The Jazz in Britain label have been issuing so many new CDs that I can’t keep up with reviews! They specialise in what I tend to think of as fairly mainstream jazz from the 1980s, often rescued from private live or studio recordings.
That’s Our Life by Alan Skidmore’s Tenor Tonic showcases some prolonged tenor saxophone playing by Skidmore and Paul Dunmall over Paul Rogers’ fluidly rhythmic bass and Tony Levin’s clattering drums. The music ebbs and flows, occasionally becoming almost Coltranesque in it’s explorations before changing course for more straightforward blowing. The double CD features rehearsals, studio recordings and two different live dates, whilst all three CDs of Danny Thompson’s Whatever’s On The Road are taken from different live dates.
I got to know Danny Thompson playing through his recordings with Nick Drake and John Martyn, then a super live duo concert with Richard Thompson, so the CD booklet’s assumption that listeners knew him first through Pentangle is not always correct. Surprisingly, the tracks here often include a folk-rock influence as much as jazz, which isn’t how I remember the band’s first album at all! Paul Dunmall is again present on most of the music, as is John Etheridge on guitar, although he seems slightly underused. Again, the music sounds less experimental than I remember at the time, but Thompson’s bass is excellent throughout and there are moments of real delight, particularly during the 1993 Exeter concert on CD3, which contains a previously unrecorded extended piece, ‘The A38 Suite – The Road West’, and which I am pretty sure I was present at!
Dave Green is another bass player I have seen a few times live. He appears on Gordon Beck’s Pay Now, Live Later CD, which also features Spike Wells on drums, Ray Warleigh on alto and flute, and Ian Ballamy moonlighting from the then very trendy Loose Tubes big band. Gordon Beck is of course playing piano. It’s all very tasteful but a little bit mannered for my taste. (It makes me think of the Fast Show’s jazz presenter: ‘Nice!’) John Taylor is a superb piano player, especially within Azimuth and solo, but on Quintessence, an album with Stan Sulzmann on soprano and the Rundfunkorchester Hanover des NDR, his playing and tunes are buried within ornate and distracting orchestral fripperies, which mostly remind me of the Moody Blues’ Days of Future Passed album, which is not a good thing. Sulzmann comes of a little better than Taylor as his sax manages to cut through the orchestra but in general I am not keen.
Best of all the bunch is Larry Stabbins’ And the birds sang, seven duets: three with Keith Tippett from Maida Vale Studios in 1983, and four recorded live with Louis Moholo-Moholo in 2000. The album opens with 15 minutes of argumentative saxophone and cascading piano asides and comments, whilst ‘Savannah’ the second track and first with Moholo-Moholo sees Stabbins’ bright blowing underpinned with subtle and dynamic drumming. The third track sees more light and space in music made by the same duet, whilst ‘The Rains Came and the Birds Sang’ starts with a warbling sax, like a fly in the room, and abstract voice from Tippet before his piano slowly enters the music. There’s lovely echoing saxophone here, and/or multiphonic blowing, carefully punctuated by exquisite clusters of piano notes. It’s probably my favourite track.
‘Montane’ sees Stabbins slowing down a little and playing over even more restrained drumming, although by the end there are some great bursts of honking and machine-gun drum sounds, whilst the sixth track feels similarly organised to ‘Savannah’. The CD closes with the final Tippett and Stabbins duet, ‘Inside and Outisde’, which also contains three minutes of ‘Every Time We Say Goodbye’. The whole track feels about loss, with mournful saxophone over careful piano notes that gradually unfold into an airy slow arrangement of the Cole Porter. It’s a beautiful, elegiac ending to the album.
.
.
Rupert Loydell
.