The leaves began to fade
Like promises we made
How could a love that seemed so right go wrong?
– Sammy Cahn from ‘The Things We Did Last Summer’
“I’ll remember all winter long”: Newcomer Alice Milburn (25) is an English jazz singer from Portsmouth, doyenne of the Vaults regular jazz night in Southsea. Much more than a demo or statement of intent First Expressions was recorded in the Hampshire summer at a Gosport studio.
If you like Stacey Kent and Naama you will be in your element dipping into these things she did last summer. Very girl next door it’s the show song type Broadway and bebop “classic” approach to the genre driving things along. So it’s retro and very much a period piece. Milburn has a persuasive voice. She’s an old soul. It’s an enjoyably mercifully uncheesy profile raising start to getting to know her sound.
Covers include the 1930s James F. Hanley Thumbs Up song that Renée Zellweger performed on the soundtrack for brilliant 2019 Judy Garland biopic Judy, ‘Zing Went the Strings of My Heart.’
First Expressions is not dark as night or torch song fodder which I prefer. But nevertheless I liked her ingénue take on the Jule Styne and Sammy Cahn 1940s classic that Frank Sinatra interpreted ‘The Things We Did Last Summer’ that has a vibrant bass contribution from bassist George Balmont. There’s a throw your head back gleefulness to the Milburn vocal too on the singer’s winning treatment of ‘It’s Almost Like Being in Love’ later on the song when the verse is carefully negotiated and the formidable scatting kicks in so when the words return it’s like she has shed a skin and found a new carefree spirit inside.
With the singer are also keyboardist Saul Hughes and drummer Josh Turn plus musical director trombonist Lloyd Pearce who solos on Milburn original ‘Brief Company’. The lyrics despair at the flakiness of a man desirous perhaps of a one night stand. The voice has confidence and personality.
‘Brief Company’ and ‘Zing Went the Strings of My Heart’ are among tracks streaming so far. The full album is out on 24 October. Scat is this steeped in the romance of the songs jazz thoroughbred’s strongest suit.
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Jody Sternberg, Sea of Love, Bonsaï Music ***1/2
Gabi Hartmann-meets-Mina Agossi-meets-Florence Joelle – that kind of space the style lands in
Sternberg, who I think is from Oz and is on the Paris scene, is known perhaps most for her brief work with Morcheeba, has an unusual, minor-key voice. There’s a sort of savoury bluesiness to it. But this album is more jazz than blues. Her slightly askew intonation and enunication but actually the more you listen spot on pitching at a husky contralto height give the record a sort of transgressive frisson which is always welcome. It’s not especially camp in the overly knowing everything in inverted quote marks cabaret sense that often sits well with a jazz vocals approach. But she doesn’t do innuendo and the songs canter rather than go the full gallop into vocal acrobatics or anything like that. It’s too laidback for that.
I’m not really being overly charitable at all or damning the release with faint praise. But I’d be telling a fib if I didn’t say I find the album a bit uneven. Because the middle songs aren’t so good and the album becomes a bit soggy almost to a disastrous extent. However, all is salvaged later. And reader you know I have a soft spot for it ultimately and keep drifting back to hear bits of it on repeat.
The title track, ‘Sea of Love’ (written by Phil Phillips), opens the album with an understated, bluesy warmth. The cinematic ‘One More Kiss, Dear’ (composed by Vangelis) features a deep-toned duet with French vocalist Arthur H which is fun. ‘Dearest Lord’ (a traditional arrangement) is also quite a moment, the bassist does sterling work. Another highlight is ‘Buzzing Bee,’ where Sternberg sets her own not at all annoying words to Freddie Hubbard’s classic ‘Little Sunflower.’ A character-rich release then. Play its best bits lots.
- Sternberg is playing Sunset in Paris tomorrow night.
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Zak Irvine – Finding My Voice
Introducing Zak Irvine who hails from the seaside spot of Bangor, North Down – the so-called Gold Coast. It’s a short train ride away from Belfast. His debut is due soon. He often plays with Ben Watson on drums and Phil Acheson on bass, plus Michael McDowell on saxophone and Tom Wall on trumpet.
My mum is a classical pianist and music teacher. She taught me from the get-go, and while I took to the piano naturally enough to finish my Grade 8 by the time I was 15, I absolutely hated practising. Standard drilling bored me. Instead, I’d take an eight-bar phrase from whatever piece I was supposed to be learning, abandon the sheet music, and just start developing it into something else.
