ELTON DEAN/JOE GALLIVAN/KENNY WHEELER – The Cheque Is In The Mail

 

(OG 610)

 

Track listing: In Spite Of It/Steps/First Team/Ragadagger/To The Sun/Off Your Beaver/Appropo/Fragment Of Memory/No Bounds/Time Test

 

Elton Dean (alto sax and saxello), Joe Gallivan (synthesiser, drums and percussion), Kenny Wheeler (trumpet and flügelhorn). Recorded in London, February 1977. Released: summer 1977. Produced by Joe Gallivan (“IN CO-OPERATION WITH ELTON DEAN”). Sleeve design: uncredited.

 

Readers who imagine that Ogun was all about hard-blowing South African-derived free/kwela jazz must have realised by now that in actuality the label journeyed to some very strange universes (as Ray Russell would say). Here we have ten tracks of what in a different era might have been called Hypermodern Jazz 2000.5; ladies and gentlemen, these three players really do sound as though they’re floating in space.

 

Where the hecking heck did this come from, and why in particular Kenny Wheeler? Having just taken delivery of and read Song For Someone – The Musical Life Of Kenny Wheeler, an allegedly exhaustive analysis of the great Torontonian’s life and work, written over a number of years by Brian Shaw and Nick Smart, I am none the wiser; The Cheque Is In The Mail was the first record of his I looked up in the book, because I was imminently going to write about it – and it is not mentioned at all, nor is Joe Gallivan’s parent big band Intercontinental Express, which the drummer co-ran with saxophonist Charles Austin and from which this trio was essentially an ad hoc splinter group.

 

Excuse my ranting, but Song For Someone is a disappointing book in a lot of ways. It is the same problem as with Morton Jack’s Nick Drake biography in that its authors were given unprecedented and unparalleled access to Wheeler’s family, friends, surviving fellow musicians and personal archive – not to mention the man himself while he was still with us – but, having been given the keys to the kingdom, they are completely unsure about what to do with them.

 

Hence, while there is a lot of very useful information about Wheeler’s upbringing in various parts of Ontario and several possible explanations for his lifelong chronic shyness and tendency towards self-deprecation and profound self-denial – none of which did him any good; the only decisive and contrarian step he seems to have taken in his life was to use the money his father had given him to study at McGill University on a ‘plane ticket to London with a view to making it as a jazz musician in Britain – the text generally plods along on a “THIS happened, and then THAT happened” mechanical basis, and even that terrain is uneven; several observations are repeated almost randomly throughout the book and the temporal continuity itself isn’t too secure; one moment he’s about to turn eighty, and barely a couple of paragraphs later he’s preparing for his 75^th birthday concert (as with almost all books in this depreciated age, a committed editor would not have spared their pruning shears).

 

I also think they’re blanding Wheeler’s work out for the sake of reaching a wider readership, particularly those spellbound by the unending products of the ECM label (there is much bleating about substandard critical reactions to Wheeler’s ECM-centred work, but it has to be understood that for much of the seventies and indeed eighties, the label’s output was generally considered by critics as pretentious proto-New Age muzak, Eicher’s vampire seamlessly sucking the blood out of contemporary jazz. I note how many of Wheeler’s ECM recordings – The Widow In The Window, even the hallowed Music For Large And Small Ensembles – are deemed, even in this book, as compromising shadows of what these musicians were capable of playing on stage).

 

Whereas the harder Wheeler stuff seems to have been politely escorted to the sidelines and minimised. I don’t just mean Song For Someone itself – there is much illuminating explanation of exactly how and why that album came together, but if Derek Bailey did anything on it (which, at the top and tail of one lengthy track, he explosively does) you’d never have known (also that Keith Christie was asked to solo at some point on the record but declined). Mike Osborne seems to have been there as a sub for Ray Warleigh, who at the time was visiting his family in Australia, and few of the musicians seem to have had good words to say about him (nor indeed about Tony Oxley, who I suspect from anecdotal evidence alienated quite a lot of the players, but who Wheeler insisted had to be the drummer).

