Evan Parker Electro-Acoustic Ensemble: The Moment’s Energy (ECM 177 4798)
This group has been described as a new kind of chamber orchestra, for while it contains some of the instruments you might find in a conventional classical ensemble (double bass, violin, piano, percussion) there are also all kinds of other things, from shakuhachi and sho to signal processing, live electronics and sound projection.

The music was commissioned by Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival and performed there in in November 20o7; some of the tracks were recorded live, others were from studio sessions beforehand. The title track is in seven parts and takes up most of the disc, with a final piece called Incandescent Clouds.

So how to describe this highly abstract music? It is fascinating how the sounds all feel part of the same world, whether acoustically or electronically generated. And an expansive world it is, throwing up wide landscapes of sound. But it is also highly detailed and multi-layered, leading the listener to lean in and become absorbed in the micro sounds as well as the macro one.

While Part II, for example, might start off with breath through shakuhachi and then bass clarinet, by the time the electronics increasingly have become to manipulate and distort the acoustic sounds they sound no less humanly generated, no further from the breath that started them.

I’m not quite sure why I enjoy this so much more than other more classically sourced contemporary music (because it certainly shares a lot of that ground and tradition). Maybe  it is because these are players more at home improvising and interacting in a live context and so the music doesn’t have quite the detachment of more strongly composer-led music.

Parker confirms yet again that he is one of our most visionary and original of musicians.

Troyka: Troyka (Edition Records EDN1014)
I realise that bands like Troyka would prefer not to have the jazz tag attached to them for fear it may alienate their younger audience, so apologies in advance for reviewing this disc here. Even through ears attached to an old man with a goatee beard, however, it sounds pretty fine.

Troyka is guitarist Chris Montague, organist Kit Downes and drummer Joshua Blackmore. There is really no way the opener, Tax Return, could exist if Miles Davis and John Scofield, among many others, had not walked some of this road beforehand. Edgy rhythms and time changes, deeply funky leanings, and instrumental mastery of the jazz persuasion.

Clint is just plain scary – large slabs of noise and wild slide guitar, while 140 reminds me of the M-Basers and Frisell at times. Born in the 80s features a beautiful set of intro guitar chords, before building into some serious swing and bloop-bleep interludes. My favourite is Noonian Soong (or should that be song?) which suddenly shifts from a finely tuned and quietly funky interplay into a rock-fusion romp, and then back again.

Najma Akhtar & Gary Lucas: Rishte (World Village 450008)
Time for a bit of a break from jazz and a pretty little slice of exotica comprising equal parts Indian singing and trance blues guitar.

For some reason when I listen to this I think of the Raising Sand collaboration of Robert Palmer and Alison Krauss, not really taking in until I read some background info that, of course, Najma Akhtar had contributed her striking voice to the works of Page and Plant. Of course rock and country are, on the surface, closer together than the classical Indian styles and the blues… except that in reality the blues are part of every other music.

For the younger readers Gary Lucas’s name will be familiar from his work with Jeff Buckley; for the rest of us we think of him as one-time guitarist for Captain Beefheart. Yes, we are talking a long and illustrious career here.

Try track six first – an amazing take on the Skip James blues song Special Rider Blues, with Akhtar making it completely her own. A lot of the others are in Urdu and the general mood is from the Indian subcontinent with Lucas adding his winning acoustic/electric blues strum and lightning runs. Both musicians are just so all-encompassing in what they do. So Akhtar can take an English folk theme for Soul Taker, and Lucas can be a multi-headed guitar monster. Just try all his different parts on that same Soul Taker.

In the end I think it all works best on the Urdu-language pieces, but maybe that’s because sometimes I like voices as pure music without having to worry what the words are.

The Necks
CBSO Centre, Birmingham UK
22-05-09

The Necks – Chris Abrahams at the grand piano, Lloyd Swanton on mini upright bass and Tony Buck at the drums –  slow the world down.

