For the next few weeks on Cosmic Jazz we shall be celebrating the 40^th anniversary of the release of Miles Davis’ celebrated Bitches Brew album.  This is music that demands your attention.  It converted me (Neil) to jazz – see the About Us section on the front page of the Cosmic Jazz website.  It regularly features in lists of 100 Best Albums in any genre, most influential jazz albums and – probably – Albums You Should Listen to Before You Die.

So what is it that is so special about Bitches Brew?  The writer Paul Tingen[1] says the album is a “paradigm shift” and he’s right.  With the influence of rock music jazz was already changing and In a Silent Way, the album Davis had recorded earlier in 1969, was one of the first to make a real impact.  However, Davis wanted more.  He had told Clive Davis at CBS that he didn’t want his music to be marketed as jazz anymore.  He was obviously looking for something more – but the important thing is that it wasn’t going to be than just rock-influenced jazz.  Think about this – in another hands, the music that emerged would have been full of rock drums, electric guitar solos and maybe some ‘happening’ vocals.

Bitches Brew was nothing like this.  Davis wanted something darker in tone than In a Silent Way and he got it.  There are two ways he did this – and the first was the way he used instruments.  There are thirteen musicians used (compared with the eight on IASW) and one of the key additions is Bennie Maupin’s bass clarinet.  It’s there just for tone and colour – there no solos and no riffs – and Maupin uses the rich dark tones of the instrument for dramatic effect.  It’s well recorded that Davis would ask his bemused band to play what they didn’t know….  More than that, Davis’ own trumpet playing has a new aggressive tone and producer Teo Macero capitalised on this, bringing the instrument forward in the mix throughout the music.

The second reason Bitches Brew sounds different is that the studio is used as an instrument too, shaping and colouring the sound.  This is producer Teo Macero’s core contribution to the creation of this jazz masterpiece.  In fact, we now know that the title track and Pharaoh’s Dance (credited to keyboard player Joe Zawinul) are really the products of Macero’s cutting and pasting in the studio.  When Zawinul first heard the album in the CBS offices, he reportedly asked who the band on the stereo was.

For Davis, the concept was clear.  He described his process over the three days of recording as follows:

I would direct, like a conductor, once we started to play, and I would either write down some music for somebody or would tell him to play different things I was hearing, as the music was growing, coming together. While the music was developing I would hear something that I thought could be extended or cut back. So that recording was a development of the creative process, a living composition. It was like a fugue, or motif, that we all bounced off of. After it had developed to a certain point, I would tell a certain musician to come in and play something else. I wish we had thought of video taping that whole session. That was a great recording session, man.

Drummer Jack deJohnette noted that Davis always went for the essence of things, and that was much more important to him than going back and redoing a note that wasn’t perfect. Perfection for him was really capturing the essence of something, and being in the moment with it. And then he and Teo later edited all these moments and put them all together. Some of the edits surprised me, but overall they were seamless, and captured the feeling and the intensity of the music.”

And this brings us back to how that vision is developed in the music.  Perhaps Miles never played better than on Bitches Brew.  Over all of Macero’s 17 edits on Pharaoh’s Dance, for example, the level of invention is consistently brilliant – riffs, patterns, runs, slurs and smears are all as good as anything in the Davis canon, early or late.  Almost better than this though is the simple fact that Bitches Brew – with its Mati Klarwein specially commissioned cover art, a gatefold sleeve, the bare-chested photo of Miles and the prose poem by ralph j gleason – is still just so COOL.

http://jazztimes.com/articles/20243-miles-davis-and-the-making-of-bitches-brew-sorcerer-s-brew

Neil has played music by the Norwegian jazz trumpet player Arve Henriksen on  Cosmic Jazz and the tracks he selected have always sounded clear, uplifting and spiritual. So to discover that Arve Henriksen  was booked for  the 2010 Norfolk and Norwich Festival in  the ancient and beautiful setting of Norwich Cathedral  sounded like the perfect match between artist and venue.

