What was the latest Jazz gig you've been to?

[RichardB]

I missed the last half hour so that I could get back to Euston, a journey I made in an hour and ten minutes by alternating between running and walking

Getting around London is a nightmare. A good place to stay, though, is the Premier Inn in Dalston, it's easy to get to and pretty cheap, not as cheap as a hostel I guess.

[Joseph K]

Getting around London is a nightmare. A good place to stay, though, is the Premier Inn in Dalston, it's easy to get to and pretty cheap, not as cheap as a hostel I guess.

Yes. Thanks for the tip. I like walking, but I don't like having to run under pressure! I admit I felt quite pleased with myself since I had never walked between Euston and Hammersmith before and while I had to consult the map lots getting from Euston to Hammersmith, it appeared I'd memorised the route which meant going back could be and was a much more expedited affair.

[Bryn]

Yes. Thanks for the tip. I like walking, but I don't like having to run under pressure! I admit I felt quite pleased with myself since I had never walked between Euston and Hammersmith before and while I had to consult the map lots getting from Euston to Hammersmith, it appeared I'd memorised the route which meant going back could be and was a much more expedited affair.

Have you considered traveling on the upper deck of London buses? Extended walking at street level in London exposes one to pretty high levels of air pollution. The TfL journey planner is by no means perfect but can give a fair approximation of the best routes to use. I share your distaste for underground travel.

[Joseph K]

Have you considered traveling on the upper deck of London buses? Extended walking at street level in London exposes one to pretty high levels of air pollution. The TfL journey planner is by no means perfect but can give a fair approximation of the best routes to use. I share your distaste for underground travel.

Thanks. The air pollution thing hadn't occurred to me. I have a pretty low opinion of buses just based on the unreliability of my local service but I will consider it for future gigs...

[Joseph K]

I'm sitting, waiting for the train having just seen Paul Dunmall with Percy Pursglove on trumpet, Ollie Bryce on bass and Mark Sanders on drums. It was a gig of surpassing astonishment. While I haven't really followed the development of free jazz trumpet playing, Pursglove is a real revelation, both the kinds of effects he has in his vocabulary and his general approach is one of eloquence and originality; I particularly like his high tessitura playing involving glissandos and he has real lyricism. So that and everything else about the gig was refreshing, especially when Dunmall plays his sopranino sax, he sounds like Bismillah Khan on acid! It was pure electricity up the spine. Also noteworthy was the opening student group whose version of Monk's 'Ugly Beauty' I especially appreciated.

[Serial_Apologist]

I'm sitting, waiting for the train having just seen Paul Dunmall with Percy Pursglove on trumpet, Ollie Bryce on bass and Mark Sanders on drums. It was a gig of surpassing astonishment. While I haven't really followed the development of free jazz trumpet playing, Pursglove is a real revelation, both the kinds of effects he has in his vocabulary and his general approach is one of eloquence and originality; I particularly like his high tessitura playing involving glissandos and he has real lyricism. So that and everything else about the gig was refreshing, especially when Dunmall plays his sopranino sax, he sounds like Bismillah Khan on acid! It was pure electricity up the spine. Also noteworthy was the opening student group whose version of Monk's 'Ugly Beauty' I especially appreciated.

[Ian Thumwood]

I have attended a couple of gigs lately. The first one was by Gavin Bryar's Ensemble and featured "Jesus' blood never tailed me yet" and "The sinking of the Titanic." Great to hear this music perfomed live and to appreciate just how much Bill Frisell seems to have been an influence on his music. Bryar's was one of those composers who I obsessed about in the late 1980s / mid 1990s when i first started to explore contemporary classical music. I really enjpyed that gig.