I didn’t even really listen to music properly until I was about 13 or 14. My entry point wasn’t jazz or classical masters; it was film composers like Thomas Newman and Hans Zimmer.
Studying those massive, atmospheric scores in school was the first time music felt truly alive to me.
When I moved to Bangor Grammar at 15, the Head of Music, Paul O’Reilly, handed me a saxophone and immediately integrated me into the school jazz band. I went on to do my Grade 8 on tenor sax, and while I loved the arrangements and the freedom of learning how to improvise, I still hadn’t found that one thing that connects your soul to the keys.
He played me ‘Maiden Voyage’ / ‘Everything In Its Right Place’ – a brilliant, genre-bending mashup of a Radiohead tune and a classic Herbie Hancock standard. The harmony, the rhythmic interplay – wow. I was blown away. I took that record home and couldn’t stop listening to it. I had absolutely no idea how those musicians were doing what they were doing, but it opened a doorway. It led me down a rabbit hole into hip-hop and R&B, genres I didn’t even realise were so heavily saturated with jazz harmony. I just fell in love with the chords.
The Real Education
By the time university rolled around, I was so obsessed that I chose to study music at Queen’s. Academically, it wasn’t the right fit for my jazz interests, but it brought something much better into my life: meeting the incredible pianist Scott Flanigan, who became my mentor.
I looked at him completely blankly. “What do you mean ‘play’? There’s no music on the page. Where is it coming from?”
From that exact moment, I realised jazz isn’t played by the mind, it moves through your body and your soul. I was hooked.
Through Scott’s guidance and cutting my teeth playing a vast array of live gigs, I discovered my own lane. I might be mostly self-taught, and maybe I’m still chasing the title of a true “jazz pianist,” but one thing is for sure: when you hear me play, it is from the heart. It’s real, it’s alive, and I thank God for it. Everything I do is rooted in my deep Christian faith, and I’ve always felt that the act of pure improvisation goes hand-in-hand with my Creator. He gave me this gift, and playing is how I worship.
A Shock to the System
The story of how this debut EP, Before Dusk and Dawn, actually came to be is a bit of a whirlwind. To be blunt: it was a beautifully rushed process.
Last year, I was playing a gig with my band at The Courthouse in Bangor. Dr. Linley Hamilton MBE happened to be in the audience. He came up afterward, told us we were sounding great, and asked me to give him a shout the next day for a chat. I had no clue what it was about.
I panicked. “What? No, don’t be silly. I’ve never wanted to do that. I don’t write tunes, I’m not an ‘artist.’ No way.”
Linley didn’t care about my imposter syndrome. He went ahead and booked the studio for two months later, and suddenly, that was that. Zak Irvine, the artist. It was a dream I’d never even permitted myself to have because I didn’t think it was possible.
I had to get to work fast – select a band of the finest young musicians around, and actually write the music.
I locked myself at the piano and thankfully, the ideas came. ‘Haze’ and ‘Ember’ were born out of those sessions, and I feel they are the strongest compositions I’ve ever written.
‘No.3’ is a snapshot of pure spontaneity, a live jam we captured right there on the tracking day.
Finally, ‘In Motion’ was a piece I originally wrote for my final recital at Queen’s, refashioned for the band.
The artwork for the EP features a photograph of a sunrise. I’ve always wanted to capture music through the lens of nature and God’s creation; for me, music and the natural world go completely hand-in-hand.
That quick turnaround gave me the ultimate kick up the backside, forcing me to overcome the fear that I wasn’t good enough. Fast forward a few months, and the first single was somehow featured on Jamie Cullum’s BBC Radio 2 show.
I will be forever grateful to Linley for his fierce passion and his desire to push young musicians entirely out of their comfort zones to achieve things they thought were impossible.
– Before Dusk and Dawn is out on 21 June. Zak plays Magy’s Farm on release day.
September dates include American Bar, Belfast; Matt and Phred’s, Manchester; Pizza Express Live, London; Scott’s Jazz Club, Belfast.