 

Or indeed of his work on Ogun and/or with the South Africans. His absolutely crucial and key contributions to OG 520 are briefly mentioned (minus the adjectives) and there’s a subtext of please can we brush this noisy stuff under the carpet and concentrate on all the nice ECM things. There is real heartbreak in the messy (and, in this book, messily and incompletely told) personal saga of Norma Winstone and John Taylor which I think really hurt Wheeler, but Angel Song? Sorry but Konitz seems to have been a bit of an arrogant prick (see also Keith Jarrett on Gnu High). So for me it’s another question of a whole lot of opportunities lost.

 

ANYWAY you’re not here to read me blethering on about a Kenny Wheeler book, but about this record! And what an odd record, the first on Ogun to involve North American musicians. Joe Gallivan comes from Rochester and in his time seems to have drifted through differing fields of music. He reputedly tested out the prototype drum synthesiser for Robert Moog in the sixties and you can hear it throughout this album and also on Gil Evans’ There Comes A Time (the title track of which commences with more or less a solo Gallivan drum synthesiser improvisation). He performed in a quite extraordinary group named Love Cry Want, which also involved Larry Young on organ and one (Steven) Nicholas – whatever happened to him? - on a self-built guitar synthesiser gizmo. Their one eponymous album was recorded in 1972 in Lafayette Park, Washington D.C. – within earshot of Nixon’s White House. It’s fair to declare that there hasn’t been anything like it in jazz before or since.

 

By the mid-seventies Gallivan was living in London. He had already been considered for the job of drummer in the Soft Machine – which presumably is how he came to know Elton Dean – but by now was busy building something else, specifically the aforementioned Intercontinental Express, co-run by Austin and himself and featuring mainly British jazz players. Gallivan was unhappy with the end recorded result, complaining that many of the musicians, schooled in hey-free-jazz-we-can-do-what-we-like-including-walking-randomly-around-the-studio-and-nowhere-near-an-actual-microphone-mAAAAAAn dogma, hadn’t a fucking clue about what recording an album involved. No names were given – though could be guessed – but Gallivan did express his fervent approval of the playing of Kenny Wheeler, bassist Roy Babbington and – the band’s real wildcard player – Ronnie Scott, who he had expected to be the least flexible of these musicians but in fact proved marvellously adaptable and, as a veteran session player, knew exactly how a recording studio worked, how best to approach the microphone etc.

 

Was the Intercontinental Express album any good, or as disappointing as Gallivan remembered? Well, listen for yourself. But three of the players regrouped in February 1977 to record ten relatively brief improvised pieces – only two tracks on The Cheque Is In The Mail venture beyond the five-minute mark.

And there is, again, no other album quite like this. In his liner note Gallivan describes the music as “just three people playing together somewhat in the tradition of older style jazz musicians” – and there are moments in pieces like “Ragadagger” where Dean’s saxello indeed sounds like a clarinet and there are echoes of the counterpart abundant in very early jazz – “but with a contemporary language.”

 

These pieces, which resemble sonic jetsam jettisoned from a long-distance space probe, are almost unclassifiable. In the opening “In Spite Of It” horns and bass synth patterns cascade like descending meteorites. There are points in “Ragadagger” when we might be listening to selected ambient works of the younger Aphex Twin. Dean’s alto playing is more abrasive than his recorded norm. On “Steps” and “Steps” all three players twinkle like distant comets illustrating the night sky. On the best track, the eight-minute-plus “To The Sun,” the trio work to build a coherent framework and Wheeler is in his most profound balladic mood. After his solo – and despite Gallivan’s protestations in his liner note about there being “no solos with accompaniment,” that is what this is – reaches its sad and natural end, another period of brief bubbling animation is succeeded by a sombre improvised two-horn harmonic and melodic line which concludes this excellent piece with full structural and emotional logic.

 

Throughout side two of the record, the players are in danger of drifting away from us altogether. On “Appropos” and “Fragment Of Memory” they are like Holst’s sirens of Neptune, so distant that they can barely be heard, let alone touched. I’m not sure I’ve heard a similar effect on any other jazz or improvised music record. Had The Cheque Is In The Mail appeared on Warp or Planet Mu in the mid-nineties it would have been hailed as a classic of ambient electronica, up there with Pete Namlook.

