Jazz Features

Pat Metheny    Tord Gustavsen    Gary Burton       John Abercrombie    

Jerry Bergonzi     John Patitucci    Christine Tobin      

John Taylor          Robert Glasper       Jacqui Dankworth

Bobby McFerrin - No worries, he's happy

Pat Metheny – On the road to guitar perfection

Pat Metheny talks about the time he spends at home as the civilian life. Even for someone whose uniform has been nothing more official looking than his habitual stripy top and a pair of jeans, it’s not an unreasonable term.

For years, Metheny spent most of the year travelling the world with an operation that involved military-style organisation as the Pat Metheny Group rose to be the biggest draw in jazz. The sense of Metheny’s band invading a locale was never more palpable than the balmy summer evening in the mid 1980s when residents of Putney arrived home from work to find a fleet of pantechnicons blocking their streets.

They had driven overnight from Barcelona and were parked around the Half Moon, one of the London pub circuit’s great music venues. With the best will in the world, the Half Moon’s back room, never mind its stage, was never going to accommodate the equipment it took to mount a Pat Metheny Group concert. So a compromise was reached. The group shrunk to a quartet, a small city of keyboards, amps and percussion went back in the truck and Metheny played a conventional jazz gig – or at least it was conventional jazz compared to the son et lumiere spectacle that had already sold out the mighty Hammersmith Odeon across the Thames for the following three nights.

In those days, Metheny and his guitar could not be parted and if there was a possibility of turning a night off spent practising alone in his hotel room into a session playing to real live people, Metheny would grab it. His road crew just had to fall into line like lower ranks following the top brass’s orders.

The arrival of two Metheny offspring has had the effect of reducing the guitarist’s concert schedule and almost – almost - weaning him off his guitar habit.

"I’d have to say that now, if I was stranded on a desert island, I think I could live without a guitar," he says with a definitely maybe tone. "Whereas before I’d spend up to three hundred days a year on the road, now it’s more like one hundred. But in terms of where I want to be as a guitarist, I’m not there yet."

At fifty-two, Missouri-born Metheny has lived through a remarkable period of development in guitar technology, advancements that he has, he happily concedes, wilfully embraced. His body of recorded work ranges from solo acoustic compositions and jazz trios to the symphonic amalgam of synthesisers, Brazilian percussion, sunny melodies and rocking out that is, arguably, presented most persuasively on the Pat Metheny Group’s Imaginary Day CD. And that’s before we get into his collaborations with – among others – Herbie Hancock, free jazz godfather Ornette Coleman, radical guitarist Derek Bailey, and David Bowie, who crooned to the Metheny group’s streamlined groove on This Is Not America.

"When I started playing, as far as jazz was concerned the guitar was relegated to a very particular sound and a very particular style," he says. "That’s not to denigrate the musicians involved. I love Wes Montgomery, Jim Hall and Kenny Burrell, who I’d rate as the first rank, and then there was Joe Pass, Jimmy Raney, George Benson and Pat Martino, all great players, who took the guitar through bebop. But although these guys had their own strong personalities, they would still create essentially one single sound throughout an entire evening.

"That hollow bodied guitar sound was the beginning for me and in many ways it’s still the central part of what I do. But the guitar can now do so many other things in terms of texture, orchestration, different tunings and so forth that I hadn’t heard in a trio or in a group with a piano, and I just figured, Why Not?"

The great thing about the guitar, for Metheny, is that it means something different to everyone, be it Megadeth playing through sixteen Marshall amps or Segovia performing solo classical music in a concert hall.

"There are a zillion shades in between and I enjoy exploring them," he says.

The musician he is currently exploring these shades with is Brad Mehldau, who is widely regarded as the brightest jazz piano talent of his generation. Since they got together as a duo that has now developed into a touring and recording quartet, Mehldau has talked with enthusiasm about getting to play with someone he grew up listening to. Suddenly Metheny, who was still a teenager when he made his first record with bass guitar genius Jaco Pastorius, pianist Paul Bley and drummer Bruce Ditmas, felt like a veteran.

