Standard form

 

I may perhaps have let slip just once or twice that I'm not necessarily the biggest fan of jazz standards, even when B. is playing them - although that does depend on what we mean by standards, and also on who is in the band at the time... anyway, I'm not looking to belabour the point, but when McC first suggested to me earlier this summer that I might want to check out the mammoth NBH release Quartet (Standards) 2020, I didn't quite leap to it. I was already aware of this huge undertaking, of course: some of the material came from concerts I'd missed out on in London, for a start, and I knew the band included pianist Alexander Hawkins, for my money one of the more consistently interesting British player-bandleaders in the new millennium; I also knew - though I only found this out within the last year - that the liner notes for this box set had been penned by one of my former BBC Radio 3 "messagebored" comrades, David Grundy. All points in favour, one might say... but... thirteen discs? I am as susceptible to giant box sets by the maestro as the next friendly experiencer - more than most, I daresay - but sixty-seven standards just seemed like too many to bite off, never mind chew*.

Still, I spent much of the summer working my way through a considerable proportion of the NBH back catalogue, and at a certain point I just found myself thinking: why not, let's give it a go. 

So, my initial impression was: wow! The band is so good, and the approach so fresh and creative, that I was easily able to avoid dwelling on the core material itself. I wasn't previously familiar with bassist Neil Charles or drummer Steven Davis - but they weren't plucked out of the air: both of them play with Hawkins, for some time now in Charles' case**; the pianist himself, a longtime admirer of B's, seized this opportunity with both hands (literally...) and plays at a high level throughout. 

Almost inevitably, though, it wasn't long before clouds began to threaten my sunny mood. I've said numerous times that for me there is quite a significant difference between "modern standards" - composed by jazz musicians - and numbers from the Great American Songbook***, whether that means old Tin Pan Alley hits or show-tunes. In the case of the latter... something very creative had better be done with them, is all I can say. (By the same token, just because a given tune was penned by a jazz musician doesn't automatically mean that a cover version of it will be worth hearing.) By the middle of the first disc - or the set of five numbers, since I don't have the physical box set - I was already struggling a bit through "Desafinado", which (purely from my heavily-skewed perspective) rather falls in between the above categories: it was written by a modern composer, sure, but with all due respect to the "Father of Bossa Nova" (and to his numerous admirers), Jobim didn't make the kind of music I am ever likely to listen to voluntarily. [My taste may be peculiar, but it is my own... and I know what I don't like.]

Entirely predictably, then, by the time I'd got through the first couple of sets/ discs, I'd already concluded that the best way for me to approach this monster album is... slowly, bit by bit. The preponderance of material which I would never normally want to hear just proved a bit too much for me, and even the excellent musicianship wasn't enough to maintain my enthusiasm. Amongst those first ten cuts, Andrew Hill's "Pumpkin" sticks out like a sore thumb as the only piece which I would ever actually seek out; I'm sure most of the tracks here did sound pretty good in these interpretations, although it's now quite a few weeks since I heard them and I can no longer remember the details, not having made any notes. But I did decide to take a bit of a break, if only to give myself the best possible chance of enjoying the rest of the music.

That turned out to be a good idea, because as I carried on gradually listening my way through, I found myself warming to the album more and more. This was not always limited to the more obvious selections, either; B. really dug deep into the bag to pull out "standards" that probably nobody else would play, such as "The Inch Worm" (disc six) and - no, really - "Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf" (disc nine), but these sound fine enough with this treatment; I would probably never want to hear the old Cole Porter chestnut "I Get a Kick out of You" at all, if asked - let alone a rendition of it lasting twenty-two minutes - but the version which opens disc six pretty much blew me away, its superb playing taking the music way beyond the source material. (I don't share B's enthusiasm for Paul Simon, suffice it to say - I am sure I am firmly in the minority there so I really shan't elaborate much, but some of his numbers came closest to wearing me down. I didn't need to hear Johnny Cash doing "Bridge Over Troubled Water", and I didn't need to hear it here either.)

