LOL COXHILL - Diverse

 

(OG 510)

 

Track listing: (a) Diver/(b)Divers

 

(a) Lol Coxhill (“Duet for soprano saxophone and loose floorboard [unrelated]”). Recorded at the Seven Dials Jazz Club/Community Centre, Shelton Street, Covent Garden, London WC2, at some unspecified point in 1976.

(b) Lol Coxhill (soprano sax), Dave Green (bass), John Mitchell (percussion), Colin Wood (cello). Date and venue as above.

 

Album released: mid-1977. Produced by Lol Coxhill. Cover illustration: Victorian lantern slide (identity of artist/photographer unknown). Back cover illustrations by “an anonymous friend” and George O’Brien.

 

You have probably already gathered from the above credits that this is not really like any previous Ogun album. Lol Coxhill was a benign law unto himself but call him an autodidact and you would’ve been liable for a disappointed reprimand. He lived in Welwyn Garden City but I have no idea whether he ever knew any of the Wilde family. He played with anybody and everybody. Rufus Thomas to the Damned. He was in Kevin Ayers and the Whole World and that is indeed his soprano burbling amid the frenetic brushwork of John Kongos’ late 1971 smash hit “Tokoloshe Man.” He also blew from time to time in the Brotherhood of Breath, hence I guess the Ogun connection, but apart from a shelved third studio album for Island Records which also had Elton Dean in the sax section he never recorded with them.

 

His primary interests as a free-but-with-conditions improviser were almost entirely expressed on the soprano saxophone. He would occasionally dust off his tenor for Brotherhood and later Dedication Orchestra performances and on the larger horn he proved himself a Rollins man through and through. But the soprano allowed him to fly more freely.

 

Diverse, which came in a deconstructive sleeve worthy of late seventies Rough Trade Records, features just two extended side-long improvised performances, or excerpts from them. They were taped in the same venue as OG 410 but as most of the audience, said Coxhill ruefully, were in the bar at the time you’d never know it was a live album.

 

The purpose of Coxhill’s two records for Ogun was to focus on his improvising work in different musical settings. “Diver” is a superb solo meditation which begins cautiously in the bucolic land of Surman country before beginning to stagger around like a last-minute New Year reveller. Far closer to Steve Lacy than to Evan Parker as a player, in terms of his gentle but firm insistence upon melodic and motivic development, Coxhill is free to explore his instrument’s potential with only momentary flurries of abstraction. Even the loose floorboard doesn’t distract too much; if anything, it provides a regular if faint percussive undertow – and on two occasions towards the end of the piece the saxophone stops to let the floorboard have a word or two of its own. In the end it simply wanders off to fade, the monologue presumably continuing well into Holborn or at least St Giles.

 

 

On “Divers” Coxhill is joined by a trio of unpredictably-chosen musicians. The late Colin Wood, then principally a member of John Stevens’ furiously minimalist and unamplified mid-seventies string-dominant edition of the Spontaneous Music Ensemble, provides the nearest thing here to a second voice or “horn.” Dependable Dave Green is not a name commonly associated with free improvisation, although at the time he was certainly a member of Stan Tracey’s open-ended quartet with Art Themen and Bryan Spring, and by extension also Tracey’s octet. Yet he fits in well with Coxhill’s ideas and is readily able to respond to and develop them. Percussionist John Mitchell I only really know from his recorded work in the mid-seventies with Mike Westbrook and Graham Collier – he may well be the secret hero of Citadel/Room 315 – and doesn’t have too much to say in “Divers”’ twenty-one or so minutes except when the music gets lively, whereupon he suddenly has quite a lot to say.

 

I’m bound to say that “Divers” isn’t the best group improvisation I’ve ever heard. It commences with Coxhill’s soprano upfront, as he steers the creaking timbers of bowed strings, like a whale reluctant to be beached; Mitchell might as well not have been there at this point. Nevertheless the saxophonist works hard to get a structure built, and when the gloom finally relents and the sunshine of a kwela-Latin rhythm and impromptu overlying riff are allowed into the room, the musicians (particularly Mitchell) audibly brighten up; Green even permits himself the luxury of a bass solo.

 

At around the eleven-minute mark, however, the worst case scenario in any free improvisation context rears its head – the musicians simply run out of ideas and come to a standstill. Coxhill is left alone to work everyone else back into the music, and this he (just about) manages; there are some extended Coltrane-ish minor-key drone/modal contemplations, then the creaky ship again until finally the kwela-Latin thing returns and takes the piece out to another fade. Certainly Diverse does not measure up to classic Coxhill records like Ear Of The Beholder, Slow Music or (my favourite) Digswell Duets, but like anything else in his story it remains an important chapter, because his music was something like an unfolding diary. Or, if you prefer, a prototype blog.

 

Current availability: reissued on CD in September 1998 and on download in April 2021 as part of Coxhill On Ogun, which compiled both OG 510 and OG 525. Interestingly Coxhill, presumably for reasons of his own, scheduled the first of these albums to come after the second one in terms of running order.