman. Both tend to the sweet-natured and bland, and give qualms about an entire studio album. 

Chris Biscoe: Profiles of Mingus (Trio Records) 

Profiles - which could reasonably be credited to the Mingus tribute group Mingus Moves - displays complete understanding of the great composer/bassist, and, it follows, total understanding of his successors. The ease and authority of players like Chris Biscoe and Henry Lowther is evident in every note. Biscoe, an unsung hero of the reeds, tempers sensitivity with a simmering inner fire. The musicians, in various combinations from ensemble to solo, capture the indelible tenderness of such tunes as Goodbye Pork Pie Hat (with a piercing Peter Hurt tenor solo) and Self-Portrait in Three Colours. If the music sometimes takes unexpected turns, it is never less than true to the originals, and miraculously achieves an expansive palate with minimal resources. This is classical music in the jazz idiom and similarly open to fresh interpretation and exploration. Sheer genius. 

Carolina Chocolate Drops: Genuine Negro Jig (Nonesuch)

Rhiannon Giddens, Justin Robinson and Don Flemons of the Carolina Chocolate Drops are very young to be making such old music. They're also black, and that's highly significant. Interaction between black and white musicians has been a feature of US roots music since the twenties and earlier, but the fact has either been forgotten or suppressed. The Carolina Chocolate Drops set the record straight with great gusto. Fiddle-tunes, jug-band stomps and worksongs come up as fresh as new paint. Their second album - produced by Joe Henry - actually extends their repertoire forwards and backwards: the modern R&B song Hit 'Em Up and Tom Waits' Trampled Rose get the string band treatment, while Giddens sings the ancient folk tune Reynardine in spellbinding style. Old-time music has always had rough charm; the Carolina Chocolate Drops' achievement is to make it seem vital and relevant.

Liane Carroll: Up And Down (Quietmoney) 

More frumpy than slinky, and with a raucous sense of humour, Liane Carroll is not your archetypal jazz vixen. But she has a wonderful way with a ballad and an adventurous spirit that would lead to trouble if she didn’t possess the intrinsic musicality to get out of it. As ever, she finds herself most fully in the songs of Laura Nyro and Tom Waits (represented here by, respectively, Buy And Sell and Take Me Home), and she can raise a storm on a swinger (What Now My Love). Up And Down, however, has higher production values than usual (with Sade and Van Morrison trumpeter James McMillan at the helm). The lush orchestration is entirely new: strings propel Liane towards a state of grace on Some Children See Him. Then, with the relish of a wild woman, she supplants all the tastefulness with reckless flashes of spontaneity (like the intro of Moanin’). And when she really believes in a song - like Turn Out The Stars, the emotional centrepiece of the album, or the heartbreaking I Can Let Go Now - the results are sublime. The former features a beautiful contribution from Kenny Wheeler, and there are also guest appearances from Kirk Whalum and Julian Siegal. There’s no danger of gilding the lily with Carroll, the most self-sufficient of artists. But if the radio-friendly production finds this great lady of British jazz a wider audience, well, it’s a win-win situation. 

Eliza Carthy and Norma Waterson: Gift (Topic) 

In which Eliza's waywardness is tempered by Norma's maturity: a happy combination. Of course, the mother and daughter have worked before - on a string of marvellous albums as Waterson:Carthy - but this is the first time the two have shared co-billing on a disc, and it radiates family warmth. Here, Eliza's zest for new challenge is satisfied by old-fashioned means: she sets Longfellow to music! And Norma's commanding presence - so effective on Poor Wayfaring Stranger - is counterbalanced by cross-generational larkiness, notably on the unlikely medley, Ukelele Lady/(If Paradise Is) Half As Nice. The dark side of family life - sibling rivalry turned toxic - is the theme of The Rose And The Lily. Significantly, Gift is dedicated to the memory of Kate McGarrigle, and comes decorated with a picture of little Florence with her proud mum and grandmum. An unabashed celebration of kinship, Gift demonstrates how the tradition is extended with each new generation.

Deirdre Cartwright & Kathy Dyson: Emily Remembered (Blow The Fuse) 

Emily Remler, a jazz guitarist from the USA, died tragically young in 1991. Here she is celebrated by Deirdre Cartwright and Kathy Dyson, still the only two female jazz guitarists in the UK. Recorded at a live date at The Vortex Club in 2010, this duet album proves the dictum (credited to Chopin) that there is only one thing more beautiful than one guitar; two guitars. Typically one guitarist vamps, as the other takes a solo, except for exultant moments of simultaneous soloing. Cartwright is a gently sizzling player, and hits the top register with pristine accuracy and brightness. Dyson is more blue, more in the classic jazz guitar tradition, and more reticent. She essays understated, surprise licks in the middle of the tonal spectrum. Both are brilliant harmonic improvisers. The interplay is too graceful, too empathetic for a cutting contest, and the album unfolds as a series of swinging and soft meditations, as unselfconscious and flowing as only a live session can be. Sarah P joins to sing Remler’s setting of a Pablo Neruda poem, and contributes her own deep-felt elegy, Sonnet For Emily.

The Cookers: Warriors (JLP) 

A delightful latter-day set by important musicians, Warriors represents an Autumnal return of springtime fire. Actually, the album provides a textbook illustration of the way tumultuous experimentation has been absorbed into the jazz tradition. The Cookers are a NY supergroup of ageing radicals, including saxophonist Billy Harper, trumpeter Eddie Henderson, bassist Cecil McBee and drummer Billy Hart, several of whom appear in the jazz novel The Bear Comes Home (my Christmas reading). A heroic, uncompromising generation - the album title is well-deserved - yet there’s a streak of good, old-fashioned entertainment about the music. The accessibility comes from the musicians’ mastery of traditional forms like blues (Ladybugg), balladry (Close To You Alone) and gospel (Priestess). Yet the urgency of The Core (stoked by the mighty Billy Hart), the sheer power of U Phoria and the high drama of Priestess (dig Harper’s transcendent tenor sax), not to mention the general freshness of the playing, all confirm that the finest modern jazz is eternal. 

Sam Crowe Group: Synaesthenia (F-IRE) 

Synaesthenia - where two or more senses are involuntarily joined together - is an apt title for an album which practically transforms sound into colour. It's down to the multi-hued textures - of Will Davies' silvery guitar, Adam Waldmann's delicate, lucid saxophone, Jasper Hoiby's ruddy bass and Dave Smith's active, fluid drumming - and an acute sense of dynamics. There's always something going on and always space to hear it. The tunes, by pianist Sam Crowe, are marked by attention to melody, yet  they develop in ways that constantly surprise, going from the lyrical to the jaunty (Mother Nature's Middle Age) or back again (Maxman). The title track is a gem: restless and disturbed, but with a compensatory exultation. A world away from the head-and-solos of straightahead jazz, Crowe's music reintroduces adventure, quirk, charm, and, yes, colour into modern jazz. Enormously satisfying, it bodes well for the band's live appearance tonight (Friday) at Matt and Phred's.

