The Jazzworthy Highland Bagpipe, earlier today.

Sonny Rollins and his band are being filmed playing Ronnie Scotts in 1974. As Sonny introduces Swing Low Sweet Chariot with a brief tenor solo, the camera moves to the man who until now has been playing soprano sax. He is wearing a small white headscarf, a voluminous yellow shirt, a black leather waistcoat, a black and yellow kilt, knee length argyle socks and a pair of brown Jesus sandals. But there is something strange about the picture: he has put down his saxophone, and is now playing…BAGPIPES!

The musician in question was one Rufus Harley, famously the first to make a primary jazz instrument of the Highland Bagpipe. He enjoyed great respect over what felt like a very long recording career, and was quite given to wearing Scottish garb, sometimes topped off with a Viking helmet. His work by no means offered the only recorded use of bagpipes in jazz, however. Dutch saxophonist Peter Bennink was a devil for the things, and Albert Ayler even paired them with an ocarina on one of his acclaim-dodging later albums. But are bagpipes really the most obscure instrument to be used in jazz? As the music has ceaselessly sought to reinvent itself, should we be at all surprised to see the instrumental pallet being broadened somewhat?

Travellin’ light?

Let us go back to 1924, and hearken to the new waxing by Clarence Williams’ Blue Five, a rendering of the popular show tune “Mandy, Make Up Your Mind.”  It starts out nicely enough, with Louis Armstrong piping away cheerfully over Sidney Bechet’s soprano sax and Charlie Irvis’ cowshed trombone, and after Eva Taylor’s vocal interlude comes Bechet’s famous contrabass sarrusophone solo. I’m sorry? Beg pardon squire..? The sarrusophone was a double reed brass instrument invented in 1856 to replace the oboe and bassoon in outdoor bands, neither of which carried well in the open air. What Bechet was doing with one is anybody’s guess, but he despatches his solo with pleasing elegance, before allowing the beast to snore contentedly in the background for the ensemble finale.

The Mound City Blue Blowers celebrate getting lucky

The year before, in St. Louis, the Mound City Blue Blowers had formed with just a kazoo, a banjo and a comb and paper. This kind of spur-of-the-moment instrumentation was nothing new – New Orleans was a breeding ground for rough and ready spasm bands at this point – but the Blue Blowers got lucky, had novelty hits, augmented their line up with early luminaries such as Eddie Lang and Jack Teagarden, and their leader, Red Mackenzie, kept the name and some or other form of the band afloat until well into the 30s. The chosen record, Arkansaw Blues, was their first, and according to Mackenzie himself sold over a million copies following its release in 1924, perhaps because it was the first time the full sonic and emotional spectrum of the kazoo/comb-and-paper combination had been so wrenchingly displayed

The simple and untempered delights of swanee whistles, jugs and kazoos also had common currency in Vaudeville, minstrel revues and medicine shows, but if we poke around the darker corners of the homespun instrument department we’ll soon find the stovepipe. This was indeed a stovepipe, but bent and tweaked until it could offer some semblance of musical backing to whomever felt their performance might be thus enhanced. And what did it sound like? Well, it sounded like somebody making funny noises into a bendy metal tube, as demonstrated by this 1927 recording by Stovepipe No.1 and David Crockett. (The “No. 1” was presumably adopted to avoid confusion with Daddy Stovepipe, Stovepipe Johnson and Sweet Papa Stovepipe). The stovepipe itself is not to be confused with the gaspipe clarinet, of course, which wasn’t an instrument but a style of playing which was popular in various musical entertainments between around 1910 and 1930.

Wilton Crawley trying not to let on that his legs were tied in a reef knot.

It embraced all manner of freak effects, animal noises, laughter, honks, howls and squawks. The players were usually multi-tasking entertainers, comedians, acrobats and what have you – the chap on the chosen record, Wilton Crawley, even doubled as a contortionist. Crawley was a passable singer and a decent musician, despite his occasional lapses into rasping degeneracy, and his bands were invariably studded with gleaming musicians – the pianist here is no less than Jelly Roll Morton!

Yes, Dorothy, you will have to pay two fares on the bus home.

As jazz developed, some surprising music was cajoled from apparently jazz-proof sources – step forward Ray Draper on tuba and Dorothy Ashby on harp. Ashby made the harp her primary instrument in 1952, initially playing free shows, weddings and dances to prove to her fellow musicians that it could be a going concern in a be-bop context. She made a number of successful albums in esteemed company, the best being with flautist Frank Wess, such as the record below (“It’s A Minor Thing”), although her output diminished after she settled in Los Angeles to run her own theatre group. 

Ray Draper and his pocket tuba.