The evening was a Friday and one of the first warm nights of the summer, the Cathedral was packed and the music started with a soaring piece featuring Henriksen and sampler/DJ Jan Bang.  Sadly, that was as good as it got.  For the next piece, The Voice Project Choir emerged from the sides with whispering sounds of precious and pretentious intensity that set the tone for the rest of the evening.  They are a local amateur choir and it showed.

Whenever Henriksen played the trumpet the tone was delicate and inspiring, even Middle Eastern flavoured at times.  The pity was the trumpet features were all too rare as he was often on vocals or conducting the choir. The music, although pretty at times, seemed to range from the ancient Christian choral tradition through to jazz and on to contemporary classical.  It was hard to see how lovers of any of these genres would feel satisfied.  There were a significant number of empty seats after the interval, although it must be said many gave rapturous applause at the end.

Eleven days later – on a cold Tuesday evening after the Bank Holiday – there was another trumpeter in Norwich. This time it was French Blue Note recording artist Erik Truffaz, with the beatboxer Sly Johnson and Philiippe Garcia on drums at Norwich Arts Centre. This is a band whose bookings include The Jazz Cafe, the Hay-on Wye Festival and the Brecon Jazz Festival and whose Paris Project CD is released on Blue Note, one of the greatest jazz labels of all time.

There were twenty-five people in the audience…

On the day, tickets had been reduced to £5 only, obviously to little effect. The band came on stage, looked around in bewilderment, and – as Truffaz noted – this was like a private party.

Those of us lucky enough to be at this private party had a rare treat. It was music to stretch and overlap boundaries but in a way that fitted together, in a way that was challenging and in a way that explored the limits of what is jazz. Sly Johnson with occasional vocals – and some sampling but mainly beatbox provided a forceful rhythm section along with the powerful and excellent drummer Philippe Garcia. There was constant engaging and almost playful interplay between the two.

Then there was Erik Truffaz. He was cool and said little. His playing was understated, delicate and precise but still powerful enough to be heard between the drums and the beatbox. On the quietest tune of the evening Goodbye Tomorrow – written by Sly Johnson – his trumpet playing was sheer, soaring, ethereal beauty.  Truffaz sometimes recorded his playing and then played it back; at times he joined with the other tw0 – and sometimes he just sat out.  There were no lavish, demonstrative solos.  There was no need for them.  This was not a night for the traditional jazz journey round the soloists.

But there was lavish applause at the end from all twenty-five of us.  So track down the recordings on Blue Note and if you get a chance to see Truffaz live – don’t pass it up.

By 1974 Weather Report were already jazz superstars.  Co-founders Joe Zawinul and Wayne Shorter had been members of the influential Miles Davis group of 1969-70 but both wanted to take this sonic innovation further.  Unlike the studio experimentation of Miles’ producer Teo Macero in which the music evolved from open-ended rhythm tracks, Zawinul and Shorter were – from the outset – more interested in composition.

Added to this is Zawinul’s restless exploration of the new keyboard sounds that were percolating into jazz from rock sources and Shorter’s asymmetric soloing on the increasingly popular soprano saxophone.  The result – a jazz group whose melodies are as strong as any compositions in jazz.

Mysterious Traveller was not the breakthrough Weather Report album (that was Sweetnighter from 1973) but it has the best grooves (Nubian Sundance and Cucumber Slumber), the most austerely beautiful soloing (Blackthorn Rose and the title track) and the most moving of Zawinul’s home studio creations (Jungle Book).  Every track is a small masterpiece and we’ll be playing them all on Cosmic Jazz over the next seven weeks.  Enjoy!

“Okay Dave, let’s start planning the 2009 tour.  Now, obviously a lot of the musicians you’d really like in this new quartet will be busy – but just give me some names to kick things off.”

“Well, Jason Moran on piano would be my first choice.”

[pause]

“Hmm.  It actually looks like he could make the dates…”

“Wow!  What a start.  Well I’d love to have Chris Potter on saxes again but of course…”

[pause]

“No, he’s free too.”

“I can’t believe this, but I’m going to go with the flow.  Now, it has to be Eric Harland on drums – but he’s everywhere these days.”

“It’s a long shot, but I’ll give him a call.”

