NICRA - Listen/Hear

 

(OG 010)

Track listing: Listen/Listen continued/Hear

Nick Evans, Radu Malfatti (trombones and ?recorders), Keith Tippett (piano and ?voice), Buschi Niebergall (bass), Makaya Ntshoko (drums and ?voice).

Recorded in the studios of Österreichischer Rundfunk, Innsbruck, Austria, on 22 October 1975. Released: April 1977. Produced by NICRA and Keith Beal (final mixdown in Hastings overseen by Beal, Evans and Malfatti). Sleeve design: Stephen Taylor.

(Author's Note: I should thank Mike Gavin, who kindly supplied me with an audio file of his original copy of this L.P. Unfortunately an extensive search of Punctum Towers has failed to unearth the copy which Hazel Miller sent to me in 1979. At that time I was a teenager living with my parents in a first floor walk-up tenement flat in Uddingston, and in the intervening forty-six years with its accompanying sixteen changes of address [in two different countries] and multiple major alterations to my lifestyle, it is sadly inevitable that the odd item is going to become lost along the way. I consider myself fortunate to have held on to what I do still have, including almost all of the other Ogun albums. All, that is, except OG 522, which has similarly gone astray, but I'll get back to that one later... - M.C.)

Why the fuck doesn't anyone make music like this any more?

That is my initial reaction to the only album recorded by NICRA. Listen/Hear was the first in a loose trilogy of Ogun albums centred around the principal horn players associated with Keith Tippett - the other two are OG 410 and OG 710, and Tippett was the only musician to play on all three. It was taken from a session recorded for the Austrian state broadcaster Österreichischer Rundfunk; in other words, this was the equivalent of BBC Radio 3's Jazz In Britain sessions.

The quintet was truly international, including as it did musicians from Wales, Austria, England, Germany and South Africa. Nick Evans and Radu Malfatti met when the latter succeeded Malcolm Griffiths in Chris McGregor's Brotherhood Of Breath, and quickly bonded. In his original Melody Maker review of this album, Richard Williams approvingly referred to them as "the boot boys of the trombone," and there is certainly something punk-ish about its cover. They also lent their covalent bonding services to Elton Dean's Ninesense and Louis Moholo-Moholo's various Spirits Rejoice! bands. Together with Tippett, they are joined by a fairly unique rhythm section - not only is this the only appearance of either musician on Ogun, but it may well represent the only occasion they worked together - of Marburg-born bassist Buschi Niebergall, who didn't record very much at all or indeed live very long (he was barely into his fifties when he died in January 1990) and - a real coup - the great Cape Town drummer Makaya Ntshoko, whom they used to call the South African Max Roach and who was happy to work with anybody from Dexter Gordon and Ben Webster to many of his fellow South African greats, including Abdullah Ibrahim and Hugh Masekela (he lived a long and fruitful life, passing on last August at the age of 83).

My presumption has always been - unfortunately the album cover does not specify - that Malfatti plays on the left channel and Evans on the right in the stereo mix. Evans is the more forthright and straightforward Roswell Rudd disciple, whereas Malfatti is more elliptical and experimental; a bit like the good cop/shy cop pairing of Griffiths and Paul Rutherford in Mike Westbrook's old Concert Band. Rutherford, incidentally, contributes a very funny liner note to Listen/Hear (in the sense of mid-seventies Hither Green humour, that is); I suspect that Des O'Connor's people never contacted Ogun requesting NICRA's televisual guest presence, but Rutherford as a musician will not appear on Ogun for some while yet (he was definitely an Emanem, and to a lesser extent an Incus, man).

So what does the actual album sound like? I always regarded Listen/Hear as one of the most explosively passionate of all Ogun releases, and listening to it again over half a lifetime later it almost seems like an admonitory record, wagging its finger at the jazz and improvised music of today and asking why it cannot be as raw and powerful as this.

