The Musical Box

ian carr

You tend to accept the sad reality of a neglected artist’s worth to a mainstream music world when his death doesn’t stir a ripple until weeks after he has flown away.

Such was the case with Ian Carr, a savagely underrated trumpeter, bandleader and author. He was also a vital but often taken-for-granted link in bridging progressive rock with free and fusion based jazz out of England in the early ‘70s.

Carr died of complications from strokes and pneumonia at age 75 in London on Feb.25. But mentions of his passing didn’t circulate until last week.

Maybe that was to be expected. There was, as Frank Zappa was fond of saying, “no commercial potential” when it came to artists like Carr. He was perhaps best known for ties to the fabled prog-turned-fusion ensemble Soft Machine, even though he was never a member. Instead, Carr’s ‘70s band Nucleus became, in 1971, an academy for players that would take Soft Machine into the final phases of its career. Among them: keyboardist and de-facto Softs leader Karl Jenkins, bassist Roy Babbington and drummer John Marshall.

Nucleus itself didn’t age all that well as the ‘70s progressed. Like so many bands born in a post psychedelic age, its music became slicker and safer as the decade wore on. But the 1970-era Nucleus - which included the future Softs trio - was exquisite.

The stylistic prototype for that group was the primitive fusion Miles Davis was creating at the time. Carr was enamored of Davis’ music to the point that, in 1982, he wrote Miles Davis: A Critical Biography. A well-received appraisal of his idol’s work, it was reprinted years later as Miles Davis: The Definitive Biography.

Carr led a sometimes difficult life. His first wife died in childbirth. He suffered from depression. He reportedly spent his final years battling Alzheimer’s disease. Yet, in the grooves of his best music, made seemingly in another lifetime, Carr respectfully knelt at the alter of Miles while taking Nucleus on a journey of discovery that balanced free jazz improvisation, prog rock drama and fusion-flavored jams.

A surprising amount of Carr’s Nucleus music is still in print. A 2002 reissue of the band’s first two albums, Elastic Rock and We’ll Talk About It Later is the pick of its initial (and best) studio work. Both feature the equally unheralded British guitarist Chris Spedding. But a sublime 2003 archival album, Live in Bremen, offers a full two-set radio concert from May 1971. That’s where you want to start.

The music is a mix of spacious jazz-rock with flourishes of post psychedelic fancy that sounds gloriously dated. And at the nucleus of Nucleus, is the trumpet voice of a Scottish-born Brit honoring his muse, the times and a sense of electric invention that was never properly appreciated during or after his lifetime. But spend some time with Bremen, and you will hear the depth and daring of a true jazz continental in full flight.

hank crawford

A mere nine days after the passing of soul/jazz giant David “Fathead” Newman comes word of fellow saxophonist’s Hank Crawford’s death. How curious that the two players, who were so ceremoniously in step with one another throughout their careers, would take leave of us over two successive weeks.

Crawford died of complications from a stroke.

Like Newman, he was a mainstay of the mighty band Ray Charles led in the late ‘50s and ‘60s. Like Newman, Crawford joined Charles as a baritone saxophonist before finding his own voice and instrument (Newman went to tenor, Crawford soon favored the alto). And like Newman, Crawford took off on a solo career while still in Charles’ employment and recorded a string of exemplary but often underappreciated albums under his own name.

Charles scholars should also note that that yet another of the soul legend’s pioneering saxophonists, Leroy “Hog” Cooper died a week before Newman’s passing.

One of the earliest and still greatest entries in the Crawford catalog is 1960’s More Soul, a record that swings with almost boppish pride at times. But when the album settles into the trio passage of Angel Eyes, we hear Crawford’s most beautiful and becoming musical device: the blues.

His phrasing on the alto was as spacious as it was mournful. It all but talked to you, told you its troubles and then thanked you for listening. There is also a killer version of Misty on More Soul. Its sense of pure soul and blues is especially empowering because Crawford, as he did throughout his career, played with such unassuming grace.

Like many soul and jazz greats whose career continued into the ‘70s, there were missteps. Most came when Crawford lost control of his recording sessions to outside producers that glammed up his sax sound with strings. Spin back to Crawford’s golden ‘60s albums and the proof was all there. His sound and sense of musical intuition were complete. In short, strings and fussy arrangements were the last things a strong Crawford solo needed.

One of Crawford’s most devout disciples is David Sanborn, the popular saxophonist often mislabeled - especially on his recent recordings - as a smooth jazz stylist. On his recent Here & Gone album, Sanborn interprets Crawford’s Stoney Lonesome with swing and soulful reverence.

“It’s spooky that Hank, David Newman and Leroy Cooper all passed with weeks of each other,” Sanborn said in a post on his website. “These guys gave me my life. They turned on the lights for me and opened the door to all that was great and true about music.”

Other recommended Crawford recordings: 1961’s From the Heart (which contains the original Stoney Lonesome), the 1994 anthology Heart and Soul and an exceptional 2001 single disc compilation that combines 1963’s True Blue and 1967’s Double Cross.

john martyn

John Martyn was many things.

