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.