 

Well, there you are. Noise-punk! Acapella post-punk! Squeaky floorboards in a pub with no audience! What next with Ogun? What do you mean we’re going to church??!!

 

Current availability: out of print, but the album can be heard on YouTube.

LOL COXHILL - Diverse

 

(OG 510)

 

Track listing: (a) Diver/(b)Divers

 

(a) Lol Coxhill (“Duet for soprano saxophone and loose floorboard [unrelated]”). Recorded at the Seven Dials Jazz Club/Community Centre, Shelton Street, Covent Garden, London WC2, at some unspecified point in 1976.

(b) Lol Coxhill (soprano sax), Dave Green (bass), John Mitchell (percussion), Colin Wood (cello). Date and venue as above.

 

Album released: mid-1977. Produced by Lol Coxhill. Cover illustration: Victorian lantern slide (identity of artist/photographer unknown). Back cover illustrations by “an anonymous friend” and George O’Brien.

 

You have probably already gathered from the above credits that this is not really like any previous Ogun album. Lol Coxhill was a benign law unto himself but call him an autodidact and you would’ve been liable for a disappointed reprimand. He lived in Welwyn Garden City but I have no idea whether he ever knew any of the Wilde family. He played with anybody and everybody. Rufus Thomas to the Damned. He was in Kevin Ayers and the Whole World and that is indeed his soprano burbling amid the frenetic brushwork of John Kongos’ late 1971 smash hit “Tokoloshe Man.” He also blew from time to time in the Brotherhood of Breath, hence I guess the Ogun connection, but apart from a shelved third studio album for Island Records which also had Elton Dean in the sax section he never recorded with them.

 

His primary interests as a free-but-with-conditions improviser were almost entirely expressed on the soprano saxophone. He would occasionally dust off his tenor for Brotherhood and later Dedication Orchestra performances and on the larger horn he proved himself a Rollins man through and through. But the soprano allowed him to fly more freely.

 

Diverse, which came in a deconstructive sleeve worthy of late seventies Rough Trade Records, features just two extended side-long improvised performances, or excerpts from them. They were taped in the same venue as OG 410 but as most of the audience, said Coxhill ruefully, were in the bar at the time you’d never know it was a live album.

 

The purpose of Coxhill’s two records for Ogun was to focus on his improvising work in different musical settings. “Diver” is a superb solo meditation which begins cautiously in the bucolic land of Surman country before beginning to stagger around like a last-minute New Year reveller. Far closer to Steve Lacy than to Evan Parker as a player, in terms of his gentle but firm insistence upon melodic and motivic development, Coxhill is free to explore his instrument’s potential with only momentary flurries of abstraction. Even the loose floorboard doesn’t distract too much; if anything, it provides a regular if faint percussive undertow – and on two occasions towards the end of the piece the saxophone stops to let the floorboard have a word or two of its own. In the end it simply wanders off to fade, the monologue presumably continuing well into Holborn or at least St Giles.

 

 

On “Divers” Coxhill is joined by a trio of unpredictably-chosen musicians. The late Colin Wood, then principally a member of John Stevens’ furiously minimalist and unamplified mid-seventies string-dominant edition of the Spontaneous Music Ensemble, provides the nearest thing here to a second voice or “horn.” Dependable Dave Green is not a name commonly associated with free improvisation, although at the time he was certainly a member of Stan Tracey’s open-ended quartet with Art Themen and Bryan Spring, and by extension also Tracey’s octet. Yet he fits in well with Coxhill’s ideas and is readily able to respond to and develop them. Percussionist John Mitchell I only really know from his recorded work in the mid-seventies with Mike Westbrook and Graham Collier – he may well be the secret hero of Citadel/Room 315 – and doesn’t have too much to say in “Divers”’ twenty-one or so minutes except when the music gets lively, whereupon he suddenly has quite a lot to say.