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- Jody Sternberg, Sea of Love, Bonsaï Music ***1/2
- Zak Irvine – Finding My Voice
- Ron Carter, Yotam Silberstein, Duets, Jojo ****1/2
- Road trip notes – Diary entries
- BELIEVE, beleft, below playlist themed
Ron Carter, Yotam Silberstein, Duets, Jojo ****1/2
But it wasn’t like dancing in the dark with a new artist. Unless you have been living under a stone or are a non-jazz fan you must know of these incredible players. Luckily – and isn’t it frustrating when for reasons of bad luck or being in the wrong place at the wrong time you miss out on players you know you want to hear – I have heard both players separately but not together. Second Great Miles Davis Quintet bassist Ron I heard at Ronnie’s Scott’s in 2009 – reviewed here; and guitarist Yotam Silbertstein was in the group of the great Jamaican Monty Alexander at the Malta Jazz Festival in 2011 reviewed here. So I knew their great quality and just what they can do up to a point. While a more mainstream player Silberstein – not remotely as well known as Carter who made jazz history with Miles – is every bit as good a player as the much more fêted Kurt Rosenwinkel whose level of musicianship he is completely on the same page as if not stylistically.
Ron who is now 89 released a rather touching gospel album this year – an aisle be having you affair, Sweet Sweet Spirit which I dug quite a bit. But being a bit of a heathen I far prefer this secular release, new since – Duets.
Gentle, extremely, even you could gloss it as. Ultra melodic? Not saccharine in the least all this harmonising and adumbration of a selection of elegantly paced themes. The only tunes I knew beforehand were ‘The Lamp Is Low’ which has fab fast walking bass from Ron and ‘They Say It’s Wonderful’ that coincidentally I heard live sung by marvellous Marvin Muoneké last week in Cadogan Hall at a very pleasant gig lit up by Winston Clifford – actually the best gig of the 4 or 5 that I have attended so far this year.
What I love best here and I love it all is the treatment of 1930s Vernon Duke number ‘What Is There To Say’ that Ella sang in the 50s with Ellis Larkins. Johnny Hartman sang it during the same decade on Songs from the Heart.
I luckily saw Griffin who died in 2008, a few times, once in Wales and closer to home in Foyle’s bookshop where I once worked selling books as a basement underling down in the Eng Lang section to legendary doyen of the shop the eccentric playwright Giles Armstrong whose scripts for radio plays I used to read when I got home to my little room in Arnold Road, Tottenham at the time where I was living in a shared house with a few nice people who included Welsh show singer Samantha Lavender who went on to be in Which Witch and Chess and an Irish violinist from Belfast Clare McSherry as she was then who now runs Musical Chairs in Manchester. A mate of Sam’s came along with me the first time I went to Ronnie Scott’s which was to hear Cuban wiz Arturo Sandoval in 1990. Not sure if Giles’ intricately plotted drawing room epics ever got broadcast on Radio 4 which is what he wanted (and by god they put out a lot worse in their dismal post Archers afternoon slump of a mid-afternoon slot sometimes) – hope they did.
The Little Giant did a great version of ‘If I Should Lose You’ that stays with me still. Back in the autumn I found that like here people still play the Little Giant’s tunes as the Tubbyologist Simon Spillett interpreted ‘Sunny Monday’ at a gig in the Bohemia in my long time home turf of Finchley.
And again as on Duets I came away with a smile. (Geezer: who wants to grimace to the creaking gate of the species all night long unless feeling in a masochistic frame of mind, again?)
I find it frustrating that real heartland style jazz as here is neglected by a new generation of seriously misled fans who get their kicks on the emperor’s new clothes non-toe tappery of nu jazz which to me is not rewarding given its unerring urge to pose and rash of performative we’re on a roof terrace, again, in a carpark, get us dull Peckham-itis.
You could spend all day long and I do and still find new things, little exquisite details, to hear like discovering the source of the Nile for the first time on this beautiful album.
This review just skims the surface and obviously bleats on a bit irrelevantly (apols) but hope you glean the gist of what I’m trying to tease out. In the blizzard of the Internet when quality is so often forsaken and neglected in favour of aural bric a brac and tacky trifles that make jingles suddenly seem like Mozart and hideous muzak somehow as beautiful as a Modigliani, somebody has to point the obvious out – jazz like this will outlive us all.
“Beautiful, also, are the souls of my people” – Langston Hughes.
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- Jody Sternberg, Sea of Love, Bonsaï Music ***1/2
- Zak Irvine – Finding My Voice
- Ron Carter, Yotam Silberstein, Duets, Jojo ****1/2
- Road trip notes – Diary entries
- BELIEVE, beleft, below playlist themed
Road trip notes – Diary entries
“Us intellectuals keep anti-social hours. It does us good.”