Kit Downes Trio: Quiet Tiger (Basho) 

For mainstream nominees, the Mercury Music Prize is a pinnacle that inevitably heralds decline, whereas for underground artists (jazz and folk) it’s only a prelude to stronger efforts. Which is to say, Quiet Tiger surpasses Golden, Downes’ 2010 Mercury-shortlisted album (just as Bring Your Own by Led Bib surpasses Sensible Shoes). Downes casts a gentle spell, and his audacity is subtle and understated. It seems that every piano note is a product of focused attention, and Downes’ compositions are luminously beautiful, without a trace of false emotion: Boreal is literally suspended in air. In other places, the music is overtly searching, as in Frizzi Pazzi and the free jazz Wooden Birds, but the dominant spirit is sensuous and attractive. Downes’ trio partners, bassist Calum Gourlay and drummer James Maddren, match him for control and precision, and James Allsopp, guesting on saxophone, shifts from whimsy to  something more rough-edged. Established idioms - a yearning blues (Skip James) and a luxuriant modern classical (Fonias) - are given new, enigmatic twists. Less jazz, more sonic ventures into the sublime. Pure genius and great cover-art too. 

Duke Ellington: Original Album Series (Rhino/Warner Brothers)

The Original Album Series - in which five albums from the Atlantic vaults are presented in a five-CD package, with the original sleeves reproduced in miniature - is a Good Thing. Previous releases have been dedicated to Aretha Franklin and Solomon Burke, and the roll of distinction continues with this latest batch, comprising five albums apiece from Ray Charles and Duke Ellington. Alas,1962-1968 (otherwise, the Reprise years) wasn't Duke Ellington's best period. Perversely, his best Reprise album (Afro-Bossa) has been passed over in favour of follies. Will Big Bands Ever Come Back - with Ellington visiting the work of his big band rivals - is interesting in a parallel universe kind of way, but it must have seemed very retro in 1965. The material on Ellington '65 is uniformly staid and Ellington '66 conclusively proves that the Duke and the Beatles don't mix. Mary Poppins should be the ultimate embarrassment, except that Johnny Hodges on A Spoonful of Sugar and Jimmy Hamilton on Feed the Birds appeal to the six-year-old Ellingtonian within. Unfortunately, the good tunes run out after Let's Go Fly A Kite, only ten minutes in. Which leaves Jazz Violin Session, a collaboration with Stephane Grappelli, recorded in 1963, and belatedly issued in 1976. It's the pick of the lot. Two saints of thirties sophistication meet in an intimate setting, one with nobility and delight and the other with quivering elegance.   

Fringe Magnetic: Empty Spaces (Loop)

The brainchild of avant trumpeter Rory Simmons, Fringe Magnet offer a very rich concoction of advanced contemporary jazz and twisted, dark song. The bold hues and subtle shades of the orchestration make for a compelling narrative even before the introduction of texts by Elizabeth Nygaard (who sings) and Charles Bukowski (who doesn't). The tonal contrasts (muted trumpet, feather-light flute, sonorous cello) create continually fascinating textures, and the singing is satisfyingly eccentric (Andrew Plummer does a first-rate Phil Minton impersonation/homage). Indeed, the project invites adjectives like 'eccentric', 'quixotic' and 'magical'. Imagine a jazz Efterklang and you're getting close. If complete integration is sometimes elusive, there's committed playing by all hands (most from the Loop Collective), and all the individual parts work very well.

Jan Garbarek & The Hilliard Ensemble: Officium Novum (ECM) 

Jan Garbarek's voice on saxophone is immediately identifiable: plaintive and keening, it transcends its jazz origins to inhabit a spiritual dimension. Hence, the success of Officium, his 1993 collaboration with Gregorian specialists, the Hilliard Ensemble. On their third album together, they move into related areas like Russian Orthodox church music, the 'faith minimalism' of Arvo Part, and even a few Garbarek originals in the idiom of fourteenth century church music. Officium Novum doesn't disappoint, with Garbarek's soaring horn a perfect match for the lustrous voices of the vocal ensemble. In it's way, Officium Novum is perfect - at once lush and austere, as immaculate as the greatest sacred music of history. Unbelievers may try to resist with irreverent thoughts of the King Singers, but, in the end, its beauty disarms any resistance.

Sarah Gillespie with Glad Atzmon: In The Current Climate (Pastiche Records) 

From the title on, everything about this album proclaims a sharp intelligence. Singer/songwriter Gillespie hangs with jazz musicians, but isn’t quite jazz. Her major characteristic is an agitated energy that finds expression in a voice that is alternately blistering and beautiful. It can turn from smouldering croak to snarl without warning, just as her lyrics see-saw between matter-of-fact observation and uneasy ambiguity. Atzmon earns his name on the credits by finding a musical counterpart to the mercurial mood swings, locating the Irish tinge in Lucifer’s High Chair or providing keening, lamenting saxophone to How The West Was Won, or imagining an electro Kurt Weill for Cinematic Nectar. Gillespie herself has some of the eccentric soulfulness of a Victoria Williams, mixed with the passionate edginess of a PJ Harvey. An album of infinite richness, Climate proves that idiosyncrasy isn’t dead yet.

Matthew Halsall: On The Go (Gondwana) 

Here’s a fine example of modal jazz:  very few chords are used, but they’re always beautiful ones, and open up possibilities for melodic development (Miles Davis invented the form with Kind of Blue). The theme of Music For A Dancing Mind resembles Night in Tunisia before Nat Birchall’s dark-hued tenor saxophone lifts the tune to an exalted level. Song For Charlie adds a Spanish tinge. Avoiding the drift into sedateness (an ever-present danger), The End of Dukkha simmers with restrained energy, and Birchall’s’ soprano sax impresses with its fluid movement and purity. Moody chords in Samantha provide a stately framework for Halsall’s plangent trumpet. The Journey Home and The Move maintain the formula: the soloists provide a richly emotive foil to the shifting beats of the rhythm team (the swirling cymbal work comes from Gaz Hughes). Halsall and Birchall have sometimes attracted the label ‘spiritual jazz’. This is to say that the feelings they project are too deep for anything less than the most sublime music.  

HAQ: Walking Walking Falling (Efpi Records) 

HAQ (pronounced ‘hack’) are a Manchester combo gone global: saxophonist Sam Andreae went to Scandinavia to study for his Masters, guitarist Anton Hunter has one foot in Manchester and one in NY, and drummer Finlay Panter divides his time between Manchester and Berlin. Somewhere along the line, they picked up Finnish bassist Eero Tikkanen. HAQ music is free jazz with grunge textures, galvanised by  Hunter, the subversive of the group (responsible for the brooding tour de force Pope) and held together by Tikkanen, who always plays with definiteness of purpose. Andreae tries for elemental power and overcomes his habit of playing harmonically dictated melody with heroic ungainliness. In fact, HAQ show an unusual interest in form, and melody doesn’t limit their freedom. The very attractive White provides an exultant finale.

Edwina Hayes: Good Things Happen Over Coffee (Twirly Music) 

The third album by Dublin-born, Preston-raised, Yorkshire-transplant Hayes makes a virtue of simplicity.  - just a voice (or two) and guitars and eleven heartbreakingly beautiful songs. It makes a good advertisement for coffee, actually. Some of the originals were written in creative bursts fuelled by coffee, and some of the covers were discovered in USA coffeehouses, and once, in a magical, serendipitous moment, Edwina found the subject of Speed of the Sound of Loneliness in a USA cafeteria (she was chef; Edwina was dishwasher). But the carefree tenderness and wistfulness of Hayes’ sweet, pure tones, not to mention the timelessness of the unplugged settings, all make for a natural high. Good Things induces a warm glow: the record is as carefully and lovingly crafted as a handmade gift. 

