(OG 310)
Track listing: Family Affair/Touch Hungry/Jumping/Eli’s Song
Harry Miller (bass), Mark Charig (trumpet), Mike Osborne (alto sax), Malcolm Griffiths (trombone), Keith Tippett (piano), Louis Moholo-Moholo (drums).
Recorded at Battersea Arts Centre, London SW11, on 6 January 1977. Released: summer 1977. Producers: Harry Miller and Keith Beal. Cover design: Niklaus Troxler (sorry Niklaus but I don’t think you could get away with a cover like that today!)
Isipingo had already been going for two or three years by the time of Family Affair’s release, with a variety of line-ups. The central idea was to provide a group focus for Harry Miller’s compositional and organisational skills and a scaled-down, more intimate and perhaps more directly rhythmic variation on the Brotherhood Of Breath’s kwela/jazz model. In the basic sextet format Miller tried out all sorts of combinations of musicians from gig to gig but none really seemed to gel. The most successful one featured Mongezi Feza and Nick Evans alongside Osborne, Tippett and Moholo-Moholo, and can be heard to good effect on Which Way Now (Cuneiform Records, 2006), but that particular performance was recorded about three-and-a-half weeks before Feza’s death and the problem therefore reasserted itself.
Miller finally resolved this dilemma by bringing Mark Charig and his old Westbrook/Brotherhood associate Malcolm Griffiths into the band. This was a very artful balance reflecting the bassist’s recently history and mixing elements of Westbrook, McGregor, Tippett and Osborne’s music in with Miller’s own, and the combination gelled quite beautifully.
Family Affair, the only Isipingo album to be released in the band’s lifetime, was taped live on a drizzly, foggy Thursday evening in early 1977. Punk was in the air, or at least on the other side of the Thames in Chelsea and Notting Hill, but nobody yet really knew what to do about it. January 1977 was the time of Buzzcocks’ Spiral Scratch E.P., but only just; it didn’t come out until 29 January and the twenty million people who claim to have bought it at the time very probably didn’t - the band could only afford to press a thousand copies, five of which found their way to Listen Records in Glasgow’s Renfield Street about three weeks after its release, retailing at a steep 99p. I bought one of them (because I’d read about it in the NME and heard Peel playing “Boredom” on Radio 1, in those pre-internet days), think Jim Kerr and Alan McGee bought one each and have no idea what happened with the remaining two. BUT YOU’RE NOT HERE TO READ ABOUT PUNK ROCK so on with Family Affair.
My point is that things were happening, and there are different stripes of rebel music. Despite the tinny, crappy upright pub piano assigned by Battersea Arts Centre to Keith Tippett – or perhaps because of it, forcing him to become even more creative within the instrument’s technical limitations – Family Affair is a superbly-choreographed band performance, and one of the jewels in Ogun’s crown, spotlighting as it does six jazz improvisers at the very top of their game…or, in the case of one of them, possibly hurtling right back down to the bottom, but more of that in a moment.
The record begins with the easy kwela strut of the title track, Moholo-Moholo audibly having a ball with his ride and rimshot refrains (his unshakeable consistency here puts me in mind of Jaki Liebezeit with Can) as the catchy riff leads into solos by Griffiths, whose playing is romantic yet occasionally discursive, Charig, who seems intent on recapturing Feza’s ghost with his snarling triple-tonguing and hyperactive half-valve shrieks before settling back into his more familiar meditative melancholy – and Tippett doubles up and multiplies supporting piano figures beneath, or alongside, the trumpeter – and Osborne, who leads the ensemble into a free section. This transitions into further free play, with Osborne and Charig swapping figures and ideas over a patient-sounding rhythm section – again, Charig sounds very much like Mongs to begin with before switching to a touch of the Harry Becketts. The interplay builds up naturally as Griffiths modestly enters on the sideline and comments before launching into an extended solo of his own, initially deploying plunger mute but later becoming open; the overall feeling is that of a hungover and slightly disappointed Vic Dickenson (actually that’s much more characteristic of Paul Rutherford’s trombone playing*; Griff was always a Lawrence Brown man).
*(Rutherford worked intermittently with Isipingo. At one performance – was it at Lancaster or Loughborough University? – the band supported Brotherhood Of Breath, and since Chris McGregor himself happened to be playing piano for Isipingo on that occasion, he invited the trombonist to join in with the Brotherhood since he didn’t want Rutherford to feel left out. It was Rutherford’s only performance with the big band, and the only time the Brotherhood used three trombonists. He enjoyed himself.)
