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. 

Kit Downes and Tom Challenger at Manchester Jazz Festival

Vyamanikal, Manchester Jazz Festival, 28th July, 2016 

For the Vyamanikal project, Kit Downes and Tom Challenger decamped to rural Suffolk to explore the acoustic properties of old churches, with Kit Downes extemporising on pipe organ in a reedy sepulchral way, and Challenger responding with a minimal, keening saxophone. Singularly responsive to the spirit of place, the music was unique and full of character, and turned on the peculiarities of oft-neglected, wheezy old instruments. 

Extending the concept to historic St Ann’s Church in central Manchester is an interesting idea, though this sacred space is rich and ornate and the church organ is well maintained, with some original pipework from 1730, when it was built. Tantalisingly, Downes mentions that his father learned to play on the very same instrument. 

Downes is drawn to the subtleties of timbre and texture and extracts a thin, shifting sound; more misterioso than pomp. It’s music that evolves in a natural organic way, however, and these are just quiet beginnings. Challenger complements with plangent simplicity. A screen just behind the players shows visuals of eerie flat expanses and cornfields, presumably from the same Suffolk wilds. This invites comparison to the old BBC Christmas adaptions of M.R. James ghost stories, but it's all a bit literal: it seems a shame listeners can't be trusted to make the connection for themselves. 

Downes temporarily diverts to a small harmonium with very much the same tonal register. We’re told that the music is fully improvised and there is no reason to doubt it, but it seems very purposeful in its meditative way, and the interplay between the two players is confident. It hardly seems necessary to say that the sound is extremely haunting. Applause would only break the spell. 

Finally the organ regains some of its conventional power, and events take on a more grand guignol aspect, as if Count Magnus has arisen from the tomb. 

No, that’s a rather reductive characterisation (you see how sensational the unfettered imagination can be). Say rather that the music evokes the circle of life and death, and is more gratefully life-affirming than gloomy.

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. 

Brought to Book II: The Peter Bellamy Connection (key words: Rudolph Valentino, Grundy, Herman Melville, John Renbourn, Good Soldier Svejk)

There’s nothing like an old book for making tangible the reality of other people and other places, long since gone. I described how I came to be in possession of several boxes of tomes, dusty and otherwise – http://www.dyversemusic.com/2014/09/brought-to-book-table-talk-of-chris.html. Browsing through them, I fell to wondering about the people behind the inscriptions and signatures on the front leaves. All these refined, self-educating, intelligent people, happily oblivious to their own mortality and the concerns of future generations of book dealers. Book people (and record collectors) should take heed: we're none of us owners but custodians, because the lifespan of a book (or record, properly cared for) is greater than the lifespan of a human being.      

I wondered about Jack Atkinson, who was awarded a copy of The Sheik by E.M. Hull as a prize for regular attendance by Girlington Wesleyan Band of Hope on March 26, 1923, and was impressed by the broadmindedness of Girlington Wesleyan Band of Hope, who passed The Sheik (with a frontispiece photograph of current heartthrob Rudolph Valentino) as suitable reading for a lad of impressionable age. The altogether more edifying The Essays of Elia and Eliana by Charles Lamb, was clearly not intended as a giveaway: it was a fixture at the Zion Baptist Sunday School, Burnley, as two antique stamps, as old as the book (1867), reveal. 

And what was Neil Darlington doing taking out A Portrait of Britain From Peril to Pre-Eminence 1688-1851 (by Lindsay and Washington) from Marple Hall County Grammar School For Girls on "10/9/74"? Can we reasonably deduce that sometime between publication in 1962 and 1974, Marple Hall County Grammar School ceased to be a single-sex institution? An entire social history can be constructed from ephemera such as this. 

We already know something about R.B.S. Jones of Pembroke College, whose neat hand adorns The Way of All Flesh, Erewhon and Erewhon Revisited by Samuel Butler, E.L. Woodward’s History of England and Mrs Grundy: Studies in English Prudery by Peter Fryer. Chris Ackroyd: “I lodged for a while with one of my tutors, called Roger Jones, who died tragically young. He was descended from a duke. He was posh and he was clever: Oxbridge, Courtauld Institute. And some of the books that I’d bought off him (I didn’t nick them), he’d inscribed in the front, in very nice writing, “R.B.S. Jones”. Roger Jones sounds a bit common. Roger Beauchamp, and then I think Spencer, Jones. Maybe he was related to the Spencers. I know he was aristocracy. The only warm room in the house was his, now that I think about it.” 

