BCB Jazz Scene
| Tuesday | 06/12/11 | @ | 20:00 |
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| | Title | Artist | Track | Album | | | Year |
| i | My Heart declares a Holiday | Bill Bruford’s Earthworks | 6 | Heavenly Bodies | 4 | 38 | 1986 |
| 1 | Pedalo | Riley Stone-Lonergan | 8 | Yamaha New Jazz Sessions 2011 | 5 | 14 | 2011 |
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| 2 | Shiva | Michael Garrick Septet | 10 | Joe Harriott - Genius | 6 | 22 | 1967 |
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| 3 | The Barley Mow | Graham Collier Sextet | 3 | Down Another Road | 5 | 29 | 1968 |
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| 4 | Black Marigolds | Michael Garrick Septet | 7 | Black Marigolds | 3 | 35 | 1968 |
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| 5 | Mosaics Part One : Theme 1 | Graham Collier Music | 5 (1) | Mosaics | 7 | 58 | 1971 |
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| 6 | Second Coming | Michael Garrick Sextet | 6 | Promises | 5 | 32 | 1965 |
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| 7 | Song 5 (Rubato) | Graham Collier Music | 2 (5) | Songs for My Father | 4 | 44 | 1970 |
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| 8 | Dusk Fire | Don Rendell / Ian Carr Qnt | 7 | Dusk Fire | 12 | 17 | 1966 |
1 - Pedalo - Riley Stone-Lonergan - Yamaha New Jazz Sessions 2011 - 2011- www.myspace.com/rileystonelonergan
2 – Shiva - Michael Garrick Septet - Joe Harriott : Genius – 1967 - www.michaelgarrick.co.uk
3 - The Barley Mow - Graham Collier Sextet - Down Another Road – 1968 - www.jazzcontinuum.com / www.grahamcolliermusic.com
4 - Black Marigolds - Michael Garrick Septet - Black Marigolds – 1968 - www.michaelgarrick.co.uk
5 - Mosaics Part One : Theme 1 - Graham Collier Music – Mosaics – 1971 - www.jazzcontinuum.com / www.grahamcolliermusic.com
6 - Second Coming - Michael Garrick Sextet – Promises – 1965 - www.michaelgarrick.co.uk
7 - Song 5 (Rubato) - Graham Collier Music - Songs for My Father – 1970 - www.jazzcontinuum.com / www.grahamcolliermusic.com
8 - Dusk Fire - Don Rendell / Ian Carr Qnt - Dusk Fire – 1966 - www.michaelgarrick.co.uk
Now, all you budding young – by which I mean from ages 12 to 18 - jazz musicians – or parents, grandparents, siblings or friends of the same – Jazz Yorkshire are running an all-day big band jazz workshop at Leeds Grammar School on Sunday 5 February 2012 between the hours of 9am and 6pm. Applications can be made at www.jazzyorkshire.org/jazzjamboree You’ll need to be capable readers with some experience of playing in jazz or wind ensembles. Leading the workshops will be Al Wood – one-time Maynard Ferguson Big Band member and John Ellis, MBE, head of the world-renowed Doncaster Youth Jazz Association, so you will benefit from the experience and talent of two top blokes. The deadline for applications is 16 December, so get surfing. Direct applicants will need a recommendation from your Teacher of Band Director – but don’t let that put you off. Spread the word and help to make this another successful workshop – Don’t let it go to waste now, ‘cos Jazz Yorkshire have but about 10 months of existence remaining prior to the plug being pulled from their steaming bath of all things good in jazz and it’s voluntary supporters.
| 1 | Pedalo | |
| Band | Riley Stone-Lonergan Qrt | www.myspace.com/rileystonelonergan |
| Album Title | Yamaha New Jazz Sessions 2011 | |
| Disc / Track | 8 | |
| Year | 2011 | |
| Label | Yamaha | www.uk.yamaha.com |
Personnel :
Riley Stone-Lonergan : tenor sax
Kim Macari : trumpet
Maxwell Sterling : double bass
Steve Hanley : drums
RIP Michael Garrick and Graham Collier
Very sadly, Michael Garrick passed away on 11 November during heart surgery. There is a fine and informative obituary on The Guardian’s website (http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2011/nov/15/michael-garrick -also try www.jazzscript.co.uk/extra/int.garrick.htm
A letter written to the AB(RSM) ref the inclusion of jazz as a subject in it’s own right – still very telling today.
