ECM cover art

The first ECM records were recorded in 1969 and released in 1970. ECM had focused on a predominantly European version of jazz, often incorporating folk elements, and attracted players including Jan Garbarek, Keith Jarrett and Terje Rypdal who have made their lifelong home with the label. Recording as well as musical quality was of the highest standard, reflected also in a cover design ethos which featured beautiful photography and creative typography.

The main ECM designer of the for the first 25 years was Barbara Wojirsch whose playful layouts and combination of fonts and handwritten titles were highly distinctive. Dieter Rehm joined her in the 1980s with a similarly varied approach.

People who regularly return to the same location tend to become sensitive to slight changes in the view, and quickly incorporate them into the philosophy into the familiar picture, so that everything remains intact.  Similarly, those to whom ECM music has become a cultural staple accept variations in the familiar ECM ‘image’with the same nonchalance as changes in the music itself, whose sound values remain unmistakable, however wide-ranging the styles.

This ingrained habit, like a paraphrase of conventional pattems of consumption, has not led to indifference among the many who have grown up with ECM over the years. On the contrary, it has produced a kind of connoisseurship in which visual recognition exists on a par with its counterpart. ECM’s music has taught many people how to listen – and some how to look! When they play the recordings, the modest rectangle in their hands enjoys an attention and affection for a time span few other visual objects can hope to enjoy. That is why rec0rd covers in general, and ECM’s in particular, are worth talking about [... ]

[To begin with, there were]  the many iconic covers that Barbara Wojirsch created with Manfred Eicher and Dieter Rehm during the long years of their association. Her retirement from ECM in 1999 did not mark a sharp break in c0ntinuity. The vocabulary of ECM’s imagery had been invented, and it was rich enough to be adopted by new artists with new points of emphasis, now focused through Eicher’s work with graphic artist Sascha Kleis. Wojirsch’s artistic development took her from expressive typography and photography in the spirit of the 1970s and 1980s to highly personal paintings and pictures. Her manner of preparing the ground – her scrapes, scratches and scribbles – has found a surprising parallel in the paintings of Mayo Bucher, who entered Eicher’s field of vision in the mid-1990s and whose work has appeared on a number of covers based on his paintings since 1997. Also characteristic of new directions for the label is the collaboration with Jan Jedlicka, whose paintings, sketches and photos have been displayed on many sleeves.

The most obvious change over the last ten years has, however, been ECM’s attitude towards photography and its use in cover pictures. Until well into the 1990s, the photographic motifs on ECM’s covers were often narrative and representational, at times even going so far as to illustrate the title of the album, albeit obliquely. Today the photographs resist easy interpretation and classification. Instead, they are photographic objets d’art that reveal their meanings only upon closer inspection, luring the viewer into an enigmatic labyrinth of interpretations. Other photographs recall stills from motion pictures – ‘unfinished’ images that relate to what has just preceded them or is about to follow, and to the continuum of cinema, the medium perhaps closest to music itself. [Manfred] Eicher used this pictorial approach in his choice of covers from a very early date, but only intermittently. His affinity to photography and the cinema has led him to cultivate a closely related field where an extended family of artists, photographers and graphic designers now join forces with the ECM producer to contribute to the label’s imagery, creating a visual pendant to the music in its collection of covers.

Many things have changed. Today ECM’s photographs are mainly black-and-white, with colour used sparingly or as a jarring accent, while uniformly austere typography also contributes to a visual identity. Even so, ECM’s covers are ‘beautifuI’, yet complex enough to disclose their full meaning only to those who seek to listen visually: ‘Think of your ears as eyes’.
- Lars Muller, from Horizons Touched: The Music of ECM

Barbara Wojirsch  and Dieter Rehm (design)

A larger collection of  Barbara Wojirsch and Dieter Rehm covers can be viewed here.

Jim Bengston (photography)

Roberto Masotti (photography)

Caroline Forbes (photography)

The shapes in the photograph still please me and I am always reminded that if you stay out on the hillside long enough something will change and not always for the worse.
- Caroline Forbes

Christoph Egger (photography)

Jan Jedlicka (artwork/photography)

Gerald Minkoff  (photography)

Confucius said that an image is worth more than 10,000 words. I am allowed only 250. Perhaps I should be relieved. This photograph, taken in January 1990 in Moscow, seems to me in perfect tune with the title of Heiner Goebbels’s disc Surrogate Cities, whose musical armature is interwoven with the words of Heiner Miiller, Hugo Hamilton and Paul Auster. The picture is of a Soviet swimming pool, a heated one, a stone’s throw from the Kremlin, a pool that no longer exists. On the site, before the Revolution, there stood a basilica, which Stalin demolished with the intention of  substituting a colossal hollow statue of Lenin (on the scale of NewYork’s Statue of Liberty), whose outstretched hand was going to contain a library. But the ground was unsuitable, and the foundations were filled with water and turned  into a swimming pool. One evening when I was walking there, a swimmer emerged from the dark depths (he can be seen in the lower left of the shot) and seeing my camera asked: ‘Are you from the New York Herald Tribune?’  I answered ‘N0′ and he vanished. When communism collapsed the swimming pool vanished too, because the Orthodox clergy wanted to reconstruct the basilica on the site.You can still get sprinkled with water there, but now it’s holy water. As Paul Auster says in In the Country of Last Things: ‘When you live in the city, you learn to take nothing for granted.’ That is why I always know that I am seeing everything – and hearing it – for the first time; but also for the last time.
- Gerald Minkoff

Muriel Olesen (photography)

The light touch of foot-soles as a woman dances at the centre of the ritual maze, a fragile flower with petals of chalk, a propitiatory choreography traced each morning on the ground.  As if in echo, the faint coughing of a white tiger from the zoo nearby. Rustlings, variations, in persistent notes that extend through the air and disappear into the night. Silences and erasures. A few magical movements will make both the pattern and the music reappear on the doorstep at dawn to greet the ephemeral beauty of the new day. Black the dress, black as as a monsoon cloud suspended over those white furrows, alreadyworked, henceforth fertile: Monodia . . .
- Muriel Olesen

Links

• Barbara Wojirsch and Dieter Rehm bring a mysterious beauty to the record label graphics of ECM by Adrian Shaughnessy (Eye Magazine)

40 years of ECM: Just Music

Forty years ago today the Mal Waldron Trio started to play in Tonstudio Bauer, Ludwigsburg.  They were recording the first album, Free At Last!, issued early the following year on the new music label founded by Manfred Eicher.   Since then, ECM has issued over a thousand albums spanning – and blurring the boundaries between – many idioms. Personally, I can’t imagine the last thirty-odd years of my own musical journey without ECM.