 

I’m bound to say that “Divers” isn’t the best group improvisation I’ve ever heard. It commences with Coxhill’s soprano upfront, as he steers the creaking timbers of bowed strings, like a whale reluctant to be beached; Mitchell might as well not have been there at this point. Nevertheless the saxophonist works hard to get a structure built, and when the gloom finally relents and the sunshine of a kwela-Latin rhythm and impromptu overlying riff are allowed into the room, the musicians (particularly Mitchell) audibly brighten up; Green even permits himself the luxury of a bass solo.

 

At around the eleven-minute mark, however, the worst case scenario in any free improvisation context rears its head – the musicians simply run out of ideas and come to a standstill. Coxhill is left alone to work everyone else back into the music, and this he (just about) manages; there are some extended Coltrane-ish minor-key drone/modal contemplations, then the creaky ship again until finally the kwela-Latin thing returns and takes the piece out to another fade. Certainly Diverse does not measure up to classic Coxhill records like Ear Of The Beholder, Slow Music or (my favourite) Digswell Duets, but like anything else in his story it remains an important chapter, because his music was something like an unfolding diary. Or, if you prefer, a prototype blog.

 

Current availability: reissued on CD in September 1998 and on download in April 2021 as part of Coxhill On Ogun, which compiled both OG 510 and OG 525. Interestingly Coxhill, presumably for reasons of his own, scheduled the first of these albums to come after the second one in terms of running order.

EDQ* – They All Be On This Old Road

 

(OG 410)

 

Track listing: Naima/Dede-Bup-Bup/Nancy (With The Laughing Face)/Easy Living-Overdoing It-Not Too Much

 

Elton Dean (alto sax and saxello), Keith Tippett (piano), Chris Laurence** (bass), Louis Moholo-Moholo (drums).

 

Recorded at the Seven Dials, Shelton Street, Covent Garden, London WC2, on 18 November 1976. Released: May 1977. Recorded by Ron Barron. Producers: Keith Beal and Elton Dean. Cover painting: John Christopherson.

 

(*front cover and spine say “EDQ,” the labels credit “ELTON DEAN QUARTET”)

(**surname misspelt on sleeve as “LAWRENCE”)

 

What initially attracted me to the writing of Paul Morley in the NME was the second live review that he wrote. The first was of Buzzcocks, but the second was of Elton Dean’s quartet at Manchester’s Band On The Wall. On that evening the quartet comprised Dean, Keith Tippett, their regular bassist Harry Miller and, sitting in for an unavailable Louis Moholo-Moholo at the drums, fellow ex-Soft Machinist (indeed, at that time still primarily a Soft Machinist) John Marshall.

 

Morley’s thoughts, and the way he expressed them, hooked thirteen-year-old me instantly. As somebody who was at the time enthusiastically getting into what we would now call for want of a better phrase free jazz – it really did prove inadequate in the end – and hadn’t heard that much punk rock, it was striking to be informed that yes, what was happening in the world(s) of British-based free improvisation (and Derek Bailey, Trevor Watts and others were cited as exemplars) was just as much, if not more, punk than the punks. It helped orientate me, and when Lol Coxhill recorded and toured with the Damned several months later, it resembled the fulfilling of a prophecy.

 

Hence They All Be On This Old Road, which came out about six weeks after the first Clash album, became something of a beacon of guidance to me, and, as happened in Manchester, one member of the regular quartet was unable to perform at the Seven Dials for its recording. On this occasion it was Harry Miller who couldn’t make it, and so a dep was called for.

 

The album could fairly have been titled The Popular Elton Dean, since it includes the quartet’s quite drastic reinterpretations of several standards. But its boldest move was, not merely to commence with, but devote the entirety of its first side to, a twenty-minute exploration of Coltrane’s “Naima.” At the time such a notion was still felt slightly blasphemous, like retooling The Bible. Yet all four players enter into the song’s harmonic and emotional chambers thoroughly.

 

At first Dean and Tippett restrict themselves to expressing and improvising directly on the main theme, while it is the restless, ambiguous rhythm section that is endeavouring to stir things up. But the most immediate thing I noticed was the rather startling playing of Chris Laurence – the dep for Miller, and I would argue, for the purposes of this record, the most important of these four musicians.

