Tom Cawley likes to make brave decisions. As the keyboard player in groundbreaking group Acoustic Ladyland a few years back, he thought it was time to break out on his own and so upped sticks and left. Curios, the piano trio he established with Sam Burgess and Josh Blackmore, quickly made its mark, and this month the band is back with its most confident set to date, The Other Place. But, as Stuart Nicholson finds out, it’s not just the jazz world keen to retain Cawley’s talents.
It could be a scene from an old Hollywood movie. A hard working young piano player is at home composing a new song. The sound of his young family can be heard from another room. The telephone rings. The voice at the other end is phoning with an offer to join the seriously big-time. The young piano player immediately suspects a wind-up. It’s got to be someone in his band. But he bites his tongue. Something in the voice tells him this is the real thing. It’s the chance of a lifetime. He lowers the phone and hangs-up as if in a daze. Cue violins and cut to a sold-out audience at the Hollywood Bowl as the young piano player walks onstage to take his place in the orchestra. Well, they don’t make them like they used to. Except in real life pianist Tom Cawley is acting this very scene.
He was at home practising, the phone did ring, and the voice at the other end was rock star Peter Gabriel’s assistant. “I had been recommended,” says Cawley, still living the dream.
This is an extract from Jazzwise Issue #138 – to read the full article click here to subscribe and receive a FREE copy of the latest Portico Quartet CD 'Isla'
The jazz world still hasn’t properly reconciled itself to the death of Esbjörn Svensson. Maybe it never will. For EST bassist Dan Berglund the death of his friend and colleague will always hang heavy on his heart. But now 18 months after Esbjörn’s death, Berglund has returned to music with the birth of a new band Tonbruket, a debut album by the band and a tour of the UK this month. Andy Robson talks to Dan about the traumatic period he has just been through and, as a leader for the first time, how he faces the new challenges the project throws up. Only journalists and EST devotees would have cause to do it: but if you skim the countless interviews with the much missed trio, the refrain of bassman Berglund – when given the chance to say anything that is – is always ‘Oh, I never grew up’.
Somehow, while Esbjörn Svensson was exhorted as the musical polymath, the interpreter of Bach and Bartók, and drummer Magnus Öström was praised for his wide musical sensibility, Berglund, partly through his own self dismissal as the big kid of the band and partly because he seemed at home with his role as the unreconstructed rocker – ye Gods, a Black Sabbath fan at the heart of the biggest piano trio in the world! – somehow Berglund escaped as the lightweight of the trio.
Yet Berglund was the emotional beat of EST, the big kid with all those effects pedals to play with, who frolicked at the heart of this extraordinary group which had the lightest touch, yet played the saddest tunes, which had the most lyrical feel yet also plumbed the darker depths.
Grieving, the psychologists and psychotherapists will tell you, can take a year to kick in, let alone for its healing work to begin. Yet barely 18 months after Svensson’s death, Berglund is relishing the release of his debut album as leader and composer, the eponymously entitled Dan Berglund’s Tonbruket.
This is an extract from Jazzwise Issue #138 – to read the full article click here to subscribe and receive a FREE copy of the latest Portico Quartet CD 'Isla'.
Chet Baker died in 1988 but his legend has stubbornly refused to diminish and today he is one of the most consistently reissued jazz artists with interest in his early glory years as high as that in the ravaged, damaged artist who would continue to record until the end of his life. In a rare, hitherto unpublished, interview Roy Carr talked to Chet in the mid-1980s not long before his death and in a frank conversation teases out areas of Chet’s life the trumpeter rarely talked about.
By the mid-1980s, Chet Baker was running Chuck Berry a close second in the way he was dissipating his talent in favour of a hard nose take-the-money-and-run career move. Though I had encountered Chet as early as 1955, when he first toured Europe, thankfully, any ongoing association rarely got beyond exchanging brief pleasantries. It was no secret that Chet was a loner and that the daily pursuit of local drug dealers governed his existence. In no way was I remotely interested in exploring that side of his lifestyle.
However, while drugs had almost physically destroyed him to the point where his skull appeared to have stretched his skin to a fine membrane, I did not feel that artistically Chet Baker was a spent force.
