(OG 610)
Track listing: In Spite Of It/Steps/First Team/Ragadagger/To The Sun/Off Your Beaver/Appropo/Fragment Of Memory/No Bounds/Time Test
Elton Dean (alto sax and saxello), Joe Gallivan (synthesiser, drums and percussion), Kenny Wheeler (trumpet and flügelhorn). Recorded in London, February 1977. Released: summer 1977. Produced by Joe Gallivan (“IN CO-OPERATION WITH ELTON DEAN”). Sleeve design: uncredited.
Readers who imagine that Ogun was all about hard-blowing South African-derived free/kwela jazz must have realised by now that in actuality the label journeyed to some very strange universes (as Ray Russell would say). Here we have ten tracks of what in a different era might have been called Hypermodern Jazz 2000.5; ladies and gentlemen, these three players really do sound as though they’re floating in space.
Where the hecking heck did this come from, and why in particular Kenny Wheeler? Having just taken delivery of and read Song For Someone – The Musical Life Of Kenny Wheeler, an allegedly exhaustive analysis of the great Torontonian’s life and work, written over a number of years by Brian Shaw and Nick Smart, I am none the wiser; The Cheque Is In The Mail was the first record of his I looked up in the book, because I was imminently going to write about it – and it is not mentioned at all, nor is Joe Gallivan’s parent big band Intercontinental Express, which the drummer co-ran with saxophonist Charles Austin and from which this trio was essentially an ad hoc splinter group.
Excuse my ranting, but Song For Someone is a disappointing book in a lot of ways. It is the same problem as with Morton Jack’s Nick Drake biography in that its authors were given unprecedented and unparalleled access to Wheeler’s family, friends, surviving fellow musicians and personal archive – not to mention the man himself while he was still with us – but, having been given the keys to the kingdom, they are completely unsure about what to do with them.
Hence, while there is a lot of very useful information about Wheeler’s upbringing in various parts of Ontario and several possible explanations for his lifelong chronic shyness and tendency towards self-deprecation and profound self-denial – none of which did him any good; the only decisive and contrarian step he seems to have taken in his life was to use the money his father had given him to study at McGill University on a ‘plane ticket to London with a view to making it as a jazz musician in Britain – the text generally plods along on a “THIS happened, and then THAT happened” mechanical basis, and even that terrain is uneven; several observations are repeated almost randomly throughout the book and the temporal continuity itself isn’t too secure; one moment he’s about to turn eighty, and barely a couple of paragraphs later he’s preparing for his 75th birthday concert (as with almost all books in this depreciated age, a committed editor would not have spared their pruning shears).
I also think they’re blanding Wheeler’s work out for the sake of reaching a wider readership, particularly those spellbound by the unending products of the ECM label (there is much bleating about substandard critical reactions to Wheeler’s ECM-centred work, but it has to be understood that for much of the seventies and indeed eighties, the label’s output was generally considered by critics as pretentious proto-New Age muzak, Eicher’s vampire seamlessly sucking the blood out of contemporary jazz. I note how many of Wheeler’s ECM recordings – The Widow In The Window, even the hallowed Music For Large And Small Ensembles – are deemed, even in this book, as compromising shadows of what these musicians were capable of playing on stage).
Whereas the harder Wheeler stuff seems to have been politely escorted to the sidelines and minimised. I don’t just mean Song For Someone itself – there is much illuminating explanation of exactly how and why that album came together, but if Derek Bailey did anything on it (which, at the top and tail of one lengthy track, he explosively does) you’d never have known (also that Keith Christie was asked to solo at some point on the record but declined). Mike Osborne seems to have been there as a sub for Ray Warleigh, who at the time was visiting his family in Australia, and few of the musicians seem to have had good words to say about him (nor indeed about Tony Oxley, who I suspect from anecdotal evidence alienated quite a lot of the players, but who Wheeler insisted had to be the drummer).