[long pause]

“You kidding?  Really?  Dave – you won’t believe this but…”

Well, however it happened, British bass player Dave Holland has to be the luckiest man alive.  Not only did he actually get this stellar line-up for his short 2009 tour, but all four members of the Overtone Quartet clearly left their egos outside the rehearsal studio and – on the evidence of this final show of the tour – in the foyer too.

This band works – and they know it.  The interplay between Moran and Potter is breathtaking and Holland’s knowing looks at Harland suggest that the bearded veteran and the young tyro love the way it’s all come good.

The sell-out audience were treated to new compositions from each player, but raw themes were just the starting point for characteristically muscular soloing from Potter and lyrical diversions from Moran, who switched effortlessly between Steinway and Fender Rhodes.  Holding it all together were Holland and Harland.  Age has never mattered in jazz, and this quartet prove it once more as they demonstrated how Holland’s ability to extract the best from his collaborators on stage continues with each new group.  Holland – born in the 1940s in Wolverhampton but with most of his creative life spent in the USA – has created a band that, on the evidence of tonight, will surely be in contention for best release of 2010 if recorded.

The opening number was Chris Potter’s The Outsiders, an original composition for this group like most of the pieces tonight.  Potter’s agile, serpentine soloing threw up fragmentary melodies that were coloured in by Moran – a symbiotic partnership that continued at this level throughout the evening.  Harland’s elastic changes of rhythm on the now fashionable small kit were mesmerising (especially from the front row) and Holland anchored it all with unassuming fluency.  Potter’s style and tone seem to get more and more secure.  He can provide pithy little cameos (as on the Steely Dan album Two Against Nature) but he can also wig out big time on complex extended solos (typically heard on his live releases like Follow the Red Line).

Holland’s own first contribution was new too – Walking the Walk was a bassline driven vamp (rather like the title track on his most recent CD Pass It On) but unselfishly Holland gave opportunities for Moran and Potter to shine again.  Moran’s Blue Blocks and Harland’s Patterns were both packed with insidious riffs and featured Moran building swaggeringly confident solos apparently from thin air.  Remember, this is the jazz pianist who gave us a jazz trio version of the minimalist techno classic Planet Rock…

The pre-encore performance ended with Interception from Holland’s landmark 1973 ECM album Conference of the Birds.  Ironically, it sounded the most contemporary and asymmetric performance of the night.  Here Holland reworked that spare and very different bad cop quartet sound to give us its more user-friendly good cop partner.  This time playing with a warm and tender agility on his custom bass, Holland drew out the underlying melody of the tune – and raised the bar again for Moran and Potter who responded with angular confidence throughout.

Interception ended with a solo from Eric Harland which had Holland shaking his head in quiet disbelief.  The Texan drummer created an endlessly inventive series of intricate polyrhythms while holding down a complex right foot pedal pattern.  Crowd pleasing of course – but with more than enough substance and originality to explain why Harland is probably the most sought after young drummer on the international jazz circuit today.

A thought on saxophonist Chris Potter.  His tone was once equal measures of Coltrane, both Redmans, Rollins and a more coarse-grained Garbarek but it is now securely his own.  Here at the QEH, it’s almost as if you see him listening, learning and then playing better than ever as the group bed around him.  Nowhere is this more apparent than on the encore, again a new Potter composition called Sky.  This final extended number built into a groove that had more than a little of It’s About That Time from Miles Davis’ In a Silent Way, one of the most important and influential jazz releases ever.  Oh – and Dave Holland was on that one too.  It was a fitting end to a memorable night – and it’s just become my favourite concert of 2009.

There have been great sophomore albums in the past – think of Love’s Da Capo or The Freewheeling Bob Dylan.  In the jazz world, how about Out There from Eric Dolphy in which his signature sound was forged or Robert Glasper’s second album Canvas, his first for Blue Note and the sign of far greater things to come?

This is another great second album.  Isla is a giant leap forward from Knee Deep in the North Sea, Portico’s Mercury-nominated debut release. Cosmic Jazz saw the quartet in Colchester and were only averagely impressed.  Perhaps it was something to do with the fact that Jack Wyllie’s soprano sax had to be borrowed at the very last minute (he’d forgotten his) but I think not.