But what stopped me in my tracks was the legend on the inside cover of a cheap, hardback USA edition ($1.75, The New American Library) of Typee by Herman Melville. It read, “Peter Bellamy, 11 Victoria Street, Norwich NR1 3QX Telephone: 0603 60411.” 

This can only be the late Peter Bellamy, the great Norfolk singer, celebrated for recordings  with the group Young Tradition and solo outings such as Merlin’s Isle of Gramarye and Tell It Like It Was (quite a few made by Bill Leader: you may remember that I’m writing a book about Bill Leader). Peter Bellamy moved from Norwich to Keighley, West Yorkshire, which is where he died and had a splendid funeral. 

The discovery led to an enquiry about the reading matter of sixties folk musicians, directed at John Renbourn.  I had recently interviewed the Pentangle guitarist in the course of my Bill Leader researches, and followed through with an email asking about the books he had in common with Nat Joseph, the chief of Transatlantic Records. Apparently, both had a passion for Elizabethan literature. This is Renbourn’s reply: – 

“Sir Gawain and the Green Knight was certainly one. Mallory’s Morte D’Arthur was probably another. We talked about John Donne and Robert Herrick. Other books that came obliquely into the folk equation for me were Jessie Weston’s From Ritual to Romance and Robert Graves’ The White Goddess. 

“Don’t remember discussing literature with Pete to be honest. He was clearly well read. Quite a coincidence that one of his books should have turned up. 

“Bert [Jansch] wasn’t a Goethe man as far as I’m aware [the German heritage and romantic sensibility had misled me]. He did enjoy The Good Soldier Svejk though. 

“Are you considering the sort of reading matter that would have been prevalent on the folk scene at the time? 

“Interesting slant if you are.”    

Manchester Jazz Festival Pt 3, Fri 25-Sun 27 July, with Matt Owens, Papanosh, Beats & Pieces, Parshmaune, Sam Healey, Paradise Trio, The Music Place Choir

Friday 25, Day 7 

Matt Owens

Keys is the subtitle of Matt Owens’ performance at St Ann’s Church, and there, squeezed in front of the altar-rails beside a grand piano, electric keyboard, two microphones and a tangle of cables, is a sculpture of keys hanging on strings. This is a sure indication that Kirsty Almeida is involved, because Kirsty excites creative energy across the boundaries. And so does Kirsty’s long-standing accomplice, Matt Owens. There is no doubt that Owens is a excellent bassist and peerless accompanist, but his own music is rich with a sense of limitless possibility.

David Muñoz, Matt Owens and John Ellis 

The opening piece - David Muñoz on piano and John Ellis on keyboard flank Owens on upright bass – sounds like the theme from some lush, glamorous and exciting film, perhaps made in the sixties. Rather prosaically, it has the working title, ‘New Idea’. The next piece, again freshly minted, is a tune with a gospel flavour called ‘Ray’. Its dedicatee is visible in the apse to the side, listening intently, and cradled in his mother’s arms. Then Kirsty puts down little Ray, takes a few steps to the altar front, and proceeds to sing a luminous new song called ‘Restless’, with music by Owens. 

It’s clear by now that Matt Owens has a genius for swooning melodies and is a pastoralist in the venerable musical tradition of George Butterworth, John Taverner and Mike Westbrook: his prowess on bass is just an incidental spin-off.  The realisation dawns on everyone in St Ann’s Church: this is my lucky day. 

And fortune continues to smile: with a playful piece described as “Tchaikovsky meets tango”, a spiritual invocation on which Ellis plays the church organ (an especially memorable moment, this) and an exploration of Latin America in tandem with pianist David Muñoz, who, with bursting heart, offers an unpremeditated autobiographical sketch (born in Chile in 1973, a terrible time and place). 

It’s less like a concert and more like being clasped to the bosom of an affectionate family, the experience was so intimate and, at times – like the communal singing during ‘Going Back to the Village’ – a sweet, sweet embarrassment.

