MIKE OSBORNE/STAN TRACEY: Tandem – Live At The Bracknell Festival

 

(OG 210)

 

Track listing: Ballad Forms/Air On A Shoestring/Back To Berks

 

Mike Osborne (alto sax), Stan Tracey (piano).

 

Tracks 1 & 2 recorded where the title implies they were recorded, on 24 July 1976; track 3 recorded at South Hill Park, Bracknell, on 26 November 1976. Released: spring 1977. Recorded by Doug Gleave; produced by Keith Beal, Mike Osborne and Stan Tracey.  Cover design: Nikolas Troxler.

 

A few years ago – in truth it was probably almost a quarter of a century ago - I watched a BBC documentary about Stan Tracey which rather smugly brushed over his brief involvement with free improvisation in the seventies. I thought it rather insulting and belittling to brush that entire phase of the pianist’s development under the “what were we thinking?” carpet. The revisionist wankers who put the documentary together were doubtless obeisant to the “thinking” of eighties fashionista spivs who were only interested in nice suits, rather than the music, as a consequence of which many musicians of Tracey’s generation and the one after found it suddenly impossible to find much work on the circuit. I haven’t forgotten the names of the spivs, nor the subsequent sweaty efforts of certain of their number to “grow” and “expand their musical horizons.”

 

This non-theory is detonated by two catalysts; firstly, although he was never going to be a doctrinaire hardcore free improviser, Tracey’s contributions to the music were genuine, curious and, for the most part, both fun and profound. It was the younger generation of players that arose in sixties Britain, ready to take on the world, who helped rescue Tracey from being Postman Stan of Streatham (although it was primarily his third wife Jackie who in 1970 proclaimed “YOU ARE NOT A POSTMAN” and set about his jazz “rehabilitation” - his problems were arguably as much to do with a heroin addiction as it was to changing fashions in jazz), and both parties were eager to learn from each other and genuinely expand their musical horizons. Secondly, recorded work in the 2000s with Louis Moholo-Moholo (see OGCD 016) and Evan Parker (Crevulations, released on Parker’s PSI label) proved that Tracey’s interest in free playing had not diminished.

 

From the seventies onwards Tracey had three duos on the go with each of the S.O.S. team of saxophonists – Osborne, John Surman (Sonatinas, released on the Traceys’ Steam label in 1978 and yet to see a reissue, is a pretty remarkable record and, in “Summer Hobo,” also includes the then-current theme to BBC Radio 3’s Jazz Today) and (the most conventional and longest-lasting) Alan Skidmore.

 

Yet the duo with Osborne was unquestionably the most intense of the three. The two men had already released a fine album on Cadillac Records (Original, recorded at Surrey Hall, Stockwell, in April 1972) and, like most agglomerations of British jazz musicians, worked as and when time and economics permitted it.

 

Tandem’s two main tracks represent what Osborne and Tracey played at the 1976 Bracknell Jazz Festival on a steaming hot Saturday afternoon towards the end of July. Annotator Steve Lake’s description of “Ballad Forms” on the album’s rear sleeve is so good and thorough that it might render any further attempts to describe it as redundant. All that needs to be added is that the twenty-three minutes and forty seconds of the work constitute one of the greatest recorded improvisations in the history of jazz music, British or otherwise.

 

Unlike some improvisers I could (but won’t) mention, Tracey saw free improvisation as an opportunity to create a spontaneous structure that stuck pretty closely to what he regarded as jazz. He never threw the harmony and melody babies out with the bathwater. The comedian Bob Monkhouse, who first met him in ENSA in the forties when Tracey was still an aspiring accordionist, and who subsequently became a very close friend of his, remarked that he knew Tracey was a genius in 1947, when he saw that the pianist could rattle off a dozen valid improvisations on a basic melody.

 

This gift stood Tracey in great stead, particularly in the seventies; the CD reissue of his Octet’s The Bracknell Connection (also commissioned and recorded in 1976) includes a nearly twenty-minute-long bonus track, “Chiffik,” in which an entire Octet number is improvised; Tracey begins it alone at the piano and, utilising his deep knowledge of harmony and what chords or notes should follow what, strikes upon a riff which the rhythm section, followed by the horns, then take up – there are impromptu unison lines and turns for soloists, and it all works phenomenally well.

 

It is the same with “Ballad Forms,” which sounds like an extended meditation on almost all forms of jazz (together with occasional intrusions from twentieth-century classical and Indian ragas). Proceeding on a modified train-kept-a-runnin’ locomotive rhythm, the two players go through West Coast bucolics, jitterbug waltzes, stride jumps, Coltrane modality and, at emotionally strategic points, out-and-out free playing. But not once is the listener led to imagine that these gentlemen do not know what they’re doing or why they’re doing it.

 

The telepathy and interplay between these musicians are uncanny. Throughout the piece, piano and saxophone move as one, although quite a lot of the time it is Tracey’s piano which is, slightly surprisingly, doing most of the pushing. But the way in which they respond to each other and advance their own responses so swiftly and instinctively approaches magic. They are constructing a piece of music, fully aware of everything that has preceded them (for an interesting counterpoint, see the title track of The People’s Republic by the Revolutionary Ensemble from the same year, which endeavours to summarise the entire history of music!).

 

There has been little in recorded music as overwhelming as the final couple of minutes of “Ballad Forms” where Osborne takes up a motif from Mingus’ “Goodbye Pork Pie Hat” and Tracey immediately furnishes harmonic support. It is as though love and happiness had been rescued from an otherwise consuming inferno. Such a deep sadness, too, in Osborne’s playing, but not a hopeless one. It sounds, at the end, as if music had been…saved.

 

“Air On A Shoestring” was the encore performance and is rather speedier and more jagged an improvisation, though again finally settles on a lightly swinging melody. “Back To Berks,” recorded at another (audibly less populated) concert five months later, is noticeably darker, Tracey sweeping off on a Rimsky-Korsakov gallop and daring the altoist to keep up. This climaxes in echoey pits of Poe doom before coming back to something between a township melody and good old boogie woogie – although the emotional trapdoor will slam shut again before either performer is done.

 

But “Ballad Forms” is Tandem’s main event, a beautiful example of how a work of art can be built into existence by artists who believe that it can be built. Listening to it now, I of course think of Streatham – Tracey in Mount Ephraim Road, Osborne further up on Prentis Road – and try not to think of the saxophonist being a doomed soul. But I also think of life versus existence, and there was only ever going to be one winner.

 

Current availability: Out of print, but this in my view demands reissuing more than any other currently unavailable Ogun album. A divided solo (Tracey)/duo 1974 performance at Wigmore Hall, Alone & Together, has been made available on Cadillac, but really Tandem is up there with Under Milk Wood and Citadel/Room 315 as one of British jazz’s very finest moments. Listen to the record on YouTube and see what I mean.