It ("Listen") begins quietly with Niebergall's sitar-like rubberband bass, behind which an ominous storm cloud of minor chord modalities can be heard from Tippett's piano. The trombones blearily awaken and cymbals tick away. The build-up is slow and bearing some sense of mourning. Eventually there comes a thundering climax, though Tippett is careful to adhere to tonality before moving into the free zone. Ntshoko is a very different drummer from, and possibly a more aggressive one than, Moholo-Moholo; his floor toms are resonant enough to sink a continent.

The tone is set for the rest of this piece; immense, brewing cyclones of activity alternating with periods of meditation and consolidation. Evans and Malfatti are for a time more like commentators on the action, although they assert their personalities readily enough. Splashing pools of piano cascades are succeeded by Sunday school hymnals before the trombones grunt their way towards a temporary ending.

This is then followed by a sequence of cautious, restrained balladry, each musician seemingly waiting for the other to make their moves. Tippett takes a lyrical solo over a patient 4/4 pulse, albeit with a brassy drone hovering in the background. Evans then plays a reasonably conventional solo before the tempo doubles and Tippett sets to cut loose again. A series of staccato piano chords leads to another free explosion, out of which emerges Malfatti's horn, with Niebergall's bass behind him sounding like a machine gun. A drum solo ensues, punctuated by Tippett's top-of-the-keyboard metronomic plinks. Trombones swoop in like furious wasps, swiftly followed by bowed bass. Malfatti indulges in some chordal vocalese.

The group then undertakes what sounds like a parody of a marching band who eventually stagger and collapse into the gutter, which in turn is followed by forays of free shouting and testifying. Evans and Malfatti improvise a fanfare on which Tippett picks up straightaway. The atmosphere is now one of a tropical hurricane, Malfatti howling through his mouthpiece. Tippett plays a deranged stride/waltz piano figure, and Ntsholo picks up the tempo with his snare to fade.

Side two ("Listen continued") fades back into what resembles a bout of interplanetary boogie woogie. This comes to an abrupt and violent end, following which Ntshoko's drums erupt from a field of silence. Malfatti's trombone and Niebergall's arco bass drones patrol the proceedings. We hear a high-pitched vocal howl, which I presume comes from Tippett (see OG 600), combined with Malfatti's multiphonics. This is succeeded by a firm bass, joined by a ticking Latin rhythm with occasional earthquake drumkit thumps, possibly some tap dancing in the distance (!) and a "1-2-3-4" count-in which I presume comes from Ntshoko. The group veer expertly in and out of straight-ish jazz and tumultuous abstraction. There is another build-up again with both trombones and an unearthly lower-register piano rumble, as well as eventually, a police siren two-note bassline. Then comes the gradual but horrific flash of eruptive noise before Tippett takes the piece out with a John Cale-style 4/4 piano riff over drums and bass. The piece fades again, but where could it have really gone from there?

"Hear," however, is the album's major event, setting out as it does to demonstrate the quintet's full improvisatory range. It starts with Tippett's mordant piano, initially commented on but soon superseded by Niebergall's bass, which plays a gloomy chord sequence oddly reminiscent of Thomas Dolby's "Airwaves" - I know, it should be the other way around. Chemistry lab test tubes and woodwork squeaks turn out to be Malfatti again, as do the multiple unsuccessful attempts to start up his motorcycle. Meanwhile, Tippett contemplates matters with rhapsodic if somewhat dissolute Bill Evans-type gestures, although these are soon detoured by what sound like a pair of distressed school recorders in the background. The piano scuttles over its upper register before landing DEEPLY at the bottom. Niebergall's high-register bowed bass becomes agitated.

As both trombones re-enter the fray, Tippett unleashes a powerful piano tempest. We are in the midst of a turbulent sea storm, but amongst the chaos the group never lose sight of a tonal centre, largely down to Tippett's pretty unshakeable respect for harmony and melody. This sort of thing was of course  dismissed as bourgeois romanticism by free improvisation purists, but the tonality lends "Hear" a nearly unbearable poignancy that it would lack were it a straight-out atonal punch-up. The trombones plunge in and out of the ocean waves like helpless Titanic passengers searching for a dinghy, are tossed in the tempest, towards the piece's climax sound as though gurgling for air.