David Muñoz, Kirsty Almeida and John Ellis 

 Papanosh

Papanosh (Festival Pavilion) are so French. But how? I mean, they eschew obvious signifiers like berets and striped jerseys and all those other silly cliches. Yet the fact remains: their music owes nothing to USA jazz, and precious little to British jazz. They have that peculiar Gallic attitude to pleasure, and abandon themselves with more intensity and strenuousness than the English have ever felt comfortable with. Their enthusiastic embrace of anarchy, too, is very French – the music is characterised by theatrical swerves of tone. And the idea of life as a carnival, and the circus as an apt metaphor for life’s absurdity: well, that is part Antonin Artaud and part Jacques Tati, and finds expression in the band’s freakish, fantastic inventiveness. Sebastien Palis’ organ is a surreal art object in itself, with its trailing wires and twinkling valves (it sounds great too, when he begins to play). Raphael Quenehen is a brilliant saxophonist, at one point blowing two horns simultaneously, just like Roland Kirk. And Quentin Ghomari, doubling on trumpet and trombone (though not at the same time), has an acute grasp of dynamics and engineers some mercurial changes. Of all the events at this year’s Manchester Jazz Festival, this is the one I would most like to relive, if the chance should come again. I was the person nodding off in the front row. 

* 

The modus operandi of the much vaunted Beats & Pieces Big Band (Festival Pavilion) is clear by the second number: big, brassy and populist, albeit with traces of ambiguity that hint at the genuinely radical. Once in every generation in every major conurbation in the developed world, some visionary musician will gather together the most conspicuously talented players of his generation and run with it. The readiest comparisons to Beats & Pieces in Manchester in the twenty-teens (is that the proper word?) would be Loose Tubes in London in the eighties, or the Stan Kenton Orchestra in L.A. in the fifties. Really, there is a comparable wealth of talent  – Sam Healey on saxophone is a real fire-breather, and I was impressed by trumpeter Nick Walters’ ability to surf the cacophony. The evident excitement and anticipation in the Pavilion is not confined to the audience alone. The fourteen musicians of Beats & Pieces gratefully seize the opportunity to transcend small group confines. 

The second half is all new, and exhilarating in its balance of large-scale musical concepts and individual freedom: though the charts were very complicated, there were only three music stands on stage. The unexpected appearance of David Bowie’s ‘Let’s Dance’ is a sop to populism. And dance we did (some of us), despite the complexity and shifting rhythms, and the deafening sound of the band in full cry (another reference point might be Buddy Rich). The genial director Ben Cottrell orchestrates all the thunderous roar.

Beats & Pieces Big Band

Saturday 26, Day 8 

A low-key day at the Festival, although I miss the best acts, receiving glowing word concerning The Wagon Train, Billy Buckley’s twanging poke about in USA roots, and Mr Wilson’s Second Liners live up to the buzz. “Glowing word” is an understatement; this is a declaration of love! (Actually directed at an individual in the group: I shall say no more.)

No, I catch Parshmaune (Festival Pavilion), who reflect the sensory overload of the inner city with lightning juxtapositions, quotations, merging rhythms, evolving jazz funk and real-time interventions by Timmy Montague, with the woolly hat and headphones at the back, intently peering into his laptop. Actually, his input is not so obvious, but, at a guess, he’s responsible whenever a hollow clang emerges from Tyrone Isaac-Stuart’s otherwise agile alto saxophone. There’s lots of urban immediacy, as when brief solos are exchanged, each topped with the ‘Here Comes the Bride’ jingle. This is presumably a comment on the constant steam of wedding parties emerging from the Town Hall opposite. 

Zuri Jarrett-Boswell, crouched over his keys, has the virtuosity to handle every situation, and Isaac-Stuart projects crafty mischievousness via his alto horn. His fellow saxophonist, Reiss Beckles, is a more diffident player. Jack Polley and Peter Hill (bass and drums) nicely dislocate the jazz funk conventions. Hearteningly, in Shirley Tetteh, the group contains that rare thing in jazz: a female guitarist. This means that  Deirdre Cartwright and Kathy Dyson are no longer alone. 

