Off Minor

Just thought I’d share this YouTube find… Abbey Lincoln is a goddess. This seems a bit borked; refresh the page if it’s not working for you…

Wow, Boat-Ting is just the best thing ever. Back again on Monday…

Steve Noble, Lol Coxhill, John Edwards
These guys were playing at the last Boat-Ting I went to (the last but one-one)… They’re all awesome, but I think I preferred their performance tonight… It seemed to get off a bit more. Tho that might have been because I’d nabbed the sofa seats at the front, so they were playing right into my face.

Last time I wrote that I didn’t really feel like I got Lol Coxhill, but I sure do now… I think I wrote some bollocks about him being more meditative and developing than other kind-of blasting players that just play all sorts of random screams. Well, that’s partly true I think, but he was playing with bursting energy that I hadn’t seen him pull out the (very few) other times I’ve seen him. John Edward’s playing was also really inspired tonight (not that it’s usually not inspired) but there was a lot of inventive sounds coming out; they all seemed like they were pushing themselves just that little bit further. They played three improvisations, the last piece was a cool short thing with Lol Coxhill starting off with some great little melody that exactly showed how it’s nonsense to say that Free Improv doesn’t know how to play tunes.

Still haven’t bought any Coxhill records, probably should have bought something from the front desk :(

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Ticked off one of my life’s great missions: to finally get to see McCoy Tyner play live. I’ve missed the opportunity quite a few times, but he’s so important to me as a musician (what with the fact that he played on A Love Supreme for a start). Anyway, got a good seat to the performance, Barbican was ok… Last time (first time) I went there was to see Wayne Shorter at last year’s London Jazz Festival, and the sound was terrible. A bit better this time, but could still do with some work…

Anyway, enough about irrelevant technicalities, it was McCoy Tyner, omg!!!!11!!!1!!! The gig was some sort of tie-in to the Impulse records birthday thing that’s been going on for, what, quite a while now (??) inasmuch as: it was the McCoy Tyner trio, with the septet coming in to play a few ‘classic’ Impulse records tracks at the end…

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Yay, second time back (first time back) to the Boat Ting (or is it Boat-Ting?) club at the Yacht Club, London Embankment… On a boat, on the Thames, good music, excellent.
Once again, four groups / ensembles… Not quite as excellent a night as the first one; not really sure why… things were a little more sparse this time…

Steve Noble, Lol Coxhill, John Edwards
Last time, Steve Noble and John Edwards were playing with Alex Ward; this week they were joined by Lol Coxhill, forming a trio that I’d previously seen performing in the QEH foyer at last year’s London Jazz Festival. N+C+E are presumably a more formal group, since they’ll all be back again at Boat-Ting on 5th March…

Anyway… This was interesting, because the N+E+Ward group was really Hard, Rocking, Power… Lol Coxhill is a bit more meditative, I guess? A bit more rolling and developing rather than a continual onslaught of random, new ideas and directions; a completely different style of playing and music.

Steve Noble is my new favourite drummer, and I’ve seen him loads, now, in the last few months… (Well, ok, a few times.) I wrote about him briefly on here before… His arms are a constant flurry, dragging stuff off and on his kit, continually trying to produce new sounds… More of a drum-kit percussionist than straight-up drummer… He’s really fantastic and engaging to watch… You don’t have to just sit back and breathe it all in…!

John Edwards is always great… Is he the hardest working bassist in London? There haven’t been many times in the last few months when he hasn’t been playing… Perhaps I’m just picking obvious gigs to go to. In any case, he’s still a genius. Steve Noble is God; John Edwards is God too.