Before each of two sets they are silently motionless for a minute as they clear their minds. Then Swanton or Abrahams summons up the first impulse and turns it into sound – a simple bass figure, a trilling piano pattern – and they are off.

The piece of music – spontaneous and unrepeatable – will last 45 minutes, it will not divert hugely from that initial pattern, or it might… The accretion of ideas, of nuances, is so slow, and then so incrementally developed that seconds become minutes, one minute becomes ten, and 45 seem to have acquired the experiences of a whole day and night. Or did they pass in one held breath? Time is definitely being played with.

All three bring very special abilities to their playing.

Buck’s are the most obvious. He slides a small hand cymbal around the metal rim of his floor tom, creating the metallic rhythm of a factory machine. Or, against an immaculately fast high-hat rhythm, he plays a constant bass drum beat which, so slowly, so infinitesimally, itself slows.

Swanton sets up atmospheric bowed monotones and then compulsive rhythms of his own, bouncing bow on strings.

Abrahams spends most of his time on a handful of notes in the middle of the keyboard, playing fidgety repeated patterns, also with finely nuanced adjustments to phrasing. In the second piece he set up an extraordinary double handed, rapidly corrugating sheet of sound, hitting the keys like a bongo-pianist.

A unique musical experience which drew an eclectic crowd though, surprisingly since this was a Birmingham Jazz gig, few jazz regulars.

“Piano trio” – the words conjure up cool supper clubs, the great jazz trios of the past like Oscar Peterson’s, Bill Evans’, and the great ones of the present like Brad Mehldau’s and Bill Charlap’s. And then there are the ones that have extended out beyond jazz like E.S.T. and the Neil Cowley Trio.

But there is one that has had a profound effect on the music and didn’t really start out in jazz at all, still isn’t jazz, nor avant-garde, nor minimalist, nor ambient, nor rock… and yet it is all of these things.

The Necks, the Australian trio of Chris Abrahams on piano, Lloyd Swanton on bass and Tony Buck on drums, sound like nothing else, and you can hear just what nothing else sounds like tomorrow evening in Birmingham when they play the CBSO Centre, courtesy of Birmingham Jazz supported by The Polar Bear record shop in Kings Heath.

It promises to be, like all Necks’ gigs, an extraordinary and unique (dangerous word but absolutely apt here) experience. The Necks start a concert with no preconceived music and musical minds as clear as they can make them. Then they build, through group interaction (which is finely honed since they have been doing this for 20 years), a set-long piece of music that uses hypnotic beats, repeated riffs and long, wide dynamic arcs.

It is music to lose oneself in – and come out of the other end changed in some imperceptible way. I can heartily recommend it.

Tickets are £13 available from 0121 767 4050 or at www.thsh.co.uk and on the door, it starts at 8pm, the CBSO Centre is a great space and is in Berkley Street.

Vince Mendoza

Vince Mendoza: Blauklang (ACT)
***

Vince Mendoza has done some fabulous work as an arranger – his orchestral arrangements of Joni Mitchell’s back catalogue for her retrospective Travelogue double album made the whole thing worthwhile, and if you thought Joe Zawinul’s Syndicate music couldn’t possibly maintain its fleetness of foot and high excitement when set for big band, then Vince’s work on Brown Street quickly put paid to those doubts.

So I was moderately excited to hear one of his own albums, complete with quite a bit of Mendoza as composer as well as arranger. The only non-originals are a traditional tune, Miles’ All Blues and Gil Evans’ Blues for Pablo.

Much of the disc is taken up with a six-movement suite called Bluesounds.

Yes, there is a predominant colour here.

The settings for 15-piece ensemble – basically a jazz band with string quartet and some less common instruments, like harp and French horn – are, of course, lovely. And an added bonus is that the featured soloist is Vietnamese/French guitarist Nguyen Le.

But ultimately, the rich harmonies and the tasteful solos end up sounding rather lifeless and possessed of a little too much good taste for their own good.