– Sue Townsend, The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole, Aged 13¾ (1982)
Monday
Like most mornings, after I get up and have coffee, I write an article for Marlbank. Monday was no different. You get into habits, don’t you even at the crack of dawn. They are not always useful. It can become drudgery even when it doesn’t seem like that at the time.
Fussing over stats, I wonder why I even read them, numbers are way down I discovered. Not an ideal way to start the week. This year has been hard for the blog. I have been thinking of calling it a day. After all I have given it a good go. But it hasn’t really achieved what I set out for it to do. The objective was to run it like a job with some income and enough to keep me going. That was quite naive. But then again I haven’t changed and used to earn a living doing this sort of thing in print. So I suppose there was a logic to starting Marlbank.
Since I was a teenager, I have been involved in lots of publications, setting up quite a few. Mostly they were just for fun, certainly in the early days. I still get a kick out of conjuring something up – like pulling a rabbit out of a hat when there is nothing there.
I occasionally bump into old school friends who remember Eye Private, a satirical paper I wrote and edited in sixth form, based of course on Private Eye. It was far more fun than editing the school magazine, or later at university editing the literature society publication, or Industrial Horizon, a magazine I helped a mate with. I enjoyed writing film reviews for the official student union paper more, and dabbled in angst-ridden poetry, wanting to be the next Beckett (still a ludicrous aspiration and pipe dream of mine—I need to work on my miserabilist chops again, note to self—and learn to speak in lofty tones. I’m currently sucking on a marble and looking across distant waters as a start).
And I don’t want to forget’ sings Etta James
Tuesday
Only in it for the money
I did my usual podcast and wrote the piece above on Tuesday. I wondered if it would get any reaction. Am I hung up? Nope. Are we just in it for the money? Royal we, eh, ain’t that grand. I just gentrified the sentence. Arise Sir Blogshite. But also neggatore, buster. But see Friday’s entry for more on the big reveal. Yay, again a sign of arrested development – I’ll be going whoop, whoop next – one response. Better than none. Sob. But what an interesting first time caller.
I didn’t mean to be negative or gloomy in the piece above, I was just trying to be honest and muse on what’s happening. I’m sure I’m not alone as AI starts to make our lives topsy turvy. If I do decide to stop the blog, I’ll be happy with that decision, but I really need something or someone else to write for to fill the void. Otherwise, I’ll: a) be bored, b) get distracted, or c) start writing novels again. What’s the prize? First prize: I’ll write a novel for you. Second prize I’ll write two.
Danced at the Fillmore
I’m completely stoned
I’m hippy and I’m trippy, I’m a gypsy on my own
I’ll stay a week and get the crabs and take a bus back home
I’m really just a phony but forgive me ’cause I’m stoned
From Frank Zappa’s ‘Who Needs The Peace Corps?’ from The Mothers of Invention’s We’re Only In It For The Money (Verve, 1968)
Like most writers, I write not out of noble inspiration but because an inner despot keeps tapping his watch and clearing his throat. I paused to listen to a Frank Zappa classic – always useful when you need reminding not to take yourself too seriously. I didn’t make it to Frisco, but yes – straight up – during my trip to London this week, my old stomping ground for more than 25 years (and still my adopted home), I did indeed “pass a wig store” over in… Finsbury Park.
Wednesday
I was dog tired when I caught the plane in the afternoon. But luckily I revived later and went over to the Vortex to review Oltremare. It was a pretty decent gig. I had heard several of the players before and truth be told went over because Ivo Neame was the piano player in the band. However I came away with a new found admiration for the writing ability of bassist Andrea Di Biase. He’s on one of my favourite albums of the year Bruno Heinen The W album Mikrokosmos which is very different.
Thursday
There was a tube strike affecting travelling a bit later when I was returning from attending a gig led by Marvin Muoneké [pronounced a bit like “Monica” I discovered] and Mark Lockheart at Cadogan Hall. It was a bit too early in the day for me. The Cadogan Hall foyer room where the event took place is pretty plush. But it wasn’t too stuffy an occasion and the sound quality was fine even stood lurking at the back.