Around Griffiths’ playing, Tippett worries away at a small cycle of upper-register piano notes and the rhythm section doubles and halves the tempo with immense, virtually telepathic ease. Eventually the main theme – a bright, bouncy trumpet-led midtempo 4/4 refrain somewhere between Herb Alpert and Hugh Masekela – asserts itself before rapidly disappearing.
On the album there are no gaps; each track flows immediately into the next (this is obviously more evident on the CD edition). Hence we jump directly into the nearly fifteen-and-a-half minute-long “Jumping,” a pinnacle of seventies jazz group improvisation. It commences with its fast, boppish theme which immediately dissolves to allow Osborne, Tippett and the rhythm to come through.
And what is there to say about Osborne (and Tippett)’s solo(s) on “Jumping”? You won’t derive many clues from Brian Case’s typically gnomish, gaunt and minimalist liner note, as usual lying somewhere between Damon Runyan and Derek Raymond. But this is an absolute peak of emotional improvising. Osborne begins very close to the theme but Tippett is already on his tail, intent on avoiding the solo turning into a Mike Osborne Trio performance, and not only never lets up, but on occasion also leads. The furious crisscrossing between alto and piano recalls a more hyperactive variant of the Osborne/Stan Tracey duo.
The intensity continues to thicken to the point where it becomes actively terrifying, as if something is about to explode. And explode it does; Osborne finds a false-register high note, hangs on to it for his life…then Tippett responds with a high note (the same one) of his own before demonically diving into deep, rich whirlpools of modal chords which recall Vaughan Williams as deeply as McCoy Tyner. Together, Osborne and Tippett convert the jaunty bop number into a church of near-medieval lamentation, out of tempo and eternal in its wounded fealty. This is an expression of raw pain, the music of artists who are hurting, and in the context of seventies jazz is nearly unique. Bass (bowed) and drums can only cascade behind them like distant waves, and the other two horns blow as though in a different and unreachable galaxy.
Osborne’s solo concludes, and Tippett’s sustain pedal fountain of descending scales abruptly turn into jittery pointillism to accompany Griffiths’ nervy, rhythm-dominant solo. Again the pianist is there all the way with the main soloist, and when it comes to his own solo, he makes the Battersea Arts Centre pop-musicians-only piano sound like a kalimba as he works over and over on a repeating cycle of notes, akin to the works of Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou played at sextuple speed and – I think (let me know in the comments section if he doesn’t; it might just be the state of the piano) – utilises the simultaneous plucking of piano strings and fast upper register keyboard runs. I don’t think any improvising pianist anywhere in the mid-seventies world, with the possible and partial exception of Cecil Taylor, was as actively and untiringly creative as Tippett was at his peak. This is a level of creativity that expands somewhere above “outstanding.” Typically, when Charig arrives for his concluding solo, Tippett mostly lays back and lets him blow unimpeded. Remind me…this was supposed to be bop?
But even “Jumping” isn’t as sheerly overwhelming as “Eli’s Song,” the album’s final and shortest track, a sad 6/8 waltz feature for Osborne. As an expression of pained terror and a mind at the end of its tether, Osborne’s solo is very nearly up there with Parker’s “Lover Man.” I am aware that he had already been long diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia and was briefly sectioned at the Maudsley as a result. He also had a heroin habit and, as the drummer Steve Noble once told me, was fully capable of emptying the entire contents of a hotel bar in the space of fifteen minutes.
The single most terrifying moment in Osborne’s “Eli’s Song” solo is when he finds a scream of a high note and savagely alternates it with a growling low note as though his brain were spilling out of his head. His playing is at times barely articulate – what a contrast to the clean, defined tones he used in Westbrook’s various bands. I can’t call it exultation (as I would do with, say, Kurt Cobain’s scream at the climax of the MTV “Where Did You Sleep Last Night”) because all I hear is a loud, elongated cry for help, confirmation of a disintegrating identity. This is the sound of a man falling apart, and the final ensemble theme abruptly shuts down, like a lid on a tomb ready for nailing.
There is a supreme confidence in the six musicians’ interaction throughout Family Affair. But only two of those six survive at the time of writing. Their absolute command as an interactive group emphasises their fragility, and perhaps also their fury. The album remains one of British-based jazz’s most outstanding recordings, and some of the players arguably did not surpass what they did on it. But in its febrile way, it is as angry as any punk rockers had a right to be – and maybe they had a lot more right to be angry.
Current availability: Reissued as part of Harry Miller’s The Collection 3-CD package in 1999 (it’s been out of print for a good long while) but more recently made available as a download.
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