Billy Jenkins: I Am A Man From Lewisham (VOTP) 

Tony Hancock, Derek Bailey and Clarence 'Gatemouth' Brown are combined in the person of Billy Jenkins. It's just bad luck for Jenkins that these three enjoy mutually exclusive fan-bases. Less blues than of late here. Indeed, only the two vocal tunes that bookend the album - both droll, defiant affirmations of pride/wellbeing - fit the blues idiom. For the rest, Jenkins is intent on proving that humour does belong in music: On (Catford) Broadway overloads a jaunty riff with lots of outre free blowing, Francis Drake Bowls Club is bonkers palm court music for scratchy fiddle (x2), tuba and melodica, Church of the Ford Transit Mini Bus captures the authentic spirit of faux-jolly Cockney bluster, whilst Terraced Fast Food is a Prelude a L'Apres-midi d'un Faune for a couch potato. Otherwise serious musicians like Nathaniel Facey, Dylan Bates and Gail Brand add instrumental colour and are frequently magnificent. Imagine Penguin Cafe Orchestra stranded in South London on a wet afternoon.

Kairos 4tet: Statement of Intent (Edition) 

Adam Waldman is one of the most distinctive saxophonists in the UK: keening, sweet-toned ,with some of the transcendent urge of a Coltrane - the trajectory of his lines are always in the ascension, or sometimes spin circular cartwheels in the air. Hs playing is deceptively languid:  the beauty is evidently the product of real ferocity of spirit. The rippling wave-forms of Box Set Anti-Hero demonstrates how  minimalism offers a way out of the head-and-changes cul-de-sac for our more adventurous jazz musicians. On her (two) contributions, singer Emilia Martensson actually matches Waldman’s plangent purity. Maybe Next Year is that rare thing: a sublime pop song hidden on a jazz album. And Waldman’s companions in Kairos suggest a partnership of equals: Ivo Neame is a sensitive accompanist, searching and lyrical, whilst Jasper Hoiby is an uplifting bassist and Jon Scott’s rippling crossrhythms manage to swing simultaneously. The Kairos Statement impresses with its sure sense of artistic purpose. 

Stacey Kent: Raconte-moi (Blue Note) 

The two Paris songs on her last, Breakfast On The Morning Train, anticipated Raconte-moi, an entire album of French songs by the exquisite jazz ballad singer, Stacey Kent. The album relies on a few assumptions: that France is the natural home of romance, style and allure. These are exactly the words that spring to mind when discussing Kent - one might add 'wistfulness', 'charm', 'grace', 'fragrancy' - so the combination works particularly well. If it seems squishy in prospect, the reality is irresistible, so that by It Might As Well Be Spring - or, to be accurate, C'est le printemps - the listener is overwhelmed by enchantment. The restraint and intimacy of Jim Tomlinson's arrangements suit the small-hours mood: his saxophone murmurs as Kent floats, held aloft in a bubble of perfect phrasing. There are nice touches like Stacey whistling in synch with high-octave piano. And her French is impeccable, so far as this non-speaker can tell.

Trudy Kerr & Ingrid James: Reunion (Jazzizit) 

A pair of jazzy (and Australian) chanteuses get together, and do what comes naturally - gossip (Girl Talk), shop for shoes (Soft Shoe), share romantic secrets (Dancing on the Ceiling) and worry about therapy (When My Anger Starts to Cry). Kerr and James blend naturally well, swapping lines, entwining in unison or counterpoint, trading girly ad libs. The material comes from the tradition of vocalese, the art of appending words to jazz solos, which is a direct route to the subconscious, and perhaps explains why so many vocalese songs are about going mad (there are two here). Not that the music is never anything less than charming and swinging, with just-so phrasing and a pleasing lilt. Clearly, Kerr and James are loving and loveable women, if a bit squishy and conventional. A soft, crooning Waltzing Matilda brings it all back home.

Soweto Kinch: The New Emancipation (Soweto Kinch Recordings) 

Soweto Kinch operates in two modes - future soul and bustling post-bop. The former is marked by Soweto's rapping and is fired by the urban rhythms of Birmingham, UK, rather than Chicago, USA. On the latter he displays a compelling saxophone, where cool logic jostles with ebullient edge. And then there's a new form, all Soweto's own: a combination of verbals and hip-hop to comment on the way we live now. His target on The New Emancipation is the modern economic system: slavery in all but name. "The more things change, the more they stay the same," he says, which is apt, because beneath the volatile modernity, echoes of Ellington and Ornette abound in Kinch's work. Desperate celebrity culture, call centres and debt recovery also come under his withering scrutiny. If nothing else, Soweto Kinch demolishes the notion that jazz has no relevance to real life.

Lee Konitz: Live At Birdland (ECM)

If curious music-lovers want to get to the bottom of this thing called jazz, they could do a lot worse than seek out this recent live recording by saxophone legend Konitz. It won’t reveal its mysteries all at once, but it offers the essence of the jazz spirit. Age has given Kontitz’ reflective, searching alto sax a new, desiccated edge, smooth and harsh at once, which is actually very affecting. Charlie Haden, who created the riff that Ian Dury subsequently turned into Sex, Drugs & Rock ’n’ Roll, adds his customary warm, throbbing pulse on bass, and drummer Paul Motian moves in multiple directions with delicate showers of accents. And pianist Brad Mehldau thrives on the kind of logical rigour that Konitz champions. His playing is cool and abstract, and characterised by real concentration of focus. In these hands, jazz standards come up fresh; replenished by a flow of inexhaustible ideas. Like the best jazz, the music is dedicated to timeless beauty.

Led Bib: Bring Your Own (Cuneiform Records) 

If the dread term ‘jazz-rock’ conveys interminable guitar solos and tricky time-signatures, think again. Led Bib derive raw power, a keen appreciation of the riff, a sense of dynamics - the quiet bits invariably serve notice of impending clatter - and transcendental yearning from rock. Yet the experimentalism and the agitated Coltrane saxophones (two of ‘em!) firmly place Led Bib in the jazz camp. And all the frenzy and ferocity can’t disguise a highly developed sense of playfulness, which is the chief Led Bib characteristic. Bring Your Own is actually more brawny, tuneful and varied than its Mercury-nominated predecessor, Sensible Shoes. Bring Your Own might be the first jazz skronk disc to crossover. (It can be done: think how firmly entrenched in the mainstream The Ramones are these days.)  Perhaps, in another decade, Led Bib will be selling sensibly shoes, when we’ve all caught up with their inspired, gleeful and intense lunacy.

Charles Lloyd Quartet: Mirror (ECM) 

Token jazzman of the Love Generation; he gave Keith Jarrett his first gig, and discovered Michel Petrucciani etc. What distinguishes Charles Lloyd today is the pensive beauty of his playing. Mirror contains some of the most plangent melodies in the jazz repertoire (I Fall In Love Too Easily, Ruby My Dear), but the search for a song extends to pop (Caroline No) and to Mexican folk (La Llorona). Best of all, English folk song The Water Is Wide is refreshed by some bluesy, gospel-tinged hard bop, which is in fact an Afro-American folk style. These may be the most gorgeous melodies in the world, or if they're not, Lloyd's exquisite phrasing and attractive tone will convince you otherwise. By dint of age and experience, Lloyd has the authority of a jazz magus (a seeker for truth, like John Coltrane, but more diffident in the search). Indeed, Mirror feels like the summation of a life's work, and the melancholia that pervades the music is the price of wisdom. The rhythm team - Jason Moran on piano, Reuben Rogers on bass and Eric Harland on drums - offer sensitive support. 

