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JAZZ AND POP MUSIC

From the Desk of: Bernadette Moreau, Gertrude D' Orleans, Dorothea A. Whickum, Lucette Boulanger

Miles Davis
The Complete Jack Johnson Sessions

I could put together the greatest rock 'n roll band you ever heard," boasted the legendary Miles Davis in the end of 1969. The then 43-year old Davis already had an impressive pedigree behind him as one of the great innovators in jazz, but at the time this must have sounded like a claim too far. This 5-CD boxed set documents Davis's search for "the best rock 'n roll band you ever heard" during February-June 1970. Featuring now famous jazz musicians like Chick Corea, Herbie Hancock, Keith Jarrett, Dave Holland, Wayne Shorter, Airto Moreira, Billy Cobham, and John McLaughlin, it illustrates both the pitfalls and the highlights of Davis's quest. The pitfalls come in the form of tracks that would better have stayed in Columbia's vaults. Oddities like "Johnny Bratton," "Archie Moore," "Sugar Ray," "Ali," and "Little High People," sound like shapeless ramblings of clueless jazz musicians. They illustrate the words of Davis's producer at the time, Teo Macero: "the musicians didn't know what the hell they were doing."

Mercifully, the highlights are very good. One could question whether we really need six takes of "Willie Nelson," but especially on the earlier versions a storm is kicked up by John McLaughlin's heavily distorted and Hendrix-influenced electric guitar, Corea's weirdness on ring modulator, and Davis's own majestic trumpet playing. The leader's unadulterated blues playing on "Go Ahead John," here showcased without the strange edits and effects on the originally released version, is also a sheer delight. However good this material in its own right, it wasn't yet great rock 'n roll. Davis needed one more ace in his pack, and this came in the form of bassist Michael Henderson, who at the time played with Stevie Wonder. Together with Billy Cobham on drums, Henderson drives the boogie groove of "Right Off" to astonishing heights, and he sets the James Brown bass riff used on "Yesternow" in concrete. On top, both Davis and McLaughlin excel with some of the best playing of their career. Teo Macero rightly called this music (recorded on April 7, 1970) "dynamite" and in 1971 he compiled most of "Right Off" and "Yesternow" on Miles's A Tribute to Jack Johnson LP.

This set offers some precious extra material from this April session, and also traces Davis' next steps in May and June with music that had little to do with rock 'n roll; the ever-changing trumpeter was already on to new challenges. Yet to create, if only for one day, the "best rock 'n roll band you ever heard," was a remarkable and historic achievement. The Complete Jack Johnson Sessions is a fitting testament. Highly recommended.- Paul Tingen

Dido
Life For Rent

Despite the multi-million sales of her debut solo album, No Angel it's difficult to describe Dido's second album Life For Rent as long-awaited. Like other artists in her field she treads a fine line between credibility and popularity, and one feels a step in either direction could alienate those who enjoyed her first effort. But, she hasn't put a foot wrong with this album. On the positive side that means more well-crafted folk-pop tunes, on the negative side she hasn't moved forward.

Although Dido played a significant part in older brother Rollo's band, Faithless (whose 1996 album Reverence sold over 5 million copies), it would be misleading to say that the groups success brought her fame. For that she had to wait for her solo album and in particular the song "Thank You" which reached the global pop consciousness via Eminem's peerless "Stan". From there the album No Angel went on to sell bucket-loads. For one with such an auspicious past, it's difficult to describe Dido as a star. It's hard to imagine there being hardcore Dido fans following her every move, and yet she does what she does very well. Like her debut, Life For Rent blends effortless melodies with seamless backing tracks. The production is perfect - every song glistens with a carefully polished sheen. The obvious singles "White Flag" and "Stoned" are engaging to the extent that you could easily be humming along without it registering in your brain. There's something unconscious, pleasantly innocuous about them. It's comfort food for the ears, one could pick any track off the album and place it in the sad, thoughtful scene about three quarters of the way through a Tom Hanks-Meg Ryan romantic comedy. That's perhaps a little disparaging. There is good, listenable stuff here, especially the edgier "Who Makes You Feel" or the comparatively funky "Sand In My Shoes". You won't be ashamed to own this or play it at your next dinner party, but one can't help wishing that there were one or two tracks with a bit more balls.- Derryck Strachan