I still haven't finished, because I really have been stretching it out, but so far I would say probably disc nine - or the five tracks which are included on it - proved the most enjoyable for me. Some old show-tune I've never heard of opens this group (I can't very well call them"sets", since the tracks are presented out of sequence, not in the order in which they were recorded), which also includes "... Big Bad Wolf", as noted above; B. has great fun with that one on sopranino sax. It's rounded out with the rather obscure "Double Clutching" by Chuck Israels#, "Sue's Changes" - also not one of the better-known Mingus compositions - and "Nardis", which is actually a Miles Davis number##, although Hawkins seems fiercely determined to play it like Andrew Hill. The upshot is, this approach of eking out the discs one at a time seems to be working out well, because my enjoyment of the music has only increased; dare I say it, these may be some of the most enjoyable standards of B's I've yet had the pleasure of hearing.

Anyway, that's about all I have to say on this for the time being - and that's just as well, since my attention seems to be elsewhere just now, and even this feeble excuse for a post has taken something like four days to write. Still plenty more in the pipeline though..!

***

On a completely unrelated note, I got briefly excited the other day when a Discogs notification led me to the reed duo album Duets (Pittsburgh) 2008, with Ben Opie###: the master record had been updated to change the reference to 298 (in the tertiary material on the first disc) to 29b. I actually have this album on CD, but I bought it six or seven years ago (i.e. during the period when I wasn't listening to much of this kind of music) and only played it once, so far; it suddenly seemed to offer the chance of some backup for my contesting the accuracy of TCF's identification of Comp. 61, something which is currently still up in the air (and likely to remain that way for the foreseeable future). But then I remembered that the piece on the duo album with Mario Pavone is 29a, not 29b... never mind. It's reminded me to play the album again anyway, if I find time for it... until I can clone myself, finding time is always the problem... 

* It doesn't help that I never got very far with the three box-set albums of standards on Leo. I was put off these very early on, and basically I never went back to them. (In those cases, the fact that the fourth voice is supplied by undistorted electric guitar presents an additional problem for me; but B's own playing on that material had a completely different effect on me from normal. Strange but true.)

** Neil Charles must have replaced Dom Lash as Hawkins' go-to bassist round about the same time I sort of stopped listening to Hawkins' music; there was no real reason for that, it was just a natural development at the time, but when I found myself listening to a lot more jazz and creative music again more recently, I didn't re-establish my interest in Hawkins. Yet. (Still time, of course.)

*** I had to force myself not to put this phrase in inverted commas, or strike it through, or couch it in irony some other visible way... such is my resistance to the whole concept which the phrase itself represents. Various reasons for that, and... I've decided to leave it there ;-)

# The original can be found on the one and only recorded meeting of Cecil Taylor and John Coltrane, which was effectively sabotaged - or at least heavily undermined - by the unsympathetic presence of Kenny Dorham, not the first choice of trumpeter on the date. (Most people probably now know the resulting album as Coltrane Time, although Taylor was actually the session leader and the album was originally released, with a different running order, under his name.) I don't know of any other covers of this tune. 

## Davis himself never recorded it, and the tune became more associated with Bill Evans (apparently - says Wikipedia! I had to look it up as I couldn't remember where the piece was originally from). Miles didn't really write much - at least not once he'd got himself firmly established on the scene - and generally preferred to have other people around to do that for him, when he himself wasn't mining standards. Any later numbers with his name on tend to sound as if they were "composed" in a few idle minutes in the studio; it will be noted, though, that B. particularly likes playing "Four", and did bring it out again for this project.

### I personally only know Opie from this recording, though his name crops up in the discography a couple of times besides... a decade prior to the duo meeting, Opie's Water Shed 5tet had recorded Comp. 23i (+40c) on their album Circuit Breaker; later, he took part in the Three Rivers Tri-Centric Ensemble, which turned out this fascinating-looking recording (which, alas, I may never actually get to hear; it seems so obscure that I didn't even bother to include it on my wants list, though properly speaking it does belong there...). I'm not sure if he studied under B. at Wesleyan, though that seems at least plausible.