The Old Guard may have growled, but in doing so Miles had greatly expanded his audience worldwide. Realising the upside of such a new direction, we both suggested songs. Chet felt that Sade’s ‘Smooth Operator’ was an obvious choice. “That song ideally suits my vocal range – I won’t have to stretch that much.”
This is an extract from Jazzwise Issue #138 – to read the full article click here to subscribe and receive a FREE copy of the latest Portico Quartet CD 'Isla'.
He is one of the greatest contemporary jazz guitar players, who can fill large concert halls in almost any large city around the world. But Pat Metheny this month embarks on an ambitious project which, rather than resting on his laurels, breaks new ground for him and his fans.Working with a group of inventors Metheny has harnessed the power of a mechanical device called an Orchestrion which allows him to trigger a range of instruments, almost like a small orchestra, which he has written for and controls in his own solo show. Ahead of his debut UK show with the new concept and as his new album Orchestrion is released Stephen Graham talks to Pat about the inspirations behind the project in this step into the unknown
The last time Pat Metheny produced a solo album back in 2003 it was a relatively straightforward affair. Titled One Quiet Night it was just the guitarist in the quietness of his home studio playing a mostly soft set on the seldom-heard baritone guitar. But, instead of standing still, Metheny has gone instead for one of the most demanding projects of his career.
“This is the biggest challenge,” he says feistily, “based on faith at the beginning if it was even going to work. I just can’t help it. What am I going to do, play ‘Bright Size Life’ for the rest of my life? Part of the job description is to keep things moving and keep asking questions.
This is an extract from Jazzwise Issue #137 – to read the full article click here to subscribe and receive a FREE copy of the latest Portico Quartet CD 'Isla'.
Polar Bear is one of the most influential UK jazz bands of recent years, inspiring a new generation of young musicians who have come up in their wake. This month they release their latest album Peepers on a new label, with a subtle more guitar-flavoured shift in direction. Selwyn Harris catches up with Polar Bear’s leader Sebastian Rochford
Sometimes Seb Rochford must wake up staring at his drums. Set up next to a laptop in front of his bed at one end of a spacious ground floor studio flat where he lives in north east London is his practice kit. It’s a black, electronic, rather than acoustic, one. He tells me how he never uses a non-acoustic drum set live but is thinking about taking this one out when he next plays with the human beatboxer extraordinaire Shlomo (with whom Rochford’s Polar Bear has recently collaborated) so he can better match his beats up sonic-wise to Shlomo’s.
Rochford’s world isn’t like that of your typical jazz musician. It involves an intense engagement with and unconscious absorption of the subcultural mélange of music going on around him. This is what he puts into Polar Bear. Hence what comes out is that rare thing: contemporary jazz that isn’t insulated from its surroundings, but one that has its finger firmly on the pulse.
This is an extract from Jazzwise Issue #137 – to read the full article click here to subscribe and receive a FREE copy of the latest Portico Quartet CD 'Isla'.
Norwegian trumpeter Nils Petter Molvaer one of the first European jazz musicians to successfully harness jazz with dance music in the 1990s and in the process managed to take jazz to an audience it had never reached: the club generation. This month he embarks on a major UK tour for the first time as he supports the release of new album Hamada. Stuart Nicholson catches up with him in Berlin ahead of his UK visit.
Trumpeter Nils Petter Molvaer has redeye. He’s about to play the Fritzclub in what was the former east Berlin and then he’s on an early morning flight to Budapest, the last leg of a 22-date European tour that’s taken in 10 countries. It has been an exhausting schedule. “We’ve covered a lot of ground. Much as I like playing it’s too long,” he says gazing into the middle distance, and then turning with a smile adding, “It’s so long I can’t remember how I travelled from home to the airport. Did I take the car? Did I travel by train? I don’t remember!”
Tired he may be, but Molvaer is a true road warrior. One of a handful of European jazz musicians able to tour through Europe twice and three times a year with an entourage that includes band members, a road manager and his own sound and lighting engineers, he readily acknowledges that “It’s a privilege.” Ever since his 1997 album Khmer (ECM) became a bestseller notching-up six-figure sales, he has steadily built an audience for his music by taking it to the people. It’s a strategy that has served him well in today’s music scene.
This is an extract from Jazzwise Issue #137 – to read the full article click here to subscribe and receive a FREE copy of the latest Portico Quartet CD 'Isla'.
