"Joe Zawinul" News / Via The Beardscratchers Compendium

Basquiat Strings: Part Two – review

Thu, 09 May 2013 22:00:01 +0100

(F-ire)

In 2007, British cellist Ben Davis and the quintet Basquiat Strings introduced their fusions of classical chamber techniques and jazz-, folk- and rock-inspired originals, unobtrusively steered by Polar Bear drummer Seb Rochford – a debut that brought the group a Mercury prize nomination that year. Now comes this leaner but equally engaging follow-up, with the drums (Rochford and Dave Smith both participate) even more tightly integrated, and this time just one cover (Wayne Shorter, Joe Zawinul and Ornette Coleman were all invoked in 2007): a mournfully seesawing, country-bluesy cello account of It Ain't Necessarily So. The music is often exhilarating, seductive in its episodes of calm, and buzzes with startling structural inventions. Busy tracks such as Calum Campbell mix a clamorous collective sound with treacherously tricksy rhythms; History of Her is a patiently unfolded rhythm-cycle intensified by Rochford's drums that swells to a whirling contrapuntal finale; Scam begins as a series of collective advances and retreats but becomes a rocking thrash; and the wraith-like Bebella turns into a melancholy bossa nova. It's been brewing a long time, but the second Basquiat chapter has been worth the wait.

Rating: 4/5

John Fordham

Robert Moog: 'I wouldn't call this music'

Wed, 23 May 2012 11:54:12 +0100

As what would have been the 78th birthday of Robert Moog is celebrated in a Google doodle, we visit Rock's Backpages – the world's leading archive of vintage music journalism – for this interview by Don Snowden, published in the Los Angeles Times in 1981, in which he shares his views on the new synth gods

It's not unusual for a musician to become controversial, but it is rare for a musical instrument to be debated. Robert Moog may have envisioned a limited market for synthesisers when he developed the instrument in the mid-60s, but it hasn't turned out that way.

"I knew it was applicable to pop music but our first market was the experimental composers, and that's not what you'd call the basis for a big business," Moog says now. "Nobody believed there was any future in that sort of thing."

Moog credits Wendy Carlos's 1968 album Switched on Bach with shattering the concept that synthesisers were only suitable for creating sound effects and avant-garde music. Tow years later the flamboyant Keith Emerson used a synthesiser on the first Emerson, Lake & Palmer LP, introducing the instrument to rock.

"Emerson, Lake & Palmer performed at Gaelic Park in New York City and it was incredible," Moog recalled. "There were 10,000 kids standing on a soccer field and here's Keith Emerson sticking knives in a Leslie cabinet. A New York musician who had bought some of my equipment was there and he was in complete shock. He said, 'This is the end of the world.'"

Emerson's wild-man-of-the-opera stage antics may have shocked some of Moog's more conventional customers but they thrilled many rock fans. ELP quickly became one of rock's most successful attractions and paved the way for other progressive rock bands like Yes and Genesis.

But synthesisers acquired a controversial reputation during the 70s. Many rock and jazz keyboard players quickly embraced the instrument for the flexibility and extra textural properties it offered. Others, however, felt that twisting knobs to create unusual sounds was tantamount to musical cheating. Queen, for instance, proclaimed on its album covers that the band did not use synthesisers.

Synthesisers became such a common feature of the progressive rock bands that dominated the mid-70s scene that the instrument virtually became the symbol of the entire genre. When the punk explosion reacted against the increasing complexity of rock music, complaints about "boring synthesisers bands" figured prominently in the attacks.

That phase didn't last too long, and David Bowie played a major role in sparking renewed interest in the instrument. By praising Kraftwerk's Trans Europe Express during his 1976 tour and collaborating with Brian Eno on a "non-musician" approach to synthesisers on the Low and "Heroes" LPs, Bowie alerted younger rock musicians that synthesisers could be used in more daring, experimental contexts.

Challenging English bands like Ultravox, Cabaret Voltaire and the Human League began building their sound around synthesizers. The Normal's Warm Leatherette became an LA underground hit in 1978 and Gary Numan cracked the national pop charts with the single Cars last year. American bands such as Suicide, the Units and LA's Wall of Voodoo surfaced with synthesiser-dominated sounds.

The new developments weren't confined to the rock arena. Giorgio Moroder's influential pop-disco production technique relied heavily on synthesisers. Eddy Grant adopted an electronic approach to reggae. Joe Zawinul used the synthesiser to simulate a big band horn section on Weather Report's recent cover of Duke Ellington's Rockin' in Rhythm.

