Bobby Wellins Sextet: Homage To Caledonia – Live 1979 (Jazz In Britain JIB-67-5-CD
This most welcome – and unmissable – single volume release from Jazz in Britain comes hard on the heels of the label’s two-CD Wellins issue of 2023, What Was Happening. Both releases feature the same splendid quartet which the swinging and audacious, harmonically hip yet “ba-loos”-drenched Scottish maestro led at the end of the 1970s, with Pete Jacobsen (p, elp), Adrian Kendon (b) and Spike Wells (d).
Following terrific quartet readings of Wellins’s What Is The Truth?, Conundrum and Aura Best, plus a mesmerising 12-minute piano solo – as strongly driven and grooved as it is sonically inventive and reflective – from the specially gifted (and blind) Jacobsen, the all-live Homage To Caledonia affords well-sequenced exposure to Lol Coxhill (ss) and Bryan Spring (pc, d) in the sextet performances which constitute both the four-part, mood-rich Culloden Moor Suite and the concluding romp that is Dizzy’s Blues (plus a vigorous integrated take on Rollins’ St Thomas). The 17 minutes of this final two-part barrel of joy feature excellent pizzicato work from Kendon as well as a captivating extended duet between Rollins and Coxhill and, later, Caribbean colour and figures from the volcanic Spring.
As on What Was Happening, Spike Wells contributes both polyrhythmic potency (hear him steam on Conundrum) and dynamic finesse (check the heart-tugging Aura Best) – plus an authoritative, engagingly written and richly illustrated sleeve note. Wells also captured all the music, in perfectly good sound, on a stereo cassette recorder. This surely makes him the leading candidate for a Guinness Book of Records spot as the musician who has contributed the most to any recording’s release, whether jazz or otherwise!
Wellins would return to the Culloden Moor Suite in his 2013 Spartacus studio recording of it with the Scottish National Jazz Orchestra. That’s an equally indispensable, more polished version of the interpretation to be relished here, shot through as this 1979 Warwick University version is with the electrifying spirit of live jazz at its coruscating best (and with typically brief and characterful introductions to the various pieces by Wellins).
As this release bears witness, Bobby Wellins had a wondrous sound on tenor: as bold and assertive as it could be subtly inflected, soulful and poetic, it places Wellins right up there with, e.g., Webster, Young and Coltrane, Lloyd and Lovano, Land and Garbarek (the last a musician much admired by the Scot). As I remarked in my JJ report on the celebration of the life and art of Robert Coull “Bobby” Wellins which took place at Chichester Crematorium in late November 2016 (and which was led by one Father Spike Wells) – “It cannot be said enough: Bobby Wellins (1936–2016) was one of the finest and most distinctive musicians – anywhere in the world – ever to grace a stage or recording studio.” As this superb release so comprehensively documents.
Avishai Cohen: Ashes To Gold (ECM 652 1046)
The Frankfurt School Marxist, musicologist and so-called “critical theorist” Theodor Adorno (1903-1969) committed some highly questionable opinions to print. One was his view that jazz was “the cry of the Eunuch”. Another was his belief that, after Auschwitz, art is no longer possible.
Both assertions are rendered as nugatory and obsolete as they have long deserved to be by the luminous dignity – nobility, even – of this deeply reflective set of stripped-to-the bone music from the Tel Aviv-based instrumentalist and composer Avishai Cohen (f, t, flh) and his splendid cohorts Yonathan Avishai (p), Barak Mori (b) and Ziv Ravitz (d).
Composed by Cohen’s daughter Amalia, the concluding The Seventh – a piece as gentle as it is quietly purposive – cannot but be assumed to allude to the events which unfolded in southern Israel one utterly vile day in October 2023. Hear the arco-underpinned, measured yet keening rubato lament that is part 2 of Cohen’s five-part title suite for an indicative sample of the depth of feeling which infuses the tautly figured yet diversely charged musicianship of this remarkable achievement.
“I can’t go on. I must go on.” Such might have been the response of Samuel Beckett both to Auschwitz and to 7 October 2023. Like Coltrane’s response to the fatal fire-bombing of an Alabama church in 1963, Ashes To Gold achieves the miracle of turning atrocity into alchemy; unspeakable horror and resultant plangent grief and protest into the irreducible human mysteries of creative affirmation and potential catharsis. Small wonder, then, that Ravel’s Adagio Assai, from his piano concerto in G major, prefaces the coda that is The Seventh.
Colin Vallon: Samares (ECM 659 3279)
Born in 1980, the melodically oriented, rhythmically and dynamically subtle (and internationally fêted) Swiss pianist Colin Vallon has made some beautiful records. They include the appropriately titled Le Vent (2014) and Danse (2017). Both were recorded for ECM with the well-attuned Patrice Moret (b) and Julian Sartorius (d), who appear here.
