CHRIS McGREGOR'S BROTHERHOOD OF BREATH - Live At Willisau

 

 

(Originally published on Facebook, 31 October 2024)

Well, since I'm new here - and, once again, many thanks for letting me in! - I thought it would be a nice idea to do an ongoing, chronological look at what is still after some 46 years of buying their records still my favourite label - Ogun Records. I did a similar exercise on one of my blogs (sorry, can't remember which one) more than twenty years ago but I think it now needs expanding and refining. The views represent my gut reactions to the music and are not intended to reflect any others, but if I get anything wrong I'm sure you'll correct me.

 

Anyway, enough of the preamble and on to the first Ogun record:

 

CHRIS McGREGOR'S BROTHERHOOD OF BREATH - Live At Willisau

(OG 100)

 

Track listing:

Do It/Restless/Kongi's Theme/Tungi's Song/Ismite Is Might/The Serpent's Kindly Eye

 

Musicians:

Chris McGregor (piano), Mongezi Feza, Harry Beckett, Mark Charig (trumpets), Nick Evans, Radu Malfatti (trombones), Dudu Pukwana (alto sax), Evan Parker, Gary Windo (tenor saxes), Harry Miller (bass), Louis Moholo-Moholo (drums).

 

Recorded at the Willisau Jazz Festival, Switzerland, on 27 January 1973 (two days after my ninth birthday!) by Roland Janz and remixed in London by Keith Beal. Cover design by Niklaus Troxler.

 

I think this album came out around September 1974, although I didn't buy it until late 1978, from Listen Records in Renfield Street, Glasgow. Boy did it blow my teenage post-punk socks off. In many ways it felt like a punk record, or at least a punk-jazz record. I heard (and saw) what The Pop Group and The Slits did just months later and knew I wasn't the only one affected.

 

As I understand things, Hazel and Harry Miller had this live tape of the Brotherhood that they couldn't sell. The band had come to the end of their two-album RCA contract and nobody seemed much interested in putting the tape out. Those few years when the New Thing was trendy and/or a tax loss for major record companies were spent, so the Millers had no alternative but to set up their own label - as Derek Bailey, Evan Parker and Tony Oxley had already done with Incus - in order to get the music out there.

 

At the time they ran the label from a third-floor tower block flat in Stockwell and since the lift was frequently out of order many an exhausting time was spent hauling heavy boxes of records up and down the stairs - and that's saying nothing about Harry having to do the same thing with his own double bass.

Still, the effort was, I think, worth it. Live At Willisau really does bear the feeling of a samizdat tape, smuggled out from behind the border. Its recording quality is less than hi-fi, to put it diplomatically, but somehow that adds to the urgency of the band's performance.

 

I've heard tell that the album was essentially taped on a very basic tape machine - possibly even a cassette recorder - and I would guess that the machine and/or microphone was/were placed somewhere in the trombone section, since you can hear crystal clear everything that Nick Evans and Radu Malfatti do, while the trumpets and to a lesser extent the saxophones tend to become a blur of sound in the collective passages.

 

This was an uncompromising edition of the Brotherhood. Comparatively straightforward players like Alan Skidmore and Malcolm Griffiths were replaced by the returning Evan Parker (he had been there right at the beginning of the Brotherhood, but spent most of the intervening two years working on Incus and Incus-related projects and/or on the Continent, principally in Germany) and the hitherto unknown Radu Malfatti. Furthermore regular second altoist Mike Osborne was absent from this gig, presumably for health reasons - so a freer approach to the music is immediately evident.

 

The opening "Do It" already sounded pretty free on the second studio BoB album. Announced by a startling fanfare of screeching brass and monolithic reeds, the band settles into the tune's two powerful riffs and it is instantly evident how crucial Miller and Moholo-Moholo are to holding the whole enterprise together; their solidity allows and frames the adventures.

 

Evan Parker takes the main solo and starts it pretty conventionally - even sounding like Tubby Hayes at times - before gradually moving out into the free zone, prompted and pushed by the rhythm section. Say what you like about his recent idiotic political comments, but as a saxophonist he is - or at any rate was - quite sensational. As he becomes more abstract, the rest of the horns roar up behind and beside him.

The music atomises and both trombonists take over the main commentary while the band improvises more and more frantically around them, but without ever losing the central riffs or any of their power. Moholo-Moholo finally coaxes them into a final thematic statement then builds up the tension until a joyous free explosion is swiftly succeeded by a fatigued slowing-down.

 

"Restless" is a fast-tempo fragment of small-group interaction where McGregor, Dudu Pukwana and the rhythm play cat-and-mouse games similar to those played by Cecil Taylor, Jimmy Lyons and Sunny Murray at the Café Montmartre a decade before. This immediately segues into "Kongi's Theme," one of those marching band pieces in which Archie Shepp used to indulge in the sixties, which features a laconic and perhaps sardonic Radu Malfatti, fearlessly expanding the trombone's vocabulary (a bit like a slightly more supercharged Paul Rutherford).

 

"Tungi's Song" is a lovely lilt of a tune which spotlights Mongezi Feza in what I think is his best solo on record. Obviously, had he lived, Mongs would very much have become a core member of the Ogun family, and who knows where he could have gone? Here he is emerging out of his Don Cherry influences and establishing a more confident and individual voice for himself - although his solo is accompanied or echoed by what sounds like one of those octave-divider devices of which players like Don Ellis were so fond.

 

"Ismite Is Might" is a slow and stately ballad feature for Nick Evans, who digs right into his Welsh Baptist roots and plays a soulful but forthright solo fully worthy of Roswell Rudd. Finally "The Serpent's Kindly Eye" brings the band back to the boil; Dudu Pukwana and Mark Charig are the main palpable soloists, but soon everyone is joining in the mêlée before a sudden and decisive ending.

 

Current availability: the album reappeared on CD in 1994 (cat no: OGCD 001) with sleevenotes by Val Wilmer and half an hour of extra material. Of the latter, "Camel Dance" is a feature for Harry Beckett (whom we didn't get to hear as a soloist on the original record) and "Davashe's Dream" (the source of the opening crashing chords to "Do It"), "Andromeda" and "Union Special" are all reworkings of tracks on the first BoB album.

 

At times you can tell why these were left off the original - the ensemble playing occasionally gets too sloppy (an audibly exasperated McGregor presses down on his keyboard to prompt the horns on "Andromeda," who seem to have got lost - at least two of these musicians subsequently confirmed to me that, erm, certain substances may have been in evidence) although Feza and Evans' solos are noticeably more straight-ahead than they were on the studio recording) but the excitement of the music does not really relent, and the closing "Funky Boots March" (a co-write for Evans and Gary Windo, the latter being the only player from whom we don't really get to hear at all) is a fine, to-hell-with-you-squares finale (you tend to forget that the Brotherhood bore a finely-honed sense of humour).

 

Overall this is one of the great Ogun albums, and a fine introduction to what proved to be a uniquely inventive and passionate body of work. As a boy I also appreciated Mr Troxler's simple-seeming but actually very astute primary-coloured sleeve designs - kids are attracted to anything colourful. If you want to buy this album then please go here.