Friday
My last gig of the week was a folk flavoured turn down the lamp affair led by singer Immy Churchill. She’s excellent and the best new singer I have heard in at least a few years. I wonder what the EP will be like when it is released, there was a glimpse of it among the Joni Mitchell, James Taylor and Elliott Smith songs.
“The food must be good – 3,000 flies can’t be wrong”
Earlier I was about to have lunch in an old haunt, a place I hadn’t been in for years. The ownership had changed. But on the face of it the joint still looked and felt the same. Just as grotty as ever. And not even lovably but I was happy enough to sit there, gaze around and hope I didn’t get food poisoning. What was that great Ronnie Scott’s joke? “The food must be good – 3,000 flies can’t be wrong.”
My phone pinged as I sat munching the obligatory burger and sipping flat but not unpleasant Guinness. And I read an email from a reader called Wayne (I changed his name as I don’t think his email as attributed was meant for publication). The reader had obviously taken a bit of trouble to get in touch. It was so nice of him. He, hopefully it wasn’t a bot, mentioned his appreciation of the reviews and my frustration referred to in Tuesday’s post that numbers are down. He also said he uses an RSS reader to check on what’s new on the site, something that I didn’t realise people did any more so that was insightful. He said he was a long time tech person and that “I really hate the direction tech has taken over the years, walled gardens, gamified attention, egregious advertising tech and surveillance. Now with AI summaries and AI scraping bots we’re ruining another facet of the open web. So I can sympathise with your position.”
What he went on to say which I totally agree with is [well I would do, obviously given self-interest in not becoming completely and irredemably obsolescent] that he feels “we need human curators for music (or culture in general)” and as a jazz novice he needs guidance.
I must say I feel the same when it comes to certain genres and my solution is often to read music journalism preferably accompanied by listening examples as I get fed up reading reviews without having the audio to follow along the gist of the writing.
Saturday
I always feel like this when I return from a burst of gig reviewing. I just want to keep doing it. There is so much out there and it certainly feeds into album reviewing when that resumes as the music has come alive. I am often puzzled by the approach of some reviewers who rarely venture out to venues to hear the music live. I know it isn’t always possible but listening to records only without hearing jazz live is like going to a restaurant and not being able to smell or taste the food.
Cliché alert I know, it’s scratching that creative itch day in day out and cheaper than therapy. Oliver Burkeman writing about How To Write A Lot in 2011 says the process is dull. “But that’s exactly as it should be: it makes creativity non-intimidating, and thus it makes creativity actually happen. Resistance slinks away, bored by your down-to-earth persistence, baffled by its unbruised buttocks”. So: onwards, beyond all begrudgery is the motto. Never mind the bloggers: cut us a bit of slack it’s a harmless pursuit is the plea. Give us a “p” Bob in the pursuit of the next blockbuster.
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BELIEVE, beleft, below playlist themed
Gems from John Coltrane, EST, Pat Metheny, Kenny Dorham, Bill Evans and Tony Bennett & more won’t make you feel at all bereft
MORE FROM MARLBANK
- Jody Sternberg, Sea of Love, Bonsaï Music ***1/2
- Zak Irvine – Finding My Voice
- Ron Carter, Yotam Silberstein, Duets, Jojo ****1/2
- Road trip notes – Diary entries
- BELIEVE, beleft, below playlist themed
Trish Clowes, Try Me, Stoney Lane **** recommended
A 21st century Dickensian dimension emerges that deconstructs in part a modern sense of London inspired by landscape
Try me – odd title but direct enough. There’s nothing new under the sun. But it is a world away from the doo-wop found on James Brown and the Famous Flames’ song of the same name from the 1950s. So for starters what’s here from My Iris [the band name] is flavoured by Hammond organ and guitar
And yet it isn’t just one thing. As beyond the soul jazz you get experimentation and much else. Tunes were inspired by a wintry walk from Rotherhithe to Blackfriars Bridge.
I suppose you could claim this is Clowes’ London album, perhaps the first of several given how coherent the inspiration proved. On a certain level this is quondam Shrewsbury saxist Trish Clowes’ most mainstream release to date. What I mean by “mainstream” is not that it swings so relentlessly you could find yourself rattling down to Balham, gateway to the south, without even noticing it; more that the language is clearly inspired by core jazz feeling and mood. All the musicians have a jazz pedigree so that helps and nobody is playing daft nursery rhymes set to a click track or availing of the work of a producer for each track and three engineers to muck about with the sonics. Other irrelevant definitions of mainstream possibly involving Gerry Mulligan or Oscar Peterson are available.