I remember the first ECM vinyl LP that I bought, in the days of independent record shop browsing, in the sadly-missed Decoy Records on Deansgate in Manchester. It was Folk Songs by the trio of  Jan Garbarek, Charlie Haden and Egberto Gismonti. I’d been going to the shop for a while, mainly to explore the blues, r&b and what’s now called Americana upstairs. But gradually I began to spend more time downstairs flicking through the jazz albums and educating myself in a genre that had opened up for me with Miles Davis’ Bitches Brew. The ECM albums, with their distinctive covers, drew me again and again; sometimes I bought one just because the cover art suggested that what was inside would be more of a certain sound I was searching for – like a landscape stretching to a far horizon. So titles like Paths Prints, Photo with Blue Sky and Places (that road snaking to the horizon!) were added to the collection.

Is there any other label like ECM (Edition of Contemporary Music)? Is there any other producer alive as significant as  Manfred Eicher?

Reading Horizons Touched: The Music of ECM, it seems that, as much as the label’s remarkable musicians have contributed to its success, the part played by Manfred Eicher is hugely important. Not only in defining the purity and clarity of the ECM sound, but also in bringing together musicians from differing geographical backgrounds and musical traditions – ‘ far-flung sound worlds’ – to create a truly new European contemporary music.

In Horizons Touched there is a perfect example of how such collaborations may come about, as told by Eicher himself:

‘I first heard the Officium defunctorum by Morales at Seville cathedral in the 1970s.  When I listened to it again twenty years later, while driving through the jagged lava fields of Iceland, I was enormously moved…The sky like ash or lead.  The luminous sound – night before one’s eyes.

While working…in Iceland, I listened alternately to the Hilliard Ensemble’s recording of Gesualdo’s Tenebrae Responses and the chants of saxophonist Jan Garbarek. Suddenly Morales seemed like a southern continent with northern birds of passage skimming in broad circles overhead – on the shores of the basalt sea...What remained was the idea.

And that is how the recording of Jan Garbarek and the Hilliard Ensemble in the Provostry of  St Gerold came about – Officium, a recording that presents new and far-flung sound worlds.’

ECM is renowned for its meticulous approach, not just to the recording process, but also for the distinctive quality and design of the album packaging. Eicher again:

‘I believe the producer’s role is to capture the music he likes, to present it to those who don’t know it yet. It’s a very important and difficult task, which must be dealt with reponsibility and integrity. If you work in that direction, caring for the sound, getting some precise information or inspired sleeve notes in a booklet, working on the pictures for the record cover, then a kind of symbiotic unity is at work, and people feel you have been producing the record for good reasons. So you can touch them, beyond cultural borders, they understand and appreciate what you have to offer them. It’s all about taking risks, but still being generous and rigorous.’

Hundreds of records made under his artistic direction include those of Keith Jarrett, Jan Garbarek, Chick Corea, Gary Burton, Dave Holland, Egberto Gismonti, Anouar Brahem, Pat Metheny, Paul Motian, Charles Lloyd, John Surman, Ralph Towner, Terje Rypdal, Bobo Stenson and Tord Gustavsen. Whilst for ECM New Series he has produced recordings by composers Arvo Pärt, Alfred Schnittke, Giya Kancheli, Heinz Holliger, Meredith Monk, Gavin Bryars, Steve Reich and John Adams.

Eicher’s own background, as a musician active in both jazz and classical music, gave him an unusually broad vantage point from which to survey the genres, and the producer has been credited with helping to bring form to improvised music and a sense of ‘improvisational’ flexibility to recordings of contemporary composition.

The label has documented jazz and improvised music from both sides of the Atlantic and brought together many musicians in new and influential combinations, amongst them the ‘Belonging’ band with Keith Jarrett, Jan Garbarek, Palle Danielsson and Jon Christensen, and the ‘Magico’ trio of Charlie Haden, Jan Garbarek and Egberto Gismonti.

Scandinavian jazz was emphasized in the early years and Eicher is still finding musicians from the Nordic zone. The last decade has seen the arrival of Trygve Seim, Christian Wallumrød, Matthias Eick, Tord Gustavsen, Arve Henriksen, and others. Southern Europe has also been explored: Italian trumpeter Enrico Rava brought with him pianist Stefano Bollani, now also recognized as a major player. From Greece, Savina Yannatou has explored folk musics of the Mediterranean and the wider world, and ECM has produced the work of Greek composer Eleni Karaindrou, including the soundtracks for films by Theo Angelopolous.

The ECM tradition of cross-genre collaboration has opened my ears to many new musics. Apart from Officium, there have been albums by Tunisian oud player Anouar Brahem, the jazz/poetry/folk collaboration of  Starflowers which brought together Finnish folk singer Sinikka Langeland with the jazz musicians Arve Henriksen, Trygve Seim  and Anders Jormin. And in 2009 there was the stunning Siwan, initiated by Norwegian pianist and composer Jon Balke, inspired by the music and poetry of medieval Al-Andalus, and featuring Moroccan singer Amina Alaoui, American trumpeter Jon Hassell, and baroque strings.

And finally, my favourite record of all time is also ECM’s biggest selling record: Keith Jarrett’s Koln Concert.  This is the one I would want on a desert island. It is entirely wonderful, but what happens at 7 minutes 20 in is the most transcendental moment in recorded music (IMO).

Mr and Mrs Clark and Percy

I popped into the Walker this afternoon to take a look at this Hockney painting – on loan from the Tate for a short time while the Walker lends Peter Getting out of Nick’s Pool to the new Nottingham Contemporary Art Gallery for their inaugural Early Hockney exhibition.  It’s always been a favourite in our house – one of those old Athena block-mounted reproductions has hung on our upstairs landing for over 25 years.