"It’s a scary thought but it’s also interesting because the difference in age between Brad and me – I think he’s about fifteen years younger – is much the same as the age difference between me and guys I’ve played with like Gary Burton, Dave Holland and Jack DeJohnette," he says. "I never felt that much of a kid with these guys. It wasn’t like playing with Roy Haynes, who’s of my parents’ generation and has been around, well, quite a few blocks now. And actually, I find it easier to relate to someone like Brad than the guys six or seven years younger than me, who are dressed up in their suits and playing music that my parents used to listen to. I listen to these guys and I’m baffled, not moved."

When he and Mehldau got together he felt an instant connection. The jazz press reacted enthusiastically to the results, with Jazzwise magazine proclaiming the Metheny Mehldau CD the jazz event of 2006. The pair have since released another album, Quartet, adding bassist Larry Grenadier and drummer Jeff Ballard, to similar critical approval and Metheny reckons that following their recent American tour, they’re ready to take the music up to another level.

"Brad and I had never played together at all before we went into the studio to make that duo album but we had a sense that we could work together," says Metheny. "And right from the get-go we discovered that, musically, we had a lot to talk about. The first track on that CD, Unrequited, was recorded within twenty minutes of us sitting down together in the studio. We both just played the way we play naturally and felt free to go on from there because we have a similar way of looking at rhythm.

"We can be playing the wildest thing and suddenly we go ‘boom’ together, right on the downbeat. I’ve had that with other musicians, drummers particularly, and I had it with Michael Brecker and with Lyle [Mays, the Pat Metheny Group’s keyboardist] of course, who’s been on this journey with me almost from the start. This thing with Brad, though, is one of the most exciting musical encounters I’ve ever had."

How far the Metheny-Mehldau Quartet goes beyond the European tour that brings them to Glasgow Jazz Festival has yet to be decided. Mehldau, like Metheny, has his own group and over the years Metheny has remained committed to his group with Mays while managing to fit in his various side projects. Justifiable promiscuity, he calls this.

It’s the great attraction in playing jazz, he says, that the musicians have to live every millisecond that they’re working. And although he’s moved down a gear workload-wise, the thrill of creating in the moment and the challenge of finding new ways to present the music are as strong as ever.

"If you look at Miles Davis’s career, you get this incredibly varied picture," says Metheny. "Yet it wasn’t just a set of disparate ideas, it all comes together as a kind of narrative because Miles had this very personal voice on his instrument. All my heroes – not just Miles but Clifford Brown, John Coltrane, Elvin Jones, Freddie Hubbard – they all have that quality. It might not have the same impact as someone who’s really flashy but to create a personal voice that speaks to people individually and provides a link so that everything you do – not just one solo or one record - adds up, that’s my goal."

From The Herald, June 23, 2007

Top

Tord Gustavsen - making the piano sing

With its spare, haunting melodies and crystal clear playing, pianist Tord Gustavsen’s latest album, Restored, Returned, has the sound of an instant classic in the Nordic jazz style. Yet the story behind its creation begins, not in the fjords that are usually cited when discussing Norwegian music, but in a book shop in Oxford.

Gary Burton - mallets aforethought

Forty-five years playing jazz at the highest level has taught Gary Burton that there are two kinds of jazz musician. There are those who are content to play in their chosen style of the music with the same instrumentation for the duration of their careers – and there are the Marco Polos who explore all kinds of situations, directions and line-ups.

John Abercrombie - Keeping the essence of that singular guitar sound

Christine Tobin - How Joni led to jazz

John Taylor – Key player on the European Scene

John Taylor is in Venice, trying to find a quiet corner to chat on his mobile phone. The English pianist is no stranger to Italy – indeed, his agent is Italian and Taylor has often appeared to be more valued there than he is at home, although his reputation hasn’t always preceded him.

Back in the mid 1980s, Taylor remembers an Italian taxi driver, detailed to collect a "Mr John Taylor, musician" and doubtless imagining ‘I had that bloke from Duran Duran in my cab’ style conversations, being demonstrably disappointed that his passenger was a forty-ish jazz player rather than a pop idol. For a while this wasn’t an unusual scenario.