As a songwriter, he was one of the most distinctive stylists to emerge from a highly fertile late ’60s British folk-rock movement. His songs were fanciful, poetic, often wildly romantic and sometimes as dark the rains that must have soaked the shores of England and Scotland where he spent his youth.

As a guitarist, Martyn was unlike any of his contemporaries. His ‘60s albums for the Island label (London Conversation and The Tumbler, among them) were sparse, but richly and harmonically complete records. But with the ‘70s came electricity and pioneering use of the Echoplex, the device that gave Martyn’s songs a textured, staccato sound. Through those albums (1973’s Inside Out and 1977’s One World being the most daring), Martyn designed an ambience that also worked in the leanest of performance settings - including his long-running duo association with acoustic bassist Danny Thompson.

Of course, he was also a seemingly reckless eccentric and a sometimes very public alcoholic. While artists like Eric Clapton covered his songs, critics has often speculated that Martyn might well have discovered his own commercial fortunes - or at least something larger than his devout but modest folk-pop fanbase  - were it not for his fondness of self-destruction.

In an interview recently referenced in the London newspaper The Telegraph, Martyn recalled being so inebriated at a concert in Spain that he fell off the stage. “I still got three encores,” he added.

Yesterday morning the whole grand saga that was John Martyn concluded. He died at age 60. No specific cause of death was announced, although Martyn has been in ill health for years. Confined to a wheelchair since a burst cyst caused the amputation of a leg below the knee, Martyn continued to perform through the end of 2008.

One of his final recordings, in fact, was a concert set called Solid Air: Live at the Roundhouse. The album included a stage performance of Martyn’s seminal 1973 album Solid Air. An exceptional boxed set retrospective, appropriately titled Ain’t No Saint, surfaced last fall. Neither album has yet been issued in the United States.

Any of Martyn’s Island albums released between 1967 and 1977 should be considered essential listening. But the masterpiece remains Grace and Danger, a devastating 1980 work cut with help from Phil Collins that documented the dissolve of a marriage to former performance and recording partner Beverley Martyn. Aside from Richard and Linda Thompson’s 1982 epic Shoot Out the Lights, no British folk-rock album placed more exposed nerve romanticism on display than Grace and Danger.

I saw Martyn play only once. He headlined the opening night of a 1987 folk festival in Oxfordshire, England. It was one of his famed duet sessions with Thompson. That night, when the Echoplex cranked up in the great outdoors during songs like Big Muff you would have thought a flying saucer was landing.

Martyn walked onstage that night looking, as a friend of mine was fond of saying, “drunk as a monkey.” With a smile on his face as bright as glowing neon, it was tough to tell if Martyn received a hero’s welcome from the festival crowd. It didn’t matter. As was the case for much of his career, he made enough of a hero’s entrance to compensate.

david "fathead" newman

This year marks the half-century celebration of an album called Fathead: Ray Charles Presents David Newman. At the time of its release, the recording was an acknowledgement by a soul legend in his prime of a prized protégé. But today it stands as a proud introduction of a key architect in an incomparable R&B sound.

Newman, a thoroughly engaging saxophonist and flutist, would go on, after leaving the reign of Brother Ray in 1964, to fashion albums that honed a contemporary soul-based jazz sound of his own alongside several acclaimed contemporaries, not the least of which was Herbie Mann.

David “Fathead” Newman died Tuesday of complications from pancreatic cancer.

Newman’s illness, let alone his death, was a shock simply because he had seemed so vibrant during a December 2007 performance at Louisville’s now defunct Jazz Factory.

A regal version of Duke Pearson’s Cristo Redemptor summed up the music of the latter day Newman that night. The sax sound was, understandably, more relaxed and patient than the one that led the beefy soul charge of his 70s albums for Atlantic. But Newman’s tone simply glowed. Ditto for the spiritual solace he applied to John Coltrane’s Naima. A perhaps inevitable version of the still-soulful Charles classic Hit the Road, Jack was on the setlist, too. But during this reading, Newman was clearly following his own muse instead of soul spirits from a storied past.

A month after the Louisville show, Newman sat in with Paul Shaffer’s band on the Late Show with David Letterman, played mostly snippets of Charles hits and was rightly hailed as a legend by the bandleader.

Newman left us with a mountain of sublime recorded music. Recommended listening includes House of David (a tough-to-find, out-of-print 1993 anthology of his Atlantic recordings), a 2000 reissue that unearths two of Newman’s finest funk and fusion albums from the early ‘70s (Lonely Avenue and Newmanism) and Life (a 2007 studio effort that reflects the more sage-like playing of Newman’s final years).

But the one to hunt down is the underdog concert album Fire! Recorded at the New York jazz haven The Village Vanguard just before Christmas of 1988, Newman’s tenor sax leads bounce, bop and burn with help from two other sax giants: Stanley Turrentine and fellow Charles alumnus Hank Crawford. The sweet tenor sax turns employed in transforming the blues of Hard Times into a beaming affirmation to end the album is one of the great lost chapters in Newman’s mammoth jazz and soul music saga.

This was a guy, afetr all, who really knew hard times. Watch the Ray biopic again and you’ll get a small glimpse into just how grim they really were. But what ultimately came out of the man’s horn was pure gold.