The truth is that this is simply a much better record- production that does them justice, great melodies and a real integration of the Portico sound this time round.  There’s more than a feeling of the expansiveness of the Cinematic Orchestra with acoustic bass well forward in the mix to and subtle use of loops, electronics and additional instrumentation (marimba, cello, violin and viola) all balanced by John Leckie’s major league production.  Responsible for Radiohead’s The Bends, here he’s miraculously contained and expanded the Portico sound and has recognised that their unique use of the Swiss made percussion instrument the hang is much more about colouration rather than as a solo gimmick.  Nick Mulvey’s hang drum – which looks like a giant version of the old Cadbury Smash alien character – is a unique kind of steel pan that adds delicate gamelan tones to powerful soloing from Wyllie and sympathetic support from Milo Fitzpatrick on bass and Duncan Bellamy on drums.

Interestingly, Wyllie is strongest on soprano rather than tenor and ironically the music woks best when it steers away from conventional free jazz blowing (as in Clipper) where the gentle percussive soundworld clashes with Wyllie’s tenor rather than enhances it.  But the way that key tracks like Isla and Dawn Patrol build and grow and then hang around in the memory (no pun intended) is impressive.  Portico still has the cyclical minimalism of Steve Reich but the mood is darker than on Knee Deep… and across all seven tracks it works.

This is a CD to come back to and linger over.  It is deeply cinematic and could well serve a future film soundtrack.  Equally, I predict an album of remixes on the back of the Subtrak mix of Line you can hear on the Portico Myspace site.  It’s exciting to hear a band that have moved so far forward for a second album.  The anticipated ‘sophomore slump’ doesn’t apply here so the only question now is can the Porticos can raise the bar again for album number 3?  I’m looking forward to seeing them try – and in the meantime I can’t wait for the Colchester show next week.

There have been a lot of Coltrane influenced releases recently but this new one (2009) must surely be one of the best.  Steve Kuhn and Coltrane have history: in 1960 at the age of 21, Kuhn was playing piano on a Coltrane quartet tour in New York.  It didn’t last – he was replaced after eight weeks by McCoy Tyner who stayed with the quartet through most of the great Impulse recordings of the 1960s.

On this new ECM recording, Kuhn’s trio is augmented by Joe Lovano on tenor (and one track, tarogato – a Hungarian reed instrument also favoured by Charles Lloyd).  The music throughout is stunning.  This set begins with Coltrane’s Welcome and ends with Kuhn’s solo piano meditation simply called Trance.

In between, the trio and Lovano work their way through the Coltrane repertoire including late originals like Crescent and Living Space together with standards like I Want to Talk about You and The Night Has a Thousand Eyes.  It all works. Kuhn’s playing is vibrant and tender. He might once have been compared with Bill Evans but here Kuhn plays with exquisite control one minute and almost free abandon the next.  In the remarkable Configuration (originally on Coltrane’s 1967 release Stellar Regions) he does all this and more.  Kuhn isn’t at all like Tyner – all block chords and modal runs.  Rather, his tone is impressionistic, with solos often built up from tiny runs and clustered arpeggios.

As for Lovano, he may play with Ravi Coltrane in the Saxophone summit group but the sound here is really all his own.  It’s fiery but controlled, with a tone that has echoes of ‘trane when it suits the mood best (as in the gorgeous Song of Praise) but melodically inventive too in a way that his recent Folk Art CD on Blue Note didn’t demonstrate.  Nowhere is this more clear than on    The Night has a Thousand Eyes where he spirals out tenor lines of such warmth and lightness that smiling is the only permitted response.

Drummer Joey Baron is all Elvin Jones one minute and then Roy Haynes the next, but even at his most thunderous (Configuration ) there’s always there’s the delicate stickwork that marks out his style.   Live at the Cheltenham Jazz Festival a few years ago, I saw Baron use a wider range of sticks and mallets with greater intensity and depth than any drummer I can think of, and he brings that artistry to this set too. There’s just a couple of solo spots for bassist Finck but both are deep and lyrical and across the full 75 minutes of Mostly Coltrane his interplay with the others is stunning.