Occasionally MJF will employ a cabaret singer to fulfil their populist brief. This is always a mistake. For the finale of the last Saturday of the Festival, nouveau soul singer Charlie Cooper lives her Beyoncé fantasy in the big tent (Festival Pavilion) to overwhelming indifference. The spectacle is so dispiriting that I leave before the Hackney Colliery Band, another post-modern New Orleans-style marching band, can turn the situation around. 

Charlie Cooper

Sunday 27, Day 9 

Sam Healey, Luke Flowers and Stuart McCallum 

I and everyone else want to hear more of Sam Healey, who brought the house down at Beats and Pieces on Friday. But if the capacity crowd for the Sam Healey Quintet at the Fesitval Pavilion are, like me, expecting a blowing session shoot-out from the fastest saxophone in the West, we soon learn to adapt to a different reality. Healey tentatively lays out a theme on piano, and the musicians drift into a state of trance. The other mode is cathartic grandeur, which is the default mode of guitarist Stuart McCallum, which drummer Luke Flowers leavens with steamroller funk. Titles like ‘Death and Impermanence’ also set Healey apart from the common jazz herd. “I’ve never been good at titles,” he blushingly confesses. Here, his bravura technique is placed resolutely at the service of the sublime. After the show, jazz promoter Janet Higgins tells me that Healey, like herself, is a Buddhist, and suddenly the preceding events all make sense. She hands me a flyer for Healey’s upcoming date at The Slug and Lettuce (August 5th), and I promise I’ll be there. 

Richard Iles

In contrast, the Paradise Trio (Festival Pavilion) offer something I’ve searched for all Jazz Festival, possibly all my life. In a word: jazz. ‘Paradise’ is the right word, because jazz at this level of accomplishment contains rich spiritual nourishment, with the three musicians embodying distinct yet sympathetic varieties of beauty? Richard Iles’ flugelhorn pours forth an unbroken thread of burnished grace in linear space; whereas pianist Les Chisnall is a harmonist, and a profoundly elegant one, and Mike Walker, as we can readily hear, is simply the most songful guitarist in the world. The feeling is of limitless resource, and power held in check. Walker, a force of nature when inclined, favours weightless chords that float in the air, and essays a plangent lyricism that is one of the most affecting sounds in jazz. The music is paradisal too because it represents an ideal of life: Iles’ ‘Appleton Avenue’, Charlie Chaplin’s ‘Smile’ and, especially, Walker’s ‘The Clockmaker’, are luminous, transient moments to last for eternity. 

Les Chisnall

                                                                                              

                                                                                Mike Walker

The last word, however, comes from The Music Place Choir (Festival Pavilion), a sixty-strong community choir from Altrincham with a programme of Richard Rodgers tunes. It’s one of those gigs that disarm criticism. This is partly because of the inspirational leadership of Clare Morel, the sense of togetherness exuded by the ladies and gentlemen of the choir, the deathless potency of Rodgers’ melodies, and, well, the undeniable fact that everyone present is having a whale of a time. Or, if they’re not, their fixed smiles give a reasonable impression that they are. 

It’s disarming too, because Richard Rodgers and Ivor Novella were my own mother’s domestic muses. She used to sing these songs about the house when we were kids. How interesting to probe into the source of the songs that come unbidden into our heads. Coincidence and the subconscious play a large part. ‘It Might As Well Be Spring’, for example, is a great song to accompany the ceremony of spring cleaning, although the spring cleaner with her mop and bucket might be oblivious to the connection. Similarly, my mum was very fond of he’s-rubbish-but-I-love-him songs like ‘Bill (He’s Just My Bill)’ , again for fathomless reasons. ‘Edelweiss’, from the Choir’s repertoire, is a song associated in my mind with my first brush against Nazis.

The voices, effective in unison though fragile individually, are bolstered by a bona fide great voice in Alison Owen, whose flexibility and force derive from the more recent tradition of soul music, although the ladies and gentlemen of the choir are delighted to have her. There’s also a small jazz combo on hand, and again, t.l.a.g.o.t.c. are gratefully accommodating. The stirring, if secular, sound of sixty raised voices (plus audience) proclaiming, for the second time that afternoon, ‘Oh What a Beautiful Morning’ brings the 2014 Manchester Jazz Festival to a memorable close. Everyone agrees that it’s been a vintage year.   