The Walker provides this note on the painting:

This painting was short-listed for the title of ‘Greatest Painting in Britain’ in a 2005 poll launched by the BBC’s Today programme.

Hockney began this portrait of fashion designer Ossie Clark and fabric designer Celia Birtwell shortly after their wedding, at which Hockney was best man. The couple are shown in their London flat. Hockney made drawings and took photographs there, but they also modelled in his studio owing to the painting’s size. The cat on Clark’s lap is actually thought to be ‘Blanche’, but Hockney felt ‘Percy’, the name of the couple’s other cat, sounded better.

Hockney struggled with the painting for nearly a year, re-working Clark’s head as many as 12 times. He aimed to capture the couple’s complex and unconventional relationship, along with its tensions. Traditional conventions of wedding portraiture are reversed,with the man seated while the woman stands. The couple’s marriage didn’t last. Hockney once commented that,“Mr and Mrs Clark and Percy probably caused it”.

This is one of a series of large double portraits that Hockney began in the late 1960s. Although some areas appear flattened or simplified, Hockney felt it was one of his paintings that came closest to Naturalism.

It’s a remarkable portrait – and an excellent account by Jan Marshall on her blog provides some telling and tragic background:

There is something about this painting which grabs me – a mixture of the composition, the subject matter, the tension in it – and not least, because of the tragic ending to the story behind the painting. This is a painting I would happily hang on my own wall – it has stood the test of time [...]

Of course it is a portait of Celia Birtwell and Ossie Clark – the husband and wife team, fashion designers, who met at art school in Lancashire and later married in 1969, when Celia was pregnant with their first son (Albert). Another son followed 3 years later (George). The painting was a wedding gift from David Hockney (how lucky were they?) The picture hints at their hedonisitc lifestyle and there appears to be a covert tension between them, shown particularly in the face of Ossie. You won’t be surprised to know their marriage was brief and Celia eventually dumped Ossie; she was sick of his drug taking and homosexual affair with the artist Adran George. She finally divorced him in 1974.

Ossie’s life seemed to spiral downwards from then on. He fell in love with Nick Balabon, who eventually left him and then died of Aids. Ossie continued taking drugs and fell into bankruptcy in the 1980’s. After losing everything, he lodged briefly with friends until the DHSS re-housed him in a tiny flat. In 1995 he invited a 27 year old Italian, Diego Cogolata, to live with him as his lover. This relationship was doomed and Ossie was eventually murdered by Diego in (who stabbed him 37 times and then bashed his head in – in 1996). Diego admitted his crime and was sentenced to a mere 6 years in prison – because it was considered he had “diminished responsibility.” Celia’s story appears to have a happier ending; in 2005 she started designing for Topshop and her designs are successful [...]

It is hard to look at this brooding portrait in the same way – once you realise the future of Ossie. But I still love that moment captured in time – where the door is still open to the future – and Ossie has the option to make whatever choice he wants to make. And the wrong cat – that appeals to me too – even the great can make a mistake, albeit a minor one.

Antony Gormley: Making Space

Watched a repeat last night of the Channel 4 documentary, Antony Gormley: Making Space, having first seen it a couple of years ago.  Beeban Kidron’s film was well worth a second view, following Gormley over a nine month period as he made work for his Blind Light exhibition at the Hayward Gallery.

We saw Gormley attempting to create a cloud in a box, into which visitors would be invited to disappear, and creating the casts from his own body for the figures to be placed on rooftops around the gallery – Event Horizon.

Departing from the use of traditional materials for sculpture, such as marble or bronze, he uses a plaster cast of his own body to produce a body-cast covered in lead or cast in iron.  The aim of Gormley’s work is to unite the internal world of the mind and sensations with the external world of feeling. His figures engage in a stillness and slowness and it is through their physical presence that Gormley tries ‘to make concrete that life that goes on within the head’

‘I want to deal with existence and I want to use my own existence.’

Gormley argues, that by turning to the body he hopes to find a source, ‘that will transcend the limitations of race, creed and language, but which will still be about the rootedness of life’.  The human body, and its relationship to the space around it, has been the central motif of the works which have propelled Gormley to be acclaimed by many as Britain’s greatest living sculptor.

Gormley likes to play with scale, a word he prefers to size. Confronted by his work Field, in which a huge room was packed with more than 40,000 tiny terracotta figures, we are all Gullivers; gazing up at the 66ft-high Angel, we are all Lilliputians. Gormley works on epic canvasses, such as the Western Australian desert, where his isolated metal figures appear out of the blistering heat, yet it all begins with his own 6ft 4in body smeared in baby oil, wrapped in cling-film, covered in dental plaster and forming the required position until it sets hard, breathing through straws stuffed up his nostrils or a tiny mouth-hole.
- David Smith, The Observer

The best bit of the film comes when Gormley hears that Sefton Council have decided that the 100 iron men of Another Place must be removed from the beach at Crosby following pressure from the ‘cod lobby’. As the campaign grows to save the work for Merseyside, which had grown to love the installation, Gormley reflects on the meaning of his large-scale works:

[Another Place] is one of my most significant works…it was an experiment, it’s now proved that it works…We have to have, in the shared bits of the world, things…that are not just about convenience, not jus about the cause and effect of daily life….Culture is not real culture unless it is shared. Every human being has the potential of being touched by poetry, every human being has the potential to be not only an observer of the picture, but to be in the picture…that’s why it matters. I’m trying to put art back where it belongs in a world it should never have left.

The argument for retaining Another Place is, of course, eventually won.  Gormley has said of the work: ‘The place made the piece. [It represents] the place we imagine when we want to escape. Each body form had to have its own ‘arena’ – be alone and be together’.

In the film Gormley reveals that it was ancient Egypt which gave him the desire to sculpt during childhood Saturday afternoons spent in the British Museum: ‘ Egypt is the benchmark of sculpture. They set, in a way, a measure of determination in the language of sculpture that I think has never been bettered … there’s no question I’m trying to make the contemporary equivalent.’