 

Why? Laurence has, over the decades, worked with a panoply of musicians, from Michael Nyman to Joni Mitchell, from Lena Horne to Morrissey. He has been a key member of the Academy of Ancient Music at St Martin’s-in-the-Fields under Sir Neville Marriner. But apart from appearing with Barry Guy’s London Jazz Composers’ Orchestra on Ode and working on some of Mike Westbrook’s key projects (indeed, on Metropolis and parts of Marching Song, he worked with Harry Miller in a double rhythm section setting), he has generally concentrated on modern mainstream-with-interests-in-free jazz, working long-term with the likes of John Surman, Kenny Wheeler and Norma Winstone.

 

But, on They All Be On This Old Road, it has to be said that Laurence is absolutely on fire, and the different environment that his playing sets up audibly influences the directions that the other three musicians take. On “Naima” alone he immediately sets up high-register conversations. He pings, bends and plunges like Tom Daley dives. Quite frequently – as happens when he gets to his own solo space in “Naima” – he can become aggressive and percussively violent.

 

Meanwhile, Dean’s alto investigates all the nooks and crevices that Coltrane’s melody opens up, with Tippett constantly echoing and challenging at the piano. Conventional beginnings expand into pointillistic hyperactivity then explode with savage rawness before settling back into troubled lyricism. Dean’s alto playing, I’d say, sits about midway between the hard-won romanticism of Mike Osborne and the febrile expressionism of Trevor Watts (he rarely brushes the extremes of either). Finally, after the song has been put thoroughly through the wringer (or, as Dean remarks in his brief, matey liner note, “respectfully stretched”), the theme is restated, although innocence has now yielded to experience as Dean yodels and ululates towards an emotional climax which also serves as an elegy and tribute; in November 1976 Coltrane was still less than ten years gone, and his absence was keenly felt by everyone.

 

Overall, the quartet’s “Naima” is a startling performance which fully deserved to be heard beyond the faithful Seven Dials patrons; it is a literal reworking which, rather than subvert, demolish or mock Coltrane’s conception, serves to emphasise why he, and this song, remained so important.

 

Hard to follow. But side two launches with Dean’s own boppish theme “Dede-Bup-Bup” which, again from fairly normal post-tune post-bop procedurals, the saxophonist, along with Tippett, steadily begins to unravel, moving patiently into free-ish territory, alto and piano chasing each other up and down the harmonic scale like merry kittens before suddenly erupting in the manner of impatient volcanoes. Then Tippett embarks on what will turn out to be one of the most frightening piano solos I have ever heard; settling on a pedal-driven lower register rumbling of thunder, he impassively builds the storm up and up to the point where it seems about to erupt into apocalypse and destruction – you really think that he’s about to take an axe to the poor instrument – before he suddenly slides the storm up the keys with a flourish then stops in time for Dean to restate the original theme.

 

There follows an odd sequence of familiar favourites. Mention is made in Dean’s liner notes about “an evening of ballads” and a quick run through “Nancy” – the only time (co-writer) Phil Silvers ever got mentioned on an Ogun album – seems to confirm this, along with an initially bucolic saxello-led waltz through “Easy Living,” with Dean getting into some very Surman-esque waters of choppiness as his solo proceeds, and Tippett in, of all things, a Chris McGregor mood, his kwela-derived block chords fitting in very easily. But then the playing implodes into a series of semi-free tropes; I’m not entirely sure where “Easy Living” ends and “Overdoing It” (credited to Laurence and Moholo-Moholo) or “Not Too Much” (Dean and Tippett) begin, except to say that out-and-out free detonations alternate with grand modal swellings. There is one final ecstatic rise to heaven from all four men – I haven’t said much about Moholo-Moholo, but damn he’s there when he’s needed, which is pretty much all the time, and nobody, not even Art Blakey, rimshots like he does (see the points in “Naima” when he does) – which proves a fittingly cathartic climax to the record. The compere announces the players, the audience is audibly happy, everyone off to catch the night bus to nirvana.