    Clare Morel, Alison Owen and the Music Place Choir 

Manchester Jazz Festival Pt 2, Tue 22 - Thu 24 July, inc The Imaginary Delta, The Bad Plus, Ex-Easter Island Head, Engine Room Favourites, Tin Men & The Telephone

Tuesday 22, Day 4 

Carles Benavent and Jordi Bonell 

Jaco Pastorius is the obvious role-model for any bass virtuoso who dares to elevate the instrument beyond its simple time-keeping role, although they might want wish to be spared his martyrdom. Carles Benavent is better placed than anyone to fill that Pastorius-shaped hole. Presumably Miles Davis, Paco de Lucía and Chick Corea thought so when they employed him. And he is less obviously tormented – as far as one can tell from his personable stage manner – and his cultural inheritance, which includes the richest of the Spanish flamenco tradition, transfers very nicely to the bass. 

Benavent’s bass playing is mellifluous, attractive, and fluid. Sometimes he played in unison with his guitarist partner, Jordi Bonell, and sometimes he played in counterpoint, so the extraordinary profusion of notes not only doubled but multiplied: the effect was like riding on a bubbling current of rhythm. 

He played a song dedicated to Jaco Pastorius, and another one dedicated to Paco de Lucía called ‘De perdidos al río’, which, Benavent usefully translated, means “If you get lost, go to the river”. On ‘Por dioss’ Bonell tried out another guitar sound, which was fuzzier and dirtier (I wonder how they would sound on two acoustic guitars? As beautiful as Segovia, I expect.) The two men were now trading solos with implausible precision, and making a game of telepathy in their duets. A blues in bulerías rhythm turned out to be ‘Footsteps’ by Wayne Shorter. 

It was all very intricate, very busy, very Spanish and vastly enjoyable. 

Jackie Kay and Adam Fairhall 

You know this lot (The Imaginary Delta, RNCM Theatre) could have been the next Ukelele Orchestra of Great Britain if they’d listened to me. They had the potential to be quite as crowd-pulling, with music that drew on trad jazz (lovingly reinterpreting ancient jazz idioms with a freshness that came as an electric shock) and the hard-core avant-garde (albeit with all the portentousness and boring bits removed) . There was a theatrical element that could be developed, and the paranormal aspect was a unique selling-point – when the long-gone singer Victoria Spivey was summoned from blues Valhalla to join forces with the band: well, that was a priceless piece of coup de theatre to set alongside the elephants in Aida. 

Instead, The Imaginary Delta have reconvened for an evening of ‘jazz and poetry’. These dread words are usually an instant turn-off, but anything touched by Adam Fairhall, a homegrown autodidact and musical genius, is bound to be good. My faith is justified before even a note is played, when the wonderful vibes player Corey Mwamba makes an unannounced entrance alongside the other musicians. 

Hard to imagine it working as well with any other poet than Jackie Kay (except perhaps Nikki Giovanni). Kay has a modest bearing, a Scottish accent that exudes warmth, and an openness that cuts to the emotional heart. And she is a very good poet. Fairhall has provided settings for her series of poems about Bessie Smith. “Every note she sang, she bent her voice to her will,” ran one line. The same might be said of Kay, who overcomes her evident nervousness, and never misses a cue. 

The music is new, with Fairhall finding just the right sound textures for Kay’s images: say, Corey’s thumb-piano to suggest the desolation of the Deep South as Bessie’s Pullman trundles past. New, even when the stately ‘Arabian Fantasy’ triggers recognition with the avidity of the Imaginary Delta’s Greatest Hit. And here it is, the disembodied voice of Ivy Smith (Ivy, rather than Bessie), miraculously reconfigured by Paul J Rogers’ stick remote. New, I say, because the following solos by James Allsopp on bass clarinet, Chris Bridges on trombone (who has obviously absorbed both Roy Williams and Alan Tomlinson) and Steve Chadwick on cornet are fresh minted and of the moment. What is explicit in the poetry is implicit in Steve Chadwick’s horn, which combines elegance and immensity in a way that would be familiar to turn-of-the-twentieth-century New Orleans. 