Gareth Gates
Go Your Own Way

No longer able to seek refuge beneath Simon Cowell's ample wing, it's sink-or-swim time for little Gareth Gates as a new brood of Pop Idol & Fame Academy fledglings flee the nest. It's one thing to bleat a couple of covers for your debut, but by the second foray we want to see if the nation's favourite runner-up is going to continue buffing his halo. Or hurl it through the window of the nearest Naughty Boy Boutique.

JAZZ CDs REVIEWS_________________________________

Amy Winehouse, Frank

Rating: (Island Records)

By Beccy Lindon

Winehouse sounds as if she has performed a thousand times in smoky jazz clubs. So it comes as some surprise to learn that she is just 19 and was raised in north London.

Sitting somewhere between Nina Simone and Erykah Badu, Winehouse's sound is at once innocent and sleazy. She claims that she can only write about what she has already learned, but she makes some starkly candid and humorous social observations on the fun-poking Fuck Me Pumps and the brazen single, Stronger Than Me.

Standout track Take the Box is a stunningly soulful tale of returning an ex-lover's possessions and You Send Me Flying does just that, thanks to a colossal vocal talent. October Song, meanwhile, forges uplifting jazz out of the death of a pet canary. There are contradictions - but it's hard not to hear the honesty and soul that resonates throughout this album.

Misia, Canto

Rating: (Warner Jazz)

By Robin Denselow

Thanks to the extraordinary success of Mariza, fado suddenly has a new international audience. But that has brought mixed blessings to other young exponents of the mournful, passionate national music of Portugal. Record companies are far more interested in fado than they were in the past, but comparisons with Mariza are now inevitable, especially if you happen to be called Misia.

She, too, is a young, stylish contender for the crown of the greatest fadista, the late Amalia Rodrigues, but favours cropped black hair and cocktail dresses rather than crimped blonde hair and gowns. Until now, Misia was often described as "the foremost contemporary fado singer", but that title is now clearly in dispute, and this new set shows why. She has a fine, dramatic and suitably emotional voice and can switch with ease from tragic ballads to more stately, courtly songs (there's not much here in the way of lighter material), but on this showing she doesn't have Mariza's spine-tingling intensity. Nor is she helped by her musicians: while Mariza's small and inventive band move fado forward, Misia is backed by a decidedly old-fashioned mixture of guitars and often cloying, sweeping strings.

Garland-Keezer-Locke

 Rating:  At The Pizza Express Jazz Club, London

By John Fordham

Jazz bands without drums or bass oblige the remaining participants to be extremely industrious. The absence of traditional tempo and harmony-mapping instruments means that blizzards of notes and rockfalls of chords have to sustain a pulse or a tonal centre instead. A classy exponent of this taxing art is the skilful trio of UK saxophonist Tim Garland and Americans Geoff Keezer (piano) and Joe Locke (vibraphone).

The three often collaborate, and this repertoire mixed familiar material with ingredients from a new album, Rising Tide. The band is more powerful and insistent in a live show than on record. The tall, faintly sinister Locke, is always a dramatic presence, and he carried the great vibes hero Bobby Hutcherson's repertoire of grandiloquent gestures to another level of melodrama. He's a phenomenal technician and gifted improviser, and his tone resembled the late Milt Jackson's in its rich mingling of fast, penetrating bop figures and glowing sustained sounds. Some of his high-speed ostinatos in support of his partners' solos were stunning in their density and unerring adherence to the beat. Garland was surefooted and secure of tone at the extremes of the tenor's range, and broadened the band's scope considerably with his authority on the bass clarinet. He added further textural materials to the trio by blowing a tenor-sax prelude to the Beatles' Blackbird on to the soundboard of Keezer's piano, and dueting with the resulting eerie overtones. Keezer, a young pianist with an encyclopedic sweep across jazz piano history, delivered a beautiful keyboard improvisation on this piece. His own elegant but rather somber feature Shelter had the soprano sax and vibraphone declaring a poignant theme over a dark, repeating piano heartbeat, and Garland's spooky but lively After Dark brought some of the best bluesily collaborative ensemble playing out of all three. It would tax the imagination of the best improvisers on the planet to keep the vitality free of longueurs, but these three make an accomplished job of it.