Ray Draper was not the first jazz tubist, but in 1957, aged just 17, he led an album bravely sharing front line duties with John Coltrane, whose self-willed tenor was not to be tangled with at this point. The chosen track sees the two instruments getting along quite amicably on the theme, but their differences become apparent at 3.19, when Draper’s sea monster solo is coming to an end and Coltrane basically pushes him out of the way!

And they say men can’t multi-task

From around 1958 onwards, and especially as the avant garde kicked in, an ever-widening range of instruments was brought into the fold, while new vocabularies were written for familiar instruments. Roland Kirk was known for augmenting his tenor with stritch and manzello – elderly members of the saxophone family – and for playing them all at the same time, bringing novelty and emotional freight in varying measure. This track, from his 1965 album “Rip, Rig and Panic,” shows a fabulous improviser showing off his party trick to tasteful effect. A bit shaky at the end, perhaps, but a small price for such a sterling performance! Sun Ra, a bandleader since the 40s as well as a fierce intellectual and a masterful showman, had pretty much tired of all restraint by 1961, and shortly after moving his band from Chicago to New York his music and its instrumentation moved in ever more challenging directions. Self-released albums with titles like “Art Forms of Dimensions Tomorrow,” “Other Planes of There” and “Cosmic Tones for Mental Therapy” featured things like Jupiterian Flute, Sun Harp, Space Dimension Mellophone and Neptunian Libflecto, to name but a few.

Sun Ra gives it some on Astro Space Organ. Probably.

Some of these were curios found in thrift shops, while others were modified versions of more conventional instruments, given peculiar names to propagate the current mythology of the band, who always got plenty of good noise out of them whatever they were. This excerpt from Moon Dance (“Cosmic Tones for Mental Therapy,” 1963) would appear to feature Sky Tone Drums and Astro Space Organ, but who knows, it could just as easily be a heavily reverb-ed Bontempi!

“Axis of melody, rhythm and pure sound?” Are you sure about that? Man, you guys kill me!

Elsewhere in the avant garde, Ornette Coleman had famously formed a pianoless quartet in the late 1950s, with the idea that the absence of a traditional harmonic mooring would allow space for his alto sax improvisations to roam around more freely. Albert Ayler had written a whole new language for the tenor saxophone, based largely on all the sounds conventional playing had sought to avoid, and driven along by sheer energy, as evidenced by the chosen tune (“Ghosts, First Variation,” from Spiritual Unity, 1964) Musicians were now free to stand at any point they wished on an axis of melody, rhythm, harmonic invention and pure sound. Or to make as much noise as they felt like, if you’d rather. In Chicago, the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians became wholly consumed by such ideas, not only leaving stuff out, but making funny noises with what was left, and a bunch of their top bananas, the Roscoe Mitchell Sextet (soon to morph into the Art Ensemble of Chicago), summed it all up when they made an album called “Sound” in 1966. The album, which sought to explore the notion that the silence in which musical sound was suspended was as important as the sound itself, was actually a record of great historical importance; using conventional instruments to make sounds for which they were not apparently designed, and deploying a battalion of “little instruments,” whistles, bells, ocarinas, melodicas and what not, it paved the way for a far less aggressive expression of the ideas of the free jazz avant garde. But was it still jazz as we knew it? You’d need to listen to the whole album to make your mind up, but here’s an excerpt from “The Little Suite” to whet your whistle…

And on it went. After this it was open season, as any number of artists felt their perfectly decent music was incomplete without a couple of rhythm logs or a handful of finger cymbals. In 1971, saxophonist Marion Brown corralled a top flight band to join him in making an album of improvisations intended to evoke a day in a forest in Georgia, wherein a gaggle of non-musicians added texture and colour by rattling away at some saucepan lids stuck to a board. A while later in Germany, guitarist Hans Reichel invented his own instrument, the daxophone, cheerfully developing an entire mythology around its supposed creator. And for a 1994 tour of Britain with his Creative Music Orchestra, Anthony Braxton had written a piece with a short break for sheet-of-tin-foil-blown-with-hair-dryer! Well, maybe it’s not too far from the comb-and-paper, but have we not come some way from the original question? Having established that virtually anything can have a place in the jazz scheme of things, are we still wary of bagpipes? Only two people can answer this – Rufus Harley and Sonny Rollins, take it away!

Mike Stoddart.

What musical advantage do Kirkcudbright, Tenby and Nantwich have over Liverpool? What is the seventh string which these and other towns have, which Liverpool doesn’t? A Fab Five, a Crucial Four, Three Tribes or Seventeen Tambourines? No. What they have is an annual jazz festival.