In jazz circles, such confusion was easily bypassed since this John Taylor has been known to musicians and audiences as JT virtually since he started to make an impact in the 1960s. The friends Taylor made on arrival in London back then, including saxophonist John Surman and trumpeter Kenny Wheeler, remain colleagues and influences to this day. And while Taylor went on to play with other luminaries including Cleo Laine, Norwegian saxophonist Jan Garbarek and former Weather Report drummer Peter Erskine, and was a resourceful deputy on alto saxophonist Art Pepper’s fabled Mitchell Theatre gig in Glasgow shortly before Pepper’s death in 1982, he still cherishes these early connections.

"John and Kenny and [bassist] Chris Laurence and [saxophonist] Stan Sulzmann are all people I’ve known and worked with for about forty years and there’s a very natural bond there," he says. "It’s about friendship as well as musical understanding and I think the understanding we have is something that can only develop in that way. It’s always great to get together with these guys. There’s an easy familiarity with them but also, because we don’t work with each other constantly, it feels fresh and inspirational too."

Taylor’s first inspiration as a jazz pianist was Oscar Peterson, whom he heard as a teenager. He’d begun playing piano by ear as a child in Manchester and with the exception of a year of lessons in his teens with "one of those typical old lady teachers," he is self-taught. From Peterson he moved on to Bill Evans, whose poetic style seems more in keeping with the lyricism and sensitivity – he’s often described as the quintessentially European jazz pianist - with which Taylor has come to be associated.

By this time Taylor’s family had moved via the Midlands to Hastings, where there was a lively jazz scene that prepared him for the move to London at the age of twenty-two.

"London then had a lot going on," he says. "There were people like Evan Parker and John Stevens who were establishing themselves with a free improvisational approach and I think a lot of this thing about a distinctly European strand in jazz actually comes from the improvising aspect of jazz itself. There was improvisation in European music long before jazz came along, of course, and I think when you’re expressing yourself, you can’t help but reflect who you are and what you’ve listened to."

At the same time as he was teaming up for early records with Surman, whose roots in the South West of England shine through in his music, Taylor was absorbing the then emerging American heroes including McCoy Tyner, Herbie Hancock and Chick Corea. He also became a regular at Ronnie Scott’s Soho club, where he played with visiting American musicians and learned what he considers a vital part of the pianist’s craft, accompaniment.

"If you’re going to be a pianist in the broadest sense, you have to learn how to play the supporting role," he says. "I was fortunate enough to work with Cleo Laine, who had a terrifically varied repertoire, and I still love to work with singers. The reason I’m in Venice is to do a concert with Maria Pia DeVito, who’s a great improviser as well as a lovely singer. Working in a duo like this, I have to find a balance, choosing when to follow and when to lead but trying not to make things too complicated. It’s always interesting."

Playing at Ronnie Scott’s club led to Taylor joining the saxophonist’s quintet, where he enjoyed working with someone who was not only one of the major figures musically in British jazz but also one of its greatest characters. It was only a brief stay – six months to a year – but Scott’s appreciation of Taylor’s talents was preserved on record, the Serious Gold album, and through at least one of Taylor’s compositions remaining in the Scott band book long after he’d left.

Part of his reason for leaving Scott was that Taylor was beginning to really make an impact in Europe by this time. He joined saxophonist Jan Garbarek, bassist Palle Danielsson and drummer Jon Christensen, effectively replacing Keith Jarrett in the ‘Scandinavian’ quartet that the American pianist had formed for a series of albums on Munich-based ECM Records. Shortly afterwards ECM, which was by then the premiere label in European jazz, picked up on Azimuth, Taylor’s chamber jazz trio with Kenny Wheeler and Taylor’s then-wife, singer Norma Winstone.

This was the beginning of another long association, during which Taylor became the ‘Bill Evans’ figure in Peter Erskine’s Evans-influenced trio, which also recorded for ECM, although it was into the new century before Taylor released an album, entitled Rosslyn, for ECM under his own name.

Inspired by Rosslyn Chapel before it became overrun by visitors on the Dan Brown-Da Vinci Code trail, the album’s title track is typical Taylor, a seductive melody that evokes a sense of place and stays in the mind long after the CD’s finished or the gig’s over.