Tippett then restores the minor modality he had set up at the outset of "Listen," the trombones offer a proclamatory coda and harp-like flourishes of piano and bass bring the piece to a natural conclusion. This is spectacular and heartfelt music played with an aura of fearlessness that is almost entirely absent from today's mustn't-make-a-racket-they-might-not-give-us-any-money-be-uplifting-and-positive climate of cultural starvation. It perhaps doesn't matter what either trombonist does or doesn't play. It's the totality of the experience that counts. True, there is a heavy air of a lot of Tippett's own writing and organising about Listen/Hear, together with the pianist's uncanny ability to invent chord sequences and even songs right there and then. But more musicians need to making records of this order of power now.

Current availability: out of print, although Mike assures me that Ogun are working on remastering the record for reissue right now. In the meantime, the only online evidence of the music is in this strange YouTube clip, from someone who uploaded all of "Listen" but not "Hear." Perhaps the latter wasn't as much to that person's liking.

 

BLUE NOTES - Blue Notes For Mongezi

 

(OGD 001/002 - double album)

 

Track listing: Blue Notes For Mongezi: First Movement/Blue Notes For Mongezi: Second Movement/Blue Notes For Mongezi: Third Movement/Blue Notes For Mongezi: Fourth Movement

 

Dudu Pukwana (alto sax, whistle, percussion, vocals); Chris McGregor (piano, percussion); Johnny Dyani (bass, bell, vocals "and most of the words"); Louis Moholo-Moholo (drums, percussion, vocals).

 

Recorded: "in a rehearsal room in London," 23 December 1975. Released: late 1976. Produced by Keith Beal and Chris McGregor. Sleeve design: George Hallett.

 

The death of Mongezi Feza fucked everybody and everything up. Robert Wyatt, who knew him well and frequently worked with him, observed some years later that he saw a parallel between the deaths of Feza and Steve Biko - both South African radicals who lived roughly in the same period of time and whose deaths were brutal and questionable.

 

What appears to have happened is that the trumpeter smashed up a taxi cab after suffering hallucinatory delusions, and/or flashbacks, that he was being taken away by Bureau of State Security authorities to be detained and killed. He was promptly detained in a now long-defunct psychiatric hospital (I know its name and former location, but the elements of confidentiality associated with my day job preclude any further description). There he was lazily and contempuously regarded as the stereotypical Crazy Black Guy and his protestations went largely ignored.

 

Feza developed double pneumonia; it was observed at his later Brotherhood Of Breath stage performances that he was already looking somewhat frail and poorly. The late autumn of 1975 was cold and harsh, as though winter had arrived early, and so were the hospital grounds. But the authorities were not, as it turned out, solely to blame. In his Invisible Jukebox feature in issue 400 of The Wire, published in July 2017, Louis Moholo-Moholo remarked that the trumpeter was often his own worst enemy - he would often jog through the hospital's corridors in the freezing cold, wearing nothing but a vest and shorts, and sometimes even come out to visit his friends at their homes.

 

Inevitably, Feza's double pneumonia worsened, and fatally - and stupidly - the hospital staff opted to give him a sedative, the last thing you should do with a patient in that condition. It allowed the fluid in his lungs to build up and ultimately suffocate him, and he died on 14 December, aged only thirty. It blew a hole in the expatriate South African jazz community - and therefore, by extension, also the plans of Ogun Records - which has never been fully refilled in the intervening half-century. At the time Feza had formed his own group, Bantu Society, which would undoubtedly have recorded for Ogun if they had had the chance. His recorded work throughout that year, which ranged from Robert Wyatt's Ruth Is Stranger Than Richard to Dudu Pukwana's Diamond Express, demonstrated how firmly he was stepping out of the Don Cherry lineage and forming an entirely individual voice on his instrument.

 

But it all turned out to be too late. After Feza's memorial service was held, nine days following his death - funds were raised to send his body back to South Africa to be buried - the four surviving members of the Blue Notes, who really had not met, let alone played together, for some considerable time, proceeded wordlessly to a rehearsal room somewhere in north London. There the musicians set up their instruments, and, still without one prior word, played and played and sang and played for something like three and a half hours without a break. After forty-five minutes or so, somebody remembered to switch on the recording equipment, and what you hear in Blue Notes For Mongezi are the results of the music that was documented.