Cheikh Lo: Jamm (World Circuit)

The dreadlocked singer offers a cornucopia of Africa - Congolese rumba, Senegalese mbalax, highlife surf guitar, Afrobeat - all unified by Cheikh Lo's husky, insinuating voice, surely of one of the best sounds in modern African music. Lo exudes the relaxed confidence of a true master. Listening to Sankara, a tribute to the late Burkina Faso president Thomas Sankara, one might suppose that Memphis soul was born in Africa, just like Mississippi blues. 

Monica Mancini: I've Loved These Days (Concord) 

The songs - These Days, God Only Knows, American Tune - formed the soundtrack for the Boomer Generation, and come mostly from the West Coast, with a few NY interlopers (notably Paul Simon). In a musical equivalent of name-dropping, several feature guest turns from their authors (if you count Brian Wilson on a loop). It's all highly pleasant, and Mancini has a distinct Karen Carpenter appeal, for those who like Karen Carpenter. Interestingly, she's the daughter of Henry of that ilk, whose own music was largely supplanted by these self-absorbed sensitive types. Rich material for a session with her therapist, perhaps.

Stuart McCallum: Stuart McCallum (Sam) 

To those who know Stuart McCallum as the amiable guitar mainstay of Manchester jazz, the visionary quality of this album may come as a surprise. His compositions have a dramatic, almost cinematic grandeur, and are broad and spacious in tone, rich in colour and sound. Frequently, he uses the repeated phrases of systems music to invoke a transcendent state. Yet there is variety: when the great, monolithic chords run the risk of becoming too static, McCallum offsets with his trademark funky guitar, as fluid as a Grant Green, or plants a diverting interlude for hornmen Andy Schofield and Iain Dixon. This is a very beautiful album, and reveals a highly original musical mind.

Kirsty McGee: No.5 (Hobopop Recordings) 

The case for Kirsty McGee as the best artist to come out of Manchester's neo-folk scene is strengthened by this live album, which manages the leap from orthodox acoustica to garage orchestra, with twisted electric guitar, malformed banjo, junkyard percussion and plangent reeds. Some of the songs are familiar from her other records, but the assured delivery shows how she now wears them like a second skin. McGee has a genius for removing the soft centre out of love songs and replacing with the hard nut of real feeling - Bliss and Dust Devils are skewed yet achingly vulnerable songs. Yet shape-shifting is no problem: she writes credibly as a scared soldier in Last Orders or as an unashamed Social Darwinist in Bonecrusher (bonus song, with cartoon animation). Her voice, with its crystalline diction and adventurous phrasing, is closer to jazz than folk.

The Magic Hat Ensemble: Made in Gorton (Jellymould)

* * * * *  

(That's five stars, chaps.) 

The Magic Hatters explode the limits of hard bop with daring and mischief. Seven Steps to Heaven, the old Miles Davis tune, is distilled to a single phrase, repeated hypnotically and overlaid with frenetic activity. Just Friends is less an endless cycle of fifths than a mood-piece of rippling beauty. And so it goes on: the rhythms of Blues March expand and contract in unison, moving from New Orleans secondline to hothouse bebop. Modern devices - like loop technology, sharp edits, trance-like harmonic patterns - are transposed to the bop idiom using acoustic instruments in real time. The feat is made possible by the incredible empathy of the players and a complete commitment to collective performance. Even so, some individual contributions stand out: Steve Chadwick’s graceful, stealthy cornet, Tony Ormesher’s blistering fretboard runs and trills, Rob Turner’s vibrant, shapeshifting drums. Most bands express their creativity with the originals and reveal their conventionality with the covers, but with Magic Hat Ensemble it’s exactly the other way around. On the whole, a cause of great civic pride for Gorton. 

Andy McKee: Joyland (Proper). 

Guitar hero from Topeka, Kansas, who, despite all signs to the contrary, only has two hands. Guitar tunings are included, plus a bonus DVD with documentary and guitar lessons. An album designed for the guitar geek, then. The rest of us might wonder how quickly the innovative touchtapping technique of Stanley Jordan has degenerated into cliche. All is soulless slapping, tepid tapping and tiresome twiddling. A version of Everybody Wants To Rule the World in the 'touch wood' style recalls Dr Johnson's comment about the dog walking on hind legs - "you are surprised to find it done at all". On the whole, Preston Reed does this kind of thing better.

Meadow: Blissful Ignorance (Edition) 

European chamber jazz at its most elegant, terse and laconic. The music is conjured out of the air, it feels so fresh (and wintery, it might be added). Meadow are a trio comprising British piano doyen John Taylor, and Norwegians saxophonist Tore Brunborg and drummer Thomas Stronen. The mood is nocturnal and elegiac. There’s a quality of distilled beauty - so understated that Kirstis Tarer and Reven actually become more spacious and spare as they proceed. Brunborg is sometimes plaintive, sometimes brooding: a great foil for Taylor’s prickly plangent piano. No orthodox timekeeper, Stronen is strong on textures and delicately placed accents. Vastly appealing, Blissful Ignorance echoes the pristine ECM sound - it was recorded at Rainbow Studios, the source of so many ECM records  - which is appropriate, because Edition is shaping up to be a homegrown version of Manfred Eicher’s label, and is a similar guarantee of quality. 

Brad Mehldau: Highway Rider (Nonesuch) 

A series of delicate orchestral episodes spread over two CDs, marked by Mehldau's quietly simmering piano, and adorned by Joshua Redman's gliding saxophone, Highway Rider is not so much a fruitful classical/jazz exchange (which it is), but a move into territory all its own. The arrangements are rich and tuneful. The sensibility is gently romantic, occasionally reaching Samuel-Barber-Adagio-For-Strings levels of sublimity. Redman's sax is resolutely non-virtuosic, but has a laconic charm that suits the music to perfection. In it's luminous tunefulness, Highway Rider most resembles the soundtrack to the imaginary movie of your dreams. It's no surprise that Jon Brion, the distinguished film composer (I Love Huckabees, Punch Drunk Love), takes the producer credit.

Pat Metheny: What’s It All About (Nonesuch) 

The technical information: Pat Metheny here uses the basic tuning of A D G C E A , with the third and fourth strings tuned an octave higher than usual. This device lends an eerie feeling to The Sound of Silence: there’s a microtonal moment that causes an involuntary shiver. The programme is entirely made up of popular songs and film themes, and the delivery is as intimate as if the guitarist were in the same room, playing for an audience of one. Strangely, the more sentimental and squishy the tune, the more affecting it becomes. This, surely, is the definitive Cherish (the David Cassidy chestnut) and Metheny uncovers a real guilty pleasure with Carly Simon’s That’s The Way I’ve Always Heard It Should Be. Garota de Ipanema only gradually comes into view, bathed in a shimmering heat haze, and bittersweetness reaches its apotheosis with Rainy Days and Mondays. No one can break the heart with a drifty major seventh chord like Metheny can. The results are only intermittently soporific, and actually more riveting than his more grandiose efforts like Orchestrion, or the overblown Secret Story. Metheny is undoubtedly a musical schizophrenic, but these wistful, acoustic affairs are a joy. 