He was the youngest of seven children, raised by a German mother and Irish father, a millionaire who ran the first pharmaceutical company to sign a contract with Alexander Fleming for the commercial production of penicillin. His parents were such devout Catholics that the family prayed in the dark. His father also meted out beatings, but Gormley insists it was a happy childhood. On the beach at Crosby he reflects on the importance of his Catholic upbringing, noting that the human body is conspicuous. ‘I think Christian iconography is quite obsessed, in a masochistic way, with the suffering body. I would like to think I’ve escaped from that and my bodies are a celebration of the fact we are spirits in a material world or consciousness in matter.’

His father was also an art lover and often took his children to galleries after mass. Gormley was sent to Ampleforth, the Benedictine boarding school in Yorkshire, where he won all the art prizes and proceeded to Trinity College, Cambridge, where he read archeology, anthropology and history of art. After graduating in the Sixties he spent time travelling in India where he became fascinated with the way people slept on streets or railway platforms, often under cotton blankets with a pair of sandals or transistor radios against their heads. ‘It was very beautiful to see this public declaration of the sanctity and fragility of life,’ he said. They directly inspired his first sculptures, in which his friends lay under sheets dipped in plaster.

Gormley achieved public prominence with Field, which won him the Turner Prize in 1994. Four years later, when the Angel of the North was commissioned by the city of the Gateshead, sceptics questioned why the money was not being spent on hospitals, but since it was unveiled an estimated 90,000 people a day have seen Angel of the North, making it Britain’s most famous piece of public art. Standing on the site of an old colliery in Gateshead, the towering steel sculpture pays tribute to the industrial heritage of the North East.

Antony Gormley: Angel of the North

 

Romare Bearden Revealed

Earlier this year, I wrote about Andy Sheppard’s album Movements in Colour, highlighting the fact that several tracks are inspired by a painting.  Now I’ve found another excellent jazz CD that is also a response to paintings. Romare Bearden Revealed (2003) from Branford Marsalis celebrates the life and works of the artist Romare Bearden (1911-1988), who took constant inspiration and several titles for his paintings from jazz masterpieces.  Performing some of the songs Bearden appropriated as titles for paintings, Marsalis also includes original compositions inspired by the bluesy quality inherent in Bearden’s art.  Bearden’s central medium was collage which fused paint, clippings, paper and other materials into powerful visual works. Born in North Carolina, Bearden moved to Harlem in 1914 where his love for jazz combined with the fertile atmosphere of artists and musicians of the era flourished.

The music successfully captures the essence of Bearden’s art by bringing certain pieces to sound. Bearden’s cultural  background comes to life on selections such as the 1938 Cotton Club Revue number, ‘I’m Slappin’ Seventh Avenue’,  and ‘Seabreeze’,  both written by Duke Ellington. A country porch  feel comes across in ‘B’s Paris Blues’ and ‘Autumn Lamp’, the latter, for me, the best track on the album, with superb guitar from Doug Wamble. Matt Collar at Allmusic.com thought so too:

Perhaps most compelling, though, is guitarist Doug Wamble’s solo turn on ‘Autumn Lamp’.  Inspired by Beardens’ 1981 rural vision of a blues guitarist playing by himself under the glow of candle lamp, Wamble utilizes a resonator guitar with a slide, calling to mind Mississippi Fred McDowell’s version of  ‘Keep Your Lamp Trimmed and Burning’ (perhaps Bearden’s inspiration as well?).

The musicians for the recording include Branford’s main quartet as well as guest musicians Doug Wamble, Harry Connick Jr, and other members of the Marsalis family.

Here is a gallery of the paintings that inspired the tracks on the album.  I’ve linked them to the sleeve notes from the CD by Robert O’Meally:

This recording can be considered part of a jam session in which Romare Bearden’s paintings play a vibrant part: the musicians playing the paintings of a visual artist who had a mighty brush with the blues.  By definition, jazz is an art of collaboration, and on this particular disc, the collaboration extends beyond the world of music into the realm of visual art and music. Only those unfamiliar with the work of Romare Bearden would consider such a jazz connection a stretch. Bearden grew up in the Harlem of the 1920s and 30’s when that glittering neighbourhood was the epicenter of the jazz universe. As early as the 1940s, jazz musicians appeared in his work, and by the 1950s he was seeking visual translations for what he heard in the structures of jazz – its improvised lines, rhythms, and textures.

The way Bearden worked was jazz. ‘You have to begin somewhere,’ he said, ’so you put something down. Then you put something else with it…Once you get going, all sorts of things begin to open up.”  The way the pianist Earl Hines spaced his notes suggested to Bearden ways of spacing lines and colours in art. ‘Silences’ between visual elements became vital to Bearden’s art. On silences in the music, Bearden’s friend the drummer Max Roach has said, ‘It’s not that there’s necessarily nothing going on. There’s always a pulse there. There are times when there’s nothing but the pulse. . .. Bearden’s paintings are like that.’

For this project, Branford Marsalis pored over reproductions of Bearden’s paintings and studied his life. As a recent transplant to North Carolina, he was intrigued by Bearden’s North Carolina roots. He discovered Bearden’s involvement with jazz culture, and that for a time the painter tried his hand as a songwriter!   What developed is an album where current jazz masters reflect on the work of a very great visual artist. The result challenges hearers to see the music, viewers to hear the paintings.

Duke Ellington wrote I’m Slappin’ Seventh Avenue for his 1938 Cotton Club Revue as a feature for tap dancer Peg Leg Bates. Branford translates the full-band work for quintet, augmented by overdubbed tenor. It is fascinating to hear Jeff ‘Tain’ Watts’s drum lines in light of this piece’s origins. For his part, Bearden did a 1981 collage with this title. Though Ellington’s piece was fashioned for the all-white club, the Bearden work’s caption (written by Albert Murray) indicates the black connection: “In those days the Easter Parade uptown was along 7th Avenue from 140th to 125th Street.”  Works by both Bearden and Marsalis bespeak high-fashion, Harlem-style.