The secon concert was more "traditional" classical and featured a Partita by JS Bach, 4 Mazurkas by the great Syzmanowki ( the latter really reminded me of McCoy Tyner) and a mercifully short selection by Webern which seqgued in to Beehovens Opus 110 Sonata. The first chords of the LvB did sound like Webern was having a joke with the abstract atonally giving way to some lusch chords. It took a few secords to appreciate that it was actually Beethoven! Shame the scheduled Bartok was replaced but I think the Syzmanowki was a revelation - for my money the most critically under-rated Classical composer. As for the Webern, I think that the music was not so well received by the audience. A brave bit of progamming but it struck me as being especially pointless. There is so much great , varied and interesting 20th century classical music yet the Webern held the same amount of appeal for me as Anthony Braxton. Happy to explore unfamiliar music but the Webern did not seem to be worth the effort - an intellectual exercise only ?

[Serial_Apologist]

Happy to explore unfamiliar music but the Webern did not seem to be worth the effort - an intellectual exercise only ?

Far from it! Webern was the one of the "original three" who took Schoenberg's innovations at each stage a step further, showing some of the implications of abandoning tonic centricity while not going the whole hog of severing the links with the Austro-German compositional lineage since he strongly identified with it. From his special choice of the poet Hildegarde Jone's mystical words for songs and larger works he might have been discovering pared down analogies with nature, the beloved theme of the German Romantics, focused at the microscopic, like Kepes's photographs of microorganisms. A stop gap in evolutionary musical modernism, without which there would have been no Boulez/Stockhausen/Nono/Berio, no pure electronica, no extending constructive principles and practices, no acknowledgements of the existential limits to which formal predetermination can be stretched, nor how understanding this reflects badly on our Judaeo-Christian obsession with domination and control in the natural as well as the personal, inter-relational and political spheres, and where this now leaves humanity.

It's a pity that you evidently missed Radio 3's "Webern day" because I learned a lot from hearing all his music as a whole, having likewise under-estimated his importance. That said, of the three (Webern, Berg and Schoenberg) I still identify the most with Schoenberg, who always saw his music as in continuity with the great tradition from Bach through Mozart and Beethoven through to Wagner and Mahler.

[Ian Thumwood]

SA

I have to admit that I can understand what Schoenberg was trying to so yet Webern for me came across as someone who went too far. One of the theories I have about music is that one of the key ingredients of some "good " music is improvisation. I think this applies whether you are listening to Bach, Chopin, Parker, Coltrane, Jimi Hendrix, etc. Improvisation may be "fossilised" within published classical music yet you can see how the process informed the music. With Webern, I think the "system" appears to undermine the "natural" quality of the music. I am aware Radio 3 had a "Webern Day" and that this had prompted ridicule from HM Daily Telegraph. For me, Webern is a few steps too far and is perhaps the point at which Classical music lost it's way until the likes of Steve Reich, etc in the 1980s. The audience reaction to the recital was interesting. I think most people were there for the Bach and Beethoven and the few critical comments I overheard applied to the Syzmanowski not being agreeable. The briefness of the Webern probably mean't that most of the audience were not investing in his music. I would have preferred to have heard the Bartok that the Beethoven and Webern replaced but felt the LvB Sonata 110 was much better than i had expected. Again, you could appreciate the traces of Beethoven's role as an improvisor in it. This is the first time I have managed to either listen or sight read one of his sonatas all the way through without being bored. It was an excellent reading but the Bach and Syzmanowski remained the most appealing to me.

[Serial_Apologist]

Of the two gigs I've attended in the past week, tonight's Art Themen New Quintet at the Bull's Head performing efficient hard bop in front of a full audience was the more conventionally "jazz". Looking extraordinarily youthful, 84-years old Art paced through two halves made up mainly of Tadd Dameron, Dexter Gordon and Mingus tunes with one Duke ballad, "Sophisticated Lady", taken as a trumpet feature for the ever-reliable Steve Fishwick, a more straight ahead Booker Little. The band laid a heavy backdrop for Art's edgily convoluted improvising - his soprano, which I think I like the better - was featured but a couple of times. If I had any criticisms, Winston Clifford's over-powered drumming prioritised rough-and-ready above the subtlety he can deliver, and Arnie Somogyi's heavy bass was at times oppressive. Pianist Mike Gorman worked in keeping with expectation. Art made equally strangulated use of Ronnie Scott's joke book in his introductions, commenting on his sidemen's academic qualifications in what could be read as jibes while my irony by-pass was on overdrive. The strange thing was that having decided to pay the slightly higher £17 on the door, there was no one there to collect, let alone check punters' pre-booked tickets: I had to ask the barman to take my fee - luckily the right amount since no change would be given.