Robert Mitchell's Panacea - The Cusp (Edition) 

Esperanza Spalding - Chamber Music Society (Heads Up) 

Both Mitchell and Spalding grapple with the problem of harnessing advanced jazz to make music for the masses. They both miss, but, hey, it was never going to be easy. Robert Mitchell, a pianist given to profound meditation, here composes actual songs and employs singer Deborah Jordan - whose delicate, pure voice is the epitome of tenderness - and rapper HKB Finn to interpret them. The songs aspire to the fragile enchantment of Edward Barton's It's A Fine Day, but Mitchell can't quite shake off his habit of inscrutable intervals and complex time changes. Spalding, a bassist/composer/singer from Oregon, USA, combines classical elegance with jazz angularity, with a major part for her own sweet vocals. Her version of modern chamber music sometimes emulates the strange charm of Joanna Newsom (Apple Blossom; the William Blake setting, Little Fly). It's all very appealing, if ultimately a wee bit precious, with classical propriety scoring over jazz intensity. Nevertheless, both albums are brave and accessible endeavours. Too good for mass consumption, actually.

Sara Mitra: April Song (Impossible Ark)

Sara Mitra is of Irish-Indian stock, married to jazz drummer Tim Giles, and was heavily pregnant during the recording of this, her debut record. These personal details have a bearing on the outcome of April Song. Mitra's voice is light and breathy yet intense, and her own songs are candid and searching. The adventurous arrangements play up the tension and contrast between horns and strings, and the sound is a lot richer than the modest resources might suggest. That unsettling migrant's song The Old Country - as odd and out-of-time as Strange Fruit when Curtis Lee and Nat Adderley wrote it in 1961 - projects the singer's darkest fear: it's only a small step from citizen of the world to total outcast. In reality, Misra makes the most of her dual-heritage, nay multiple-heritage. The intelligence of her songwriting, together with the sensuality of her singing, make for a winnng combination. 

James Morton's Porkchop: Don't You Worry 'Bout That (Fresh Ground Records) 

Porkchop maintain the noble tradition of the organ-combo, the most populist genre in jazz, with real flair. Fresh rather than innovative, the combination of huffing, hustling alto sax with a vocal quality (James Morton), clean, funky guitar (Danny Ilett), groovy, limber Hammond organ (Dan Moore) and no-nonsense drumming (Ian Matthews) is finally irresistible. The tunes are all Morton originals (except for a slinky God Bless The Child, and an Eddie Harris choogler, Cold Duck Time), but so solidly in the vernacular they feel like familiar soul-jazz staples. Potent and exciting stuff.

Corey Mwamba, Dave Kane & Joshua Blackmore with Alex Bonney: In The Vortex 

http://trio.coreymwamba.co.uk

Free jazz remains the ultimate underground music. In The Vortex, a recording of a performance given by vibraphonist Corey Mwamba, bassist Dave Kane, and drummer Joshua Blackmore at The Vortex in January this year, is a valuable document. The two-CD set is only available on the group's website (above), and is recommended for Mwamba's instinctive originality on vibes: he is an elemental driving force on an instrument that is often used for fey or novelty effect. Kane contributes orchestrally varied sounds on string bass, and Blackmore veers between delicate hues and full-blown ferocity. The spontaneity of group improvisation gives it a wonderful freshness - the excitement of discovery is palpable - and due attention is paid to dynamics (like the quiet delicacy at the beginning of Breathe In). Trumpeter Alex Bonney joins for three of the four pieces on the second disc, and adds his own special brand of desiccated eloquence. The package usefully demonstrates how discipline is needed to truly achieve 'freedom', and how, in this most demanding of forms, group interaction takes priority over individual expression. 

Neon Quartet: Catch Me (Edition) 

Since the first Neon album, pianist Kit Downes has replaced Gwilym Simcock and drummer Tim Giles has been added, with saxophonist Stan Sulzmann and vibes player Jim Hart providing continuity. The chemistry is unaltered, and a nice balance is struck between skittish vitality (from Hart and Giles, mostly) and gruff tenderness (that's elder statesman Sulzmann). The technique of all four is formidable: Tim Giles is astonishing, pushing in lateral directions with crispness and snap, whilst Hart provides streamlined propulsion on that most rhythmic of instruments, the vibes. Kit Downes, an inner-directed pianist, is surprisingly approachable, as he unspools long lines of melody. If the playing is marked by empathy - they sound like a well-established group - the writing is outstanding. Nepapanees (by Sulzmann) is a drama of light and shade with playful accents, and Passwords (by Hart) is a model of passionate lyricism. The ballads (Villiers, by Downes, for example) are exquisite, and just a bit pensive. When they turn up the heat, as in Torino (by Downes), instinctive musicality takes over. Credits are evenly split between Sulzmann, Hart and Downes, and all deserve the highest praise.

Marius Neset: Golden Xplosion (Edition) 

It’s clear that Wayne Shorter has marked Neset’s playing. That’s Shorter the oblique melodist as well as the dazzling colourist of Weather Report (download track 4, Sane, for yearning, Heavy Weather-style lyricism). But then Neset, a virtuoso saxophonist from Norway discovered by Django Bates at Copenhagen Music Conservatory, has absorbed the playing of all the modernist masters. He mimics the astonishingly contrapuntal effects of Roland Kirk on track 1, Introducing: Golden Xplosion, but doesn’t need multi-tracking to sound like a saxophone choir: Old Poison appropriates the circular breathing of Evan Parker to juggle criss-cross rhythms. Neset also impresses as a composer. Angel of the North is an exultant, profound work. Then there’s the sympathetic interplay of Jasper Hoiby on bass and Anton Eger on drums (dig the skipping, slippery detail of Shame Us), while Bates himself adds his distinctive prankster touch on keyboards. There’s no mistaking the pleasure the musicians had in the making of Golden Xplosion. It communicates: a completely satisfying album.

Oddfellows: Oddfellows (Limefield) 

The gooseberry, a popular object of cottage-horticulture in Lancashire, is a bit like the native folk music: wild, hairy on the outside and delicious to taste. Which is to say, there’s no one famous on Oddfellows - erstwhile Oldham Tinker John Howarth is the nearest - but it comes from deep Lancashire, and uncovers a whole world of indigenous folk, with old and new songs in the traditional vernacular. These are studio recordings of the house musicians who gather at the Oddfellows pub in Middleton, famously, on Monday night at nine. They are considerable talents, whatever the public awareness. Here you’ll find the gorgeous voice of Pete Macmillan, as burly and tender as a Lancashire Pavarotti, and salty characters like Andy Kenna and the shamelessly unreconstructed Jack Lee. There are Irish retentions (Vin Short’s Little Bridgid Flynn), affecting testimonies to working-class resilience (Mike Canavan’s Knocker Upper Man), and drollery aplenty (Howarth’s The Funeral Song), shot through with humanity and warmth. The old-timers were shepherded in the studio by jazzman John Ellis and Bill Leader (who is a household name in folk) who preserve the good cheer of the bar-room session. 

Gretchen Parlato: In A Dream (Obliq Sound)

New Yorker Parlato retains the virtues of the bossa nova - that patented mix of fragility and sensuousness, set to shimmering, spare yet perfect accompaniment. Ostensibly, Parlato is just murmuring and cooing in a rhythmic way, but, how she can captivate the listener. Her deceptively simple style is deployed on material as harmonically advanced as Wayne Shorter's ESP and Herbie Hancock's Butterfly, and the assurance of the musicianship reminds why New York is still the centre of the jazz world. The sentiments are dreamy and romantic, in the time-honoured Latin way, yet the note of maternal love in the originals (there's lots of infant gurgling too) is new. In A Dream raises the bar for bossa.