Gwyn Herbert/ Will Rutter

Rating:  At The Pizza Express Jazz Club, London

By John Fordham

Twenty-one-year-old English singer Gwyn Herbert turned up here last year with a demo that ended up in the bin. Then it was rescued and subsequently propelled her to her own shows at Pizza Express and now a debut CD.

 Bojan Z, Transpacifik

Rating:  (Label Bleu)

By John Fordham

Here Yugoslavian-born piano star Bojan Z, frequently an unaccompanied solo player, joins what looks on paper like a conventional jazz trio, with Scott Colley on bass and Nasheet Waits on drums.

And that's what it sounds like too, as the disc opens with the the needling, mid-tempo swinger Set It Up; except that the pianist immediately starts making highly inventive use of acoustic and Fender Rhodes lines simultaneously. Bojan Z's Balkan roots soon surface in the stealthily twisting theme of The Joker, but his originality as a contemporary composer is clear on the limpid turns of Flashback. A gently dolorous Bulgarian folk-tune unfolds as a duet with the mellow-toned Colley and a kind of Chick Corea flamboyance characterises Z-Rays. Groznyan Blue has the bassist's Charlie Haden-like depth playing the theme over soft brushwork before Jarrett-tinged bursts of piano, and a short, sparkily exhilarating Duke Ellington swinger closes the show. All comparatively straight by Bojan Z standards, but a delicious sample of personal, subtly-extended piano-trio potential.

Tim Berne's Science Friction, The Sublime And

Rating: (Thirsty Ear)

By John Fordham

One of the great jazz performances in Britain in 2002 was the Vortex Club appearance by a contemporary US quartet led by bassist Drew Gress. Three of its members (saxophonist Tim Berne, keyboardist Craig Taborn and drummer Tom Rainey) also make up the fearsome foursome Science Friction, with Gress's place taken by guitarist Marc Ducret.

Science Friction is a more abstract band than Gress's was, keener on throwing raw sound textures around, more inclined to extended collective journeys (this almost two-hour live double-album has only six tracks), and generally wilder in atmosphere. But The Sublime And - their second release - is a remarkably accessible piece of uncompromising new music from undoubtedly the best group Tim Berne has ever led.

Its strengths are the understanding Berne and drummer Tom Rainey have built up over time, the intuitive feeling newcomer Taborn has for the dynamics of a situation, and the contrast with Ducret's whirling energy. The pieces often hang on staccato, muttering, dynamically narrow reshuffles of handfuls of notes, a melodic territory shared by Steve Coleman, Greg Osby, Steve Williamson and others, the New York M-base school of Ornette Coleman's Prime Time. But the tendency of that idiom to melodic monotony is swept away here, with the group's drive and invention keeping you on tenterhooks for the next surprise, be it from conventional musical material or sheer noise. Berne's alto sax might purr in a daydream over Rainey's distant tattoo and against Ducret's seamless countermelodies, then ascend to long, fading whistles to allow the drummer to explore his amazing talent for constant change without repetition or loss of momentum. A fragile, songlike sax line might drift over snowflake keyboards, before the eruption of a collective melee, eventually broken by a Ducret free-rock solo of high-register wails, groaning slurs, and surefooted runs. A Taborn keyboard meditation splices a classical precision and melodic purity against computerized rustles and clatters, or a dirgey freebop theme reveals a weird semi-Latin undertow. An exhilarating Ducret breakout on the second disc's Jalapeño Diplomacy sounds like Derek Bailey's busy scrablings, John Scofield's avant-funk and Bill Frisell's glowing textures combined. Science Friction takes the possibilities of composed and improvised new jazz to another level, and their November tour with this music will be fascinating to witness.