Similarly for Graham Collier at www.guardian.co.uk/music/2011/sep/14/graham-collier-obituary and www.allaboutjazz.com/php/news.php?id=88675
Michael remained rather proud of the fact that he was expelled from Eleanor B. Franklin-Pike's piano lessons for inflicting Glenn Miller's In the Mood upon fellow pupils at a musical soiree
2 | Shiva | |
| Band | Michael Garrick Septet | |
| Album Title | Joe Harriot - Genius | |
| Disc / Track | 10 | |
| Year | 2000 | |
| Label | Jazz Academy JAZA 6 | www.michaelgarrick.co.uk |
Personnel :
Michael Garrick : piano
Joe Harriott : alto
Ian Carr : trumpet
Tony Coe : tenor
Don Rendell : tenor
Dave Green : bass
Trevor Tompkins : drums
Graham Collier liked quoting an old friend's description of watching him handle a big band as like someone "directing 14 Jackson Pollocks"
As Duncan Heining observes, it is fitting somehow that Graham's late career masterpiece, Directing 14 Jackson Pollocks, would be the last record he would issue during his life. It simply brims with vitality, good humor and humanity
| 3 | The Barley Mow | ||
| Band | Graham Collier Sextet | ||
| Album Title | Down Another Road | ||
| Disc / Track | 1 / 3 | ||
| Year | 1969 / 2007 | ||
| Label | Fontana Records / BGO Records | www.bgo-records.com | |
Personnel :
Graham Collier - bass
Harry Beckett – flugelhorn
Stan Sulzmann – alto, tenor sax
Nick Evans – trombone
Karl Jenkins – oboe, piano
John Marshall - drums
Michael made a study of Indian music in the 1960s before the Beatles made India an attachment to their lifestyle, and much of the Rendell/Carr Quintet's repertoire is inspired by Indian ragas; Black Marigolds, perhaps his best-known piece, is a "self-conscious parody." He learnt Parker's solos by rote, not such an uncommon feat for a jazz musician, but his absorption of twentieth-century classical compositional theory, if idiosyncratic and erratic, is. Not too many jazz musicians are familiar with Messiaen's six modes of limited transposition, Scriabin's 'Prometheus' chord or Nicholas Slonimsky's Thesaurus of Scales and Melodic Patterns (a book he refers to only, I suspect, to tell the story of its author's party-piece, which was to play the right hand of Chopin's Black Keys study with an orange!). It’s this wealth of intellect that expels all fear possibly associated with recording a jazz album with significant Harpsichord and Celeste content
| 4 | Black Marigolds | |
| Band | Michael Garrick Septet | |
| Album Title | Black Marigolds | |
| Disc / Track | 7 | |
| Year | 1968 / 2005 | |
| Label | Vocalion | www.duttonvocalion.co.uk |
Personnel :
Michael Garrick : piano
Joe Harriott : alto
Ian Carr : trumpet
Tony Coe : tenor
Don Rendell : tenor
Dave Green : bass
Trevor Tompkins : drums
Collier was the first Briton to graduate from the jazz course at Berklee College of Music, Boston. In 1968 he became the first composer to receive an Arts Council bursary for a jazz piece, his Workpoints project, at a time when many in the arts establishment thought jazz was a commercial music undeserving of public subsidy. (Ahem?!) Many British jazz artists have since been funded because of Collier's mix of perseverance, belief, political nous and bolshieness.
Graham Collier was an influential member of the London-based jazz generation of the late 1960s, fired by a new confidence that contemporary composition could finally be independent of its American models. He also initiated a jazz course at the Royal Academy of Music in London, and was the conservatoire's first jazz director and subsequently professor, from 1986 until his retirement in 1999.