Moog certainly didn't expect the outgrowth of his life-long hobby of building electronic instruments to be put to such diverse use. The 46-year-old inventor-engineer graduated from Columbia with a degree in electronic engineering and earned a PhD in engineering physics from Cornell. He developed the synthesiser in collaboration with a musician friend, Herbert Deutsch.

"I liked the guy's music and working together with him was interesting," Moog said by phone from his home in North Carolina. "We certainly didn't design the instrument with the idea that a guy with no musical training would use it. We always hoped and planned that it would be used by decent musicians.

"The keyboard was an afterthought. That was one convenient way of controlling it, switching it on and off and changing the pitch. The mini-Moog was conceived originally as a session musician's axe, something a guy could carry to the studio, do a gig and walk out. We thought we'd sell maybe 100 of them."

Moog obviously underestimated the demand for the instrument. Moog Music mushroomed from a small operation to one employing more than 40 people. A host of other companies entered the electronic instrument field during the 70s – adding string, guitar and polyphonic synthesisers as well as "syndrums" to the musician's potential arsenal – but Moog tired of the corporate whirl and four years ago sold out his interest in Moog Music to the Norlin Corp.

"I began in a completely undefined direction in 1964 and just by pursuing things that were interesting, I got myself into a fairly big operation," he explained. "The Norlin Corp. doesn't understand doing things that are interesting and then reaping the results. They have to see results every month and everything you do has to be approved by people who went to the Harvard Business School.

"I didn't function in that environment. What Moog Music is doing now is going after the well-developed, almost mature areas of the market and I want to go after the things for which there's no market yet. I'm finishing building a house and setting up a shop to build custom electronical musical instruments."

Moog may have retired from the rat race but still keeps in touch with the music world through a regular column for Contemporary Keyboards magazine. Curious about his opinions of current developments, Calendar submitted to Moog a tape of 10 songs offering a representative cross-section of the instrument's use in pop music today.

His reactions:

Star Cycle, Jeff Beck (from There and Back)

"It's a saving grace having Jan Hammer playing the lead. He's done more to use a small keyboard synthesiser expressively than any other one musician. There are 10,000 keyboard players breaking their fingers trying to do what he did. It's certainly not the most exciting music. There's a lot of music there but it sounded too arranged to me. This is my personal taste, but I would have preferred it a bit looser.

"That sequencer bass that's chugging along through the whole thing has a certain energy to it but also a certain sterility because it's always the same. I notice the same sort of thing in the Donna Summer tune [I Feel Love from Live and More]. Warm, lyrical vocals but essentially it sounded like she was fighting the sequencer. When the sequencer stopped, I felt that I could hear the audience sort of coming alive and breathing a sigh of relief."

Cars, Gary Numan (from The Pleasure Principle)

"I assume the lead instrument was the synthesiser but the playing came across a little bit simple. There's no pitch-bending, which you have to do in order to get expression in a lead line. I think you can get expression in a lead line. I think you can get away with simplicity in pop music as long as some part of it is complex or alive. For instance, the Eddy Grant tune [Living on the Front Line from the album of the same name], he's great singer. I'm not sure I've heard him before but I'd like to hear him again. I really liked the way the vocals sounded but the rest of the tune is really simple.

"On the other hand, the vocal was very weak on the Genesis tune [Cinema Show/Aisle of Plenty from Selling England by the Pound]. That's Peter Gabriel?! He sounds like he's half-dead on that record. It doesn't sound like recent Gabriel. That particular tune is long, static and the record as a whole came off to me as just not worth listening to."

Pop Muzik, M (from New York-London-Paris-Munich)

"I really like that tune. There was sequencer to it but I found the use of the electronics there, the punctuation that just flies out all over the record, is very, very musical. You can hear that a lot of thought and work went into getting those sounds right because there's very little that's used over and over."

Rockin' in Rhythm, Weather Report (from Night Passage)

"What can you say? I listen to a lot of Weather Report and what struck me about this is that the blending of the instruments is really spectacular. There was no self-conscious sticking out of electronics like on the simpler tunes. It sounded to me like a cartoon of a big-band sound. He got the musical essence of it but you'll never be fooling anybody into thinking there were actual horns. Zawinul's very creative, very musical."