Lol Coxhill. I think I’ve seen him about four times, now? I don’t quite know what to make of it all, because he’s great, but difficult to pin down because his playing seems a lot more thoughtful than a lot of his contemporaries… That means his playing doesn’t really seem to instantly grab me as much as anyone else, but that’s probably a good thing and means he’s less full of tectonic tricks, a more intelligent (?) player. Anyway, I don’t know what I’m talking about… I need more Lol Coxhill records…

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Miles’ Seven Steps to Heaven was recorded in April/May 1963, and documents the Miles Davis group in flux, making the transition between the Coltrane/… groups of the late 1950′s–early sixties, and the ‘classic’ quintet with Wayne Shorter et al. 7STH is basically Miles + George Coleman, with two rhythm sections: Victor Feldman, Frank Butler and Ron Carter (on five tracks), and then Herbie Hancock, Ron Carter and Tony Williams on the remaining three May 14th tracks (my Columbia reissue comes with two tracks not-on-original-LP).

The tunes are pretty decent, but there’s nothing too magical happening. What’s really interesting, though, is how George Coleman is almost exactly half-way between John Coltrane and Wayne Shorter; his playing on Seven Steps to Heaven sounds perfectly Prestige-era Trane-y; his solo on So near, So far sounds just like it had come out the axe of Wayne Shorter…

Here’s a post on Keep Swinging listing some jazz CDs with “hidden tracks”. EST always seem to make sure to hide something at the end of the disc, after about 15 minutes of silence… I think Polar Bear’s last one did the same thing. Pity is, in EST’s case, for Strange Place for Snow it was actually the best part of the disk.

It was great to finally be able to get back to one of the Bohman Brothers’ improv nights, this Wednesday; the last time I went to one of these things, they were still in the loft-space in Bonnigton Square (Vauxhall), but they’ve now moved to the Battersea Arts Centre, just outside Clapham Junction… Which is good, because it means cheap return tickets in and out of Guildford :) Plus there’s a handy bar downstairs (although the room itself is a little tight).

Tonight was two duos: Steve Beresford (piano) + Sharon Gal (voice), and Steve Noble (percussion) + Alan Wilkinson (saxes). Both did two sets of single improvisational pieces.

The Beresford / Gal thing was cool (see post image); Beresford is about the only european free-improvising pianist that I really honestly like; he’s always full of cool ideas, knows when to shut up, and really tight across the keys. Although this was actually the first time I’d seen him without Evan Parker :/ Gal was pretty funky… Vocals never really turn me on, but this was pretty cool.

The Noble / Wilkinson duo was really fantastic; the screaming lines were extra awesome in the confines of the tight performance space, right up close. I had forgotten that I still have an Emanem CD of theirs (Free Base) that I’d never really got round to listening to, properly… That’s now sitting in my CD drawer ready for a good opportunity…

If you’ve never been to one of these gigs, and you’re in the area and able to, it’s well worth it. It’s only a fiver to get in, the audience is tiny (less than a dozen people) yet the music is so great. Adam Bohman was seemingly worried that there weren’t many people there, in the audience, that night… Hopefully that doesn’t mean it’s dwindling away towards a point of non-viability?

Ok, I won’t shy from it, I really do think Soweto Kinch is the most exciting thing to hit the mainstream of British jazz, to my mind, for at least the last six and a half years… (!) Ok, he’s probably not technically the best sax player in the world, he might not have the most imaginative lines in the universe and, yes, he has played the same set list for seemingly the last two years straight (at least, it seemed to be pretty much identical both times I caught him at the Coventry jazz festival in 2004 and ’06). However, I really don’t know of any band so truly vibrant and care-free, with such an over-riding sense of fun and humour… It’s like Soweto Kinch is in his own perfect world, and there’s nothing else really coming anywhere close. In the MainStream there’s the Oxbridge-style of F-ire collective outfits, the Leicester University-set of Arts Council wannabes, and then Soweto Kinch, whose band sounds like a well-matured student outfit, formed in the performing arts department of Wolverhampton Polytechnic (to point out that Kinch is actually himself a product of Oxbridge — having graduated from Oxford with a degree in Modern History — is to slightly miss the point).

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