The other gig was a half-hour lunchtime freebie given by a duet of that fine jazz violinist Graham Clark and a pianist colleague of his going back to school times, Jonathan Cohen, held in a Victorian church in Highgate. Five set pieces deprived adequate time to stretch included a free improvisation that elicited a loud "Wow!" from a lady behind me, and a version with barely audible vocal of Nick Drake's River Man - Graham accommodating with understatement to his essentially classical-styled partner, weaving carefully around rather than against the fine-spun orthodoxies. An appreciative audience of around thirty may have had the benefit of journeying there by car on what was a very very wet day on which my not-so-old trainers proved non-leak proof - which may well have contributed to my rather negative assessment of an undoubtedly muted performance.

Will I be up to Tyshawn Sorey at Cafe Oto tomorrow afternoon, is the question.

It is now next day and announcements of much of the journey being subject to delays and closures rule out the Sorey, sadly.

[Ian Thumwood]

SA

I wondered if you concurred that , post -pandemic, a lot of the live jazz available has dried up? The regular jazz gigs programmed in the foyer at Theatre Royal never recommenced and even "go to" venues like the Turner Sims have not been too adventurous with programming. Jazz seems to have ceased entirely at the Anvil in Basingstoke and my work commitments mean that a jaunt along the A27 to Poole on a school night is no longer feasible. Not sure what is being programmed at the Lighthouse these days. I think the amateur scene around here also seems to be mich quieter than it used to be. The Winchester Jazz Festival had a few gigs but I was unable to attend due to other commitments. All in all, it does not seem possible to go out around here to randomly listen to jazz as used to be the case around 1990s. I am now almost totally reliant on the Turner Sims although the programming is unadventurous these days. The three music gigs I have been to this year have all been classical.

[Serial_Apologist]

SA

I wondered if you concurred that , post -pandemic, a lot of the live jazz available has dried up? The regular jazz gigs programmed in the foyer at Theatre Royal never recommenced and even "go to" venues like the Turner Sims have not been too adventurous with programming. Jazz seems to have ceased entirely at the Anvil in Basingstoke and my work commitments mean that a jaunt along the A27 to Poole on a school night is no longer feasible. Not sure what is being programmed at the Lighthouse these days. I think the amateur scene around here also seems to be mich quieter than it used to be. The Winchester Jazz Festival had a few gigs but I was unable to attend due to other commitments. All in all, it does not seem possible to go out around here to randomly listen to jazz as used to be the case around 1990s. I am now almost totally reliant on the Turner Sims although the programming is unadventurous these days. The three music gigs I have been to this year have all been classical.

I'm starting to read Duncan Heining's new book. Listening back to recordings of the figureheads he writes about and others of the time, it saddens me that the music was unquestionably so much more committed back then, and just leaps out from the speakers. I was reminded of this truth listening to the previously unreleased recordings on the accompanying CD. All that combined with all the new names needing to be kept abreast of since Covid, wondering is it really worth it, and feeling less secure about late night travel, seems for the first time in my adult life to have rather knocked the shine off the music, to be quite honest. I feel much the same about much of the contemporary new music scene, and find myself going back to personal roots as some kind of haven. Maybe it's just the blues of the fall.

[Ian Thumwood]

If you want an indication of where the cutting edge of jazz might be at the moment, a rare jazz gig at the Theatre Royal last night might be a good indication. The 90 min set was performed by the French Orchestre National du Jazz with great saxophonist Steve Lehman. Weirdly , the gig formed part of a festival of AI organised by Southampton University with others events held to look at AI in other elements of art.