Warm Leatherette, The Normal

"I wouldn't call this music. I'd call it more poetry, and pretty sophomoric poetry at that. The background sequence is short and repeated without variation. It's cleverly constructed to complement the subject matter. I hate to think on how little that must have cost to put together."

(Not Just) Knee Deep, Funkadelic (from Uncle Jam Needs You)

"I like the group. The vocals are what's important and the whole effect to me was musical. I heard a lot of different used of electronics in there. I think the bass line was electronic although it's hard to tell sometimes because, with the right number of fuzz boxes and the right playing technique, someone can almost make it sound like a synthesizer."

Warszawa, David Bowie (from Low)

"What was it used for? Obviously it's orchestral in concept. The whole quality for me was heavy and plodding; there's nothing joyous or swinging about it. It just got repetitious after a while, not enough musical variation."

Does Moog see any general trends or potential pitfalls in the future?

"The use of sequencers and pre-set patches, these electronic assists of some sort, raise a philosophical question," he reflected. "What is the musician really doing when he plays something that's preprogrammed? If he keeps busy, he can get as much musical content into manipulating something that's already preprogrammed as he can by playing every note on the keyboard from scratch.

"On the other hand, I just had to wonder, when the Donna Summer tune is played live, what do those guys do? The audience expects a musician to be doing something and if he's not doing as much as they except, it's more showbiz than music.

"Both the players and instrument designers have to learn something about really getting control of a lead synthesiser. To me, it's a big difference between just playing a keyboard and playing it with pitch-bending and vibrato so that it's expressive. Playing the keyboard is OK but there are very few people who can do something like Jan Hammer does."

This week's new live music

Sat, 09 Jul 2011 00:07:53 +0100

Congotronics Vs Rockers, London

The sounds made by Congolese group Konono No 1 far outstrip their homemade origins, taking in systemic repetitions and harmonic complexities. At this event, however, we can see how musicians from the rock world have taken up a challenge that only the likes of Björk and Belgian rapper Baloji have previously attempted. Now (with members from Kasai Allstars) calling themselves Congotronics, the band are touring as part of a 19-strong troupe of musicians including singer songwriter Juana Molina and alt-rockers Deerhoof, to support their recent Tradi-Mods Vs Rockers collaboration album. It's odd, it's noisy, and incredibly groovy.

Barbican Hall, EC2, Tue

John Robinson

Lovebox 2011, London

If you were having it large most weekends in 1997, it's likely that you now save it up for Lovebox, where you can have it no less large, even if you're only having it once a year. A London festival with the best of both worlds (proximity to civilisation on the one hand; trees, pockets of mild eccentricity and variety on the other), this is a three-day event for the one-time big beat devotee (it grew out of a Groove Armada club night) grown older but without abandoning the party agenda. This year, indie (the Wombats), urban dance (Katy B; Skream) and hip-hop (Snoop Dogg) are all mined for their most party-appropriate acts, but it's probably Snoop (performing his humid, G-funk classic Doggystyle) who may best capture the mood.

Victoria Park, E3, Fri to 17 Jul

Kesha, On tour

Given the circumstances of her upbringing (a crazily peripatetic early life, brought up in rehearsal rooms and at dive bars where her mum plied her trade as a struggling singer-songwriter), you would forgive Kesha if she were the writer of hard-luck country rock anthems. As it is, she's what you might call the anti-Taylor Swift, and the performer of juvenile delinquent rave pop – a world of parties, underage drinking and the attentions of low-quality "dudes" so far chronicled on her 2010 album Animal and now presented here on her Get Sleazy Tour. Those who no longer live with their parents might find themselves slightly outside the target market of these brash confessions of teenage independence, but the appeal of the noisy synth pop anthem is something that can sometimes transcend age. And hey, who doesn't like to party sometimes?

T In The Park, Kinross, Sat; Oxegen, Naas, Sun; O2 Apollo Manchester, Mon; HMV Apollo Hammersmith, W6, Wed

John McLaughlin, London

With last year's album To The One, guitar master John McLaughlin rammed home the message that over 40 years on the road have not slowed his lightning reactions or his enthusiasm for high-energy fusion music. McLaughlin performs two rare back-to-back club shows on this date with his 4th Dimension band. He has described the last recording as representing an imaginative renaissance for him in 2009, and though its mix of cascading runs, percussion thunderings and rock-drama climaxes might initially sound familiar fare for him, both the playing and the composing hum with a fresh collaborative energy. Keyboardist Gary Husband elegantly shadows McLaughlin's phrasing at every turn, the hard-groovers are leavened by an easygoing airiness on slow pieces, and the synth-sounds of Joe Zawinul or the riffs of McLaughlin's iconic 1970s Mahavishnu Orchestra surface all over the place.