 

Current availability: the album was reissued on CD and download in November 2021, with the above performances bookmarked by four other recordings from the same concert – “Edeeupub,” “Here’s That Rainy Day,” “Attic” and “Echoes” - which had only recently been discovered. As these four recordings last about forty minutes between them, this effectively gives us a whole new album.

 

I am not entirely certain what the precise running order of the Seven Dials concert was, except that it probably commenced with “Edeeupub” and concluded with the “Easy Living” triptych. And the newly-discovered recordings are without exception fascinating and illuminating listening, and I’m very glad that Ogun have managed to make them readily available; as usual, they have also worked wonders on the sound quality of the original L.P., which is now improved immeasurably.

 

That having been said, it has also to be stated that it was probably not the best idea to begin the performance, or indeed this album, with “Edeeupub.” Make no mistake; these are thirteen or so absolutely engrossing minutes of music making, even if the listener is initially a bit mystified by the piece’s determinate abstractions – what exactly are Elton and Keith up to here? Midway through Tippett’s solo, he builds up a huge drone-like figure at the bottom end of his keyboard. This becomes almost electronic in nature – at points we could be listening to an Autechre recital – and as it steadily rumbles towards totalitarian dissonance, Tippett…suddenly shuts it off, swoops up the keyboard and gives way to Elton.

 

Then it strikes you, as does the partially anagrammatic title – this is a reconstitution of “Dede-Bup-Bup”! It both sets the stage for and clears up any misunderstandings regarding the latter. But it never really breaks out of take-no-prisoners free-form austerity – Dean’s very subtle thematic variations notwithstanding – and it reminds me of how so many musicians on that scene effectively shot themselves in the foot by coming on and DOING THE DIFFICULT BIT FIRST. Whereas it’s so much more effective to begin with the easy bits – “Easy Living,” if you will – then gradually immerse your listeners into the adventure, but then maybe there’s something fundamental I don’t get about the symbiotic relationship between improvising musicians and their audiences.

 

“Here’s That Rainy Day” mostly consists of a shuffling and at times very African percussion-style duet between bass and drums before Dean and Tippett come in with a slightly acrid theme statement. But Dean’s own “Attic” really is thirteen minutes of the business, a fundamentally conventional ballad (which does speed up towards the end) which Dean and Tippett in particular play and improvise upon in a comparatively straight way. It isn’t until we’re halfway through Tippett’s solo until he begins to experiment with rhythm and tonality. The whole thing is rather like Stan Tracey’s seventies quartet on performance-enhancing steroids. There’s a real spirit of discovery at work here and it’s the perfect way to usher any casual listener into the EDQ world – I would definitely have put this, rather than “Edeeupub,” at the beginning.

 

The album, as it now stands, concludes with “Echoes,” a Keith Tippett theme performed plaintively by Dean’s saxello and which sounds oddly familiar – again, you eventually realise that this is (or will turn into) the closing theme from Frames by Tippett’s Ark (see OGD 003/004) but Dean’s group recites it in the manner of one of those no-longer-troubled meditations that conclude some Coltrane records (“After The Rain”) and, like the rain, Tippett’s upper register flourishes, like fluctuant stars in the sky, fade from our senses, leaving us with only sense.

HARRY MILLER’S ISIPINGO – Family Affair

 

(OG 310)

 

Track listing: Family Affair/Touch Hungry/Jumping/Eli’s Song

 

Harry Miller (bass), Mark Charig (trumpet), Mike Osborne (alto sax), Malcolm Griffiths (trombone), Keith Tippett (piano), Louis Moholo-Moholo (drums).

 

Recorded at Battersea Arts Centre, London SW11, on 6 January 1977. Released: summer 1977. Producers: Harry Miller and Keith Beal. Cover design: Niklaus Troxler (sorry Niklaus but I don’t think you could get away with a cover like that today!)

 

Isipingo had already been going for two or three years by the time of Family Affair’s release, with a variety of line-ups. The central idea was to provide a group focus for Harry Miller’s compositional and organisational skills and a scaled-down, more intimate and perhaps more directly rhythmic variation on the Brotherhood Of Breath’s kwela/jazz model. In the basic sextet format Miller tried out all sorts of combinations of musicians from gig to gig but none really seemed to gel. The most successful one featured Mongezi Feza and Nick Evans alongside Osborne, Tippett and Moholo-Moholo, and can be heard to good effect on Which Way Now (Cuneiform Records, 2006), but that particular performance was recorded about three-and-a-half weeks before Feza’s death and the problem therefore reasserted itself.