"I was lucky," he says, "because Rosslyn was still quiet when I first went there. It was an emotional time for me and the tune developed, I think, out of another piece I’d been working on. There was definitely a sense of earlier times about the chapel itself and I wanted to convey a timeless quality in the music. But location certainly has an effect when I’m writing."

The concerts that bring Taylor to Scotland this week feature him playing solo piano and then in duo with British jazz’s rising piano star, Gwilym Simcock. Taylor who has taught on the Royal Academy’s jazz course, spent fifteen years as professor of jazz piano at Cologne College of Music, before retiring last year, and currently occupies a "half-time" post at York University, is quick to disclaim any credit for Simcock’s rapid progression.

"This student and his professor thing that’s grown up around us is a handy phrase but it’s not true," he says. "I think I saw Gwilym once at the Academy and he came to my house for a chat once, and that’s it. It does look like we’re building a relationship as performers, though. We’ve played a couple of concerts together now and hopefully these Scottish gigs will take it further."

Outstanding though he is as a team player, playing solo is one of Taylor’s particular strengths. The last time I heard him alone, at the Jazz Sous les Pommiers festival in Normandy in 2005, he held a packed house in a night club on a sunny Saturday afternoon absolutely spellbound with a set that seemed almost pre-composed.

"Well, I suppose I’ve been doing these gigs for quite a while now and I always have an idea what I’m going to do beforehand," he says. "I’ll jot a few ideas down on a piece of paper, although I might change the shape and content as I go. My aim is to present a balanced programme. I like to invite the listeners in - not make it too obscure – and give them something that I’d like to come down off the stage and listen to myself."

From The Herald, April 2, 2008

Top

Robert Glasper – No going back to the future

Robert Glasper has seen the future of jazz and, he says, it doesn’t lie in the past.

The Houston, Texas-born pianist who signed to the iconic jazz label Blue Note Records in 2004 reckons that jazz is undergoing a resurgence right now but it needs to work harder and look outside of itself more to maintain interest.

Not for Glasper the idea of jazz being a music preserved in aspic, reflecting a time in the 1960s, the 1950s, or even earlier, and appealing only to people who either remember or have tuned into these eras.

"I want to reach the average person," he says. "I get young people coming up to me after a gig, saying ‘I don’t have a single jazz CD on my iPod. I didn’t even know that jazz could sound like what you’re playing but I like it.’ And these people come back. If you only play with a 1960s or a 1950s vibe, you only get people who have latched onto that vibe - or jazz fans. We need to expand the audience and stop making jazz so mysterious, a form of music that people don’t even want to try."

Glasper’s philosophy is to acknowledge the great musicians who have gone before but also to respond to what’s going on around him. There’s a good example of this delivered in instalments on his two Blue Note albums.

On the first, Canvas, Glasper recorded a version of Herbie Hancock’s classic 1960s composition Maiden Voyage that hinted at something from more recent times. Two years on, in the very natural sounding, flowing medley that graces his In My Element CD, Maiden Voyage had become almost subordinate to that newer song, Radiohead’s Everything in its Right Place.

"That’s my point," he says. "And actually by doing that, I’m not being exactly revolutionary. Jazz musicians have always adopted and adapted the pop songs of the day. It’s just that for me to play some show tune from way before I was born doesn’t feel right and it’s not as if there’s no great new tunes being written or nothing of interest happening in other genres."

Thirty year old Glasper certainly couldn’t be accused of having narrow musical interests. Just from keeping up with family, friends and an old school classmate, Beyonce Knowles, he would know what’s cooking on the pop, soul and hip-hop scenes. R&B chart-topper LeToya Luckett is Glasper’s cousin and Q-Tip (who phones in a suggestion on In My Element), Talib Kweli and Jay-Z are good pals. Glasper has also played piano for Erykah Badu, written horn arrangements for Common and is musical director for Mos Def.

But then, he’s always had catholic taste. It runs in the family. His mother, Kim Yvette Glasper-Dobbs, who was murdered alongside her second husband in 2006, was a gospel singer and pianist who could turn her hand to country and western gigs, Broadway shows, jazz songs and Top-40 pop music.