Jamie Cullum, Twentysomething

Rating: (Universal)

By John Fordham

For some followers of jazz, Jamie Cullum and his smooth-singing ilk are the true saviors of this stubbornly unkempt music's future. For others, these youngish collectors of Frank Sinatra, Peggy Lee and Nat King Cole records have moved into a world that just flirts with jazz, one in which an album should ideally contain a hit single and some drive time-friendly tracks, where instrumental improvising is pushed into a back seat, where dress designers and stylists get mentioned in album credits. It is a galaxy away from the one in which spontaneous musicians radically reinterpret their material afresh night after night, and where nurturing the right conditions for the unexpected is the priority. Pat Metheny, a brilliant musician who understands only too well that if jazz means anything it means surprises, has been pulled for years between commercial settings that require him to repeat himself, and small-audience ones that let him be.

Just the same, Wiltshire's engaging young singer/pianist Jamie Cullum has been rapturously and inaccurately greeted as the British jazz success story of the past year, and this album is the first product of his headline-grabbing £1m deal with Universal records. It's an elegantly-produced 14-track summary of Cullum's enthusiastically open listening habits, from American Songbook classics (there are two Cole Porters among six standards), to unselfconsciously autobiographical originals from himself and his brother Ben, and high-quality classic-pop material from Jimi Hendrix and Jeff Buckley. Just to put the jazzers straight, there's comparatively little instrumental playing, what solos there are  bright and focused but fleeting, and even the leader's effervescent and fast-developing piano playing gets pretty short shrift. So far, so expected. The point of the disc is the songs, and in both the choice of the material and the range of interpretation, Jamie Cullum's ability to learn fast and listen hard has undoubtedly made this set a leap forward from his self-generated Pointless Nostalgic debut last year. Cullum's virtues are a remarkable relaxation (which makes music-making, even in a sophisticated studio recording, sound like fun to him), a youthful bounce that makes his work engagingly airy and light, and a hipness of timing that marks him out from many of his competitors on this crowded stage. Twenty something is also very shrewdly produced (by George Benson and BB King producer Stewart Levine) to keep the more luxurious of additional instruments (strings, flutes, horn ensembles) in a subtly supportive role that always leaves Cullum's forthright, unadorned and already characterful voice way out in front.

The balance is immediately evident on the opening, What A Difference A Day Makes. It is also there in the hinted Fender Rhodes, swelling organ sound and eventually George Benson-like unison scat with the band on the Stevie Wonder and Van Morrison-like These Are the Days - a Ben Cullum original. Cullum's pledge to infuse jazz with rock and soul's urgency surfaces on a funky, guitar-wailing Singin' in the Rain, but it is less successful on I Could Have Danced All Night, with its Headhunters-like bass lick. But his disarmingly innocent musings on his own young life click pretty well on the title track, over a hypnotically walking piano vamp. Although Cullum can gracefully swing all night, it's often his startlingly insightful ballad singing that stays in the mind after a show. He makes a coolly accomplished job of Bob Dorough's excellent But for Now, and a genuinely moving one of Heyman and Levant's Blame It on my Youth, as he has increasingly done in live performance lately. There may be no better time in Cullum's life for him to handle this tough assignment. His eager, splashy piano style is reined in for much of the disc, but it does break out in I Get a Kick Out of You, building from short, clipped phrases and rattling repeated notes over softly dabbing chords to an onrush of impatiently percussive left-hand figures.

Paul Motian, On Broadway

Rating: (Winter and Winter)

By John Fordham

This is a beautiful collaboration, from 1989, with imposingly imaginative former Bill Evans drummer Paul Motian, Joe Lovano on tenor, Bill Frisell on guitar and Charlie Haden on bass, playing an American Songbook repertoire in their own completely inimitable ways. This ensemble was one of Motian's best-ever bands, with Frisell sounding far more tune-anchored, direct and purposeful than in his later, more impressionistic, musical life.