 

Because of the limitations of the long-playing record, the original double album was necessarily a set of highlights but still made for one of the most harrowing listening experiences I can recall; the passion, the grief, the words, above all Johnny Dyani’s words, seemed almost too painful for public consumption, but as an act of catharsis and reconciliation it was surely needed, and over the course of its four sides the music did seem to reach a point of acknowledgement and resolution.

 

As I say, only about half of what was played that day appeared on the initial double album. That was draining enough listening in itself and the uncommon intensity of the music made a lot of people feel intimidated. This was some of the most rawly and openly emotional music ever recorded, and it proved unnerving to some because it represented traditions of mourning unknown to Western European music, or indeed culture, but which in the history of the Xhosa tribe stretched back centuries.

 

But others were also unnerved by the music - many of the expatriate South African community who knew Feza well could not listen to the record because its contents, and specifically its words, were personally upsetting. Listening to Blue Notes For Mongezi might have been akin to looking in on a process that the average, conditioned Western listener could not hope to understand - whereas, with the Blue Notes themselves, it was immediately instinctive. As a thirteen-year-old, I found the rawness, the rage and the sadness overwhelming and overpowering; yet I recognised its patient and painful journey towards resolution and rebirth.

 

In 2008 the full recording finally became available on the Blue Notes - The Ogun Collection 5-CD box set. Over two CDs, the playing time has effectively doubled in length, and we now have the complete record, or as complete a record as we’re going to get, of everything that was played and taped on that day; according to Keith Beal, the musicians started playing practically the moment they came into the room, while the recording equipment was still being set up, and there is an abrupt but small break in the music between the two CDs which marked the point where the tape reels had to be changed, but otherwise the performance is complete.

 

The completeness also alters the listener’s perspective on the music radically, such that one is effectively listening to a new extended piece of music altogether; the grief is immediately apparent as the music fades in at a point where most records would be expected to climax - Dudu’s alto squealing, Dyani’s bowed bass scribbling, McGregor’s piano an abstracted ghost on the far left, Moholo-Moholo’s drums busy but strangely subdued. The pace is necessarily slower and more organic than on the original L.P. release but the overall picture is critically more detailed; we have Dyani’s urgent ostinatos and parched Xhosa (and occasional English) cries but they are now set in a more complex landscape where there are long periods of straight swing or Coltrane-type waltz passages.

 

In the “Second Movement” Dyani’s bass solo remains poignant to the point of unendurable (in terms of unalloyed, bereaved sorrow), though clearly influenced by Charlie Haden’s Liberation Music Orchestra recording of “Song For Che,” with rattling percussion from all direction accompanying his playing and Dudu’s solemn alto succeeding him in the foreground with an eventual martial feel of defiance in the group’s rhythm. This is then succeeded by Dyani and Dudu’s vocal harmonies and chants, again accompanied only by free percussion.

 

From this point of prayer-filled stasis, the music gradually picks up again on the second CD; Pukwana picks up on “Yellow Rose Of Texas” from nowhere in particular (though in the English vocal sections I not only notice lots of “We love you”s but also Dyani’s ominous “We know your enemies.” Meanwhile, in his hilarious review, Barry McRae, the only writer on Jazz Journal who liked post-Ornette jazz, gets himself into a right tangle attempting to describe the whole album in terms of its music alone, without reference to its societal context; I was reminded of what Constant Lambert said in Music Ho! about Hindemith - unfair in Hindemith's case but I think his words worth repeating here - "He seems to think that some mystic value resides in the mere performance of notes - that the scraping of horsehair over catugut is in itself a health-giving and praiseworthy action, comparable to having a cold bath in the morning or being a Storm Trooper. His view of music would appear to be almost excretory") and turns that too into an ANC-worthy anthem of hopeful triumph, while the band as a whole suddenly swing through a whole series of Blue Notes/Brotherhood standards, most notably a spirited run through Feza’s “Sonia” with a terrific McGregor/Dyani duet section. Ultimately we arrive, after a lengthy and patient set-up, at the lilting major key tribute to Feza which concluded the original album, where the Blue Notes appear to will their own rebirth and “live” once more. Blue Notes For Mongezi is their “Everything’s Gone Green” and just as emotional and complete a listening experience, and the most honest and dignified of musical memorials I can recall.

