A sidenote to begin with. Isn’t it interesting when you encounter musicians you think you know the sound of. But really don’t. When they pop up in other contexts it’s confounding. Your so-called knowledge was only scraping the surface. Looking for the best caveat against boxing musicians into categories? Then it’s that.
But we all do it. I suppose it’s a byproduct of having overly tidy, boring minds or to be a bit less scathing, a desperate attempt via unsuitable methods to make even partial sense on a microscopic level of the mystery and transcendental majesty of art. And the unruly irony isn’t lost on me given that this is a jazz blog primarily.
The Wake of course isn’t a jazz record. That does not matter one iota. Any self respecting music fan needs to know it. If connecting it will then seep into your pores, touch you and move you given how it works on a human level. Go on, why not, insert the Foy Vance name into the spell of a classic of the 19th century like Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass that later inspired the Beats. “Loafe with me on the grass, loose the stop from your throat,/ Not words, not music or rhyme I want, not custom or lecture, not even the best,/ Only the lull I like, the hum of your valvèd voice.”
It is not for spreadsheet Phils more an encouragement to fill your boots with emotion. And on a certain level such metaphysical commotion deep down somewhere even found in the rawest of the gospel blues is intact and pristine. Secularised for our times regardless I reach for that most revolutionary of poets of the 16th & early 17th centuries, John Donne.
The Rev’s words like: “Since I am coming to that holy room,/Where, with thy choir of saints for evermore,/I shall be made thy music; as I come/I tune the instrument here at the door,/ And what I must do then, think here before” strike a chord.
And in that – without being literal – holy music room here you find two thirds of the Neil Cowley Trio in a completely different context. It’s English pianist & keyboardist the charismatic Neil, who curls a Wurly along the way, and the trio’s gifted bassist Aussie Rex Horan who has been in the NCT since Richard Sadler departed many moons ago. Evan Jenkins isn’t the drummer. But another jazzer and rock drummer Jeremy Stacey is. He is known for his work with the great English jazz singer Claire Martin on Take My Heart and was in Noel Gallagher’s High Flying Birds for ages. He’s also significant here on this latest from extravagantly gifted nordie Irish singer-songwriter Vance.
The Neil Cowley trio reformed in recent times and are touring, see the gig guide. Their new EP Built on Bach is out at the moment. There is a further Cowley connection in that famed studio engineer Ethan Johns – one of the producers of Macca’s New (2013) – and with whom ‘Rolling in the Deep’ participant Cowley worked on for 2024’s Entity – produces and engineers. The sonics as you’d expect given his pedigree are pukka. There’s a tactile fully fledged sense of comfort to the all round capture. Mercifully it has a sort of “woody, quality“. It’s not at all tinny. Nibbling the hoops, what a great rhythm section.
The main focus is of course the extraordinary Vance. Sui generis, that voice speaks to the soul without corny mannerism and delivers the album that to riff on the join the circus sentiment of ‘Caravan’: “Turn up your radio/And let me hear the song/Switch on your electric light.” The Wake presses that idiomatic switch winningly on a number of comparable levels. The search for spiritual enlightenment is ongoing.
Around for ages there are 6 albums before this one. Vance is pretty high profile, out there touring and there are lots of dates right now. It’s going to be a huge summer of music in Belfast with the huge fleadh cheoil na hÉireann in town for the first time from 2-9 August and Vance plays the city around assumption time a week later on 15 August down in the Custom House Square.
The Wake serves as what is glossed as the final chapter of this “grief-shaped” odyssey grieving for his father who was a travelling preacher.
It says it on the tin on the very beautiful “put your hands up” song ‘Hi, I’m the Son of a Preacher Man.’ Producer Johns adds guitar and Hammond organ in the sound. Lyrics on this are jointly written with Bonnie Bishop who does backing vocals too. The pair have performed together down in Magy’s Farm.
The song was written on Vance’s 50th birthday. The Bangor man seasider Vance is now a year older.
One St. Patrick’s Day in the afternoon
How my heart nearly burst when I saw you
You didn’t say it but you knew the truth
And I could see it on your little mind
Foy Vance – from ‘Call Me Anytime’
The whole album sends me caught one more time however impulsively after a few listens to a poetic passage from Eugene O’Neill’s great play of 1956, Long Day’s Journey Into Night. Even when making such a leap shears away thematic context and seems a bit of a liberty a lit up stream of consciousness selection however you choose dear reader your random juxtaposition is perhaps inevitable. It’s this bit I was thinking of:
“I was set free! I dissolved in the sea, became white sails and flying spray, became beauty and rhythm, became moonlight and the ship and the high dim-starred sky! I belonged, without past or future, within peace and unity and a wild joy, within something greater than my own life, or the life of Man, to Life itself!”
Amazing stuff, then – utterly magnetic – the song I like best is song of familial pride and love, ‘Call Me Anytime.’