This group just really like playing together and producer Manfred Eicher and his New York engineer James Farber capture this with the usual ECM clarity.  Tribute albums don’t always work but this one does.  I love this album and will be playing it for years to come.  As they say, if you’re going to buy one Coltrane-flavoured CD this year – make it Mostly Coltrane.

A re-assessment
Herbie Hancock has always sought to take jazz and his version of it forwards. From his Blue Note album Maiden Voyage in 1965, Hancock has always deliberately pushed in new directions, sometimes courting popular taste and sometimes experimenting with something genuinely different. His vision is simple – he understands that just about anything can be grist to the jazz mill.

The New Standards came out in 1996. Hancock was well know for music that broke both musical and technological barriers – Headhunters (1973) and Rockit (1983) for example – but here was something new. Hancock applied the jazz term ‘standards’ to the contemporary pop repertoire. The mix was pretty varied too – songs by Lennon and McCartney, Donald Fagen and Walter Becker, Peter Gabriel, Paul Simon, Prince and others. It wasn’t what many listeners were expecting as his next move.

Today, it’s more of a norm for artists like Brad Meldhau to champion Radiohead and Nick Drake and for groups like Robert Mitchell’s 3io to play Massive Attack. Miles Davis – as so often – had led the way in 1985 by recording two contemporary tunes (Time after Time and Human Nature) but these were played pretty straight – certainly on record. They are jazzed up versions of the pop tunes rather than jazz interpretations. That’s not to belittle their impact and, indeed, when Davis and his band stretched out on either song the result was often magical.

But this is a major point. New standards are not merely pop tunes with a few flattened blue notes and maybe a change of tempo. Standards given the jazz treatment are reworkings, usually of songs not composed by jazz artists, that use melodic, rhythmic and harmonic elements of the song but – as Eric Morecambe once famously said in another but related context – “not necessarily in that order”.

By titling the album The New Standards, Hancock puts down an ambitious marker. The message is clear: these cuts could be like the timeless Broadway classic standards of the 1930s – Summertime (1935), My Funny Valentine (1937) and All the Things You Are (1939) – in that they provide the basis for imaginative reinterpretations that have their own unique identity shaped by the performer rather than the composer.

So twelve years ago Herbie Hancock took a clutch of great tunes and the best contemporary jazz performers into the studio to record what was to be a quietly innovative record. From the opening blast that is New York Minute (Don Henley) through to his own composition and final track Manhattan (New York Lights and Love) this album – mostly – works. Hancock is magnificently supported by Brecker who plays with energy and control on both tenor and – unusually – soprano sax – and while Scofield is less active across the album, his contributions are always telling. For this writer, one track says it all. Hancock’s version of Peter Gabriel’s Mercy Street is a triumph – from the subtle opening tablas of Don Alias to the closing Brecker/Hancock riffing it’s confident, clever, relaxed and engaging.

Of course, some tunes don’t work. It’s quite hard to like Norwegian Wood anyway and this rather literal and wimpish version doesn’t really work. It was the wrong Beatles choice and all sorts of tracks would have worked better – Lady Madonna, Blackbird, Sister Sadie, In My Life. But this is forgiveable because so much of the album works so well.

Unexpectedly, Scarborough Fair – one of the oldest standards in the book along with Greensleeves - is a triumph. Similarly, one of Prince’s less well known compositions Thieves in the Temple (from the rather dismal double album Rainbow Bridge) really recasts the song with a different tempo and a stong propulsive groove with powerful soloing again from Brecker and Scofield. Throughout, Hancocks’s own contributions, usually on acoustic piano, are often more impassioned and less conventionally mannered than we might expect – listen to the delicacy of touch on Kurt Cobain’s All Apologies, for example – and Jack deJohnette on drums and Dave Holland on bass are just the rhythm section to beat.

This is an album you should own. There are tracks like Mercy Street, All Apologies and Thieves in the Temple that you’ll come back to again and again. Each is a little jewel of construction, full of sparkle and innovation. Check out The New Standards – you won’t regret it.