He is perhaps best known, however, for running a workshop for unknown young musicians, including the pianist Django Bates and saxophonist Iain Ballamy, in London in 1984, from which sprang Loose Tubes, one of the most creative and influential jazz orchestras founded in Britain
| 5 | Mosaics Part One : Theme 1 | ||
| Band | Graham Collier Music | ||
| Album Title | Mosaics | ||
| Disc / Track | 2 / 5 | ||
| Year | 1971 / 2007 | ||
| Label | Philips Records / BGO Records | www.bgo-records.com | |
Personnel :
Graham Collier - bass
Harry Beckett – trumpet / flugelhorn
Alan Wakeman : soprano, tenor sax
Geoff Castle : piano
John Webb : drums
Bob Sydor : alto, tenor sax
The late great wit and jazz musician, dear Humphrey Lyttleton described Michael Garrick’s “inventiveness, wit and zest for musical exploration as little short of uncanny” – such words from Humph must surely be the highest of all praise.
| 6 | Second Coming | |
| Band | Michael Garrick Sextet | |
| Album Title | Promises | |
| Disc / Track | 6 | |
| Year | 1965 / 2008 | |
| Label | Vocalion | www.duttonvocalion.co.uk |
Personnel :
Michael Garrick : piano
Joe Harriott : alto
Ian Carr : trumpet / flugelhorn
Tony Coe : tenor
Coleridge Goode : bass
Colin Barnes : drums
Graham Collier’s 1970 album, Songs for My Father, heralded Graham Collier Music. The name designed to free Graham of the necessity of having to work with 6 people because of the association of the word “sextet”. Graham Collier Music gave Graham the freedom to add and subtract musicians as he wished
| 7 | Song 5 (Rubato) | ||
| Band | Graham Collier Music | ||
| Album Title | Songs for My Father | ||
| Disc / Track | 2 / 2 | ||
| Year | 1970 / 2007 | ||
| Label | Fontana Records / BGO Records | www.bgo-records.com | |
Personnel :
Graham Collier - bass
Harry Beckett – trumpet / flugelhorn
Alan Wakeman : soprano, tenor sax
Bob Sydor : alto, tenor sax
Tony Roberts : tenor sax
Alan Skidmore : tenor sax
John Taylor : piano
Chick Webb : drums
Michael Garrick’s Autobiography “Dusk Fire : Jazz in English Hands” is available at www.michaelgarrick.co.uk and of course at
| 8 | Dusk Fire | |
| Band | Don Rendell / Ian Carr Quintet | |
| Album Title | Dusk Fire | |
| Disc / Track | 7 | |
| Year | 1966 / 2008 | |
| Label | Universal Music / BGO Records | www.bgo-records.com |
Personnel :
Ian Carr : trumpet , flugelhorn
Don Rendell : soprano, tenor sax
Michael Garrick : piano
Dave Green : bass
Trevor Tompkins : drums
... a letter written by MICHAEL GARRICK to the Associated Board of the Royal Schools of Music in 1989
Jazz and "Serious Music" : A Philosophy
Jazz, in the simplest terms possible, is a musical impulse which constitutes a logical and vital growth of serious music making. It is not a confrontation with older music: indeed, it carries forward those qualities which make "classical" music great and fulfills a musician's quest for wonder and adventure as well as fidelity to the human condition. It is essentially evolutionary and the assumption that it is a different species altogether is a fundamental error based on too constrained an overview.
It uses Western instruments and in so doing has extended their usable ranges and expressive power: it functions, in the main, within our twelve tone system and expands, not contracts or cancels, the harmonic language within which all the basics still apply: it employs traditional notation and developed chord symbols: it requires of its exponents not only practise disciplines (scales, arpeggios, interpretation, sight reading) but also a compositional awareness of form and mental access to whatever melodic, harmonic and rhythmic components may exist at the given musical moment: it has proved its enduring relevance to the twentieth century by its reassertion of feeling as a life-source in the face of much that is negative; as such, it has transcended racial and cultural barriers.
There is also the widely expressed wish of exclusively "straight"-trained musicians to be able to inhabit the idiom. Fortunate indeed are those youngsters who, along with their grades, have been able to acquire a foundation in jazz techniques. Not only does it make fresh calls on personal creativity but since a main thrust of its development is in relation to time and sensitivity as regards its use by the player, it sharpens a musician's awareness to all other music.
This is not to say everything which has ever come out of, or is presently emerging from, jazz is unequivocally beatific! But the classic sources are clear enough by now: Ellington, Armstrong and Parker, to identify a basic triumvirate. And although primarily an American phenomenon, Britain, placed uniquely between the United States and Europe, has produced much that is original and refreshingly different.
In short, the repertoire, techniques and disciplines arising from this almost century-old musical renewal which is fast finding its place in musical institutions worldwide, would be highly apposite as an intrinsic part of the Associated Board's presentation and examination structure.
© MICHAEL GARRICK
July 1989