Sid Peacock & Surge: La Féte (Peacock Angell Records) 

Féte is a French word meaning ‘festival’ or ‘party’, and it seems particularly apt for this debut by the 16-piece big band led by Birmingham-based Irish composer Sid Peacock. It’s an album that spills over with exuberance and colour, with a vivid variety of moods, dynamics and tempos. Tunes are full-blooded and often unabashedly romantic: the evanescent Kora, or Bit of Peace, carried along by the wordless vocalising of Ruth Angell. Sometimes proceedings tip into anarchy - the title track juggles different rhythmic metres with élan - or the listener is transported from paradisiacal exotica to clamorous urbanity (Bronze Bling, a real tour de force). La Féte is quite a journey, and if Peacock succeeds in his chief aim to derange the senses, he does so with a lot of charm (the satisfyingly trippy Hallucinogenic Garden), and along the way reveals the wealth of talent of the Birmingham jazz community (drummer John Randall is a marvel). Well worth seeking out. 

Jay Phelps: Jay Walkin’ (Specific) 

More on Jay Phelps below, but the first thing to say is that pianist Jonathan Gee (mathematically precise), bassist Larry Bartley (pure-toned and propulsive) and drummer Gene Calderazzo (crisp, powerful, explosive) are the best rhythm team currently active in the UK: for the way they interact as much as for individual prowess. (Karl Rasheed-Abel, also superb, plays bass on two thirds of the album.) Featured reedsmen Shabaka Hutchings and Brian Edwards offer contrasting styles, by turn brooding and sunny. The material ranges from the Afrocentric intensity of Six Degrees of Separation to a re-imagined Semplice by Tchaikovsky. Jay Phelps? Canadian-born, settled in Britain as a teen, first made his mark as trumpeter with Empirical. He sidesteps the Miles Davis influence and emulates Clifford Brown: graceful, sharp, burnished, lyrical. If he impressed with Empirical, now he’s in complete command of the hard-bop idiom. Vocalist Michael Mwenso, however, steals the show whenever he appears: a charismatic with a Clarence Carter chuckle, Mwenso sings like an inspired add-on to the outstanding rhythm team. A timely release. Just when editors insist on the annual round-up, here comes the year’s best jazz album. 

Phronesis: Alive (Edition) 

This state-of-the-art live recording clearly captures a shining moment for the Anglo-Dutch trio. It's obvious that bassist Jasper Hoiby is the leader. He contributes all the tunes, calibrates the heat with his swoops and surges, and suffuses all with a dark, deep-toned woodiness. Mark Guiliana, who might be playing a continually evolving solo, is a wonderfully polyrhythmic drummer, and pianist Ivo Neame, restless and searching, makes the music his own. Indeed, the set is finely balanced between all three individuals. It hits top gear from the first moments of the first tune, the majestic Blue Inspiration, and, with eight extended work-outs to follow, the musicians never flag for a moment. Abraham's New Gift, with its urgent lift, is outstanding.

Courtney Pine: Europa (Destin-E) 

An ambitious idea - nothing less than a musical interpretation of the (pre-)history of the European continent - is realised in a suitably expansive way. Wide open soundscapes utilise jazz know-how, state-of-the-art technology (without overshadowing flesh-and-blood players), Celtic, Mediterranean and classical retentions and a worldview occasionally reminiscent of Duke Ellington at his most exotic. Like Ellington, Pine writes brilliantly for distinctive personalities: fiery Cuban violinist Omar Puente, graceful pianist Zoe Rahman, nimble reedman Shabaka Hutchins, with the sturdy bassist Alec Dankworth holding it all together. Pine also displays a talent for shape-shifting. On his jousts with Puente (Druid’s Lyre and Greek Fire), he not only translates hot fiddle licks to the saxophone but replicates the timbre of the fiddle with a brassy bass clarinet. The latter is the dominant voice: large and majestic, but also capable of brightness and fun. What strikes most is the juxtaposition of modernity and antiquity. Europa is not so much an evocation of the past, as a promise of a world to come. All musicians might as generous-spirited as Courtney Pine in the twenty-second century.  

Tutu Puoane & Brussels Jazz Orchestra: Mama Africa (Saphrane) 

Belgian-based, South African singer Tutu Puoane remembers the great Miriam Makeba with a fusion of big band jazz and Xhosa folk song. Kwela explodes into multi-hued colour in these imaginative and vigorous arrangements: the saxophone echoes rousing vocals on The House in Midrand (a real tour de force, this), and punchy Basie -style horns adorn the Zulu praise song Mayibuye. Excitement is the common factor. Mama Africa feels like a return, given the big jazz influence on SA music, and, at the same time, this feels fresh and full of possibility. Puoane is astonishing: she exudes warmth and grace, yet holds her own against everything the Brussels Jazz Orchestra throws at her. Beauty is rare at any time. Finding beauty on this scale is incredible. 

Real Book North West: Real Book North West (33 Records)

A genuine source of local pride: RBNW are a jazz supergroup, who focus exclusively on works from indigenous composers. This album suggests that they have struck a rich seam. The Manchester jazz community, on this evidence, is overrun with lyrical, good old-fashioned melodists. Virtually every theme is attractive, and the musicians - Mike Walker, Andy Schofield, Les Chisnall, Steve Berry and Dave Walsh - bring out the full grace of luminous tunes such as Clockmaker (by Walker), The Aviators Ball (by Matt Owens), and People That I Love (by John Ellis). And just when you think they might be a bit too much cool clarity, the bright post-bop of Time To Remember (by Dan Whieldon) proves that RBNW can swing too.

Tim Richards Trio:  Shapeshifting (33 Records) 

A joyous and swinging pianist, Tim Richards is fully at ease with a capable rhythm section. Bass player Dominic Howles and drummer Jeff Lardner maintain a relaxed flow of rhythm, and display muscle when required. Richards himself has absorbed the styles of Bud Powell, Duke Ellington, Cedar Walton and Bobby Timmons, who are all covered here. He rejoices in the old-fashioned jazz virtues of elegance, commitment to swing and clarity of line. But, nestled among the jazz chestnuts are four luminous Richards originals. Tunes such as Eleventh Hour and Seraglio fully match the standard of beauty elsewhere. The former hints at the rhapsodic lyricism of Ellington, while the hypnotic quality of Seraglio points to a later generation of jazz piano masters. Chick Corea and Keith Jarrett are not represented here, but Richards is clearly on their wavelength. 

Matana Roberts: Live in London (Central Control) 

Its the incongruity that startles. Matana Roberts is a young black Chicagoan, indifferent to her physical beauty, who projects her feelings through a saxophone using the vocabulary of free jazz. Live in London documents a concert at The Vortex in 2009. Typically, a Roberts solo consists of short, melodic passages repeated with minimal variation in a hard granite tone, moving from phrase to phrase with the weighty density of an iceberg. Roberts is weak on delicacy but strong on presence, and actually very strong on melody: she could credibly fulfil Albert Ayler’s project of bringing hard-core avant-garde to the masses. By way of contrast, the UK rhythm section - particularly Robert Mitchell on piano - are restless, quicksilver and animated, and winningly suspend the performance between severity and delight. 

