(OG 710)
Track listing: Bellaphon/Haven't The Chance Of A Ghost*/Vega/Ode To The Ghost Of An Improvised Past/Pavanne/Pipedream
(*Subsequently retitled "Ghostly Chances")
Mark Charig (cornet, tenor horn), Keith Tippett (organ, zither, piano, vocals, church bell), Ann Winter (vocals on tracks 2 and 4, church bell on ?track 1). Recorded at St Stephen's Church, Southmead, Bristol, on 14-15 January 1977 (but mainly on the 15th as "the church was more heated"). Released: spring 1977. Produced by Mark Charig and Keith Beal. Front cover painting by Mick Rooney.
The third of the Tippett 1977 trilogy - after OG 010 and OG 410 - and also the deepest, Pipedream is an astonishing testament to a musician who should be considerably more celebrated than he is. In common with most British or British-based jazz trumpeters, Mark Charig has tended towards self-effacement, self-deprecation and shyness, whereas he is a major innovator whose due has not been properly given.
Charig is best known for his work in Keith Tippett's sundry groups and the Tippett-adjacent models of Soft Machine and King Crimson, as well as the Brotherhood of Breath and its various offshoots (Ninesense, Isipingo); he has also been one of the core members of the London Jazz Composers' Orchestra for over half a century. Oh, and in the second half of the seventies he was a member of a hard Left jazz-rock agitprop band named Redbrass, whose personnel briefly included a young singer named Annie Lennox. Yet Pipedream is one of only a very few records to be issued under his name - there have been three more subsequent ones, released at drastically spaced-out intervals, in which he is generally a member of a group of free improvisers. He has lived in Germany for nearly forty-five years. In terms of underselling oneself, he makes Kenny Wheeler seem like Kenny Ball.
Pipedream, however, is a major statement. Wanting to get away from That London, Charig and Keith Tippett drove to Tippett's old stamping ground of Bristol, specifically to the Anglican parish church of St Stephen's, in the northern suburb of Southmead.
It was early 1977 - just over a week after OG 310, also involving Charig and Tippett, was taped - and it was very cold. Southmead is not a luxurious area. But the two musicians wanted to record there, and it is entirely fitting to suggest that there are not three, but four, musicians on Pipedream, the fourth being...the church itself. So much of its music is based upon the acoustics of the building, the spaces it offered, the ambience of hopeful holiness.
These are improvisations fed by the spirits of ghosts (as is explicitly referred to in the names of two of the album's tracks). As these musicians perform, one cannot avoid conjuring up the likely thousands who had trod the floors of this church before then. Although not a live album, Pipedream feels as if it is being performed in front of an audience of benign phantoms.
The record commences with "Bellaphon" and the chiming church bell over which Charig's cornet plays a Milesian blues; sombre but warming, like a lament that has not yet sealed the church door against the nightmare of hope. The bell eventually fades to admit Tippett, who mostly performs on the church's organ. Apart from a few characteristic upper register flurries later on, Tippett concentrates on the instrument's capacity for the sonorous and resonant. As he familiarises himself with the organ, Charig offers a fairly thorough summary of his improvisational style. Never an "out-there" player in the take-no-prisoners sense, he nevertheless moves through what he is capable of doing, including nods to Kenny Wheeler, half-valve smears worthy of Lester Bowie, some mouthpiece abstractions reminiscent of Wadada Leo Smith - and as the fifteen-minute-or-so piece reaches its climax, Tippett's fingers now rushing across the organ's keyboards, Charig's butterfly flutters conjure up a vision of Don Cherry improvising with Sun Ra - and few other trumpeters have attempted the modest multiphonic chord he conjures up at the piece's conclusion.
"Ghostly Chances," as the second track must now be known - perhaps the original title's punning was deemed too much levity for what is essentially a recital of sacred music - the two men are joined by singer Ann Winter, who is the real mystery at the heart of Pipedream. This as far as I can tell was her only appearance on a record and she has remained unknown to me before and since. Why this should be the case is a genuine mystery, since she is a very talented vocal improviser indeed. As she sings, Tippett concentrates on the zither - one of those instruments we rarely heard or saw him play outside of the context of an Ovary Lodge or an Ark. He comes up with a slightly sinister three-note refrain - which did turn out to mutate over the subsequent quarter-century into a staple of the work of fellow Bristolians Portishead - over which Winter sings gently and patiently, definitely in the lineage of Julie Tippetts and Maggie Nicols (and the former seems to have been around for Pipedream, since Charig thanks her for "the life giving qualities of her beef stew" in his brief liner note). Charig meanwhile murmurs and grumbles on mute like a bat in the most distant of belfries. "Vega" is a very brief overdubbed solo statement where one Charig, playing tenor horn, addresses another, who is playing cornet.
"Ode To The Ghost Of An Improvised Past" more or less sums up Pipedream's central ethos. Commencing with a rapid flurry of fists beating down upon - the closed keyboard of a piano? - the piece soon settles into a slightly more agitated but also slightly more melodic trio meditation. Again, Tippett concentrates on the zither but also does a spot of interior piano string plucking, while Winter asserts her presence more strongly, demonstrating a quite astounding vocal range and a general approach to breath control and tone which puts me absolutely in mind of...Jeff Buckley! Once more, Charig can be heard commenting on what his colleagues are doing - and yes, if you listen to the CD or download edition of Pipedream really closely, you will hear the ambience of 1977 Southmead, including footsteps and I swear at several points the sound of traffic passing by and passers-by distantly chattering outside; a superb remastering job, since these sounds were not at all evident on the original L.P.
Pipedream, as an album conceived in 1977, concludes with a pair of Charig/Tippett horn/organ duets. "Pavanne" is a marvellous piece of intuitive improvising, with decided aggression on the part of both players but also extremely natural ellipses into strong thematic statements. Tippett finds a tripartite chordal structure to provide a base for the playing - at times, with effects resembling car horns sounding, his organ work puts me in mind of Britten's A Ceremony Of Carols, largely written in New York with bustling traffic outside the composer's hotel window. Time and time again, the two players arrive at peaceful reconcilitation, only to shake themselves up with more adventure and perhaps a degree of suppressed anger.
The title track, which concluded the original L.P., is one of the most magnificent and emotional statements I have heard from any "jazz" musicians. While Charig concludes "Bellaphon" with a flurry of blunted runs which puts me in mind of Harry Beckett, his articulate speech of the wounded heart on "Pipedream" is fully comparable in terms of poignant impact with what Beckett plays in the ninth and concluding part of Westbrook's Metropolis, converting a night-night-all-lights-out atmosphere into the darkest and most profound of laments. This music is so sad and moving that it hurts me as much as it did when first I heard it in 1979. It is as though Charig and Tippett are turning out the lights on the world, thinking only of ghosts - apart from the obvious one of Mongezi Feza, whom Charig does not sound like at any point on this record, it is hard to name them - and yet, while the piece (and the album)'s title is obviously a pun on the pipes of the church organ, it also serves as a dim beacon of hope located at the centre of imagination; look how so much better this world could be. Its impact remains overwhelming, and if Pipedream had been recorded by Manfred Eicher and released on ECM we would have long since been singing its praises. This is up there with the big ones.
Current availability: reissued on CD in 2010 and on download in May 2021 with an extra track at the end, "The Trio Gets Lost In The Magic Forest" where Charig, Tippett and Winter literally do sound like rootless ghosts, whirling in perpetual half-light, burrowing amongst the buried cargo of a long-sunk ship. How amazing a singer Ann Winter was. What the hell happened to her? If she's still out there, please let us know!
