Review: Band of 5 Names

Festival of trumpet

The Valley Jazz Festival 2007 has scheduled a diverse program with trumpet playing on every night. Clint Allen's 7th Chapter of Fine Brass, Dan Quigley, Scott Tinkler, Vince Jones plus yours truly with his quartet. On Thursday night at The Zoo it was Phil’s Slater’s Band of 5 Names. I’d heard Phil’s playing only on cd and a live Don Cherry style piece on the ABC’s Music Show so I was eager to hear his music live.

Music to me is the art of communicating emotions. Great musicians touch you, move you. What I look for in a musician is the simultaneous ability to express mood and feeling through their playing, to present coherent imaginative ideas, and their relationships with other musicians on the same stage.

All too often I hear one dimensional trumpet players. Some play in an alpha male style – a heroic style that leaves no room for human frailties (what one trumpet player called 'a punch in the face' style). Others, aping famous trumpeters, play with a cold thinness that shows little understanding of the instrument or even the idea of communicating emotions.

BOFN

In a trumpet, piano, and drums configuration the Band of 5 Names performed one long improvisation. Phil Slater’s trumpet tone is full and open. His is a passionate and original trumpet voice made from contrasts in tonal colour, rhythm and dynamics. Slater has the technically ability of superb breath control, precise fingering and a lip that held out through most of the set. This he used to service the narrative of the improvisation.

Slater explored the limits of the trumpet. At times he created intensity through long complicated downwards runs punctuated by jumps up into the higher register to start more runs. It was thrilling to hear a trumpet in flight like this. These passages gave way to low whispering, spatial long forlorn notes, and at times with low moans that came from the physical manipulation of the valves. Slater also used a Mac laptop with what sounded like an analogue delay to ramp up the intensity by adding layers to some legato runs. His lip gave way to air and fast fingers through a tough passage at the end of the set. This I really liked because, after an hour, he was still going for it.

With his head half cocked Phil Slater listened to pianist Matt McMahon and drummer Simon Barker feeding off their ideas. The band listened to each other’s playing and generally had good communication. Barker was an excellent accompanist driving, exploding, providing colour.

Their impro was really a number of themes strung together by solo segues on piano and drums. In a long impro it is difficult to know when the narrative has ended, where to put the full stop. As a listener I felt there were a number of points where this had been reached.

An epic sonic landscape

The Band of 5 Names created an epic sonic landscape. Their music stands within the long and proud tradition in Australia of searching for original sounds and forms. Bands such as The Necks, with whom BOFN share a similarly large scope in improvisation, come to mind. It's fantastic that the Valley Jazz Festival 2007 has programmed such important music.

Flamenco trumpet

BACALAU

Since I can remember, people have commented that I have a 'Spanish' sound. I'm not too sure what that means. Do I sound like a guitar or a bloodied bull in an arena? Perhaps they are picking up on a fascination with Spanish culture and history. I'm intrigued by Andalusian music from Spain and North Africa - of lyricism set again rhythmic complexity.

I assumed that trumpet featured prominently in Spanish music. Sure it can be heard in film scores and some orchestral works but I was quite taken aback to learn that it was just a little add on /frilly filler in some modern flamenco recordings.

Bacalau is an attempt to redress this imbalance: to try to meld the flamenco guitar and percussion with the trumpet.

bacalau hung outside a shop

Bacalau, the salted cod essential to so many Spanish dishes, needs to be seasoned to bring out entirely original dishes.

Bacalau is having a rare appearance at the Brisbane Jazz Club this coming Friday night. Check out the details on the poster.

The influence of Roy Elridge

Occasionally I find myself surprised by the emergence of a memory of a long forgotten musical influence. Coming across the name of Roy Elridge, the fiery trumpet player, triggered this within me recently. I was reding Ian Rankin's latest Rebus novel, The Naming of the Dead. One of the victims is called Ben Webster and the associations flowed.

In the pantheon of American jazz trumpet players Roy stood as a bridge between Louis Armstrong and Dizzy. ie, he played swing. Perhaps it was because, like Lester Bowie, one of his seminal influences was carnival music that Roy played with a great sense of drama.

This is best illustrated in the 50's record Ben Webster and Associates. Apparently Ben ran into Roy on the way to the recording studio and invited him to the session. It's really a jam session that was so popular in those times... a couple of blues and standards. Now that's normally a formula to turn me right off but the playing is superb. Roy's solo starts with the 1st 12 bars of a blues repeating a triplet riff G# A B over and over. By the change in the second chorus he is screaming like a Baptist preacher (even though he was a Lutheran). ecstatic, exuberant, the glory that is a trumpet. He seems like he's pushing his instrument to the max. Jubilation is the object. Roy is just not doing the changes but has this preacher -in- the -pulpit quality that so suits the trumpet.

As a little aside, I'm including this little article I found that illustrates the racism endured by Afro Americans playing in white bands.

In Praise of Lester Bowie

This may well turn out to be a series 'in praise of ' trumpet players and composers that have influenced me.

Lester Bowie dressed like a lab attendant or sometimes a pastry chef. He was the purveyor of “serious fun’ a lineage that come out of Louis Armstrong.

To me Lester Bowie was a font of brilliant iconoclastic trumpeting ideas. I saw him in London playing solo trumpet with an all male African choir. The impact of this performance on me at the time was to show me alternate routes for the improvising trumpet.

His notion was to expand the vocabulary of the trumpet: to imbue this noble with a depth of emotive language. One critic called his music ‘a hybrid, with roots and branches of varying hues’. But what has attracted me is his tone that speaks so full of the joy and sadness of life.

Lester joined Roscoe Mitchell , Joseph Jarman (woodwinds), Malachi Favors Maghostut (bass), and eventually, Famoudou Don Moye (percussion) in the Art Ensemble of Chicago , among the most influential and creative groups in modern music. They’ve been playing for over 3 decades and, if you haven’t heard them, download some tunes and listen to them.

Some of his solo efforts for ECM included such gems as “Miles Davis meets Donald Duck” and the sublime “Everything Must Change” sung by his wife Fontella Bass.

Lester’s final venture was the "avant pop" of Brass Fantasy. Made up of assorted trumpets, trombones, French Horns, tuba and drums, it played a crazy mix of free jazz, standards of decades past, funk, Latin, R&B. One brilliant track is an angry arrangement of Strange Fruit made soon after the LA riots in the early 1990’s.

Lester died on Nov 8 1999 and I think that day should be a Serious Fun public holiday.