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Bebop Spoken There

Art Blakey: "You [Bobby Watson] don't want to play too long, because you don't know they're clapping because they're glad you finished!" - (JazzTimes, Nov. 2019)..

The Things They Say!

Hudson Music: Lance's "Bebop Spoken Here" is one of the heaviest and most influential jazz blogs in the UK.

Rupert Burley (Dynamic Agency): "BSH just goes from strength to strength".

'606' Club: "A toast to Lance Liddle of the terrific jazz blog 'Bebop Spoken Here'"

The Strictly Smokin' Big Band included Be Bop Spoken Here (sic) in their 5 Favourite Jazz Blogs.

Ann Braithwaite (Braithwaite & Katz Communications) You’re the BEST!

Holly Cooper, Mouthpiece Music: "Lance writes pull quotes like no one else!"

Postage

15867 (and counting) posts since we started blogging 15 years ago. 874 of them this year alone and, so far, 72 this month (Sept. 25).

From This Moment On ...

September

Sat 30: John Pope Quintet + Late Girl + Shapeshifters @ Bobik's, Jesmond, Newcastle.
Sat 30: Papa G's Troves @ Prohibition Bar, Newcastle. 8:00pm. A 'Jar on the Bar' gig.

OCTOBER

Sun 01: Smokin' Spitfires @ The Cluny, Newcastle. 12:45pm.
Sun 01: Dulcie May Moreno sings Portrait of Sheila @ Central Bar, Gateshead. 2:00pm. £10.00. Moreno sings Sheila Jordan with Giles Strong, Mick Shoulder & John Bradford.
Sun 01: Middlesbrough Jazz & Blues Orchestra @ Saltburn Community Hall. 2:00pm.
Sun 01: The Easy Rollers @ Prohibition Bar, Newcastle. 7:00pm. £13.70., £11.55.
Sun 01: Brand/Roberts/Champion/Sanders @ Blank Studios, Newcastle. 8:00pm. A Newcastle Festival of Jazz & Improvised Music event.
Sun 01: Papa G's Troves @ The Globe, Newcastle. 8:00pm.

Mon 02: Harmony Brass @ Cullercoats Crescent Club. 1:00pm.
Mon 02: FILM: Wattstax; 50th Anniversary @ Forum Cinema, Hexham. 8:00pm.

Tue 03: Paul Skerritt @ The Rabbit Hole, Hallgarth St., Durham DH1 3AT. 7:00pm. Paul Skerritt's (solo) weekly residency.
Tue 03: Jam session @ The Black Swan, Newcastle. 7:30pm. House trio: Michael Young (piano); Paul Grainger (double bass); Sid White (drums). CANCELLED!

Wed 04: Vieux Carré Jazzmen @ Cullercoats Crescent Club. 1:00pm.
Wed 04: Darlington Big Band @ Darlington & Simpson Rolling Mills Social Club, Darlington. 7:00pm. Rehearsal session (open to the public).
Wed 04: Paul Skerritt @ Vespa Italian Bar & Steakhouse, Primrose Hill, Jarrow. From 7:00pm. To book a table - 0191 483 3355.
Wed 04: Take it to the Bridge @ The Globe, Newcastle. 7:30pm.

Thu 05: Vieux Carré Jazzmen @ The Holystone, Whitley Road, North Tyneside. 1:00pm. Free.
Thu 05: Sound the Trumpets @ King's Hall, Newcastle University. 1:15pm. Free.
Thu 05: Hot Club du Nord @ The Lubetkin Theatre, Peterlee. 7:00pm. £10.00. POSTPONED!
Thu 05: Thursday Night Prayer Meeting @ The Globe, Newcastle. 7:30pm.
Thu 05: Tommy Bentz Trio + Mark Croft Duo + George Shovlin & George Lamb @ The Harbour View, Sunderland. 8:00pm. Free. Harbour View Speakeasy's USA blues double bill + Shovlin & Lamb!
Thu 05: Merlin Roxby @ Prohibition Bar, Newcastle. 8:00pm. Ragtime piano. A 'Jar on the Bar' gig.
Thu 05: Tees Hot Club @ Dorman's Club, Middlesbrough. 9:00pm.

Fri 06: Alcyona Mick @ Lit & Phil, Newcastle. 1:00pm. A Newcastle Festival of Jazz & Improvised Music event.
Fri 06: Classic Swing @ Cullercoats Crescent Club. 1:00pm.
Fri 06: New Orleans Preservation Jazz Band @ Oxbridge Hotel, Stockton. 1:00pm. £5.00.
Fri 06: Rendezvous Jazz @ The Monkseaton Arms, Monkseaton. 1:00pm.
Fri 06: WORKSHOP: Philosophy of Arts & Entertainment @ Lit & Phil, Newcastle. 2:00pm. A Newcastle Festival of Jazz & Improvised Music event.
Fri 06: Balo @ Lit & Phil, Newcastle. 6:20pm. A Newcastle Festival of Jazz & Improvised Music event.
Fri 06: Paul Skerritt @ 3Sixty Champagne Lounge, Hadrian’s Tower, Newcastle. From 7:00pm. To book a table - 0191 933 8591.
Fri 06: Lexer/Mayes/Noble + Semay Wu + Miman @ Lit & Phil, Newcastle. 7:20pm. A Newcastle Festival of Jazz & Improvised Music event.
Fri 06: Dulcie May Moreno @ The Vault, Hexham. 7:30pm. £20.00. Book in advance. Moreno with Alan Law, Paul Grainger & John Bradford.
Fri 06: Dean Stockdale Quartet @ Saltburn Community Hall. 7:30pm. 'Celebrating Oscar'.
Fri 06: Nu Brass Sounds: Big Brass Bash @ Billy Bootlegger’s, Newcastle. 8:00pm. Free.
Fri 06: TBC @ Prohibition Bar, Newcastle. 8:00pm. Blind Pig Blues Club. A 'Jar on the Bar' gig.