The old sax hand Lovano is completely at ease in materials that fit him like a glove, and Motian's and Haden's free-swing allowing everybody to make the narrow confines of standard songs seem like wide open country. But for more recent Frisell admirers, there's also plenty of slowly-unfolding tone-color exploration and Lovano's two sumptuously floating tenor breaks on Body and Soul are gems.

Vitous/Garbarek/McLaughlin/Corea/DeJohnette, Universal Syncopations

Rating: (ECM)

By John Fordham

The most spontaneously musical jazz bands often only need one genie and a supporting cast of beautiful assistants. Drop five genies into one show and the pyrotechnics frequently produce more noise and smoke than revelation. This happens occasionally on the international touring circuit, when promoters hurl the likes of Herbie Hancock, Michael Brecker, Pat Metheny and other American stars on stage in the flailing hope the collision will be magic.

Miroslav Vitous, the Prague-born bassist and co-founder of fusion superband Weather Report, has done something similar, but with patience, forethought, and a better reason than just gawping at the sight of all those jazz names printed side by side. Between 2000 and March this year, Vitous assembled a team of famous players for a single dazzling record project - including Jan Garbarek, John McLaughlin, Chick Corea and Jack DeJohnette. And the music this quintet of bandleaders produced over the three-year gestation of Universal Syncopations is as big as the idea.

Vitous's remarkable achievement has been to dissolve the egos and reputations of his partners into an integrated program of his own music (all the pieces are his, though three involved collaborations with Garbarek and DeJohnette). By virtue of his own unique combination of Slavic folk roots and the American jazz of Miles Davis and John Coltrane, he coaxes all the players into leaving their own familiar luggage at the door. Norwegian saxophone dreamer Garbarek, for instance, hardly ever plays on sessions other than his own; nor has he recorded such a consistent display of unambiguously jazzy improvisation since the mid-1970s. Corea, often a florid and sumptuously romantic player, operates more like a sideman here, and his dramatic and staccato chording behind his partners often suggests his own and Herbie Hancock's pivotal harmonic and rhythm impact in the great 1960s Miles Davis bands. Guitarist McLaughlin plays in brittle, impulsive bursts of sound, exploding into the spaces in the music and then falling silent, as he did in his pre-guitar-hero early years. Vitous, making his first ECM recording for a decade, plays with reverberating authority, and improvises with bounding agility and invention; and DeJohnette plays like a percussionist and a kit-drummer simultaneously, his cymbal sounds humming with overtones, his tempo-playing full of ambiguous intent. If this quintet has a core, it is the trio of Garbarek, Vitous and DeJohnette, with briefer appearances from the other two. But the opening Bamboo Forest is a parade for them all, with Garbarek's silvery soprano sound entering over DeJohnette's chattery Latin pulse and ringing cymbal exclamations, the sax-phrasing growing closer to Wayne Shorter's (where it stays for much of the disc) as the undulations of Corea's piano figures and the elastic snap of Vitous's bass appear around it. McLaughlin's opening phrase is a quote from the late Wes Montgomery's West Coast Blues, as if to announce his intentions to rekindle old fires.

On Univoyage, the ensemble sound borders on free-jazz, but is constantly throttled back to the lazily taut group textures of the mid-1960s Miles band by the contributions of a very selectively deployed brass trio. Garbarek then roundly dispatches all purist gripes that he's a Euro-folkie who can't play "real" jazz with a slyly swinging exploration of Vitous's Tramp's Blues that makes you want to get up and applaud. The piece turns into a Mingus-like call-and-response exchange with the bass, muted brass purring beneath. Sunflower begins as a brooding drifter, before surging into an urgent bass/drums groove, again eagerly explored by a now deviously dynamic Garbarek, and with Corea's abstract flurries even suggesting Britain's Keith Tippett. But if all this sounds like a jazz-purist's exercise, check the ecstatic funk on Beethoven, or the dark, ambient murmur of Vitous's majestic bass on the slow Brazil Waves. This is a wonderful contemporary jazz set with a sense of the past, but in which all the players reconsider their histories to maximize the intensity of the present.