Ronnie Scott's, W1, Mon

John Fordham

Buxton Festival

Though Buxton isn't just about opera, it's the festival's regular explorations around the edges of the familiar operatic repertoire that gives the real character to the three-week-long programme. Each year the festival puts on three productions of its own, rarely venturing too far into the 20th century but always turning up something forgotten or neglected, and broadening the operatic menu with guest performances by touring companies as well. This year there's an updating of Handel's Saul by Olivia Fuchs; Donizetti's opera seria Maria di Rohan, directed by Stephen Medcalf with Mary Plazas in the title role; and – to mark the bicentenary of the birth of Ambroise Thomas – a rare staging of his most celebrated opera Mignon, conducted by the festival's artistic director Andrew Greenwood.

Opera House, Sat to 27 Jul

Andrew Clements

The Proms, London

Advance word on the 2011 Proms programme was that this was going to be a relatively ordinary season, with budgets being carefully regulated to make sure there was enough in the kitty for a bigger splash next year to coincide with the Olympics. But the Proms 2011 programme is one of the most intriguing and wide-ranging seasons for years. True, there isn't a long, glitzy roster of visiting orchestras from around the world, but from the opening weekend onwards there's a regular supply of first-rate soloists, important premieres and imaginatively devised programmes. It kicks off on Friday with the BBC Symphony Orchestra, with Benjamin Grosvenor as the soloist in Liszt's Second Piano Concerto, followed on successive evenings by a concert performance of Rossini's final opera, William Tell, and Havergal Brian's huge Gothic Symphony.

Royal Albert Hall, SW7, Fri

Andrew Clements

John Fordham

John Robinson

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Finn Peters: Music of the Mind | CD review

Thu, 28 Oct 2010 22:45:01 +0100

(Mantella Records)

British flautist and saxophonist Finn Peters is no purist jazzer, despite possessing a tenor sound that spans the worlds of John Coltrane and the soul-jazz horn players. He's worked with Dizzee Rascal and Matthew Herbert and the contemporary classical group Noszferatu, and this venture – two years in the making, with electronics and computer-music guru Matthew Yee King – explores the possibilities of music coupling regular ensemble playing to computer sounds generated by directly tapping brainwaves. The technology doesn't yet permit real-time generation of tricky melody lines by thought alone, but Peters says many of the moods and starting points on this session came by that route, and the upshot is a frequently tightly grooving brew of early Dr Who-style radiophonic bleepings, Headhunters-like bass hooks, free-sax laments reminiscent of Albert Ayler or Ornette Coleman, charging Joe Zawinul riffs, and choppy rhythm-layering sax parts like the music of Tim Berne or David Binney. Hip-hop beats against punchy basslines, long electronic hums like rubbed glass, Latin groovers turning into nimble duets for Peters's sax and the remarkable Oren Marshall's tuba, lapping-water noises and churchy organs – it all adds up to a session of very absorbing contrasts driven by a canny dance sensibility, even if the unique impact of the brainpower technique isn't all that apparent.

Rating: 3/5

John Fordham

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Joe Zawinul: Money in the Pocket | CD review

Thu, 11 Feb 2010 23:15:03 +0000

(Atlantic)

The late, great Joe Zawinul is most fondly remembered for Weather Report and for his later leadership of one of the best world-jazz fusion bands, the Zawinul Syndicate. Money in the Pocket, however, represents the Zawinul story earlier on, in 1965, after he had been playing in Cannonball Adderley's band for four years. That band's catchy themes were significantly influenced both by Adderley's gospel roots and by Zawinul's melodic powers, and this session reflects the driving grooves of that popular soul-jazz style – so there are a lot of backbeats, repeating riffs, horn-harmony wailing and stagey stop-time breaks. But if some of this is generic early jazz-funk, Zawinul's piano-playing reveals his sophistication and sumptuous elegance, notably on solo outings such as the ballad My One and Only Love. The funky Some More of Dat is squarely in Lee Morgan's Sidewinder mode, but the closing Del Sasser shows how complete a jazz pianist Zawinul already was by this time, and what a distinctive composer, too.

Rating: 3/5

John Fordham

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