Different Every Time: Book of the Week, 5-9 Jan

[Serial_Apologist]

Marcus O'Dair's Robert Wyatt biography Different Every Time is Book of the Week on Radio 4 next week (Monday-Friday 9.45 am/12.30 am).

[BLUESNIK'S REVOX]

Thanks for that. My NY resolution was to continue to avoid R4 but I will catch that on the replay! Principles.

BN.

[Ian Thumwood]

I've got a massive pile of books to get through this Christmas. I've just finished the Dalziel & Pascoe book "On Beulah's Height" which I've been unble to put down over the holiday. I'd always imagined that crime thrillers would be poorly written but this was hugely impressive and not as light as the enjoyable TV series. That will leave a book about football scouts, Fleming's "Goldfinger", a book about Celtic maps and a football annual! This is without ploughing through a River cottage cookbook and a graphic novel. !

Seen the reviews for the new Herbie biography? The one I read wasn't too impressed.

[BLUESNIK'S REVOX]

I've got a massive pile of books to get through this Christmas. I've just finished the Dalziel & Pascoe book "On Beulah's Height" which I've been unble to put down over the holiday. I'd always imagined that crime thrillers would be poorly written but this was hugely impressive and not as light as the enjoyable TV series. That will leave a book about football scouts, Fleming's "Goldfinger", a book about Celtic maps and a football annual! This is without ploughing through a River cottage cookbook and a graphic novel. !

Seen the reviews for the new Herbie biography? The one I read wasn't too impressed.

Another Herbie book, belated, but the author was on WBGO this (early) morning as they did an very good overview of Herbie Nichols life and recordings.

"The Mercury Press has just published (2009) jazz
scholar Mark Miller’s biography of pianist-
composer Herbie Nichols. It’s a small
paperback, 224 pages, without accompanying fanfare.

But HERBIE NICHOLS: A JAZZIST’S LIFE is,
in its own quiet way, equal and perhaps
superior to the larger competition. It could
fascinate a reader who had never heard
Nichols on record or in person: Miller
is that fine a writer and researcher."
Worth seeking out.

BN.

[aka Calum Da Jazbo]

excerpt from Nichols study

currently unavailable on amazon but available as a download for less than a tenner

[BLUESNIK'S REVOX]

Excellent! What struck me again from the WBGO program was how well Max Roach fully intergates and adds to Nichols compositions and with so brief preparation. Then again he had a thing for pianists like this, the much later Atlantic trio with Haasan a case in point.

I didn't know HN also wrote poetry and articles on jazz. Fascinating guy and great timeless music.

BM.

[Alyn_Shipton]

Thought some on this thread might be interested to read the review of the Nichols book I did for Jazzwise (March 2010 issue):

Herbie Nichols: A Jazzist's Life
Mark Miller
Mercury Press

Not many of Herbie Nichols' 44 years on earth could be described as successful for him. A pianist, composer, occasional journalist, and sometime poet, he scuffled for work for most of his professional life, and only achieved due recognition years after his death from leukaemia in 1963. Apart from A. B. Spellman's short pen portrait, and the notes to various Nichols albums (particularly those by his friend Roswell Rudd) there has been little in print about him. Mark Miller's new biography — as short and to the point as the pianist's life — changes that. Based on a surprisingly large amount of extant documentation, the book brings together a rounded portrait of Nichols. Miller postulates the reasons why a man who had many good, stable and long-lasting friendships, and who always seemed to be able to hustle a gig from somewhere, should have had such a consistently downward spiralling career. This is perhaps more remarkable in that Nichols was not a drinker, a drug user or a womaniser, just apparently cripplingly shy. One particularly poignant moment is when we discover that instead of going home to his sister's cramped apartment, he often spent all night sleeping on the "A" subway train, hurtling to and from Harlem through the small hours.
The book valuably puts Nichols' slender recorded legacy in context, indeed Miller makes the case for some hitherto unattributed sides being extra examples of his work, such as Blue Lu Barker's first Apollo session. If at the end we might feel we don't know Nichols the man much better, it's probably because he chose not to reveal much of himself even to his closest friends. What we can say is that Miller has finally given us the wherewithal to discover almost everything there is to know about Nichols the musician.

[Alyn_Shipton]

And since we're in book review mode - this is from the same organ - current issue:

Different Every Time: The Authorized Biography of Robert Wyatt
Marcus O’Dair
Serpent’s Tail £20.00

The toughest test for any biographer is whether the subject comes alive on the page. It’s tougher still when the subject is both still alive and artistically active, so the construct on the page has constantly to be measured against the real thing. It’s much easier to deal with a long-dead subject where the author’s portrait can go unchallenged. But Marcus O’Dair has managed to create a living, breathing portrait of Robert Wyatt, subtly infused with his own observations about the man, but never dominated by the feeling that Wyatt is somehow calling the shots.
The life itself is in two parts – before and after Wyatt’s crippling fall from a window in 1973. O’Dair paints a strong and compelling picture of the early years. A golden boy with a doting mother, captivated by music and practising drums at the Majorcan home of the poet Robert Graves, who turns out to be a fan of both Cecil Taylor and Ronnie Scott. The diligence of O’Dair’s research is such that our brief dip into the Balearic waters is fully fleshed out, from thumbnails of Graves, Laura Riding and their literary circle to accounts of the Indigo jazz club in Palma. Most of Wyatt’s stopping off points in early life are similarly well-drawn, and the book presents a fascinating portrait of the evolution of Soft Machine. Central to it is the perception that Wyatt often got his best results by playing Devil’s advocate, for example steering rockers towards free jazz and jazzers towards the rigidity of rock.
The accident is compellingly handled, despite Wyatt’s reluctance to discuss it, and blurry memories of it. But the second “side” of the book, charting Wyatt’s reinvention from “Rock Bottom” to the present, brings the man’s career into sharp focus again. The collaboration with Costello and Langer, for instance, is handled just as deftly as that with Ayers, or Hopper and Ratledge, and again O’Dair’s command of detail and the most minor personalities is impressive. Finally there’s another paradox – those of us who were lucky enough to hear Wyatt with Charlie Haden at the RFH’s Meltdown series in 2009 were unaware this relaxed, often funny, conversationalist nowadays battles chronic stage fright as a musician.

[BLUESNIK'S REVOX]

Thanks a lot Alyn. Re Herbie Nichols, the WBGO progam this morning ended with the Vic Dickenson, Buddy Tate, Joe Thomas etc "Blues for Baby" from "Mainstream" on Atlantic in 1958. Herbie, with a piano solo in a far more traditional setting. Not usually my thing but I found it all hugely enjoyable. A long track but one for a JRR? Keep everyone happy in 2015.

BN.

[Ian Thumwood]

Roswell Rudd's collection of Nichols compositions is brilliant. Outside the context of big band writing, no one was composing pieces quite as original as Nichols until Wayne Shorter in my opinion. The structures / form of tunes and sequence of chord changes are extremely radical for the time and far, far more sophisticated that Monk with whom Nichols is often compared. Pieces like "Karna Kangi" use exotic scales whereas "Some urban bushmen" uses a lengthy form. You won't find much of an AABA structure here and even the blues compositions like "The Happenings" are completely altered harmonically. Even some of the "simpler" tunes will throw you out. This is probably the most rewarding book of lead sheets out there and one my friends and I return to whenever we rehearse each month.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Herbie-Nichols-Unpublished-Roswell-Rudd/dp/193008000X/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1420362118&sr=1-1&keywords=herbie+nichols