 

Miller finally resolved this dilemma by bringing Mark Charig and his old Westbrook/Brotherhood associate Malcolm Griffiths into the band. This was a very artful balance reflecting the bassist’s recently history and mixing elements of Westbrook, McGregor, Tippett and Osborne’s music in with Miller’s own, and the combination gelled quite beautifully.

 

Family Affair, the only Isipingo album to be released in the band’s lifetime, was taped live on a drizzly, foggy Thursday evening in early 1977. Punk was in the air, or at least on the other side of the Thames in Chelsea and Notting Hill, but nobody yet really knew what to do about it. January 1977 was the time of Buzzcocks’ Spiral Scratch E.P., but only just; it didn’t come out until 29 January and the twenty million people who claim to have bought it at the time very probably didn’t - the band could only afford to press a thousand copies, five of which found their way to Listen Records in Glasgow’s Renfield Street about three weeks after its release, retailing at a steep 99p. I bought one of them (because I’d read about it in the NME and heard Peel playing “Boredom” on Radio 1, in those pre-internet days), think Jim Kerr and Alan McGee bought one each and have no idea what happened with the remaining two. BUT YOU’RE NOT HERE TO READ ABOUT PUNK ROCK so on with Family Affair.

 

My point is that things were happening, and there are different stripes of rebel music. Despite the tinny, crappy upright pub piano assigned by Battersea Arts Centre to Keith Tippett – or perhaps because of it, forcing him to become even more creative within the instrument’s technical limitations – Family Affair is a superbly-choreographed band performance, and one of the jewels in Ogun’s crown, spotlighting as it does six jazz improvisers at the very top of their game…or, in the case of one of them, possibly hurtling right back down to the bottom, but more of that in a moment.

 

The record begins with the easy kwela strut of the title track, Moholo-Moholo audibly having a ball with his ride and rimshot refrains (his unshakeable consistency here puts me in mind of Jaki Liebezeit with Can) as the catchy riff leads into solos by Griffiths, whose playing is romantic yet occasionally discursive, Charig, who seems intent on recapturing Feza’s ghost with his snarling triple-tonguing and hyperactive half-valve shrieks before settling back into his more familiar meditative melancholy – and Tippett doubles up and multiplies supporting piano figures beneath, or alongside, the trumpeter – and Osborne, who leads the ensemble into a free section. This transitions into further free play, with Osborne and Charig swapping figures and ideas over a patient-sounding rhythm section – again, Charig sounds very much like Mongs to begin with before switching to a touch of the Harry Becketts. The interplay builds up naturally as Griffiths modestly enters on the sideline and comments before launching into an extended solo of his own, initially deploying plunger mute but later becoming open; the overall feeling is that of a hungover and slightly disappointed Vic Dickenson (actually that’s much more characteristic of Paul Rutherford’s trombone playing*; Griff was always a Lawrence Brown man).

 

*(Rutherford worked intermittently with Isipingo. At one performance – was it at Lancaster or Loughborough University? – the band supported Brotherhood Of Breath, and since Chris McGregor himself happened to be playing piano for Isipingo on that occasion, he invited the trombonist to join in with the Brotherhood since he didn’t want Rutherford to feel left out. It was Rutherford’s only performance with the big band, and the only time the Brotherhood used three trombonists. He enjoyed himself.)

 

Around Griffiths’ playing, Tippett worries away at a small cycle of upper-register piano notes and the rhythm section doubles and halves the tempo with immense, virtually telepathic ease. Eventually the main theme – a bright, bouncy trumpet-led midtempo 4/4 refrain somewhere between Herb Alpert and Hugh Masekela – asserts itself before rapidly disappearing.