Or indeed of his work on Ogun and/or with the South Africans. His absolutely crucial and key contributions to OG 520 are briefly mentioned (minus the adjectives) and there’s a subtext of please can we brush this noisy stuff under the carpet and concentrate on all the nice ECM things. There is real heartbreak in the messy (and, in this book, messily and incompletely told) personal saga of Norma Winstone and John Taylor which I think really hurt Wheeler, but Angel Song? Sorry but Konitz seems to have been a bit of an arrogant prick (see also Keith Jarrett on Gnu High). So for me it’s another question of a whole lot of opportunities lost.
ANYWAY you’re not here to read me blethering on about a Kenny Wheeler book, but about this record! And what an odd record, the first on Ogun to involve North American musicians. Joe Gallivan comes from Rochester and in his time seems to have drifted through differing fields of music. He reputedly tested out the prototype drum synthesiser for Robert Moog in the sixties and you can hear it throughout this album and also on Gil Evans’ There Comes A Time (the title track of which commences with more or less a solo Gallivan drum synthesiser improvisation). He performed in a quite extraordinary group named Love Cry Want, which also involved Larry Young on organ and one (Steven) Nicholas – whatever happened to him? - on a self-built guitar synthesiser gizmo. Their one eponymous album was recorded in 1972 in Lafayette Park, Washington D.C. – within earshot of Nixon’s White House. It’s fair to declare that there hasn’t been anything like it in jazz before or since.
By the mid-seventies Gallivan was living in London. He had already been considered for the job of drummer in the Soft Machine – which presumably is how he came to know Elton Dean – but by now was busy building something else, specifically the aforementioned Intercontinental Express, co-run by Austin and himself and featuring mainly British jazz players. Gallivan was unhappy with the end recorded result, complaining that many of the musicians, schooled in hey-free-jazz-we-can-do-what-we-like-including-walking-randomly-around-the-studio-and-nowhere-near-an-actual-microphone-mAAAAAAn dogma, hadn’t a fucking clue about what recording an album involved. No names were given – though could be guessed – but Gallivan did express his fervent approval of the playing of Kenny Wheeler, bassist Roy Babbington and – the band’s real wildcard player – Ronnie Scott, who he had expected to be the least flexible of these musicians but in fact proved marvellously adaptable and, as a veteran session player, knew exactly how a recording studio worked, how best to approach the microphone etc.
Was the Intercontinental Express album any good, or as disappointing as Gallivan remembered? Well, listen for yourself. But three of the players regrouped in February 1977 to record ten relatively brief improvised pieces – only two tracks on The Cheque Is In The Mail venture beyond the five-minute mark.
And there is, again, no other album quite like this. In his liner note Gallivan describes the music as “just three people playing together somewhat in the tradition of older style jazz musicians” – and there are moments in pieces like “Ragadagger” where Dean’s saxello indeed sounds like a clarinet and there are echoes of the counterpart abundant in very early jazz – “but with a contemporary language.”
These pieces, which resemble sonic jetsam jettisoned from a long-distance space probe, are almost unclassifiable. In the opening “In Spite Of It” horns and bass synth patterns cascade like descending meteorites. There are points in “Ragadagger” when we might be listening to selected ambient works of the younger Aphex Twin. Dean’s alto playing is more abrasive than his recorded norm. On “Steps” and “Steps” all three players twinkle like distant comets illustrating the night sky. On the best track, the eight-minute-plus “To The Sun,” the trio work to build a coherent framework and Wheeler is in his most profound balladic mood. After his solo – and despite Gallivan’s protestations in his liner note about there being “no solos with accompaniment,” that is what this is – reaches its sad and natural end, another period of brief bubbling animation is succeeded by a sombre improvised two-horn harmonic and melodic line which concludes this excellent piece with full structural and emotional logic.
Throughout side two of the record, the players are in danger of drifting away from us altogether. On “Appropos” and “Fragment Of Memory” they are like Holst’s sirens of Neptune, so distant that they can barely be heard, let alone touched. I’m not sure I’ve heard a similar effect on any other jazz or improvised music record. Had The Cheque Is In The Mail appeared on Warp or Planet Mu in the mid-nineties it would have been hailed as a classic of ambient electronica, up there with Pete Namlook.
Well, there you are. Noise-punk! Acapella post-punk! Squeaky floorboards in a pub with no audience! What next with Ogun? What do you mean we’re going to church??!!
Current availability: out of print, but the album can be heard on YouTube.
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