 

Current availability: although the Blue Notes box set is long out of print, Blue Notes For Mongezi was reissued in its own, full-length right on CD in 2022 and of course is also now obtainable via download.

ELTON DEAN’S NINESENSE - Oh! For The Edge

 

(OG 900)

 

Track listing: Dance/Fall In Free/Forsoothe/M.T./Friday Night Blues/Prayer For Jesus

 

Elton Dean (alto sax and saxello), Alan Skidmore (tenor sax), Harry Beckett (trumpet and flügelhorn), Mark Charig (trumpet and tenor horn), Nick Evans (trombone), Keith Tippett (piano), Harry Miller (bass), Louis Moholo-Moholo (drums).

 

Recorded at “Grass Roots Jazz Club,” The 100 Club, 100 Oxford Street, London W1, on 22 March 1976. Released: October 1976. Producers: Elton Dean and Keith Beal. Cover design: Dick Whitbread.

 

The first thing I should say is that this is maybe my favourite Ogun album cover; Dick Whitbread always had something extra going. Its hypnogogic pastoral air of slightly paranoid whimsy would be worthy of housing a record by Matching Mole or Caravan, and perhaps reflects a Canterbury Scene pedigree which may have made some jazz fans suspicious.

 

I have the feeling, without any basis whatsoever in fact, that Elton Dean was not initially welcomed fulsomely by the British jazz community. He wasn’t rejected but might have been eyed with some suspicion on a “bloke out of Soft Machine” basis, which even in the early seventies was unfair. He had famously been a member, along with Long John Baldry (and, it has to be said, Mark Charig), of the mid-late sixties band Bluesology, whose keyboard player Reginald Dwight infamously altered his stage (and eventually his real) name in honour of Messrs Dean and Baldry’s first names (there is but one sneery reference to Mr Dean and his music in Dwight’s memoir Me, which may reflect the entrenched prejudices of that book’s ghostwriter).

 

But he also encountered Keith Tippett at the Barry Jazz Summer School in 1967 and thereafter, along with Charig and Nick Evans, became Tippett’s first-call horn section, appearing in his working sextet and as the nucleus – not to be confused with Nucleus, nearly all of whom were also involved – of Centipede; indeed Dean was given the marathon solo leading to the climax of Septober Energy. But Tippett’s horn section was also pinched (albeit under benign agreement, i.e. Robert Wyatt asked if he could borrow them for a bit) by Soft Machine, and it was the Dean/Mike Ratledge/Hugh Hopper/Wyatt quartet who appeared at the Pop Proms in 1970.

 

So there may have been a “rock musician” element at work to make purists slightly suspicious of Dean – see also Gary Windo and George Khan - although this is not fully borne out by his work of the first half of the seventies. Although not on Ode, he was an early and long-serving core member of Barry Guy’s London Jazz Composers’ Orchestra, and between roughly 1973-77 was also a floating member of Chris McGregor’s Brotherhood Of Breath – although the latter band already boasted two incendiary altoists in the form of Dudu Pukwana and Mike Osborne, and given the general big band rule of thumb that three altos constitute a crowd, he never really became a major BoB voice. In the meantime, his and Charig’s day jobs in that era were as part of Georgie Fame’s backing band, with which no sane person should have a problem.

 

Yet Dean undoubtedly felt the need for an outlet to air his own music, and in 1975 set about putting Ninesense together. The expressed aim in doing so was to act as a sort of bridge between the work of Tippett’s groups and that of the Brotherhood Of Breath, but taking great care not to impinge upon the musical territory of either. As the band’s slender studio discography proved, this was more readily achieved the longer they stayed together and developed.