Certainly Try Me contrasts heavily with her chamber jazz and classical sounds summoned on duo album Colour Fields which I liked a lot. I’ve heard Trish live and she has an excellent sound. And as a writer is just as inventive.
Oh, gentle reader, heard Emma Rawicz, by the way? If so the difference between the two – Rawicz is English jazz’s most recent star – is that Rawicz is more jazz-rock in her approach. While I like both players lots, of the two I prefer Clowes’ approach. And I think this is her best album to date.
Insight on an inlet
On ‘St Saviour’s Dock’ the place where her walk ended, the enigma of the space with its “unique echoes, the sounds of various birds, the metallic sounds of construction work” partly drew her in.
I was reading a fascinating blog called A London Inheritance about the area. According to the author, referring to a map that you can view on the blog, the area between the waterway on the left and St Saviour’s Dock is the area that would become known as Jacob’s Island (after Jacob Street running through the centre).
“It was Charles Dickens who would bring some notoriety to this small patch of Bermondsey” when he again according to A London Inheritance located Fagin’s den and Bill Sikes’ death on Jacob’s Island in Oliver Twist.
Clowes says she needed to construct a piece regarding the inlet it seems to me in a very un-Dickensian manner (the invention of the saxophone did pre-date David Copperfield but would have been scarcely known: jazz came much later) using extended sax techniques, playing into the piano strings with the sustain pedal down, and then writing a melody she says from the resultant harmony and structure of the tenor saxophone multiphonics.
I think you get the firmest grasp on the jazz side of Clowes’ personality here and she seems to have shed her primary influences (eg Iain Ballamy) at last. Food’s notion of another kind of Quiet Inlet is very different in a far more fjord like floaty ambiently electro-acoustic sense doncha agree? All significant artists who grow, and Clowes is and does, erase their influences when they have fully absorbed them or if not make these less and less obvious.
The Royal Academy of Music educated 42 year old who has been living in London for more than 20 years and who holds a doctorate in composition awarded by Birmingham City University is a polymath. And yet albums in this style are easiest to digest for people who spend their free time in jazz clubs and at jazz festivals than some of her past work aimed more at classical arrived at responses.
The band knits well together. I would like to hear a little more of guitarist Chris Montague in the sound however. But you hear him effectively on ‘Quiet Time.’
But really you come to this album for the sax sound above all and that as always with Clowes is rewarding given the poise and skill she constantly exhibits. Certainly there is nothing cold here which is an achievement in itself and the array of styles fed in is so multi-faceted it’s an album that keeps you guessing. You won’t be saying I’m sorry I haven’t a clue at all afterwards as it all makes perfect sense.
And the river itself? I quote from T. S. Eliot drawn from the “Fire Sermon” part of The Waste Land (1922) who to me is the modernist who best conveyed the Thames in poetry: “Sweet Thames, run softly till I end my song,/Sweet Thames, run softly, for I speak not loud or long./But at my back in a cold blast I hear/The rattle of the bones, and chuckle spread from ear to ear.”
Clowes’ sense of place and flow, using her band as a vehicle as much as Eliot used avant-garde syntax, ancient rites and rituals as part of his expression, clearly inhabits the space just as imaginatively.
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Immy Churchill, Songs That Shaped Me, Vortex Downstairs, ****
Appearing with Jonah Evans on Minilogue synthesizer, piano and guitar familiar from Kasper Rietkerk album The Island on which singer Immy Churchill is also on; pianist Scottie Thompson who also played electric guitar and later was joined by guesting singer Lileth Chinn, an old school friend of Churchill’s on songs like Rabbie Burns’ ‘Ca’ the Yowes to the Knowes‘, James Taylor’s ‘Sweet Baby James’ and Joni Mitchell’s ‘Both Sides Now’ the evening was one of folk and beyond with a jazz twist just now and then.
My reason for coming along last night for the early evening hour downstairs was because last year on an album called Wake by German pianist Lukas DeRungs I was much taken by a vocal of Churchill’s on it. The piece was called ‘In the Dark.’ Churchill who studied at venerable Marylebone Road institution the Royal Academy of Music is the daughter of leading pianist and arranger Nikki Iles who conducts the NDR Big Band and Pete Churchill known for his work with London Vocal Project which Immy has also been part of.