Mendoza, it seems, needs a vibrant, singular artist to work with – like Mitchell or Zawinul. Le could have been it if it had been his album and Mendoza was merely the arranger. 

Mike Westbrook: Rossini (Hatology)
***

Long out of print, this 1986 recording is a very welcome reissue. The British bandleader, composer and arranger turns his attention to the opera composer and reworks the William Tell Overture (five different versions here), as well as The Thieving Magpie (and its close cousin Thievish Magpie) as well as other bits of various operas.

The classic 80s Westbrook crew is all here – Andy Grappy on tuba, Peter Fairclough on drums, Peter Whyman on alto, and of course Kate Westbrook does some of her familiar highly stylised singing.

The charm is to be found in the familiar tunes and the way they are twisted and turned to jazz ends.

There are some strong solos, from Whyman in particular, but the chief treats here lie within the ensemble passages. 

Taj Mahal: Maestro (Heads Up)
***

I’m a big fan of the erudite bluesman who has found new riches in world music collaborations.

There is a celebrity spot-element to this retrospective, and the guests include Ben Harper, Angelique Kidjo, Jack Johnson, Los Lobos, Ziggy Marley and others.

It shows Taj’s many different musical interests, from blues to reggae, old rock ‘n’ roll to African music, but he has done most of it better before. Scratch My Back is a strong opener, and Angelique Kidjo is a good match for Mahal on Zanzibar, which they wrote together. Otherwise it’s more like a grand occasion than a really good musical session. 

Giovanni Guidi Quartet: The House Behind This One (CamJazz)
****

If there seems to be something of an obsession with Italian jazz at the moment, it’s not intentional; it’s dependent upon what I am sent for review. Guidi is a pianist from Umbria who leads a lively band including an American saxophonist and a Portuguese drummer.

After a solid bit of solo piano to start, track two comes on like a Bad Plus workout, with a dark, squalling tenor solo from Dan Kinzelman. The band can do gentle, as they show on the title track, and a while later they move from a Guidi’s Peace Treaty to Ornette Coleman’s Peace Warriors.

Fresh sounding.

Just back from a great second set from the Mingus Orchestra at the Jazz Standard, in New York’s Gramercy area.

The various Mingus bands – the Dynasty, the Big Band and the Orchestra – are now resident at this club which, just as it sits midway between the Village venues and uptown Manhattan, also strikes a nice compromise between the basic nature of the Greenwich clubs and the overly sophisticated ambience of the posh supper clubs.

The inclusion in the band of Wayne Escofery on tenor was a particular treat – but so too were the superb solos by the band’s more unusual instrumentalists, Michael Rabinowitz on bassoon, John Clark on French horn and Doug Yates on bass clarinet.

Bassist Boris Koslov, of course, always takes the award for most difficult shoes to stand in, but he keeps something of the great man’s spriit in both his sound and his playing.

Tonight At Noon was a particularly strong piece, and Ku-umba Frank Lacy swapped his trombone for the mic and a barn-storming version of Devil Woman Blues to close off.

Great, too, to spot the indomitable Sue Mingus, Charles’ widow and the woman who is the driving force in keeping Charles Mingus’s music the great living and breathing body of work it is.

Have just heard that Keith Jarrett is playing a solo concert at the Royal Festival Hall on Monday 1 December.

Tickets go on sale next Wednesday 29 October on 0871 663 2505 or here.

I still hold on to this naive hope that one day Jarrett will play Symphony Hall in Birmingham. I’ve never seen him in concert and am kind of holding on for that momentous day in Birmingham.

Or am I just being a fool?

Tonight at the CBSO Centre the former Empirical pianist and recent graduate of the Manhattan School of Music, John Escreet, returns from that fab island to this with some important new friends.

They include the alto saxophonist David Binney, who has wowed audiences here before with his street-sharp style, and drummer Tyshawn Sorey, who is a member of the trio Fieldwork with pianist Vijay Iyer.