Jelly Roll Morton’s  Jungle Blues is related to his legendary ‘Animule Ball’, ‘Hyena Stomp’ and other works where the whooping and thumping of the zoo is open to musical imitation along with vocal effects from human ‘animules’, including a heap of signifying. Indeed, at one point we seem to get a conversation between the lion-trombone (Delfeayo Marsalis) and the brilliantly eloquent trickster (Wynton’s trumpet). The approach could be called Beardenish: playful, earthy, bluesy. Sections and solos are like the patches in a collage, each speaking its piece and then stepping back to complement the whole. Look at Watching the Good Trains Go By (above).

Since the 1950s, when Seabreeze was done by Dizzy Gillespie, Yusef Lateef, and others, this is the first recording of Bearden’s most celebrated song. Branford: ‘I decided to go back to the original Bolero. I took it down an octave, which let me get further down into it. And no double-timing’.  Bearden’s lyrics speak romance: “Seabreeze, blowing to the shore/Cool, like the perfumed kiss of a starlight-night/ Awakening love that still burns so bright:/Seabreeze.”
See Bearden’s Reclining Nude.

J Mood was first recorded on a 1986 Wynton Marsalis album for which Bearden drew the cover image of trumpeter, female shapes and water-waves. ‘I would say I knew [Bearden] well,” said Wynton at the recording date. “I would run into him and he would rap to me. He said he’d work on my cover if I would come to his studio. So I did, about twenty times at least. He was a brilliant man, and soulful, soulful.”

B’s Paris Blues is Branford’s new composition for the date. “I was thinking about Bearden’s Paris years, and about Sidney Bechet, who made great records in Paris with guitar players.” Doug Wamble is the guitarist here, playing rich rhythm beneath Branford’s intense melodies, and then picking in a style that echoes Django Reinhardt as much as the country blues. Check Bearden’s Paris Blues and recall that Bechet was important to Armstrong and Ellington, and that Africa had a strong influence on modern painting and music.

Wamble’s Autumn Lamp was inspired by a collage from Bearden’s series recalling North Carolina. Autumn Lamp (Guitar Player) ‘did not come easily’, writes Myron Schwartzman. ‘Watching it change over a period of several weeks reminded me of the awe I felt listening to Bud Powell, Max Roach and Curly Russell perfect Bud’s composition Un Poco Loco….Bearden himself likened the struggle to jazz: ‘You do something, and then you improvise’. ‘Look at Bearden’s work close-up, from the edge across the surface’, advises the painter Diedra Harris-Kelley (Bearden’s niece): investigate textures and colors. Wamble seems to report from just such a close investigation.

True to Bearden’s interest in art and ritual celebration, Steppin’ on the Blues has a jaunty, affirmative air. “The trick is that it’s dance music,” said Branford who studied the 1924 Tommy Ladnier version of Steppin‘.’ Then I felt I’d earned the right to offer more than a carbon copy – which nobody wants.” Saturday night music rings throughout Bearden’swork: See Of the Blues: At the Savoy.

‘Laughin’ & Talkin’ (with Higg) is Tain’s c0mp0siti0n’ said Branford. ‘I kept hearing it in my head while I looked at Bearden’s pictures. Without the piano, it has an open, adventurous sound. That’s Romare: adventurous. His work reflects a world of tradition and also the will to break. And in his work you just see all those drummers, drummers everywhere.” See Bearden’s Drum Chorus – with testifying horns and with the drummer’s sticks that could be a conductor’s batons, writer’s tools, or a swinging artist’s brushes.

Carolina Shout is a natural for this collection, not only because of Bearden and Branford’s shared Carolina stomping grounds, but because Bearden used the title for one of his most significant collages. The musical composition Carolina Shout was written by the master stride pianist, James P. Johnson, in imitation of the southern black religious ring-shout; it became the test piece for stride pianists of that era. Just as the word shout carries the double message of spiritual epiphany and good-time party noise, the collage’s imagery connects down-home church and uptown rent-party: body and soul.

Romare Bearden Revealed suggests one of the good trains that inspired so much jazz music, with wheels clickity-clacking, whistles blowing the blues, and people on board calling and responding – or, as Bearden liked to put it, calling and recalling.

Links

• Romare Bearden: Wikipedia
• Romare Bearden Foundation
• Romare Bearden: The Music in His Art, A Pictorial Odyssey:video

Big Wheel

I’m just sitting here watching the wheels go round and round
I really love to watch them roll
No longer riding on the merry-go-round
I just had to let it go…

I took this photo of the new 80 metre-tall Liverpool One Wheel on my phone tonight on our way into Zizzi’s. It’s apparently the first in Europe to be sited on top of another building: it sits in Chavasse Park perched on the shopping complex. The wheel weighs 365 tonnes and will be there until the end of January, with rides offering incredible views costing £6.

A Serious Man

‘Receive with simplicity all the things that happen to you.’
- Rashi, 12th-century Jewish scholar

‘I read the book of Job last night. I don’t think God comes out well in it.’
- Virginia Woolf

We’ve been to see the new Coen Brothers film, A Serious Man.  They’re back on top form with this one – very funny, acutely observed and some great filmic moments such as the transition from the 19th century shtetl prologue literally down the ear canal of  the protaganist’s teenage son Danny to the accompaniment of Jefferson Airplane’s ‘Somebody To Love’.

The film recounts the unravelling fortunes of Larry, a professor of theoretical physics, living with his wife, Judith, his teenage son and daughter, and his decidedly eccentric brother in a new housing development in the late sixties. As Roger Ebert has written:

We learn from the Book of Job: Man that is born of a woman is of few days, and full of trouble. Such a man is Larry Gopnik. He lectures on physics in front of a blackboard filled with bewildering equations that are mathematical proofs approaching certainty, and in his own life, what can be sure of? Nothing, that’s what. His wife is leaving him for his best friend. His son is listening to rock ‘n’ roll in Hebrew school. His daughter is stealing money for a nose job. His brother-in-law is sleeping on the sofa and lurking in unsavory bars. His gun-nut neighbor frightens him. A student tries to bribe him and blackmail him at the same time. The tenure committee is getting unsigned libelous letters about him. The wife of his other neighbor is sex-crazy. God forbid this man should see a doctor.

From The Guardian review:

Joel and Ethan Coen have bookended the decade with a superb film at the very beginning, The Man Who Wasn’t There (2001), and another two stormers at the end: their superlative adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men in 2007 – and now this sublimely funny, involving, utterly distinctive serio-comedy of mid-life crisis set in the American midwest in the 1960s, which happens to be where and when the Coen brothers themselves were brought up.