Tuesday, June 18, 2019

CD Review/Interview: Daniel Elms with Manchester Collective & Jubilee Quartet - Islandia (New Amsterdam NWAM114)


(By A.J. Dehany)

An urgent evocation of the primal spirit of islands suffuses the dramatic textures of composer, arranger and guitarist Daniel Elms' debut album Islandia. Recorded at Abbey Road with chamber orchestra, electric guitar and synths, and a concluding track recorded live at Hull Minster, the five pieces assert the ineffable universalities of post-genre music, using elements drawn from classical, jazz, electronic and world music.

Daniel Elms’ influences include the sharp-edged and “glassy” orchestral palette of American composer Jacob Druckman, and the parallelism and geometric constructs of Béla Bartók, and the album uses material from folk songs and even techniques inspired by serialism. In his approach to crafting music, he cites Debussy’s Jeux as a formative influence; it’s important to him, that melody, harmony and instrumentation be conceived simultaneously as inseparable conceptions. “Instrumental and timbral choice,” he says, “have always been an intrinsic part of my writing - even a line sketched on the piano will be marked with its suggested instrumentation and timbral character. There’s so much “emotional” content conveyed by instrument and timbre - they are incredibly deep compositional tools, not just ones of arrangement.”

Born in Hull of what he calls a “seafaring family” he left to study composition at the Royal College of Music but later returned to the inspirations of Yorkshire and the coastal northeast of England. Closing track Bethia was first performed in 2017 as part of Hull’s UK City of Culture. The album fell into shape as a loosely sea-themed song cycle or suite without too much conscious prodding, he says. “I hadn’t set out to make something so personal - a retrospective if you like. But as I began to sketch the material while locked away on the coast, the waves and storms that rolled in sparked something. Progressively everything I wrote lived or died by its ability or failure to evoke something of the sea.”

The title track Islandia is a wide-ranging passage through episodes of unsettling atonality and tense suspended harmony, then driving rhythms for strings, horn and synths. It has an original approach to tempo, which fluctuates symmetrically over the ten-minute piece. You feel physically drawn along on a voyage through the stormy currents and profondeurs of archetypal universal aspects of being. Islandia is inspired by the Utopia novel of the same name by Austin Tappan Wright. Daniel Elms says his music isn’t Utopian in itself but does invest in a strong sense of place and places, both from direct experience and from his fascination with less familiar forms of music.

Islandia uses themes from the Pacific island song Meke Iwau or “Club Dance”. In The Old Declarn much of the material is derived from one particular folk song of the same name, which he found in a book of Appalachian folk songs during a month-long residency at the former home of Imogen Holst. The book contained twelve regional variations of the song, which he applies musically in spare haunting writing for piano.

Soft Machines evokes eerie harmonic realms. It is composed using a short note series that cycles round with declining bar lengths, phasing and interacting with itself in a complex
unpredictable way. Spiky electric guitar and trumpet break across an immersive orchestral texture. Christian Barraclough’s trumpet is Harmon muted with tape delay whose decay time changes over the piece creating uneasy undulations of rhythmic sense.

North Sea Quartet and Bethia steer us into deep atmospheric evocations of lost maritime pasts. Bethia is the name of a ship that was built in Blaydes Shipyard, Hull, though it is more commonly known by its later name HMS Bounty (the very same vessel from “Mutiny on the Bounty”) after its purchase by the Navy. This atmospheric live recording draws to a close the album’s ancient sense clashing with the modern as it breaks into an insistent electronic beat. The vocals and lyrics derived from traditional sea shanties about the North Sea and Northern ports. “Northern sky rose,/ Blood red, blood-red rose/ East and West,/ You who sail ‘cross the sea,/ Sailor bold.”

Daniel Elms is presenting the album live for the first time on tour with an ensemble of nine musicians drawn from his regular collaborators the Jubilee Quartet and the Manchester Ensemble, who are presenting their extraordinary and unmissable take on Paradise Lost. They are in the vanguard of a pleasing progressive tendency (shared by organisations such as nonclassical) to demystify works from the classical canon and contemporary experimental tendencies. It’s an exciting moment for complex creative music.

A.J. Dehany
The writer is based in London and writes independently about music, art and stuff. ajdehany.co.uk

Islandia is released 21 June on New Amsterdam on vinyl, CD and download.

Album tour with Manchester Collective
Tuesday 18th June, 20.00: The CLF Arts Cafe, London
Friday 21st June, 20.00: Penny Red Arts, Hull
Saturday 22nd June 20.00: The White Hotel, Salford

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