So, the finest downtown New York has to offer led by a man who cut his jazz teeth with the Doncaster Youth Jazz Association and has since played with Julian Siegel, Gerard Presencer, Denys Baptiste among others, before studying with Jason Moran and Kenny Barron at the Manhattan school and playing with Seamus Blake and Wayne Krantz.

The John Escreet Group with David Binney are at the CBSO Centre at 8pm. Tickets are £12 from 0121 767 4050, at www.thsh.co.uk and on the door – this is a Birmingham Jazz gig.

Dave Holland Sextet: Pass It On (Emarcy)

*****

Yes, it’s predictable. Another Dave Holland and another full house of stars.The band may have changed but the standards are always of the highest, the playing is always exciting and the music enriching.

Dave Holland

Gone is the novel line-up of the Holland Quintet – vibraphone instead of piano. Trombonist Robin Eubanks remains from that group but is joined by Antonio Hart on alto, Alex Sipiagin on trumpet, Mulgrew Miller on piano and Eric Harland on drums.

The opener, The Sum Of All Parts, says it all both in title and its compelling mix of solo and ensemble playing. Holland, in his writing and arranging, manages to give a jazz combo the range and richness of a big band, while still leaving lots of space for individual expression.

There is nothing outlandish here, nothing fanciful, headline grabbing, or even overtly innovative. What there is is timeless jazz of an exceptional artistic integrity. The very opposite of a fashionable purchase – this is an investment that will not fade.

Wolfgang Muthspiel 4tet: Earth Mountain (Material Records)

****

The Austrian guitarist was last heard in a duo setting with Tunisian oud player Dhafer Youssef (they played a great set at this year’s Coventry Jazz Festival) but here he is leading a quartet. Swiss pianist Jean-Paul Brodbeck joins the Austrian twin bass and drum team of Matthias and Andreas Pilcher, with nearly all the material written by Muthspiel.

It’s a fine band that can turn its hand to lyrical “acoustic” jazz or turn the fusion switch as needed. All are concise and cogent improvisers, and Muthspiel seems to grow in stature with each release. This has the accessibility of a Pat Metheny Group album without the rock stadium grandeur – much more intimate and club-sized, but able to groove hard.

Charles Lloyd: Dream Weaver – The Atlantic Years 1966-1969 (Warner Jazz)

***

What you get on this double disc is selections from both live and studio albums the tenor saxophonist made when he became the jazz darling of the rock festival crowd. It’s also the time when he fostered the nascent careers of two brilliant youngsters: drummer Jack DeJohnette and pianist Keith Jarrett.

The Coltrane influence (though perhaps without the same degree of gravitas) is clear on a long live work like Tribal Dance. Jarrett even quotes Coltrane at the beginning of his solo in this one. Some of the recorded sound is as flaky as you would expect from ‘60s live recording with DeJohnette’s cymbals particularly ill-served. Still, there’s lots of excitement. If you don’t own Forest Flower, and are too young to remember the ‘60s – dip into this one.

Surinder Sandhu: The Fictionist (Saurango)

**

Surinder Sandhu plays the traditional North Indian violin called the sarangi and has hugely eclectic taste which leads him to write music mixing Indian, jazz, classical orchestral and prog rock elements. The results are richly exotic and can be uplifting and delightful… or they can be a bit of mess.

This was written for Liverpool’s Capital of Culture year and is played by the RLPO with Sandhu’s Birmingham-based jazz group and others.

At the centre is his Symphony No 1, and it is surrounded by other pieces that don’t sound particularly different. All have moments of interest and the contrasting textures – for example of soaring orchestra strings, slapped electric bass, rock drums and solo sarangi in the first movement of the symphony – are attractive. But beyond the textures and instrumental prowess I find it difficult to make much sense of it. I can’t help feeling a narrower scope and a sharper focus would result in music of more efficient communication and probably greater profundity.