It has long been a source of discomfort for Liverpudlian jazz fans that their city, for all of its compendiously-documented musical history, just ain’t that great for jazz. It’s not totally jazzless – a few hardy souls of robust humour are still honking away in back rooms of pubs – but there’s not much focus to it all and it’s less than extravagantly promoted. This year, however, change is afoot. Neil Campbell at the Capstone Theatre has had a root through the very top drawer of modern jazz to bring us Liverpool’s first International Jazz Festival, with nightly events at that venue from February 28th to March 3rd. From the joyful avant-garderie of Led Bib, to the iron-smelting tenor tone of Denys Baptiste, from the prog-tinged three-man onslaught of the Roller Trio to the formidably imaginative young pianist Kit Downes and the incessantly questing soprano sax of Courtney Pine, the line-up reads like a class register of the A-stream of modern British jazz. Newcomers to the music will find something to turn their heads, no matter what other musical direction they’re approaching it from, old timers will be rubbing their hands with glee, and if there isn’t enough going on already, the brightest local lights will be playing real good for free at various points around the headliners’ sets. All you need to know – for now, at least – is here: http://www.thecapstonetheatre.com/index.php/jazz-festival-events

But isn’t jazz dead, you ask, flattened beneath the ample rump of its own history? Well, what do you think? Bear in mind that jazz has always been music of change and surprise, and its every evolutionary shift, from New Orleans to Swing to Bop and beyond, has prompted even its most staunch supporters to pop a couple of pennies over its eyes. Surely if you’ve got to give anything the last rites more than twice you need to ask some serious questions about its mortality, but instead of getting mired in existential debate, let’s just compare two records: “Tiger Rag” (1917) by the Original Dixieland Jazz Band (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yqU1TiNe_us) and “Deep Heat” (2012) by Roller Trio (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TD7HPZHD0p0). Think on it – both of these records were made by young men in their twenties in the grip of a collective muse, working totally in the moment and worrying unduly about neither the past nor the future; they echo slightly earlier musical idioms (ragtime and progressive rock respectively); they make occasional use of the “freak” sounds of their instruments, and they are both driven along by an infectiously unruly energy. Does that sound dead, or might we agree that, despite the great historical and stylistic gulfs between the two, they are basically the same record? How can modern jazz not be healthy if it sounds so fresh and so alien to new ears while still following the “rules?”

But meanwhile, back at the jazzfest… We’ve seen how events like this, properly supported, can grow and grow. So what is to stop it developing into a celebration of all music that pushes at its own boundaries? Who is to say that in a very few years time we won’t be spending a week in early spring wandering around venues big and small soaking up venturesome sounds, from the outer limits of improvised music and rock to the trouser-seat spontaneity of tight little combos weaving together any number of different musical strands. And Liverpool has never been short of music fans who cock a snook at talent shows and horsemeat homogeneity, who want more, who’d love to see a forum for some of their favourite mind-boggling oddballs, who delight in saying that they’ve never heard such sounds in their life! But above all, they want the city which sparked their inextinguishable curiosity, the city which spawned the Rutles, Sonia, Our Kid and so many others finally to step out from the shadow of Kirkcudbright! Liverpool, your time is now!

Mike Stoddart.

A regular reader, one Dave Gillespie, presented me with a common complaint. He said that much as he enjoyed listening to jazz, he couldn’t shake the feeling that he was trying to crack a code, that there was a language being spoken in some of the music to which he was not privy. And let’s be honest, he’s right. Any band playing music with an element of improvisation will need its own system of cues and signals, and the musicians can be expected to develop a certain telepathy. It should come as no surprise, then, to hear them seasoning their performance with the odd personal touch. I suspect Dave’s curiosity has been aroused by the blurred line between communication and indulgence, especially if he’s been listening to jazz rock. Really, the only way to figure out if they’re talking to you or to themselves is to keep listening – the line will move back and forth while you’re at it, and it will occasionally seem a lot less blurred, but there are no fast rules and life is short. So if a critic may eulogise, say, a particular Miles Davis solo, don’t doubt yourself if it makes you think of icicles on a window frame. What the hell, he’ll play another solo soon enough and in the meantime the saxophone player might change your life with half a dozen notes!