Glasper was brought up in the church and by his early teens he was playing piano at his local Baptist, Catholic and Seventh Day Adventist churches, directing choirs and accompanying gospel singers.

"There was always a piano at home, because my mother played, and I used to mess around on it until I was about twelve," he says. "That’s when I got serious and started listening to things properly, checking everything out. The church certainly affects your playing. People will be crying and hollering, and you have to provide a soundtrack to that. You learn how to connect to people. But I always say that whatever I listen to makes me sound the way I sound – and whatever I don’t listen to makes me sound the way I sound too. What goes in through your ears comes out through your fingers."

If In My Element was part of the grieving process for Glasper – the track Tribute includes the Reverend Joe Ratliff’s raw, moving eulogy to Glasper’s mother – it was also a demonstration of how subtly the hip-hop influence can be introduced into jazz. Glasper almost audibly shudders when talking about the kind of jazz and hip-hop fusion where someone works the decks while a jazz band blows or a jazz drummer tries to play a funk beat and fails miserably.

"I’m not setting myself up as a hip-hop pianist – I’m happy to play that and soul too, but it’s jazz where I’m most comfortable and most able to express myself," he says. "I also don’t want to make a big thing about mixing up genres. Because the point is that it’s okay to do these things and you can do them naturally. There are times on the bandstand when I’ll play something and our drummer will respond by locking into a groove and it becomes quite hypnotic. But we don’t plan that in advance."

Indeed, very little of a Glasper concert is pre-planned. Once tunes and their chord sequences have been rehearsed and committed to memory, they become free spirits.

"I’d say 80%, maybe 90% of the time, my bass player and drummer play what they want to play," says Glasper. "I hired them because I trust them and I admire their ability to create, and I like to be inspired and surprised onstage too. I don’t want to walk out there knowing exactly what’s going to happen and I don’t think people want to go and hear a gig where they know just how things are going to turn out either. It’s like a basketball game. If the Rockets played exactly the same game five times, I wouldn’t want to go and watch that."

To those who fear that jazz musicians leave just a bit too much to chance, Glasper has words of reassurance. He too has left jazz concerts where he felt that the musicians were having a competition to see who could play fastest and realised afterwards that he couldn’t remember a single melody that was played.

"That’s not what we do," he says, "and one of the reasons why Radiohead lend themselves so well to jazz is that they write really nice chord changes and while they use some weird time signatures, they have a way of sneaking in something complex without you realising it. Because they write such beautiful melodies. Good jazz has the power to do all of those things and while I want to create art – it’s like we’re doing a painting in the moment - what I want to leave the audience with especially is good tunes that they can go home singing."

From The Herald, March 27, 2008

Top

Jacqui Dankworth - Carrying on the family tradition

Jacqui Dankworth is often referred to as the jazz princess, due to her parents, Dame Cleo Laine and Sir John Dankworth, being habitually pronounced as the nearest thing British jazz has to royalty.

There’s a skeleton in the cupboard, however, that might point to the singer being an actual princess here in Scotland. Her maternal grandfather may have been a Campbell from Jamaica but according to one source, he was descended from a Scottish colonel who was a Stuart, and a Royal Stuart at that.

Not that Dankworth will be pursuing any ancestral claims as her imminent Scottish tour takes her within a few miles of at least two battlefields, Prestonpans and Culloden, from a previous Stuart quest for the throne.

“My mother’s side of the family is a real melting pot,” she says. “So anything could be possible. There’s Native American and Chinese blood in there, too, apparently, and as far as I know, my great grandmother lived on a Jamaican plantation, probably owned by a Scotsman. My uncle, who’s the oldest survivor on my mum’s side, keeps getting told that there’s family land over there but he’s never done anything about it and I’m not sure I’d feel right about poking about there either. Maybe one day.”

For long enough, just living with the Dankworth name and her mother’s reputation was enough to contend with for Jacqui without digging any deeper into family history. Jazz was the music she grew up with – it could hardly be otherwise – but while the surname opened doors, she also found that people placed expectations on her.

At one point in her younger days she told her parents that she wanted to become an opera singer, which drew rather nervous responses from them. While her brother, Alec, went off and studied jazz bass in America, and worked for a while with Dave Brubeck, so that he could be regarded as a musician in his own right, Jacqui swayed between acting and singing, then eased her way slowly into singing jazz via stage musicals.