What worked out best from what I heard was the Joni Mitchell and the darker Elliott Smith element of the evening. Churchill has played with Joni Mitchell tribute band Hejira a 7-piece touring band, set up by Pete Oxley.
There was a certain amount of what Churchill termed “musical chairs” as Evans and left hander Thompson swapped instruments. Evans’ use of the spacey synth certainly coloured the rawness of the tunes and warmed the textures. Churchill’s guitar playing was subtle, often softly strumming. There was a lot of re-tuning which to be honest I find a bit tedious. But to be fair to play the “weird tunings” of Joni Mitchell in such a blend that had to be done. Immy told us jokingly that she was terrified of coming in on the wrong chord. Fat chance of that happening but she wasn’t even humble bragging. Effortless at the mic she has great breath control and clearly comfortable even in such a close and personal roast of an occasion in such a tiny, pretty packed, room. The outside noise filtering in from the square where locals barbequed and rollerbladed outdoors on a warm-ish Friday evening wasn’t really an issue even when the lamp was turned down so low artistically. Final thoughts? A singer definitely on a rapid rise who is finding a framework to wrap her sound within. I’ll try to review her new EP when it’s released as a follow-up.
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“It’s about the exchange”: Tom Challenger and Evan Parker unite
A conversation between two tenors
“Duo is the simplest form of group playing.” That is how Evan Parker describes the format at the heart of May Spring Last a Lifetime, a new recording [extracted above] with fellow tenor saxophonist Tom Challenger.
“It’s the simplest, the purest in a certain sense, and the most challenging,” Parker says. “There’s nowhere to hide, really. It’s about the exchange.”
The album is the first duo release from the two musicians. It grew out of years of informal playing sessions before eventually making its way onto the stage and, later, into the studio.
Recorded at Arco Barco in Ramsgate, May Spring Last a Lifetime places two tenor saxophones in direct dialogue.
The shared instrumentation is central to the project. Parker speaks of a common language between the players, but also of learning from Challenger’s discoveries on the instrument and testing how those ideas might find a place in his own vocabulary.
For Challenger, the interest lies partly in the way the music unsettles expectations.
“As much as there is just two of us and you can tell there’s two of us, there are moments where there’s no one,” he says in the booklet conversation accompanying the release. “And then there are moments where there are four or five.”
A central figure
Few musicians have had a greater influence on British improvised music than Parker. Emerging in the late-1960s, he became one of the defining voices of European free improvisation and helped establish a distinctly British approach to the music. His work as a solo performer, bandleader and collaborator has shaped generations of improvisers, while his exploration of circular breathing and extended saxophone techniques has expanded the instrument’s vocabulary. Even after more than five decades of activity, Parker, 82, remains a restless and prolific presence on the scene.
A distinctive voice
Challenger belongs to a much younger generation of musicians who have absorbed lessons from both jazz tradition and contemporary improvisation while developing a language of their own. Alongside work with his own ensembles, he has become known for projects that move between composition and spontaneous performance, often bringing together musicians from different corners of the creative music community. Recent years have seen him emerge as an increasingly significant figure within UK improvised music, not only through his playing but also through his work as an educator and organiser. His work spans the avant-garde street-music ensemble Brass Mask, whose 2013 debut Spyboy merged New Orleans brass traditions with left-field improvisation, and the contemporary acoustic quartet Dice Factory, which has explored complex structural composition since their 2012 self-titled debut. He has also bridged the gap between jazz and experimental rock with the electro-improv outfit Ma since their 2008 album Jyketie. Notably, Challenger is renowned for site-specific acoustic explorations, such as his 2016 album Vyamanikal with pianist Kit Downes, which captured saxophone and church organs interacting with the architecture of five different Suffolk churches.
Different generations, shared concerns
While they come from different generations of British improvised music, both musicians have built careers around extending the possibilities of the saxophone.
The recording finds common ground in curiosity rather than contrast. What emerges is less a meeting of established master and younger disciple than a conversation between two musicians listening closely to one another.
False Walls release
The album was recorded and mastered by Filipe Gomes, with photographs by Caroline Forbes.
Issued by the Kent-based False Walls label, the CD edition includes a 20-page booklet featuring a 4,000-word conversation between the two musicians and is presented in a six-panel gatefold package.
The duo will launch the album at Cafe Oto in Dalston on 21 July ahead of its release on CD and digital formats on 7 August.
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