 

Finally the band got a chance to record for Ogun. Oh! For The Edge was, like most Ogun albums of the time, a live recording, done at the 100 Club almost six months to the day before the famous two-day Punk Special festival (God bless everyone who appeared at the latter, including a completely improvised set from the embryo Siouxsie and The Banshees based around the Lord’s Prayer – “Prayer For Jesus” indeed. Their set was recorded, can be found on YouTube and actually isn’t bad at all; there is a rudimentary structure and they get around it as best they could at the time, necessity and raw intelligence amply compensating for technical limitations. I saw far worse at the London Musicians’ Collective, let me tell you. On the board of forthcoming 100 Club attractions I chuckled to see Louis Moholo[-Moholo]’s Culture Shock advertised, which to me at the time sounded a far more attractive and potentially radical event – this was a huge band featuring [pause for breath] seven of Ninesense, plus both Pukwana and Osborne, plus Gary Windo, plus Johnny Dyani [along with Harry – two basses], plus Julie Tippetts, plus an indeterminate number of other singers and percussionists [oh and Jim Dvorak filling out the trumpet section]. Apparently Ogun’s recording equipment was there, but for whatever reason the performance never got released. Oh, and I’ll have you know, there was one spring day in 1977 when Elton Dean was filling his car with petrol at a service station and who should come along but Captain Sensible, who immediately prostrated himself at Dean’s feet, did the I’m-not-worthy routine and begged for his autograph. The second Damned album, Music For Pleasure, released later in 1977, featured guest saxophonist Lol Coxhill, who also toured with them at the time).

 

Observant readers will note that this album was really recorded by Eightsense. A second trombonist, Radu Malfatti, was unable to make the gig – presumably he was too unwell to do so – and clearly cancelled at short notice, since no dep appears (there is an apocryphal story that the reason for this was that all the possible deps – Malcolm Griffiths, Paul Rutherford, Paul Nieman, Derek Wadsworth – were across the road at the London Palladium that night backing Shirley Bassey. However, research has failed to unearth any evidence of Dame Shirley appearing at the Palladium at any point in 1976 apart from closing that year’s Royal Variety Performance on 15 November – also present were Gilbert Becaud, Max Bygraves with Lionel Blair and his dancers doing a routine entitled, God help us, “Back In My Childhood Days,” Mike Yarwood, the catastrophic tragedy that was Lena Zavaroni, and various transient and long-forgotten television entertainers of the period. Oh, and the Dance Theatre of Harlem, who were probably worth seeing - so this will have to remain a nice but mythical fable).

 

The recording quality of Oh! For The Edge is comparatively elemental – once again, a remarkable remastering job took place as far as the CD reissue was concerned – but that works in the music’s favour, which punches where it needs to punch. The opening “Dance” operates pretty much in the Brotherhood Of Breath slipstream with its harmonised roundelays and percussive punctuation, although I was amused two-and-a-half years later to hear a not dissimilar riff in Tubeway Army’s chart-topping ground-breaker “Are ‘Friends’ Electric?” I’m sure this was entirely coincidental – I cannot imagine the teenage Gary Numan getting his head around Ninesense, though do note his odd vocal similarity to Robert Wyatt (only the Melody Maker’s late Ray Coleman seems to have otherwise spotted this) – and Dean’s band quickly spin off into their own field anyway. Solos are taken by Nick Evans, doing his usual exuberant Roswell Ruddy thing, and Alan Skidmore in something of a Rollins mood, completely and adamantly undaunted by Tippett, Miller and Moholo-Moholo’s continuing attempts to detour him with their increasingly explosive free play.

 

“Fall In Free” appears to begin about two-thirds of the way in and spotlights the rhythm section – Tippett initially improvises meditative high chords above a steady In A Silent Way-type pulse before all three suddenly break into uptempo 4/4. This in turns ushers in Dean’s alto, which proclaims and improvises on the tune’s main theme – he was responsible for composing all of the album’s tunes, except for the last two – with its thoughtful Ellingtonian hues and its final disturbing church chordalities, hanging in suspended animation like a kiss or a sword.