Asaf Sirkis Trio: Letting Go (Stonedbird)

  

The whiplash rolls and shimmering cymbals of Asaf Sirkis strike the perfect balance between power and elegance. Without question, he is one of the best drummers active in UK jazz. Oddly, his own projects have been mostly rock-derived. Inner Noise reached places that have (mercifully) lain undisturbed since Brain Salad Surgery by ELP. This edition of the Asaf Sirkis Trio is a stripped down, post-Hendrix trio, with Tassos Spiliotopoulos in the role of the guitar god. How well matched the two players are, precisely calibrating levels of intensity, or nicely apposite, as when Sirkis surges and ebbs underneath Spiliotopoulos' billowy guitar chords. Bassist Yaron Stavi contents himself with steady time-keeping, and Patrick Bettison contributes pleasingly desiccated harmonica to two tracks. Nothing is external, nothing unnecessary, and, contrary to the title, a mood of restrained emotion is sustained throughout. Good crossover appeal.

Judge Smith: The Climber (Masters of Art)
Judge Smith: Curly's Airships (Masters of Art)

Judge Smith was a founder member of Van Der Graaf Generator (as Chris Smith he appears on the sleeve of 68-71, but nothing was recorded), which makes these albums (The Climber is new; Curly's Airships is a reissue from 2000), of interest to fans of the world's scariest prog-rock band. Smith here attempts a mix of narrative and music he calls the 'Songstory', which, despite his claims of innovation, is practically identical to 'the concept album' or 'rock opera'. He also seems drawn to Boy's Own Adventure stories. The Climber describes the fatal lure of the Italian Alps to a maverick mountaineer, and Curly's Airships tells the story of the doomed R101, the world's biggest airship, through the eyes of aviator Curly. Like the best of VDGG, the music describes a bad trip on the way to revelation, respectively in the mountains and in the sky. But Smith approach from the view of a documentarian, rather than a screaming expressionist like Peter Hammill. Curly's Airships details early aviation and government bureaucracy with documentary accuracy, and its dramatis personae includes Arthur Brown as 'The Chairman' and Hammill as 'Lord Thomson', both stiff-necked representatives of the ruling class. Hugh Banton and David Jackson of VDGG provide musical back-up. Dense, and spread over two CDs, Curly's Airships occasionally resembles a R4 Book of the Week delivered in recitative over elaborate jazz-rock arrangements. It's strong on exposition at the expense, but no worse than, say, Les Miserables or a Michael Tippett opera. The story demands close attention, and rewards with a compelling study of the psychotic tendency behind the British stiff upper lip. The closest it comes to a showstopping tune is The Final Taboo (Theme 16), which gets a reprise at the finale. But oddly, the tune that ends up rattling through your head is Imperial Zeppelin, from Fool's Mate, Peter Hammill's solo debut in 1971. That song is credited to Hammill/Smith, the only co-write on the album, which indicates how long Judge Smith has been fixated on the idea of flying dirigibles. As a piece for solo voice and choir, The Climber is not on the epic scale of Curly's Airships. The intimacy actually makes it more approachable. The tension between the hero, self-deluded and oblivious to danger, and the choir, doubling as voice of reason and implacable force of nature, is brilliantly handled, and as exciting as a good book. But, like a good book, how many times would you want to repeat the experience? Judge Smith, like his Climber, is a rather solitary figure: as quixotic (and English) as Robert Wyatt in his determination to extend the boundaries of rock music. Indeed, his complicated relationship to rock might be explained (or not) on the next 'Songstory', which recasts Orpheus as a Potters Bar-born rock'n'roller, with a great deal (on the evidence of the trailer at the end of The Climber) of weeping guitar freak-outs.

John Surman: Flashpoint - NDR Jazz Workshop (Cuneiform Records) 

The first wave of modern British jazz is only in retrospect a golden age, belatedly honoured with the term Jazz Britannia. So it showed great foresight on the part of German broadcaster NDR to film John Surman’s big band in rehearsal in April 1969, for release some forty-odd years later as a CD and accompanying DVD. The participants are a virtual Who’s Who of Jazz Britannia (Alan Skidmore, Ronnie Scott, Mike Osborne, Kenny Wheeler, Harry Miller), caught in a space between tradition (borrowing inspiration and structures from Duke Ellington) and innovation(the infusion of free jazz, and the South African influence). The footage offers  valuable insights into the nature of communal music-making (an eye-opener for those who only know Surman as the hermit of Rainbow Studios, Oslo). Clearly, on the basis of wistful themes like Once Upon A Time, Surman’s melodic sense was  born full-formed. An essential document. 

Tamco: Don't Think Twice (Edition) 

The trick here - and it's devastatingly effective - is to apply sweet ingenue tones to songs (by such as Leonard Cohen, Elvis Costello and Jacques Brel) which probe the dark psychological depths of sexual behaviour. The accompaniment sounds like a punk garage band under the direction of Ennio Morricone (Dan Moore's Hammond organ is a ringer for Ray Manzarek). So emotional cruelty is tossed off with nonchalance (the Bob Dylan title track), and orthodox sentimentality comes tinged with psychosis (Jolene, River Deep Mountain High). Bristol-based singer Tammy Payne's languorous tones are ideal for that extraordinary seduction song, Summer Wine. Most incongruous of all, she applies her fragrant  tones to a blood-thirsty murder ballad, Henry Lee, complete with walking bass and organ drone. But is it jazz? The jury is out on that one; it is, however, undoubtedly the most purely enjoyable release of the year.

Clare Teal: Hey Ho (MUD Records) 

Kurt Elling: The Gate (Concord)

A musical shopholic, Teal goes mad in the boutique of song and mixes styles and idioms with gay abandon. It’s Not Unusual suits the slinky sixties treatment, but Down By The Sally Gardens? She brings the same emotional sweetness to Care of Cell 44 by The Zombies and We’ll Gather Lilacs by Ivor Novello, but it’s a roleplay really. Because Teal is far too twinkly to take herself seriously, the romance never sours: she\s more Jeanette Macdonald than Judy Garland. The odd lapse of taste only happens when she enters the modern world. Which is, sadly, also true of Kurt Elling with The Gate. Blessed with a rich baritone voice, impeccable intonation and sense of time, Elling makes Jamie Cullum seem like the callow pipsqueak he is. But here he extends his repertoire to cover Earth, Wind & Fire (After The Love Has Gone), the Beatles (Norwegian Wood) and Joe Jackson (Steppin’ Out), and the results are more slick than sublime. 

Jon Thorne and Danny Thompson: Watching the Well 

Jon Thorne, Manchester’s foremost jazz bassist, here pays homage to his musical hero Danny Thompson (of Pentangle and John Martyn renown) with a suite written specially for the great bassist. It is a work of beautiful, unabashed romanticism, and Thompson moves through the music with a stately, measured tread, and makes the earth move with every low rumble. His string bass has a deep, rich, earthy sound, and the other soloists delightedly sink into it: singer Jojo Thorne, with a voice of operatic purity (Thompson is not the only object of devotion), guitarist Stuart McCallum, at his most ambient, and Gilad Atzmon, offering weeping clarinet arpeggios. If the music is just too beautiful and too immaculate to attain flight mode, Watching the Well is a remarkable example of an artist wearing his heart on his sleeve. And with Jon Thorne, you get a very big heart.

Christine Tobin & Liam Noble: Tapestry Unravelled (Trail Belle) 

Carole King's  million-selling 1970 album is here faithfully revisited (with the bonus of a Tobin original, Closing Time), and stripped to the bare components of voice and piano. This actually adds to the strengths of the original, characterised by personal intimacy and musical accomplishment. Tobin, never more radiant, sings with intense feeling. The over-familiar You've Got A Friend becomes, once again, an expression of empathy and sympathy. So Far Away is almost unbearably wrenching. The dominant mood, exemplified by Tapestry itself, is one of wistful tenderness. Noble follows her sensitively, with less harmonic adventure and more simplicity and passion than normal. The recording was apparently prompted by the death of Tobin's sister, a great Tapestry fan. It adds a poignant twist: the singer seems more concerned with human loss than lost love. But the album would be immensely moving even without knowledge of the sad background. 

