HARRY BECKETT’S JOY UNLIMITED – Got It Made

 

(OG 020)

 

Track listing: Got It Made/Moon Dancer/Time Again/Jungle Wild/Spiral Image/Getting It Right

 

Harry Beckett (trumpet and flügelhorn), Ray Russell (electric and acoustic guitars), Peter Lemer (electric and acoustic pianos), Roy Babbington (electric and acoustic basses), Martyn (?) David (percussion), Alan Jackson (drums). Recorded at an unspecified location (but obviously in a studio) on 13 July 1977. Released: December 1977. Produced by Harry Beckett and Keith Beal. Sleeve design: Penny and Steve Taylor. Photography: Fred Kavalier.

 

The third Joy Unlimited album received generally dismissive reviews at the time of its release. With the possible exception of OG 527, it was the most conventional and straightforward, and perhaps also the most commercial, album Ogun ever put out. The dogmatists didn’t like it. What is this fusion fluff, critics queried. What a betrayal of the fiery spirit of free cont. p. 94. What is a label like Ogun doing putting out muzak?

 

I have to admit that I didn’t have much time for the record either. I’d been so taken by the devil-take-the-hindmost freewheeling aura of Memories Of Bacares that I regarded this one as a letdown. Everything here, I thought, just sounds so…bleurgh…conventional. What happened? In the late seventies I was a reasonably angry post-punk teenager. I wanted Pere Ubu, Suicide and Devo. Noise and adventure. A lot of the time these days I still do; that hasn’t changed. What could I do with what sounded like an everyday and utterly unremarkable album of jazz-rock fusion easy listening? What could anyone?

 

But I didn’t let go of my copy of Got It Made. It stuck around. Over the decades I would keep fleetingly thinking; well, maybe I’ll appreciate it someday. Then I found I had other things to do and never got around to that. Until I got the idea to do this blog and realised that I’d finally have to come to new terms with the album. Was it as forgettable as I remembered it being? Well, I’ve already found myself reacting differently to several cherished items in the Ogun catalogue – perhaps I’ll feel different about it now. So I’ve now listened to it, in full, three times.

 

What was the younger me – or indeed jazz critics circa 1978 - thinking? I am absolutely knocked out. Got It Made is a fabulous record. I think it might be one of my favourite Ogun albums. It’s one of those rare jazz sessions where everything and everybody – musicians, material, environment – just gels. Thank goodness I kept it. I knew there’d be a reason to do so.

 

The line-up here is almost entirely different from Memories Of Bacares. Only Ray Russell, and obviously Harry Beckett himself, return from that record, although Martyn David, who was present on the first Joy Unlimited album when his first name was spelt “Martin,” was also back in the group (what IS the situation with Mr David’s first name, anyway? Is it Martin or Martyn? A Google search suggests that either is valid. Use the comments box below to enlighten me). But this is a real Rolls-Royce of a rhythm section. Peter Lemer, Roy Babbington and Alan Jackson – total British jazz heavyweights who’ve seen and done everything and with whom you mess at your peril.

 

The album starts, logically, with the title track; a repeated minimalist tuned percussion figure that briefly raises the eyebrow – just where is this record going to go? – turns out to be the launching pad for a terrific and infectiously catchy carnival tune, perfect for a sunny August Bank Holiday Sunday afternoon in Ladbroke Grove. Cleverly, the introductory theme is given to Lemer’s piano, so when Beckett comes in he goes straight into a solo. Ray Russell picks up on what the trumpeter is doing without delay, and it’s uncanny how all six musicians interact so telepathically with each other; even through Jackson’s energetic drum solo, Russell has something to say at the back with his Hank Marvin quivers. Towards the end Lemer builds up tension with high-register keyboard flutters, but these, as the band’s name suggests, are the dynamics of joy. What a fantastic – and danceable – opening track.