“I can remember going to my first auditions when I was just out of school and they would ask if I could sing as high as my mum, and I thought, Give me a chance. I was only eighteen and it had taken my mum years to develop her singing range,” she says. “People did seem to expect someone with my name to hit her strengths straightaway, whereas if you’re incognito, as it were, you probably get time to work on your style.”

She became a success in a variety of acting roles with the Royal Shakespeare Company and once appeared as everything but the soldier in a staged performance of Stravinsky’s The Soldier’s Tale. She also had a folk-pop group, Field of Blue, with her former husband, Harvey Brough of Harvey and the Wallbangers, along the way.

Jazz was exercising a pull, though, and when brother Alec, always supportive, offered her a tour of Hawaii, Hong Kong and Indonesia with his band, she accepted. Closer to home, she worked with saxophonist and now composer in residence at Newcastle University, Tim Garland, on a song cycle alongside two of the best jazz singers in Britain, Norma Winstone and Christine Tobin. The singing side of her career was building momentum.

“I definitely felt less pressure acting because I wasn’t doing what my mum does,” she says. “I really enjoy singing, though, and I suppose you can’t avoid comparisons but I would steer clear massively of any songs that mum was known for singing.”

Then one day a letter arrived. From Cleo. “It was a really long letter and obviously written with my best interests in mind,” she says, “and in it mum said that she realised that I wasn’t singing certain songs and she knew why, but I should go ahead and sing them anyway because all the great jazz singers had sung them and that was no reason to shy away from them.”

The only time Jacqui had asked her mother for advice previously had been about those high notes that she kept being asked to replicate at auditions.

“She told me to pretend I was a cat and get the note up my nose and go miaow,” she says laughing. “That didn’t really help me, although presumably it worked for her. And I’m not sure I took her advice about singing all these great jazz standards either because although I sing some classic jazz songs, I like all sorts of different music and a lot of what I do is more contemporary. I’m just a singer of songs really.”

Except, she’s not. She’s a songwriter, too, and having previously written both words and music for Field of Blue, she’s growing into the jazz singer as writer role by putting lyrics to established compositions. Her former collaborator, Norma Winstone, has done this successfully, turning instrumentals by trumpeter Kenny Wheeler and bass guitarist Steve Swallow into songs that are now sung quite widely and for another home-grown example, she need only look to Tina May, whose lyrics to tunes by Joe Zawinul and Bobby Watson have gone back across the Atlantic.

“It’s a thing quite a few jazz singers do and I can see how it happens,” says Dankworth. “Sometimes I’ll hear a song and I’ll love the words but maybe not the tune or vice versa, and of course, when both are great, that’s ideal. But often I’ll hear something and think, now why should the guitarists or the saxophonists get that to themselves? It happened the other night when my guitarist, Chris Allard, was playing this tune, Travels by Pat Metheny, at the soundcheck and I just fell in love with it. It had a real spiritual – as in the style of song – feeling about it and I could relate to that. The words came really quickly, about twenty-four hours, which is quick for me - I usually take weeks – and now I have a co-writing credit with Pat Metheny. If the guys’ll let me play it.”

The guys being Allard and fellow guitarist Mike Walker, the Mancunian who has become the guitarist of choice for bandleaders including Mike Gibbs and George Russell. Dankworth normally tours with a quintet but hit on the idea of using two guitars to create a more intimate atmosphere. If it’s a setting where the singer can’t “hide” in a bigger sound, it’s also one, she says, where the musicians can really respond to each other and the audience.

“The longer I go out playing gigs, the more I become convinced that live music is a special thing,” she says. “I don’t think people realise just how much musicians react to the way an audience listens. If the audience clap and shout a lot, then obviously the musicians feel encouraged. But being aware that people are listening carefully can make you feel really good about the music, too. I like an audience to feel moved, uplifted in some way. I got a letter once from someone saying, You’ve changed my life – and I suppose the idea is that you should do that to everyone. But if I can do that to one person, then it’s all worthwhile.”

From The Herald, May 31, 2008

Top