Samares is for me this trio’s most beautiful outing to date. Featuring eight original Vallon compositions, it evinces throughout an art which has the courage to let space, time and texture “be” in the music while also shaping those fundamental elements in a variety of ways: as delicately lyrical as they are impassioned, as intelligent as they are sensuous. Sample Ronce, which features a strong, brushes-kicked rhythmic impetus – and also employs what sound like prepared piano sonorities, as do several other pieces here. Enjoy, especially, the building dynamics and atmospherics within the ostinato minimalism of Time, again a “prepared piano” piece, and the “held back” or implicit development of the title track. Entrancing music, this, from first note to last.
Carsten Dahl Golden Ratio Trio: Interpretations. The Norway Sessions (Storyville 1014363)
Founded in 1952, the Danish Storyville label continues to release excellent material. In this and the following review are two very different examples (or rather, exemplars) of current small-group jazz. Both are led by seasoned Danish musicians – pianist Carsten Dahl (born 1967) and double-bassist Thomas Fonnesbæk (born 1977). But the similarities end there.
Dahl’s Golden Ratio trio with Daniel Franck (b) and Jakob Høyer (d) plays throughout the 43 or so minutes of the two sessions (one from January 2023, one from March 2024) which make up Interpretations. The second session is at times more assertive than the first: hear the swinging Wind, tumbling and cooking Birds and crisply sprung and swung Monk’ish Dance Steps. But both sessions are distinguished by a spaciously rendered three-in-one improvisational quality.
I’ve never heard Dahl play as patiently and tenderly as he does here, in his own searching, post-Bley and Jarrett way, complemented throughout by adroit contributions from his cohorts. The all-original programme is in the main credited to the trio, with Franck contributing Morgonsång and Dahl penning Vacker and Open Window – the last dedicated to the late, great Danish drummer Alex Riel.
Thomas Fonnesbæk: In Rome (Storyville 1018538)
The last track on Dahl’s Interpretations above is titled Breathing. There’s plenty of that essential factor throughout the sparkling poetry that is the 55 minutes of bassist and leader Thomas Fonnesbæk’s delightful Rome, but in different register. Listening to the Dahl recital can feel like one is present at the birth of something unplanned, intimate and evolving. Conversely, the diversely conceived yet integrated 11 tracks of Rome – the majority from the excellent, harmonically and rhythmically sophisticated Italian Enrico Pieranunzi (p) – register as polished, melodically striking pieces of a long-mastered compositional order, often of pleasing song-like character.
The fully rounded and deliciously sprung quality of Fonnesbæk’s post-NHØP sound and phrasing is complemented to perfection by contributions from Pieranunzi and his compatriots Rosario Giuliani (ss), and Roberto Gatto (d) with Valentina Ranalli adding charming vocals to Blue Waltz and Come Rose Dai Muri (both co-credited to Pieranunzi and Ranalli). Fonnesbæk himself contributes the poised, reflective and gently swinging Orphant In Rome, while Gatto fashioned the patient and lucid ascensional steps of Satie’s Mood.
Many thanks to Storyville, then, for offering two such vividly contrasting Danish-led examples of the potentialities of small-group jazz today.
Lars Danielsson, Verneri Pohjola, John Parricelli: Trio (ACT 8000-2)
Recorded in spring 2024, these 48 or so minutes of chamber jazz are part of a series of ACT sessions recorded at the famous Château Palmer in Margaux-Cantenac, France. The abstracted landscape cover art is up to ACT’s usual high standards but any pretensions to high culture status are wiped out by the fact that the inner plastic tray of the CD carries a colour advert for another ACT recording, Duo, by pianists Michael Wollny and Joachim Kühn. How tacky is that?
As for the music: I’ve long been a big fan of Danielsson’s ultra-melodic art (realised here on bass and cello) and there’s no doubting the qualities of Pohjola (who can make his trumpet sound like a flute) and the multi-faceted Parricelli (g). I’d love to love this release. Unfortunately, there’s only so much that this particular sentient being can take of the (admittedly, often exquisitely rendered) mild and mid-range, mid-toned and mid-or-slow-tempo reflections on offer.
A track title like Playing With The Groove promises much but the groove stays on the tepid side, while a slow-drag reading of Mood Indigo brings to mind the old existentialist joke “Is there life before death?”. Other listeners may beg to differ. Sorry, guys!
Chris Lee: A Troubled Man (jazzizit JITCD 88MAN)
Subtitled “a musical portrait of Kurt Wallander” this is a well-packaged, unusual and attractive 39 minutes of both poised and flowing, lean and lyrical quartet reflections inspired by some choice scenes from the famous Swedish TV detective series of some years ago. The music was apparently inspired by “classic film noir scores of the 60s (Lalo Schifrin’s Bullitt, Johnny Mandel’s Point Blank) and the Nordic jazz of Jan Garbarek”.
The taut English lyrics from Lee (p) are printed in the sleeve brochure, together with specification of the film material addressed by the pianist and his well-attuned cohorts Mark Jennett (v, half-spoken, half-sung) Joe Pettitt (b) and Rod Youngs (d). To further whet your appetite, the 10-piece song cycle has titles such as Shaking The Shadows, Night Watch, House In The Country, To The Sea and Aubade.