Euphoric, sad and thoughtful all at once, this strange and wonderful film is rounded off with a gloriously well-crafted apocalyptic vision and a chilling intimation of divine retribution for earthly wrongdoing.

And from The Observer:

Joel and Ethan Coen, the first and still the most distinguished of the succession of recent film-making partnerships between American brothers, were born and raised in the Midwest by Jewish academic parents but went to university on the East Coast. They made their joint movie debut in 1984 with a hard-nosed noir thriller set in Texas, and over the next 25 years, always working together (and latterly sharing credit as director), they’ve only made a single film set in their native Minnesota and only one in which the characters are predominantly Jewish…

Now the Coens have brought together their home state and their Jewish upbringing with a characteristically quirky, darkly humorous movie set in an unnamed Minnesota town in 1967, at which time Ethan would have been 10 and Joel 13. The brothers invariably have some literary or cinematic model lurking behind their work: it was Homer’s Odyssey and Preston Sturges’s Sullivan’s Travels in O Brother, Where Art Thou?, for instance. Here it is the Old Testament Book of Job and the wry Jewish fictions of Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud and Philip Roth, which were becoming almost the dominant force in American literature at the time the film is set…

This film is at once laugh-out-loud funny and deeply serious, troubling and satisfying, warm and bleak, both respectful of the Jewish heritage and mocking its restrictions and false comforts. And at the end, Larry and his family are left teetering on the edge of an abyss, looking for shelter as a storm gathers and the future approaches.

A Serious Man: trailer

The Coen Brothers

Combining thoughtful eccentricity, wry humour, arch irony, and often brutal violence, the films of the Coen brothers have become synonymous with a style of filmmaking that pays tribute to classic American movie genres, especially film noir, while sustaining a firmly postmodern feel. Born in St. Louis Park, MN, in 1954, Joel Coen studied at New York University before moving into filmmaking in the early ‘80s. He and his younger brother began writing screenplays while Joel worked as an assistant editor on good friend Sam Raimi’s 1983 film The Evil Dead. In 1984, they made their debut with Blood Simple. Both of them wrote and edited the film, while Joel took the directing credit and Ethan billed himself as the producer. It earned considerable critical acclaim and established the brothers as fresh, original talent. Their next major effort, 1987’s Raising Arizona was a screwball comedy miles removed from the dark, violent content of their previous movie, and it won over critics and audiences alike. Their fan base growing, the Coens went on to make Miller’s Crossing (1990), a stark gangster epic with a strong performance from John Turturro, whom the brothers also used to great effect in their next film, Barton Fink (1991). Fink earned Joel a Best Director award and a Golden Palm at the 1991 Cannes Film Festival, as well as the festival’s Best Actor award for Turturro.

Their 1994 follow-up to Barton Fink, The Hudsucker Proxy, was a relative critical and commercial disappointment. Whatever failings The Hudsucker Proxy exhibited, however, were more than atoned for by the unquestionable success of the Coens’ next film, Fargo (1996). A black, violent crime comedy with a surprisingly warm heart. The brothers shared a Best Original Screenplay Oscar for their work.  The Coens went on to make The Big Lebowski in 1998. A blend of bungled crime and warped comedy, Lebowski was a laid-back, irreverent revision of the hardboiled L.A. detective genre. In 2000 the Coens moved into the depression era with O Brother, Where art Thou?, an admittedly loose adaptation of Homer’s Odyssey, starring George Clooney, John Turturro, and Tim Blake Nelson as escaped convicts on a surreal journey through 1930s Mississippi. The following year found Joel the recipient of his third Best Director award at Cannes for the darkly comic, monochromatic post-noir The Man Who Wasn’t There, starring Billy Bob Thornton as a humble, small-town barber who gets mixed up in a tangled web of blackmail and deceit. Two years later, Joel and Ethan re-teamed with Clooney for Intolerable Cruelty, a film that represented their version of a ‘30s screwball comedy. The film was noteworthy in that it was the first movie made by the brothers that did not originate with them; they rewrote a script that was already in existence.  2004 saw the release of the Coens’ first remake, The Ladykillers starring Tom Hanks.After a three year layoff from movies, the brothers returned with an adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men. The taut but philosophically minded thriller opened to nearly universal praise and became one of the two films to dominate year end critics and industry awards. Joel and Ethan won the best Director award from the Director’s Guild of America, and found themselves nominated as directors, writers, and producers at that year’s Oscar telecast.
- from AllMovie.com

Malcolm Lowry: an exhibition

I popped into the Bluecoat this afternoon to see the exhibition marking the centenary of Malcolm Lowry’s birth, Under the Volcano, which is in its last few days. I was glad I did – it’s an enormously interesting exhibition, featuring paintings inspired by Lowry’s work as well as memorabilia from Lowry’s Wirral and Liverpool upbringing collated by Colin Dilnot.

Malcolm Lowry (1909-57) was inspired by the Wirral of his childhood. His Merseyside youth informs his writing, and Liverpool, which he described as ‘that terrible city whose main street is the ocean’, continued to hold tremendous significance for him. Under The Volcano (1947) is considered one of the most poignant, poetic  and significant novels of the last century. Set in Mexico on the Day Of The Dead, the novel’s tragic resonance and insights into the struggle for creative expression have inspired many artists as well as writers. I read it decades ago – as a student – and only have a vague memory of the atmospherics – carnival noise in the streets and dark, alcohol stupefied interiors.  This exhibition has encouraged me to read it again.

The exhibition focusses on Lowry’s Merseyside origins and his international dimension. It reflects his continuing influence on artists across the creative spectrum – painters, filmmakers, choreographers and musicians, as well as writers and historians. I was impressed particularly with three impressive paintings by Edward Burra , a series by Julian Cooper and work by Adrian Henri.

