A quarterly journal with information about all Westbrook projects,
tours and recordings.
Excerpts from Issue 75
In this issue:
This month Smith’s Academy celebrates Mike Westbrook’s 70th birthday. 21st March 1936 - a pivotal time in world history and in music. While Hitler was sending troops across the Rhine, Russian romantic composer Alexander Glazunov died in Paris, and Mike Westbrook was born in High Wycombe.
The year in which Satchmo was swinging that music, and Duke echoing Harlem, also saw the birth of Albert Ayler.
When Mike was barely one week old, Richard Rodney Bennett was born in Broadstairs. Bennett, respected in the classical world for his absorption of a wide range of stylistic influences, incorporated jazz elements into his sound world. Westbrook’s music is similarly diverse, though his journey moved the other way. Firmly rooted in the music of Armstrong and Ellington his early work blended these traditions with the innovations of the jazz avant garde. Constantly evolving, his expanded palette now embraces classical techniques, opera, and more. It still retains the capacity to delight, provoke and surprise even the most informed of his listeners.
At seventy you can be forgiven for taking things easy, yet his diary reveals a range of activity of which men half his age would be proud. Some of the more senior Smith’s Academy staff still have fond memories of Duke’s 70th birthday tour. He was still on great form presenting a familiar programme, yet introducing new voices and new material. Mike’s 70th birthday season promises to deliver a similarly memorable mix of old and new.
There will be a big band concert with the Guildhall Big Band. This includes a long-overdue premiere of the Wasteground Concerto (1981). A brand new piece The Waxeywork Show gets its first airing with Mike’s newest ensemble, the Westbrook Village Band Project. Then there’s a reissue of the Citadel/Room 315 album, given a timely plug when Mike is in conversation with composer Philip Clark at Foyle’s Bookshop in London. And there will be performances of Art Wolf, including one with an expanded group for Radio 3’s Jazz on 3. And, thanks to the efforts of that indefatigable Informee Frank Eichler, television viewers in southern Germany can see a complete Westbrook Rossini concert.
But, in the end, it’s not just the breadth of vision that makes Mike’s music special, but its quality, and the human values which are always at its heart. If Mr Blair has his way many of us will carry on working later in life. We should be grateful for men like Westbrook and Ellington who prove, not simply that it can be done, but that it can be done with class, energy and originality. And that’s a real inspiration.
Happy birthday Mike. Keep it up, Maestro!
The Dean
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About ten years ago Kate and I put an ad in the newsletter of the South Hams village where we were living for anyone who played a brass instrument. This yielded a teenager who was learning french horn. The Holbeton Brass Band made its debut with french horn, tenor horn and tuba, playing carols at Christmas. Soon another youngster joined on alto sax, and regular sessions began in Kate’s painting studio. After a while musicians from the nearby village of Ermington joined, bringing in trumpet, trombone and tenor sax and, in the school holidays, clarinet. Here was a viable line-up, mixed in age and ability. I was able to tailor the arrangements to the players’ capabilities. Nobody wanted to improvise so I wrote the solos. As exercises in jazz phrasing I transcribed, for example, Baby Cox’s scat vocal chorus on Duke’s 1928 recording of The Mooche for everyone to play. Likewise part of John Handy’s solo on Jelly Roll from the Mingus Ah Um album.
The band turned out for the summer fete, for local charity events, the beer festival and the carol service. It played for the re-opening of an ancient cart wash on a farm north of Dartmoor and, on a beautiful sunny day, for a service at the Church of Peter the Poor Fisherman, a ruined church on the cliffs, open to the sky.
Quite often someone couldn’t make one of these gigs. However, we found that there were many musicians in the area, including practising or former professionals, willing to help out. We called on altoist Stan Willis, a friend and colleague from way back, and an improviser of the first rank, who lives in Brixham. Stan’s presence gave the band a lift, as did the contributions of Mike Brewer, a fine lead trumpeter from Newton Abbot. Soon we started holding separate sessions for the ‘guests’, who were keen to play, and I wrote some special arrangements. Sam Smith, an excellent trombone player and big band leader from Exeter, joined. Karen Street, now living in Wells, came in on tenor sax from time to time. As well as the Holbeton Brass Band, we started to do the odd gig with this rather hastily named South Westbrook Band. At the time, however, it was difficult to see how to take it further.