 

“Forsoothe” is for me the album’s main event; one of those stately-cum-agonised slow-motion horn statements over unmoored rhythm with, again, a slight Hispanic feel and possibly also a Hasidic feel – that strain of Judean lamentations you also find in the music of Wyatt, Carla Bley and Henry Cow (and in some cases Soft Machine; see also “Fletcher’s Blemish,” which Dean composed for their fourth album – the latter would be immensely improved by a drastic remix, bringing all the horns back up front where they ought to be). Dean features himself on the saxello, the uncommon curved variant on the soprano saxophone which he found in a junk shop while touring with the Softs in the very early seventies and which is not quite the same thing as Rahsaan Roland Kirk’s manzello (which has an upturned rather than curved bell and a slightly straighter neck). The commonest thing it has with the soprano saxophone is that it is an absolute bugger to keep in tune.

 

Anyway, Dean solos passionately and eloquently, only working up emotionally when the other horns begin to surge up behind him like ominous waves before Tippett’s piano swirls herald the engulfing flood. Although the music here reaches the edge, it stops just short of going over it, and so the ensemble resolves back into the main theme – but there is a residual emptiness, a grief if you will, that wasn’t there at the beginning, as well as an indication of where Tippett himself would shortly be heading with his music for larger ensembles.

 

Which brings us to side two, an extended suite of mourning. The original other trumpeter in Ninesense, alongside Mark Charig, was Mongezi Feza. You can hear from the band’s Live At The BBC recordings how well he fit into the music and how rapidly he was developing his own, individual improvising voice. But his premature, stupid and entirely avoidable death in December 1975 knocked the wind out of everybody who knew him – so we begin the second side with “M.T.” (“Empty”?), a solemn Dean-penned ballad with funereal marching drums and a distinct Carla Bley harmonic feel (Dean, along with Windo and Hopper, would work to great effect with Bley in her 1977 touring band).

 

This leads directly into a reading of Mongezi’s own “Friday Night Blues,” full of the trumpeter’s characteristically jaunty major-key voicings and Sunday School stateliness. The Ninesense reading is patient and I’d say canters along good-naturedly rather than swings, like a newly-nourished horse. The opening solo is a rare and possibly unique Mark Charig solo on tenor horn, and the initial question in one’s mind is: why is he soloing on this instrument and not on trumpet? The initial answer to that is “why not?” but as his solo develops you slowly realise that he’s doing it in Feza’s style, full of staccato tonguings, jabs and swoops – he’s paying very subtle tribute. Harry Beckett, whom Dean invited to join Ninesense in Feza’s stead, follows with a relatively restrained and relaxed trumpet solo. After some very brief piano commentary from Tippett, Dean returns on alto to solo, somewhat acerbically, before taking the band back towards the main tune.

 

The side, and album, conclude with “Prayer For Jesus,” which on the sleeve is mistakenly credited to Richard Rolle, the fourteenth-century religious hermit and mystic. While it was he who composed the poem of praise, it was the early twentieth-century organist, choral music teacher and composer George Oldroyd who set it to music (and strictly speaking the piece is entitled “Prayer To Jesus”). Ninesense perform the piece as solemnly and raggedly as a Salvation Army band at the end of its tether, and close it with a Picardy third which Gil Evans obviously had in mind when he arranged “Moon Dreams” for Miles Davis’ Birth Of The Cool band. They mourn, but must also celebrate.

 

Current availability: reissued on CD with OG 910 in 2009 and available for downloading here, but buyer beware – there is only one CD to accommodate both albums, hence for reasons of space limitations “Friday Night Blues” has been edited down by some seven-and-a-half minutes and now just fades in with Tippett’s piano commentary, followed by Dean’s solo, missing out Charig and Beckett’s solos entirely. If you fume “well, why couldn’t they have put the music out as a 2-CD set?,” bear in mind that the added costs and expenses involved in manufacturing a double-CD album for the sake of seven-and-a-half minutes of music are not really economically viable for a very small record label. Ogun Records are not Universal Music Group and have to do the best that they can with limited resources. It seems much more preferable to me to be able to have this music available again in whatever form rather than not have it available at all. If you want to hear the whole thing, then you’ll need to seek out the original L.P., or you can simply catch it on YouTube over here.