While the staff at Smith’s Academy are working on this issue of the magazine the world is watching Tony Blair hand over the baton to Gordon Brown, and commentators are reflecting over the past decade. Ten years is a long time, in music as in politics, and we’ve all seen our share of changes.
Some things remain. Smith’s Academy for one. A browse through our archives shows that as the Blair years began Mike was composing a string quartet for the gogmagogs, a saxophone concerto for John Harle, and starting to work on Platterback. The Westbrook Orchestra was taking us to Bar Utopia, the Duo introducing us to Friedrich Hollaender, while the Off Abbey Road band put in occasional appearances, and the Brass Band stepped out to perform the Westbrook Blake. There was also talk of making available historic material from the Academy’s vaults. Good Friday 1663 and The Ass have since been released on CD, and now – making its first appearance in digital format – Mama Chicago is being issued (Jazzprint JPVP139CD).
We’ve described before (SAI 77) the trials and tribulations encountered cleaning up the decaying master tapes. The end product demonstrates loud and clear that it was worth all the effort, and it’s great to have it available at last. The sound is full and rich and the music bursts with energy. Everybody in this seven piece ensemble is in sparkling form, but the vocal team of Kate Westbrook and Phil Minton is truly outstanding. It’s a sobering thought to realise that these performances were recorded just six weeks after Margaret Thatcher became Prime Minister in 1979, and had been performed in Edinburgh the year before that. Talk about water under the bridge!
Despite an ever-increasing pile of re-issues arriving almost daily, there has been no resting on laurels at Smith’s Academy. Students have continued to come up with new and surprising projects, each one for a different line-up. Hard on the heels of the innovative Waxeywork Show came their one-woman opera CAPE GLOSS Mathilda’s Story, and Marie Vassilliou’s stunning performance at the world premiere.
Swanage was the scene of the next premiere Blues for a Blue Earth, bringing together the brilliant Billy Thompson and the delightful community-based Purbeck Strings, and the Stanford String Quartet.
The ink was scarcely dry on this when the Westbrook Blake material had to be completely rearranged for the choral version using piano, violin and accordion.
The resulting London concert - put on, incidentally, six weeks before Blair stepped down— was as strong as any we’ve ever heard. It is heartening that Kate and Phil are still giving spine-tingling vocal performances. Several old friends and new gathered in London’s Foundling Museum and were joined by distinctive historic characters including Captain Thomas Coram, founder of the Foundling Hospital, who looked on approvingly from his portrait by patron William Hogarth, and friend and supporter Georg Frideric Handel (represented by Roubiliac’s bust) who also lent his presence to the evening.
Karen Street demonstrated she is a major interpreter of the Westbrooks’ music, and Billy Thompson – a newcomer to the Academy – proved to be a master of classical, jazz, rock, folk, gypsy, blues and any other style of violin you care to think of, and brought a fresh and vibrant voice to this music.
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Meanwhile yet another score has been completed—a work for piano and wind band The Empress Concerto dedicated to Bessie Smith. This is one of a series commissioned on a theme of Women’s Portraits, and it will be premiered in Paris in December.
And yet more tasks lie ahead for our hard-pressed Department of Composition. Plus ça change...
The Dean
In defiance of the world-wide slump in CD sales that is causing such gloom and doom in the big record companies, indeed in celebration of the likely demise of the giant corporations who’ve come to dominate the musical life of the planet, Smiths Academy, with the help of dedicated independent labels, continues to generate albums.
The Village Band’s debut album Waxeywork Show will hopefully be available at summer gigs and online from jazzcds in August, in anticipation of an official ’launch’ in October.
The craze for re-issues continues apace. Jazzprint jpvp 139CD (distribution PHD and jazzcds.co.uk) is the latest to emerge blinking from the archives. Like Kate Westbrook’s Happy Jazz Singer, of Bar Utopia fame, Mama Chicago looks, and sounds ‘better with age‘. The Grande Dame not only survived the transfer
from analogue to digital but actually thrived on receiving so much care and attention after years of neglect. She, re-surfaced with a new swagger in her step and a devilish twinkle in the eye. And re-discovered photos of the Brass Band at Onkel Po’s club in Hamburg—where Wolfgang Michels, A and R man for Teldec, first spotted the band—give the authentic flavour of the period.
Next is On Duke’s Birthday (Hat OLOGY 635, distribution Harmonia Mundi, also available from jazzcds) Digitally tweaked and impeccably repackaged in distinctively Hat style, this historic recording captures the very first performance of the work, in Amiens in 1984, the first of a series of important recordings for Werner Uehlinger’s label.
From across the globe comes the news that re-issue fever has now hit Tokyo, with the imminent release of two albums from the early’70s. Mike Westbrook Live! is a decidedly lo-fi recording that nevertheless encapsulates the rock-fuelled music of the immediately pre-Cadillac days.
Goose Sauce, the Brass Band’s ‘difficult’ second album, fills the gap between the street music of For The Record and the jazz cabaret of Mama Chicago. Into the pot went jazz and theatre classics, political song, cod folk songs and panto music, stirred with lashings of improvisation. Delicious!
Last but far from least in the current crop of re-issues comes London Bridge Is Broken Down, one of the most far reaching works in the canon, greatly missed from the catalogue since EMI’s take over of Virgin Records. No doubt encouraged by the response to Citadel/Room 315, BGO will be putting it out in the New Year.
at the Foundling Museum,
Brunswick Square, London
18th May 2007
There are several contenders for the choice of Mike Westbrook’s most important work – The Cortège, On Duke’s Birthday, London Bridge is Broken Down, Westbrook Rossini – all are serious contenders. However, for me it has always been Westbrook Blake, either Bright as Fire or Glad Day. |
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As part of an imaginative Festival of Contemporary Church Music, no more appropriate venue could have been chosen for this work. An audience of just eighty was accommodated in an elegant room hung with paintings, the most notable being Hogarth’s great portrait of Thomas Coram gazing down benignly on us and on the performers.
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I have experienced various line-ups for this work over many years, but this was the most extraordinary of all – no saxes, no brass, no bass, no drums! Would this drastically slimmed down ensemble produce a somewhat attenuated version? Such fears were totally unfounded and quickly dissipated by Mike’s knack of reconstituting his material in polymorphous ways: Mike on piano,Karen Street on accordion, Billy Thompson on violin, and the voices of Kate and Phil Minton. |
And instead of the usual children’s choir we had the London College of Music Chamber Choir. This choir, while lacking, obviously, the childlike innocent sound of a children’s choir, sang with great precision and understanding of Mike’s conception, and was sympathetically directed by Paul Ayres.
The vocals of Kate and Phil, and Mike’s recitation have become an integral and essential part of this work, and they made their usual powerful impact. I cannot imagine anyone other than Phil singing with equal intense and involving passion. Karen understands Mike’s musical ideas as well as anyone, and her contributions on accordion, whether ensemble work or solos, formed the crucial bedrock of the piece.
The revelation for me was the overwhelming playing of Billy Thompson. He is an improvising virtuoso of phenomenal power and invention. At times I wondered if he was about to become too dominant, but was finally transported and convinced by his imaginatively conceived solos. Once again Mike has found a string player of great originality and has been able to assimilate him into the Westbrook musical world.
Michael Copp