A dead-march is inspired by Kay’s image of a graveyard where Bessie’s ghost haunts her lovers. The music then follows the archetypal pattern of a New Orleans funeral: Fairhall dispels the dirge with some steaming train time boogie woogie, and the other musicians leap aboard, heroic in their affirmation of life’s energies. They stand as a symbol of generations of musicians who have given their all and who, in the end, have shared the fate of Bessie Smith: “she had a laugh, and that was all she had.”   

Adam Fairhall, Chris Bridges, Steve Chadwick, Tim Fairhall, James Allsopp, Gaz Hughes, Corey Mwamba and Paul J Rogers  

Wednesday 23, Day 5 

Two pianists, or rather, a pianist and a piano trio divert me today. Alexander Hawkins (St Ann’s Church) draws equally on jazz and classical, as much Messiaen as Duke Ellington, but both are transformed by Hawkins’ bravura technique. He may dazzle with cascades of notes, or - such are the dynamic extremes - charm with a serene and airy lyricism. The music he extracts is rich, serious and elevated, and seems to belong in the beautiful and sacred space of St Ann’s Church. 

Alexander Hawkins

When he calms a bit, the listener catches echoes of the past – a glimpse of Gershwin, perhaps, or Mussorgsky offering Pictures at an Exhibition in some grand saloon. This, it must be said, is akin to the eye making out faces from the random patterns on an ancient mossy wall. Then something tangible emerges from the tonal thicket, and what’s more, it’s recognisably jazz: a fantastic re-imagining of ‘Take the A Train’. Hesitant at first, the train starts with spluttering, spasmodic runs before gathering speed at an alarming rate. It’s derailed a few times by fugitive rhythms, but that only adds to the excitement. And then in, short order, following the logic of free association and the community of jazz genii, Hawkins essays ‘Love in Outer Space’ by Sun Ra, replicating each part of the Arkestra, including the percussion, on one or more of the 88 keys of the piano, which, the way Hawkins plays, is a one-man Arkestra. 

His open-ended explorations last precisely the hour allotted in the schedule, and end as they began, with Hawkins bent under the lid of the piano, crooning “siii” and “saaa” into the piano’s interior, listening hard to the resonance. 

The Bad Plus

The Bad Plus enter the large stage of the dark auditorium of RNCM Theatre and pianist Ethan Iverson essays a simple theme of song-like simplicity; the bass enters; Iverson fills in the chords with atonal harmonies, reshaping the piece. David King, on drums increases the intensity with a splashing cymbal and emphatic backbeat. Now the tune is positively florid and King is giving it ten to the dozen, but the original tune can still be detected beneath the frenetic activity. The climax comes: pp suddenly follows ff (a favourite trick of The Bad Plus). The simple theme is restored in its dying fall. A snare beat signals finality; rapturous applause and whoops follow. This is ‘Pound For Pound’ by bassist Reid Anderson, and it characterises The Bad Plus methodology and The Bad Plus appeal. Anticipation sharpens about what will come next. 

‘The Empire Strikes Backward’ (cute titles are another feature) has a trickier time signature and more strenuous activity, and illustrates the trio’s ability to deliver hummable melodies in 7/8 time. ‘Gold Prisms Incorporated’ utilises repetitive chords and boasts a pounding back beat, but the mock rock is subverted by a passage of free time and ascending chordal arpeggios are set to a dark, ominous drone. The music fractures completely, before the bombastic riff makes a conquering return, only to be superseded in another quick change by a new far-out rhythm. A bass solo climaxes this piece and more ravenous applause follows. 

And so it goes on. There were more players in The Imaginary Delta at last night’s concert in the theatre, but somehow the trio seem larger, and their presence expands to fill the space in inverse ratio to actual physical size. I ponder this during Iverson’s solo on ‘You Are’, a practical application of Bach-like mathematics to the chamber jazz format. Heads are now involuntarily nodding.      

Me, I think it was great as prog-rock but deficient as jazz, and, personally, I regard jazz as the higher art-form. The promised performance of Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring didn’t materialise. I have mixed feelings about this. 