Ali Farka Toure & Toumani Diabate: Ali & Toumani (World Circuit Records)

Sadly the swansong not only of the great Mali musician Ali Farka Toure, a pioneer of the desert blues, but also Orlando 'Cachaito' Lopez, the bass player who graced all those Buena Vista Social Club records. Appropriately, there's an ease and purity about the music. Toure's ringing guitar lays down a lick, evocative of Delta blues perhaps, but really deriving from a more ancient source. Toumani Diabate, the world's greatest kora player, adds a harp-like counter-melody, which, though quicksilver and elaborate, retains the essential quality of simplicity. It's music that soothes and charms away all anxiety. Toure doesn't sing so much as murmur with satisfaction and contentment. Cumulatively, this gentle, homegrown music takes on an indefinable, almost otherworldly quality. At least two of the musicians were in heaven before they died.


Trichotomy: Variations (Naim)

A suitable candidate to fill the large-shaped hole left by est (Esbjorn Svensson Trio to the uninitiated). Melodies are clean and mellifluous; grooves hustle and bustle in split metres and yet somehow swing; the mood is mercurial; attractive pastoralism is likely to be upended by arresting dentist-drill techno tones. It's surprising to learn that pianist Sean Foran, percussionist John Parker and bassist Patrick Marchisella are not acolytes of Euro-jazz, but actually met at Queensland Conservatorium. The sound is nevertheless delicate, controlled and spacious in the best European tradition. For track 4 (Start) the basic piano trio is expanded with a string quartet to great effect.

Helen Watson and Mark Creswell: Fiver (www.helenwatson.net) 

Great jazz singers are primarily interpreters: this side of Watson’s art is displayed with Burden of Paradise, her group with Snake Davis, at Manchester Jazz Festival on Wednesday 27. That some are gifted writers leads to a sense of confusion, as if such excess of talent was distasteful, or careless with the pigeonholes (you can be either a jazz singer or a singer/songwriter, but not both). And so Helen Watson’s recordings are homemade, with spartan production values and limited print runs, chiefly to be sold at gigs, like this 5-track EP (available individually on iTunes etc. and, yes, it retails for £5). And Fiver is wonderful! It channels real experiences - like love and intimacy and desire - in the most profound way, wavering between fragility and strength, and incidentally offers unforgettable images of her old hometown, Manchester (this, from, The Day Before The Day Before: “Victoria sat squat upon her throne…”). Co-writer Mark Creswell contributes sturdy melodies and nice guitar picking. The pair turn the low-key setting to advantage: these songs come from a very private space. Five stars, naturally. 

Tim Whitehead: Colour Beginnings (Home Made) 

JMW Turner, who elevated the sketch and ditched academic painting, was the free jazzman of English Romantic art. Appropriately, Turner is the inspiration for Tim Whitehead, a full-voiced saxophonist with a relish for fresh challenges. The starting point for the pieces were improvisations by Whitehead made directly in front of Turner sketches at Tate Britain. They were then transcribed and interpreted by a team including pianist Liam Noble - a fine colourist himself - and the resourceful Milo Fell on drums, with Patrick Bettison and Oli Hayhurst alternating on bass. It succeeds because Whitehead avoids the obvious: Turner’s hazy colour-tones are not mirrored by nebulous sound-tones. On the contrary, the music is dynamic, urgent and consistently swings, as shown by track nine, Tower On A Hill At Sunrise and track 12, Dancing In The Sky (the relevant Turner pictures are reproduced in a full colour booklet). Melodies are luminous and rhythms are textured, yet there is nary a bit of introspection, with the exception of the atmospheric opener, Night Into Dawn. Indeed, Whitehead might be too extrovert for his own good. His exuberant singing style spills over from saxophone to voice in a couple of places. 

Norma Winstone: Stories Yet To Tell (ECM) 

This exquisite chamber jazz - with the ECM characteristics of high clarity and high refinement - really succeeds in evoking a mood of bitter-sweet remembrance. Klaus Gesing on soprano sax is as plaintive as Jan Garbarek , and Glauco Venier summons memories of John Taylor with his sensitive piano accompaniment. The focus of attention, however, is always on Norma Winstone, that doyenne of modern British jazz, whose voice is rich and well-preserved. Indeed it seems to grow in beauty with the years. Her sense of colour, her superb use of pauses, breathing, phrasing, and rising and falling volume are all placed at the service of songs (her words, other people's music, generally) about passing seasons, lost loves, human frailty, the impermanence of the world. The eternal verities, in fact, yet, couched in that feather-soft yet robust voice, they appear as mysterious as a dream within a dream. 

Jah Wobble & The Nippon Dub Orchestra: Japanese Dub (Hertz)

After Chinese Dub by Jah Wobble and the Chinese Dub Orchestra, the intrepid sonic explorer's trip further east and sideways makes perfect sense. In a steadily shrinking world, one has to look to increasingly far-flung places to emulate the shock that, say, King Tubby Meets The Rockers Uptown had in the mid-seventies (K Dub 10 here has a family resemblance). The howl of a Kabuki actor (which opens Shinto Dub) is always going to be impenetrably exotic to western ears. And then there's the wide-open spaces that Japanese folk and dub reggae have in common. Wobble's heavy, heavy bass rings like a bell in an empty sky:  an ominous thunder besides the lightness of the shakuhachi flute and plucked koto. The meaning of the sung pieces remains elusive too, but it's fair to say that regret at the fall of a cherry blossom (Silence) is subsequently overtaken by apocalyptic dread (Mishima/Kurosawa). The profound depth of Buddhist gloom is another eye-opener. 

Joe Zawinul & Absolute Ensemble: Absolute Zawinul (Intuition)

So the consummate jazz fusioneer was Viennese. Joe Zawinul was so thoroughly immersed, first, in soul jazz with Cannonball Adderley, and later, in cutting edge fusion with Weather Report, that his personal cultural roots have been overlooked. This posthumous album reaffirms his interest in world music - Bimoya and Sultan are lavish electro-Afro fantasias - and extends the gospel-flavoured funk he pioneered with Mercy, Mercy, Mercy (with Good Day). More surprisingly, extended orchestral works like Peace and The Peasant reveal him as a true descendent of Mahler. The latter adorns a folk-song melody with dazzling symphonic colours. Ballad For Two Musicians, as pretty as A Remark You Made, is a soaring Mahler-esque death-and-resurrection. Yet Zawinul's genius was for synthesis, so that all these diverse elements and influences become inextricably entwined. A fitting swansong for a master.

Also Received:



Pat Metheny: Orchestrion (Nonesuch). The king of fusion guitar pursues his idea of ideal beauty via a scientifically-enhanced version of the nineteenth-century orchestrion, which somehow enables an arsenal of electro-acoustic instruments to play alongside his guitar. The results veer between entrancing grace and vacuous muzak, albeit technically dazzling vacuous muzak.


Woody Pines: Counting Alligators. More good things coming from the North Carolina backwoods. In its relish of both good old-fashioned rustic quaintness, and modern urban sleaze (Cocaine Bill), Alligators invokes the great Michael Hurley, and even the anarchic Cab Calloway (Crazy-Eyed Woman). There are UK dates in March.