 

As for “Moon Dancer,” I think this is one of the loveliest pieces of music in the Ogun catalogue. It’s a beautiful ballad in which flügelhorn, acoustic guitar, piano and flanged Fender bass twirl around each other’s souls like renewed angels. I thought of what a Weather Report with Miles on trumpet might have sounded like – don’t be clever and giggle “In A Silent Way”! – and this piece of music exists at that level. Beckett’s playing in particular reaches the same heights of transcendence that it managed in the closing section of Westbrook’s Metropolis, where he turned a late-night end-of-the-day reverie into a cavern of mourning. Jackson’s brushwork is so subtle you hardly notice its presence. Passionate and heartfelt – and typically, after a final thematic statement (and few other improvisers can put so much into just playing the theme; think of Lester Young stopping midway through a solo because he’d forgotten how the song’s lyrics went), Beckett leaves it to Russell to take the song out with a delicate solo. This is in fact a classic of recorded British jazz, and I think that, with the right encouragement (and lyrics?), the tune could still become a standard.

 

The tempo rises again with the aptly-named “Time Again,” a fast, happy hard-bop number that really benefits from Messrs Jackson and David’s tandem percussive drive, around which the other musicians expertly weave a picture of purposive interaction. “Jungle Wild” is an extended 3/4 highlife workout that of these six tracks comes closest to Brotherhood of Breath-type affairs and finds Joy Unlimited at their most dynamic. The album’s annotator John Fordham singles out Russell’s backing to Lemer’s Fender Rhodes solo – which latter emerges cautiously from a number of improvised motifs, then brightly – and Jackson’s snare drum work for particular attention, but there is just so much going on here; the way in which Russell immediately falls in behind Beckett’s solo and the two players respond to each other with real excitement and humour, or how Beckett, Russell, Lemer and Jackson orbit the steady pulses of Babbington and David as they hold the whole thing together. At times Russell even ventures into high-pitched near-abstraction – but the whole never goes over the edge; the musicians know each other well enough to pull back when needed.

 

“Spiral Image” is another wonderful ballad – a long and meaningfully-meandering melody which makes me think of things like “A Remark You Made” (Weather Report again), although Jackson’s drumming is noticeably more active than it was on “Moon Dancer” – and it is typical of Beckett’s generosity that he confines his contributions to opening (on open trumpet) and closing (on muted – very Milesian) thematic statements, though still manages to encompass worlds within them. In the context of Joy Unlimited, Beckett seems to play the role of a benign football team manager, giving his colleagues plenty of space in which to express themselves.

 

The album concludes with the buoyant waltz of “Getting It Right” in which, again, every player’s contribution matters; Babbington’s bass is particularly exuberant, and if Russell’s guitar generally remains a lot closer to rock than jazz throughout this recording (with even a spot of psychedelic phasing at one point here!) and is less “out” than in his Rites And Rituals days, his command of dynamics, phrasing and tone remains palpable; no wonder the likes of John Barry, Andrew Lloyd Webber and Andy Mackay wanted his services. The tune is as catchy as anything else on the record and the band take the album out in high spirits as Russell continues to improvise while the music fades out (with the implication that this middle-eight could go on forever!).

 

What a superb record Got It Made is. It deserves to be far better known. And it took me well over half a lifetime to arrive at that conclusion. Why? Because of free jazz dogma. Because if something wasn’t atonal or noisy in the seventies, it was routinely deemed as being of no consequence. Because critics chose to subscribe to dogmatic and inaccurate notions of how musicians “should” play, ignoring Beckett’s Barbadian background and pretty much all of his musical history. A world in which melody, tonality and rhythm were regarded as cardinal kapitalist sins. Hence, until almost fifteen years after Beckett’s passing, we have largely chosen to be blinded by outdated and indeed expired notions of theory and approach, rather than to open the window, let the light in and simply enjoy good music, whatever its nature. I think that Got It Made, given the right push, could even become a hit in the 2020s. We disregarded it at the time because, from a personal perspective, I was too young and inexperienced in life to get it and, from a general perspective, because Beckett and his colleagues weren’t playing the precise type of music in the precise type of way that was, at the time and for far too long thereafter, expected and demanded by far too many people. A lifetime later, I realise why I never got rid of the record – it was patiently waiting for me to grow up and understand it.

 

Current availability: Out of print but it can be listened to on YouTube. Bacares and Got It Made have a combined running time of ninety or so minutes so they would either need to be reissued separately or as a double-CD package. Actually one of the majors should pick up on Got It Made. They’d be surprised by just how bloody good it is.