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.