Our move to Dawlish in 2004 sadly put paid to the Holbeton Brass Band. It may return in another form. There is certainly still a need for it. We were however better placed geographically to resume the SWB, with the original players but with the addition of sterling Dawlish tenor man Gary Bayley. Which brings us to the Village Band Project.
Regular rehearsals are held at the RAFA Club. In the upstairs pool room, surrounded by World War II memorabilia, and in a general backwoods atmosphere reminiscent of Sven Klang’s Combo, a new ensemble has been born with a sound quite its own.
Writing for the six horns is a challenge and a joy. When Kate came up with the concept of the Waxeywork Show we decided to write it for and premiere it with this group. But until the first performance at Totnes Jazz Collective on February 9th I don’t think any of us had quite realised how potent the combination of Kate’s voice and lyrics with the acoustic horns would be. Clearly this is a sound that will carry far.
The Village Band has inherited much of the spirit of the old (Mike Westbrook) Brass Band, and some of its repertoire. You will still hear Sepent Maigre. And the Waxeywork Show has echoes of Bartlemy Fair. Nevertheless, as it should be, the Village Band Project is very much the product of its time and its situation, and of the talents and aspirations of the individuals concerned. We hope that the Village Band Project will blow your way, and blow you away, soon!
Mike Westbrook
more information about Mike Westbrook's Village Band Project
10th November 2005
Coming Together was the highlight of this concert at The Warehouse near London's South Bank Centre, still savoured on a post event stroll in the mild autumn night on the illuminated Thames riverbank. Let me start at the beginning though...
The opening piece Interference (comp. Richard Barrett) with Carl Rosman on contrabass clarinet, voice and drum to my mind was a minutely planned equivalent of white noise, something not easily achieved. In that it fell within the scope of one of the evening's themes of music and texts reflecting on itself, its performance and the people involved. The piece served to clear the palate rather as bread does for a wine tasting. Senses sharpened, we were then introduced to the second theme of the evening, political song, in a rendering of Hanns Eisler's Hollywood Elegies by Kate Westbrook, accompanied by Ian Pace on piano. Kate prefaced the mostly German texts with a spoken version of some translations.
The Year of Miracles (Annus Mirabilis), comp. Mike Westbrook, based on the original by Chris Cutler and Lindsay Cooper) featured Kate Westbrook again on vocals. As an antithesis to the 'annus horribilis' it carried the utopian theme in the tradition of William Blake forward to our time.
Without Smith's Academy staff participation, renderings of Michael Finnisey's Not Afraid and Recent Britain suffered somewhat from the intentionally blurred vocals. Still N.A. gave food for thought in that it was not, as might have been expected, simply a celebration or a criticism of the spirit in the wake of the London bombings, but envisioned this attitude in other situations. The motif of R.B., fragmented excerpts from news bulletins, has been heard in a better setting in The Show Goes On on Kate’s Goodbye Peter Lorre album.
Palestinian Stone Child (comp. David Smith, excellent vocal performance by Carl Rosman) illustrated, to freely quote Henry James's foreword to his New York edition, that "the statements of a protagonist or narrator should not be mistaken for the views of the writer/composer". While we cannot condone violence and counter-violence, we understand the emotions of the child caught in the conflict and it has a right to be heard.
Ian Pace's quasi una fantasmagoria Opus 120 No.2 (Ian Pace and Mark Knoop on piano) painted a canvas of the music business and its establishment, of performances and audiences, matinees and cocktail talk, teachers and students. Always compassionate, it ranged from sad to satirical.
On Philip Clark's All The Rage Alex Ward, expertly on guitar with a distinct percussive element, and Kate Westbrook, her voice beautifully modulating the spoken text, defined a structured rhythmic space between them.
Engaging the audience with a steadily increasing drive the grand finale was Coming Together. Music by Frederic Rzewski set to excerpts from a letter by Sam Melville, one of the prisoners killed in the Attica prison riots. For this all performers joined in, among them Philip Clark on portable organ. Outstanding in this was Kate Westbrook's fifteen minute tour de force, showcasing her vocal capabilities, her clarity and ability of precise timekeeping. She made the piece come alive, a minimalist text and music setting with rhythmic variations and subtle changes in volume inducing a kind interference pattern of the mind.
Not an evening of light fare (but then that is not what anyone had come for) leaving me with the satisfaction of ears and mind well exercised.
Frank Eichler
These are excerpts from the March 2006 edition (Issue 75) of the Smith's Academy Informer. To subscribe to the full paper edition, please write to us at the subscription address below.