The sound of the universe where space really is the place.

This was the night that the Barbican went truly cosmic and allowed the man from Saturn (or at least his newly appointed ambassador in the gap toothed shape of former Special Jerry Dammers) to visit some of his earthbound fans.

Dammers has been piloting his Spatial AKA Orchestra for a couple of years now but this was their major concert hall outing in London. Billed as Cosmic Engineering, the choice of music reflected Dammers’ interest in other ‘musical mavericks’ on the fringes of jazz – Sun Ra, Martin Denny, Alice Coltrane and ‘Sir’ Coxone Dodd were his unlikely partners in this journey through the spaceways.

To make this ambitious project happen, Dammers has chosen a big band lineup that’s conventional enough. Some of the leading players on the UK jazz scene have been brought together in a terrific frontline – Mercury nominee Zoe Rahman on Fender Rhodes and piano, Nat Facey (most recently with Empirical) on alto, Finn Peters on flute and Larry Stabbins, Denys Baptise and Jason Yarde on tenors. With the vocalists and percussionists this was a stage full – eighteen in total – and I wasn’t counting the various costumed mannequins less than artfully placed on the edges of the stage alongside Captain Scarlet’s spacecraft, African masks, a glitterball or two and assorted Arkana. Add to this a back projection screen which featured cheesy 1950s space travel images alongside rare footage of Sun Ra, Marshall Allen and others dancing around the Pyramids and the scene really was set.

As Dammers positioned himself in front of a bank of 1970s synthesizers – none of which did anything other than squawk and rumble – the band walked onstage through the audience just like the real thing – space costumes and Pharonic headdresses, flowing robes and painted masks.

As perhaps one of the few people in the audience who saw the very last visit of Sun Ra to the UK – at the Brixton Fridge in November 1985 – this looked and felt much like the real thing. And the band were convincing too. There might not have been enough solos of the calibre of Sun Ra’s longtime sidemen but Facey’s long and impassioned outing on a deep and dark version of Where Pathways Meet was awesome. This was Pharoah Sanders with the volume set at 11.

Classic Sun Ra tunes predominated – but there was also space for a twisted version of Nelson Riddle’s Batman theme, Salah Rageb’s Egypt Strut and Moondog’s Bird’s Lament. Throw in a couple of Alice Coltrane classics (including the hypnotic Journey in Satchidananda) and some Cedric Im Brooks and you have a mix made in – well – Saturn, I guess. Remarkably, it all came together: the band were authentically ragged in places, the sound mix was muddy and the graphics primitive but the experience was total. To mix the Specials’ Ghost Town with Ra’s Nuclear War was inspired and Alice Coltrane’s Armageddon managed to be both chilling and celebratory.

Dammers explicitly linked the Sun Ra cosmic sound to the deep jazzy grooves of Jamaican saxophonist Cedric Im Brooks (who always acknowledged his debt to Ra), the Cairo Jazz Band of Salah Rageb (who once dedicated a song to Ra) and Coxone Dodd (whose Studio One sound had Leroy Sibbles’ locked in basslines not a million miles away from the cyclical bass figures of Ronnie Boykin, the Ra bass player). Dammers seemed to have achieved the impossible: bringing all this passionate, deep and spiritual music together into a holistic soup that simply worked.

This wasn’t music for everyone but if you were new to the Sun Ra experience it was as close to the real deal as anyone is likely to get following Ra’s departure back to Saturn in 1993. Ending with – of course – Space is the Place, this was a concert experience that few would forget – even if they tried to. As they walked out of the hall they were met with the horn section who had gone out as they came in and who now put a smile on everyone’s face as they carried on playing more choruses of what is probably now the Sun Ra theme tune – “space is the place, yes space is the place…”

There’s been a lot of hype about the British jazz group Empirical. The entire front line of Nat Facey, Jay Phelps and Kit Downes were each nominated in the rising star category in the recent BBC jazz awards – what are the chances of that happening again? A quartet tonight (no Phelps on trumpet) – with alto saxophone, piano, bass, and drums – Empirical are young and sharply dressed in a post-Wynton kind of way. Does that affect the music? Answers on a postcard or better still comment in a blog – preferably ours…