 

On the album there are no gaps; each track flows immediately into the next (this is obviously more evident on the CD edition). Hence we jump directly into the nearly fifteen-and-a-half minute-long “Jumping,” a pinnacle of seventies jazz group improvisation. It commences with its fast, boppish theme which immediately dissolves to allow Osborne, Tippett and the rhythm to come through.

 

And what is there to say about Osborne (and Tippett)’s solo(s) on “Jumping”? You won’t derive many clues from Brian Case’s typically gnomish, gaunt and minimalist liner note, as usual lying somewhere between Damon Runyan and Derek Raymond. But this is an absolute peak of emotional improvising. Osborne begins very close to the theme but Tippett is already on his tail, intent on avoiding the solo turning into a Mike Osborne Trio performance, and not only never lets up, but on occasion also leads. The furious crisscrossing between alto and piano recalls a more hyperactive variant of the Osborne/Stan Tracey duo.

 

The intensity continues to thicken to the point where it becomes actively terrifying, as if something is about to explode. And explode it does; Osborne finds a false-register high note, hangs on to it for his life…then Tippett responds with a high note (the same one) of his own before demonically diving into deep, rich whirlpools of modal chords which recall Vaughan Williams as deeply as McCoy Tyner. Together, Osborne and Tippett convert the jaunty bop number into a church of near-medieval lamentation, out of tempo and eternal in its wounded fealty. This is an expression of raw pain, the music of artists who are hurting, and in the context of seventies jazz is nearly unique. Bass (bowed) and drums can only cascade behind them like distant waves, and the other two horns blow as though in a different and unreachable galaxy.

 

Osborne’s solo concludes, and Tippett’s sustain pedal fountain of descending scales abruptly turn into jittery pointillism to accompany Griffiths’ nervy, rhythm-dominant solo. Again the pianist is there all the way with the main soloist, and when it comes to his own solo, he makes the Battersea Arts Centre pop-musicians-only piano sound like a kalimba as he works over and over on a repeating cycle of notes, akin to the works of Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou played at sextuple speed and – I think (let me know in the comments section if he doesn’t; it might just be the state of the piano) – utilises the simultaneous plucking of piano strings and fast upper register keyboard runs. I don’t think any improvising pianist anywhere in the mid-seventies world, with the possible and partial exception of Cecil Taylor, was as actively and untiringly creative as Tippett was at his peak. This is a level of creativity that expands somewhere above “outstanding.” Typically, when Charig arrives for his concluding solo, Tippett mostly lays back and lets him blow unimpeded. Remind me…this was supposed to be bop?

 

But even “Jumping” isn’t as sheerly overwhelming as “Eli’s Song,” the album’s final and shortest track, a sad 6/8 waltz feature for Osborne. As an expression of pained terror and a mind at the end of its tether, Osborne’s solo is very nearly up there with Parker’s “Lover Man.” I am aware that he had already been long diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia and was briefly sectioned at the Maudsley as a result. He also had a heroin habit and, as the drummer Steve Noble once told me, was fully capable of emptying the entire contents of a hotel bar in the space of fifteen minutes.

 

The single most terrifying moment in Osborne’s “Eli’s Song” solo is when he finds a scream of a high note and savagely alternates it with a growling low note as though his brain were spilling out of his head. His playing is at times barely articulate – what a contrast to the clean, defined tones he used in Westbrook’s various bands. I can’t call it exultation (as I would do with, say, Kurt Cobain’s scream at the climax of the MTV “Where Did You Sleep Last Night”) because all I hear is a loud, elongated cry for help, confirmation of a disintegrating identity. This is the sound of a man falling apart, and the final ensemble theme abruptly shuts down, like a lid on a tomb ready for nailing.

 

There is a supreme confidence in the six musicians’ interaction throughout Family Affair. But only two of those six survive at the time of writing. Their absolute command as an interactive group emphasises their fragility, and perhaps also their fury. The album remains one of British-based jazz’s most outstanding recordings, and some of the players arguably did not surpass what they did on it. But in its febrile way, it is as angry as any punk rockers had a right to be – and maybe they had a lot more right to be angry.

 

Current availability: Reissued as part of Harry Miller’s The Collection 3-CD package in 1999 (it’s been out of print for a good long while) but more recently made available as a download.