Still, Dave’s misgivings took me back to my late teens, to wondering why I was becoming so excited by music that sounded like a couple of Spanish waiters having a fight in a busy kitchen. Charlie Parker’s records had obvious charms, their high-speed anxiety recalling the headlong excitement of my beloved punk rock records, but Art Pepper’s “Smack Up” had me entirely beguiled, as if it was taking the back off jazz’s watch to show me how all the parts worked. And his life story couldn’t help but entrance somebody reared on the squalid iconography of rock ‘n’ roll: Pepper spent his entire professional life in the thrall of narcotics, and his career was devastated by the attendant lifestyle. Crimes of every description supported his habit, from armed robbery and burglary down to the theft of a cement mixer, and the 1950s and 60s, which should have been his glory days, were marked by frequent prison sentences and a lengthy (if unconvincing) spell in rehab. He affords himself little mercy in his autobiography, Straight Life, which remains one of the most harrowing tales of the much-mythologised “jazz life”. He re-surfaced in the 1970s, his demons tamed if not entirely beaten, and he became quite the star, with a steady recording schedule and a hectic touring diary that lasted until his death in 1982. The series of albums he made for the L.A.-based Contemporary Records between 1956 and 1960, however, are the enduring documents of a truly great musician, an alto player worthy of Charlie Parker’s crown. Whatever his state of health, Art remained on the money every time he entered a studio, blessing even the most ill-starred session with his fleet-footed improvisation and russet lyricism. What better description of his playing than that offered by a fellow musician: “it sounds like a man crying – it just tears you up.”

And so to Smack Up. Recorded on the 24^th and 25^th October, 1960, the album sees a further advance on the already high emotional charge of Pepper’s playing style: the repetition and distending of particular phrases,  the finely-judged tensions released by flurries of notes, like he’s finally found the words to say what was bothering him. All five members of the band swing along almost telepathically, Jack Sheldon’s poised trumpet an ideal foil for Pepper’s wounded bluster on an album consisting entirely of compositions written by saxophonists.

Art Pepper – alto sax

Jack Sheldon – trumpet

Pete Jolly – piano

Jimmy Bond – bass

Frank Butler – drums

Smack Up (Harold Land) – a brisk hard bop number, bounced along by Jimmy Bond’s springy bass playing, which moves swiftly into a Pepper solo that can’t wait to get out of the traps. All of the qualities of his style are evident, as the worrying away at a phrase at the beginning gives way, on cue from a couple of piano chords, to more flowing invention. Following brief trumpet and piano solos (note how, playing behind the piano, Butler drops the cymbal fizz and off-beat accents that stoked up the horn solos), Pepper and Sheldon trade fours, displaying their distinctly different approaches.

Las Cuevas de Mario (Art Pepper) – dedicated to and named after one of Pepper’s friends. OK, one of his dealers. The band handles the piece’s intriguing time signature with such ease that it doesn’t immediately sink in that it’s in a then-obscure 5/4. Its crab-like gait is propelled pretty much by Bond’s bass, with Butler’s drums adding percussive colour while Pepper floats effortlessly around the rhythm. Sheldon’s solo starts at a point where understated becomes merely undercooked, however, and despite waking up a few bars later, he still sounds a little bemused.

A Bit of Basie (Buddy Collette) – a breathlessly propulsive piece driven by Butler’s implacable drums and by Pepper’s urgent soloing, rich with his trademark note repetitions and bending, stretching phrases. Jolly’s riffing solo echoes Basie’s own economic piano style, building great tension by means often as simple as nagging away at one single high note, and the piece bows out with Pepper and Butler swapping fours to thrillingly exciting effect.

How Can You Lose (Benny Carter) – an amiable, swinging stroll which originally appeared on Carter’s “Jazz Giant” album.  The blues-drenched chord changes elicit a fairly straightforward but friendly solo from Sheldon, who is clearly enjoying his most comfortable moment.

Maybe Next Year (Duane Tatro) – even at this slow tempo, Pepper’s wistful playing is keenly communicative – note how the piano player stands aside after just eight solo bars – and every note he plays seems to have been carefully picked from the stave at some perfect moment of emotional ripeness. The rest of the band keep a low profile on this one, leaving us free to admire in stark relief Art’s yearning and vibrato-rich performance. Not one for the cynics!

Tears Inside (Ornette Coleman) – by the time this album was recorded, Ornette Coleman had a fearsome reputation as a doyen of the avant garde, thanks to his piano-less quartet and harmonically free melodic conception.  There’s not much to be scared of here, however. Pepper handles the tricksy theme as though it was a nursery rhyme, and it comes as some surprise to hear Sheldon shadowing him with such ease. It doesn’t last; the performance resolves itself into a fairly straightforward twelve-bar pattern following the theme, and Sheldon, who enjoyed a parallel career as a stand-up comedian, takes a solo that initially suggests he’d forgotten which job he was on. Following solos from the rest of the band, Pepper and Sheldon lock horns most effectively, meshing wonderfully over a return to the theme to end the album on a high.

A follow-up album, the appropriately-titled “Intensity,” was recorded just a month later – shortly after recording “Smack Up,” Pepper was arrested for drug possession, and his benign producer at Contemporary, Lester Koenig, gave him the date to help towards the cost of his bail. He was imprisoned for three years, Koenig patiently shelving the album until his release, and that was pretty much it for Art Pepper in the 60s. Let us be thankful for the many fine albums he made while his reckless lifestyle wasn’t getting the better of him!

Mike Stoddart.