I am not a fan of computers (don't get me on mobile phones Appps....grrrrr) but the gig consisted of music from their Ex Machina album which featured a big band with 2 vibes players , 5 reeds , piano , 1 trumpets , 2 trombones and a tuba. The bassist and drummer stood out for me , the woman playing the bass being the glue that held the ensemble together. The other component was electronic manipulation where was central to the performance albeit I felt the acoustic element was far more interesting.

All the music seemed to use eccentric sequences of odd time signatures with the writing owing more that alot to contemporary classical music. I did miss the orchestral writing not playing passages as per more orthodox big band writing as the sections where very much used to provide texture , often in juxtaposition with the 1 vibes. Lehman was exceptional as a soloist and the ensemble passages owed much to his style.

It was fascinating to watch and listen to and very much at odds with what is being lauded in the UK at rhe moment. The cues definitely came from European academic music and was very much detached from Free Jazz. This music was probably the most adventurous jazz I have heard for years although as a listener it was difficult to understand how the AI worked in the process. Personally, the electronic manipulation felt cosmetic and it was the more musical elements which seemed most Important.

I would guess that those attending the festival who came from the IT world would have been intrigued but maybe not fussed by rhe jazz. None of the usual faces I see at jazz gigs were in attendance last night but this was Winchester after all , where I would suggest Classical music and Folk are bigger draws.

The one question I would have is why does anything with electronic enhancement always have to be dissonant? It would have added variety if consonants had been employed for variety.

[Serial_Apologist]

If you want an indication of where the cutting edge of jazz might be at the moment, a rare jazz gig at the Theatre Royal last night might be a good indication. The 90 min set was performed by the French Orchestre National du Jazz with great saxophonist Steve Lehman. Weirdly , the gig formed part of a festival of AI organised by Southampton University with others events held to look at AI in other elements of art.

I am not a fan of computers (don't get me on mobile phones Appps....grrrrr) but the gig consisted of music from their Ex Machina album which featured a big band with 2 vibes players , 5 reeds , piano , 1 trumpets , 2 trombones and a tuba. The bassist and drummer stood out for me , the woman playing the bass being the glue that held the ensemble together. The other component was electronic manipulation where was central to the performance albeit I felt the acoustic element was far more interesting.

All the music seemed to use eccentric sequences of odd time signatures with the writing owing more that alot to contemporary classical music. I did miss the orchestral writing not playing passages as per more orthodox big band writing as the sections where very much used to provide texture , often in juxtaposition with the 1 vibes. Lehman was exceptional as a soloist and the ensemble passages owed much to his style.

It was fascinating to watch and listen to and very much at odds with what is being lauded in the UK at rhe moment. The cues definitely came from European academic music and was very much detached from Free Jazz. This music was probably the most adventurous jazz I have heard for years although as a listener it was difficult to understand how the AI worked in the process. Personally, the electronic manipulation felt cosmetic and it was the more musical elements which seemed most Important.

I would guess that those attending the festival who came from the IT world would have been intrigued but maybe not fussed by rhe jazz. None of the usual faces I see at jazz gigs were in attendance last night but this was Winchester after all , where I would suggest Classical music and Folk are bigger draws.

The one question I would have is why does anything with electronic enhancement always have to be dissonant? It would have added variety if consonants had been employed for variety.

Because the consonants have nearly all been used up??

Personally I have to agree with Schoenberg that non-resolving harmonies don't necessarily have to be dissonant, or viewed as such. There's a gradation between dissonance and consonance. In any case "it all depends on what you mean by [dissoance]..." (Prof. Joad). Present-day reality is pretty dissonant, and if jazz is too, it's reflecting that reality and doing its job..

[Ian Thumwood]

So Medieval music should have been pretty dissonant by using that logic !

The music involved a computer programme that was devised with a workshop in Paris who specialise in using IT in musical situation and the notes implied that the programme changed the music as the musicians were playing. I would have liked to have known if this meant the orchestra was improvising and whether thos meant the orchestral parts changed with each performance.

The encore was a ballad which threatened to sound like Body & Soul but I think this was accidental....maybe part of the programme.