Edward Burra

Extensive notes on this painting at the Tate

Extensive notes on this painting at the Tate

Notes on this painting at the Tate

Bluecoat programme notes:

Edward Burra (1905-1976) occupies a particular place in 20th century British art: represented in major collections yet remaining, like Malcolm Lowry, something of an outsider. He is best known for his satirical, often macabre paintings of 1920s and 1930s urban life, particularly its seedier side. He flirted with Surrealism and his allegorical works share some of its characteristics. Working mainly in watercolour, he imbued his art with ‘a feeling of tawdriness and the meretricious and yet, at the same time, (created) such convincing beauty’ (George Melly).

Despite constant ill health, Burra traveled widely, visiting Lowry in Cuernavaca in 1937, together with Lowry’s early mentor and their mutual friend, the American writer Conrad Aiken. On his return to England Surra painted Mexican Church, its composition based on two postcards of churches he’d visited, the cathedral at Taxco and Santa Catarina, Mexico City. Burra and Lowry did not get on, however both shared an interest in Mexican culture.

Burra was influenced particularly by the Mexican muralists and the prints of Jose Guadalupe Posada (1851-1913), whose depictions of lively skeletons had a profound effect, contributing to his interest in representations of death. Under the Volcano’s Day of the Dead theme is echoed in Burra’s other two paintings shown here. Dancing Skeletons, painted after a visit to Spain, anticipates his Mexican journey and immersion in the iconography of death. In Skeleton Party, completed nearly 20 years later, Surra returns to this earlier theme. Whilst the pyramid shapes on the horizon have been identified as slag heaps in an industrial landscape, they could equally suggest the twin peaks of Lowry’s Mexican volcanoes.
- Bryan Biggs Artistic Director The Bluecoat Liverpool: Under The Volcano; An Exhibition for Malcolm Lowry 1909-1957

I love Edward Burra’s Harlem paintings. There’s a good selection of his paintings, including some of those, here.

Julian Cooper

Bluecoat programme notes:

The three paintings by Julian Cooper are from a series of seven completed in the 1980s entitled Under the Volcano. The novel was instrumental in the artist’s search to develop a kind of abstract painting using figurative methods, one capable of taking on contemporary experience in the way that Lowry’s novel does, with its intricate symbolism and a vivid representational surface. For Cooper the book ‘had everything. It was set in a landscape, it was outer narrative and inner narrative as well, it had lots of references to literature and cabbalistic religion – it had all the complexity of a Renaissance painting. ‘

Douglas Day’s biography of Lowry in particular, linking the writer’s life to his fiction, provided Cooper with a ‘layering of myth and reality. .. I see the novel now as quite prophetic in the way that its leading metaphor applies as much to an “economic growth” as to an alcohol addiction’.

Like Lowry’s writing, the paintings are meticulously detailed and create a real sense of place and time, an evocation of Mexico and the book’s setting. Each takes a particular episode from the book chosen for its self-sufficiency and symbolic power. They avoid being simply illustrative however, the structure and execution of the paintings echoing the complex layering of meaning found in Lowry’s masterpiece. Despite the specific references, the paintings are autonomous, requiring no prior knowledge of the book.
- Bryan Biggs Artistic Director The Bluecoat Liverpool: Under The Volcano; An Exhibition for Malcolm Lowry 1909-1957

Adrian Henri

Bluecoat programme notes:

In his series of paintings and drawings, Adrian Henri (1932-2000) sets the Mexican Day of the Dead in contemporary Liverpool, populating Hope Street with a crowd including artists and writers William Burroughs, Alien Ginsberg, Frida Kahlo, Ed Kienholz and Henri’s Liverpool painter friend, Sam Walsh. In the main painting shown here the white suited, pipe-smoking figure on the far left is Malcolm Lowry.

Henri’s partner Catherine Marcangeli describes his interest in the writer: ‘He went to see the Day of the Dead exhibition at the Museum of Mankind, a visit that had immediate echoes with Lowry. He bought lots of paper-lace patterns, sweets in the shapes of skulls, and all manner of folkloric artifacts … when he painted the Day of the Dead years later those echoes were also mixed with a host of other references, the most important and obvious one being his own earlier painting, Entry of Christ into Liverpool, of which The Day of the Dead, Hope Street is a kind of new version, except that the “friends and heroes” are dead ones here.’

There are other echoes, of a visit Henri made to a graveyard in Lorraine on the Day of the Toussaint (All Saints’ Day in France, when people take flowers to the graves of dead friends or relatives), and of the eerie and sinister masks at the Basle Carnival.
- Bryan Biggs Artistic Director The Bluecoat Liverpool: Under The Volcano; An Exhibition for Malcolm Lowry 1909-1957

Bluecoat programme notes:

For Cisco Jimenez, a native of Cuernavaca where Under the Volcano is set, Lowry’s book and his life continue to provide – 70 years after he stayed there – a barometer for measuring the expectations and failures of this Mexican town. For Jimenez the paradox portrayed in the novel repeats: the clash of the popular against the contemporary, tradition under threat from global changes and impositions, and the failure of utopianism (colonial utopias, the social experiments of the 1960s, the neoliberal policies in the 1990s).

Jimenez’s mixed media sculptures make playful reference to Lowry’s life: his drinking (Two Atoms Connected), golfing prowess (Necklace), and in Peddler the imagery and folkloric aspects of Under the Volcano, whilst AK47 Barroca is indicative of the artist’s concern with the contradictions and violence of the everyday in Mexico.

‘Cuemavaca is no longer what it used to be. What remains are tourism and opportunistic “cliches” of the quiet and colonial past – multiple thematic hotels and restaurants for wealthy foreigners and visitors from Mexico City, and real estate speculation. Nature has been covered over with tons of concrete, and the last old mansions with their majestic gardens are slowly falling down, giving way to massive condominiums (which we call “condemoniums”). You face such disaster every day’.

Echo review of the exhibition:

Malcolm Bradbury described Malcolm Lowry as having a “curious internationalism”.  That is what has perhaps led him to be less well known in his home city than he might have been, and is also what the Bluecoat has attempted to reflect in this new exhibition marking the centenary of his birth.  Those who do know of Lowry will probably have read his magnum opus, Under The Volcano. But few will be aware that the author of what has been described as one of the greatest novels of the 20th century was born the son of a Liverpool cotton broker in New Brighton.