Thursday 24, Day 6 

Ex-Easter Island Head

Ex-Easter Island Head (St Ann’s Church) seemed to have stumbled upon a new method of making music, which is quite an achievement at this stage of the game. Benjamin D. Duvall, Jonathan Herring and Ben Fair lay electric guitars on a flat surface and beat them with mallets. There are a few refinements, which would be mysterious even if my view wasn’t obstructed in the 12th pew down: the direction the guitars face seems to be important, and the spot on the guitar body where the strike lands affects the sound. With an overlay of (conventional) percussion and augmented by discreet electronics, EEIH sound like a cross between a gamelan orchestra and Velvet Underground. 

Then, not content with pioneering one innovative instrumental technique, EEIH have come up with another. Again, I’m not sure how they did this, but gently tapping the strings with a trembling hand and waving the other hand over the guitar, as if it were a theramin, produce ethereal, oscillating chords that quiver in the air. Then it’s back to the mallets and slapping. But this was not horrible noise. On the contrary, it was beguiling and hypnotic. If it was shocking, it was shocking because it was so new, but the music was more mellifluous than not. When something resembling an orthodox thrash emerged towards the end, the effect was transcendent. I have seen the future of rock ’n’ roll… 

Martin Archer and Mick Beck with Seth Bennett 

Martin Archer is the chief engineer of Engine Room Favourites (Festival Pavilion). He cavorts about the place with a mischievous grin and orchestrates the mayhem by waving his arms. Everywhere there is a welter of taps, rustles, bangs, scrapes and whirrs (I was going to add bonks, forgetting my childhood lexicon of rude words) from the four-strong percussion team (including veteran drummer/composer Peter Fairclough). Sometimes, as in the opening piece, they pull off a user-friendly Coltrane: it’s Ascension without the tears, with Corey Mwamba bopping brightly on the bottles as Archer offers long legato phrases on the soprano saxophone, and Graham Clark (at the tip of the hat from Archer) responds with an extraordinarily lovely yet astringent fiddle solo. 

What’s great about Engine Room Favourites is the spontaneity and freshness. The music never stops evolving, but it invariably grows into something quite unexpected. There are champion soloists like Mick Beck on tenor sax, but the usual head-solo-solo-head thing is not an option: instead, individuals work in odd combinations – vibes and piano; vibes, bass and tenor; or soprano alone – the better to counter the barrage of percussion that shadows their every move. Or they may attempt lone acts of rhythmic derring-do, say speeding up or retarding the beat. This encounters a warm response from Seth Bennett, an unstoppable force of nature on bass. 

And then, in the tumult of the climactic number (did they call it ’Satin Lantern’?), there’s another surprise: the musicians, who have all been pushing and pulling in their various ways towards the shared goal of ecstasy, suddenly all gel and play a proper written theme which coalesces into surging groove-music! 

It was extraordinary, and all the more valuable for providing a glimpse into a vibrant and hidden music scene, one totally off the London radar. Engine Room Favourites thrive in Sheffield and environs, and amount to nothing less than a revolutionary revelation!      

* 

Of course, MJF has always been susceptible to high concepts, so when Tin Men and the Telephone (RNCM Theatre), a piano trio from Amsterdam, propose a technologically interactive, ideas-based performance, it meets with a ready response from the Festival promoters. 

Ideas like what? Oh, accompanying a Sharápova tennis match at Wimbledon, projected onto a screen backkdrop: a groovy vamp for when play is interrupted, and ‘Someday My Prince Will Come’ for sustained volleys. Or shaping melodies for a cut-up commentary from the recent World Cup (the words “de bal” featured heavily). Or, having successfully matched melody with human speech, attempting the same trick with a herd of cows (the bow of bassist Lucas Dols comes in handy here). In a nice touch, the on-screen cows turn their heads en-masse in the direction of the music. 

Best of all, audience members are invited to turn on their mobile phones and influence the performance according to some on-screen directions (“faster”, “bass solo”, “please stop now” etc.) The suspicion grew that the ideas were more interesting than the music, which was a bit like throwaway Bad Plus, but it was certainly entertaining.

Tin Men and the Telephone  

Diego Amador, described as a flamenco piano player (which would be something to see), is not having a good night. His original error, from which he never really recovers, is to share a double-bill with Tin Men and the Telephone.