So, with such rising reputations, I had high expectations of their visit to Ipswich. Were they fulfilled? Not entirely, but the longer the performance went on, the better it got. They are accomplished musicians and play collectively, a welcome change from the all too frequent and predictable head-solo-applause-solo-applause pattern which can lessen one’s appreciation of some jazz clubs. They play original compositions and they play tunes by Eric Dolphy. There is nothing wrong with that, especially when you have an intriguingly deep alto player like Nathaniel Facey in the band. In fact, a tribute album to Eric Dolphy is planned for release next month.

The size of the crowd was encouraging for a Sunday night in Ipswich and although playing in a theatre, the rapport between audience and band felt good. The band at the start of the night commented on the quality of the sound following sound checks and their enthusiasm for playing. And yet, the first set left me disappointed. Was it good in individual parts rather than a whole, was it disjointed, was it too academic and clever? Not sure, maybe it was all of these things – but it left me unsure.

But what a transformation for the second set! More extended tunes, fire instead of ice, involvement replacing distance, emotion where there had been coldness. I felt engaged. The audience were happy and their applause brought an Eric Dolphy’ tune as an encore.

For me, this had been a night of two halves rescued by an enhanced and more unified team performance after the break. Must have been those half time oranges… We will be checking them out again in the New Year when they come to Fleece Jazz – this time with young vibes star Lewis Wright in tow.

“Does anyone here know how good he is?” said Sonny Rollins after working with Stan Tracey on the soundtrack to the film Alfie in 1966. Er, yes – they do now!

This was a blistering set from an extended Stan Tracey Trio with special guests Guy Barker on trumpet and Dutchman Benjamin Herman on alto sax. I thought Barker was a revelation – endlessly inventive, powerful playing that underscored his status as one of the finest trumpeters Britain has produced. Herman is just a youngster in this company and his playing initially seemed to lack confidence but by the end of the first set he had established himself as an integral part of the group. Clark Tracey has had nearly thirty years playing with his dad – and it shows. His tiny drum kit belied the power and scope of his playing and the obvious empathy with Tracey senior was apparent in every texture.

What about Tracey himself? Well, the piano playing of the godfather of British jazz (now 81) is as dynamic and vibrant as ever. This was a largely Thelonius Monk set – understandable as Monk and Ellington have been the biggest influences on Tracey. He plays with the quirkiness and odd time signatures of Monk but his arrangements (most notably in the classic Under Milk Wood suite from 1965) have the sweep and scope of the Duke. It’s a great mix, and at this intimate venue you got a chance to see how Tracey creates these rich chords, sudden darting percussive runs and Monkish stabs at the keyboard – left hand crossing over his right with dazzling accuracy.

The tunes tonight included Well You Needn’t, Pannonica, Blue Monk and – unexpectedly – a fabulous interpretation of I Want to Be Happy. Now if only this was available on a CD….

Tracey’s backstory is amazing and worth repeating briefly here. In the 1950s he played on cruise liners, knew Tony Hancock and toured with Cab Calloway. In the 1960s he was the house pianist at Ronnie Scott’s (where he obviously picked up some of Scott’s dry wit as well as a debilitating heroin addiction) and so he backed visiting jazz royalty including Ben Webster and Sonny Rollins. In the 70s his fortune waned and he retrained as a postman but by 1978 he was supporting Gil Evans in a concert at the Royal Festival Hall.

More new commissions for large group suites followed and he started the quartet with son Clark that would form the basis of his current group. By 2008 he was an OBE and CBE – a rare honour for any musician – let alone one from the world of jazz.

This Suffolk show was something special with the constant feeling that you were in the presence of unassuming greatness. A real joy.

Watch Tracey playing with Ben Webster here:

And check out his own comprehensive website at www.stantracey.com where you will be greeted by the opening chords of Starless and Bible Black from the magnificent Under Milk Wood suite – a house favourite here at Cosmic Jazz.

Try out Benjamin Herman’s MySpace site here and listen to a great tune called Bootlicker featuring Stan Tracey.