In fact, there are many intriguing aspects to the man who was a writer, golfer, nomadic adventurer and inveterate drinker (alcohol caused his death at 47).  The Bluecoat’s two-month celebration of all things Lowry includes the publication of a new book, From The Mersey To The World, the screening of John Huston’s film Under The Volcano starring Albert Finney, and music written by poet Ian McMillan. At its heart, however, is this exhibition of artwork and film inspired by the writer and covering not simply his life in the Mexican town of Cuernavaca (where the novel is set on the Mexican Day of the Dead), but also his fascination with the Isle of Man, his time in New York and his spartan existence in Canada.

It turns out to be perhaps one of the most satisfying exhibitions held recently at the Bluecoat, mostly because while it features disparate artists, it has a pleasingly unified central theme – they all share a fascination with Lowry. Adrian Henri’s vibrant Day Of The Dead In Liverpool paintings sit alongside works from Julian Cooper’s Under The Volcano series, Cooper’s images redolent of Hockney or Hopper.

There are also a series of intricate Under The Volcano-themed prints by Chilean artist Jorge Martinez Garcia, while the Tate has loaned the gallery watercolours by Lowry contemporary Edward Burra which (despite his apparently disliking Lowry) also feature the skeletons so prevalent in day of the dead iconography.  And, most fascinatingly of all, there are never-before-seen telegrams, borrowed from Liverpool Record Office, charting the highs and lows of the globetrotting writer’s hectic life.

Links

• Five short strolls, or one long hike, through Malcolm Lowry’s Wirral by Michael Carson
• Under the Volcano: a hypertextual companion
• Lowry, Jazz and ‘The Day of the Dead’ by Graham Collier

 

 

Mist rising in Sefton Park

Just a walk through the park as the early morning mist was lifting. This was last Monday – 9 November – but what with all the Berlin stuff, this is the first chance I’ve had to post these photos.

All the long day the vapours played
At blindfold in the city streets,
Their elfin fingers caught and stayed
The sunbeams, as they wound their sheets
Into a filmy barricade
‘Twixt earth and where the sunlight beats.

A vagrant band of mischiefs these,
With wings of grey and cobweb gown;
They live along the edge of seas,
And creeping out on foot of down,
They chase and frolic, frisk and tease
At blind-man’s buff with all the town.

And when at eventide the sun
Breaks with a glory through their grey,
The vapour-fairies, one by one,
Outspread their wings and float away
In clouds of colouring, that run
Wine-like along the rim of day.

Athwart the beauty and the breast
Of purpling airs they twirl and twist,
Then float away to some far rest,
Leaving the skies all colour-kiss’t
A glorious and a golden West
That greets the Lifting of the Mist.

- Pauline Johnson, The Lifting of the Mist

Emily Pauline Johnson (Tekahionwake) (1861 – 1913), commonly known as E. Pauline Johnson or just Pauline Johnson, was a Canadian writer and performer popular in the late 19th century. Johnson was notable for her poems and performances that celebrated her First Nations heritage. Johnson was one of a generation of widely read writers who began to define a Canadian literature.

Tomasz Stanko at RNCM

Travelled over to the RNCM last night (alone, unfortunately – R was still feeling rotten) to see the new Tomasz Stanko Quintet. The band features two Finns – pianist Alexi Tuomarila and drummer Olavi Louhivuori – and two Danes, electric guitarist Jakob Bro and bassist Anders Christensen.

Now, I’ve enjoyed his albums – particularly Litania: The Music of Krzysztof Komeda from 1996, and its follow-up, From the Green Hill. But tonight I have to admit I was not engaged. Perhaps I was distracted by Stanko’s decidedly eccentric appearance – he was wearing what appeared to be high heeled boots with spats, drainpipe trousers and a loud check tweed jacket, all topped off with a black pork-pie hat.

But the rest of the audience seemed well-pleased with the short set (80 minutes, one encore) and applauded enthusiastically. This was the Manchester Evening News review of the concert:

Veteran Polish trumpeter Stanko is in the front rank of European jazz musicians but he has been a rare visitor to the UK. His current tour has therefore been eagerly awaited and this superlative performance fully justified the build-up. There were unmistakable touches of Miles Davis in his bittersweet lyricism and his open-ended ensemble sound had echoes of the American giant’s 1960s quintet. But Stanko demonstrated that he was very much his own man with a distinctive style combining short, stabbing phrases with stratospheric cadenzas.

His compositions, too, were full of unexpected twists and turns though it was the graceful ballad Song For Sarah that provided the most memorable melody. Stanko’s young accompanists are a successful trio in their own right but mesh seamlessly with the trumpeters methodology.

Pianist Marcin Wasilewski’s exquisite touch and unfailing inventiveness were highlighted in a series of dazzling solos. His bond with bassist Slawomir Kurkiewicz and drummer Michal Miskiewicz allowed both to showcase their individual flair without disturbing the rhythmic balance.

Contemporary jazz does not get much better than this.

I was probably having an off night. Certainly the YouTube clips, below, from the Quintet’s new album, Dark Eyes, are  atmospheric  in a  lyrical and melancholy sort of way,with delicate and sensitive contributions from band members.

Update, 17 November.

This was The Guardian review of the Stanko Quintet at the London Jazz Festival two nights ago:

Tomasz Stanko is the quintessential European jazz star in his pork-pie hat, snazzy suit and elevated shoes. With a radio mic on the bell of his trumpet, he’s free to stalk the stage of a captivated, sold-out QEH. He has a sure touch when it comes to recruiting young talent, too. His all-Polish quartet was one of the great success stories of the past decade, and he looks set to repeat that success with an even younger quintet.

Stanko’s music is always packed with good writing, including striking tunes such as Samba Nova and Grand Central, and beautiful pieces such as Dirge for Europe and Rosemary’s Baby (the encore). Yet his band is fearless: happy to blow freely, create spacious soundscapes or just stick to a groove when the moment is right. The whole palette of contemporary jazz is under their fingers.

Stanko’s open trumpet sound is very special: masculine, sensitive, spare, elegant – all the adjectives applied to Miles Davis come out of the drawer when he’s in town. It’s not so much that he sounds like Davis, but that he fills that Miles-shaped void.

And this video appeared on YouTube, filmed from on stage: