Label:
Columbia – SCX 6316
Series:
Lansdowne Series –
Format:
Vinyl, LP, Album / Country: UK / Released: 1969
Style:
Post Bop, Improvisation
Recorded:
Landsdowne Studios, Holland Park, London, March 18, 1968.
Supervision
by – Denis Preston
Sleevenote
by – Ian Carr
Album
Design by – Gerald Laing
Engineer
by – David Heelis
A1
- On Track .............................. 8:21
A2
- Vignette ................................ 4:59
A3
- Pavanne ................................ 9:15
B1
- Nimjam ................................. 3:59
B2
- Voices ................................. 13:36
B3
- You've Said It ....................... 8:40
Don
Rendell – tenor saxophone, soprano saxophone, flute, clarinet
Ian
Carr – trumpet, flugelhorn
Michael
Garrick – piano
Dave
Green – bass
Trevor
Tomkins – drums, percussion
The
Don Rendell-Ian Carr Quintet still holds a special place in the affections of
British Jazz fans.
Back
in 1962, Don Rendell had a quintet with Graham Bond on alto. “Graham phoned up out of the blue and told me
he was going to play the organ and sing,” Don told me. “I wasn’t thinking about having an organ and
singing in the quintet, so we just parted.
I had no notice about it.” That
band had not long released an album, Roarin’, on the Jazzland label. Tony Archer, the group’s bassist, suggested
Don check out Ian Carr, newly arrived from Newcastle. “He was playing at the Flamingo Club with
some band,” Don explains. “I thought he’s good, so I said to Tony,
‘Yeah, we’ll try and get Ian to come in.’
It just changed over night from Graham Bond to Ian Carr.”
Ian was playing with
Harold McNair, the Jamaican reedsman. He
takes up the story, “I’d come from the
MC5 (Mike Carr Five) – a world class band – and Harold didn’t really have any
kind of policy and wasn’t very well organised.”
Ian jumped at the chance to join what was then the new Don Rendell
Quintet. Meanwhile, John Mealing had
replaced original pianist John Burch, Trevor Tomkins was now the drummer and
shortly after Dave Green took Tony Archer’s place.
This
band features on the Spotlite Records’ album The Don Rendell 4 & 5 plus the
Don Rendell-Ian Carr Quintet. The band
recorded the sides for American Hank Russell, Howard Keel’s musical director,
in ‘64. Russell and Don were Jehovah’s
Witnesses and Don describes it as ‘a friendship thing.” Russell hoped to secure a release in the
States but nothing came of it. Backed
with three tracks from the group’s appearance at the Antibes Jazz Festival in
1968, it reveals an already fine mature group but the contrast with the Antibes
tracks is enormous. When Shades of Blue
came out in ’64, Colin Purbrook was on piano and the band had moved on
artistically. Where the Russell record
draws heavily on the Great American Songbook, Shades of Blue focuses on
original compositions.
Dave
Green feels the early quintet was ‘very based on the Miles’ thing’. “We were trying to emulate these great
players,” he laughs. “I was trying to do
a Paul Chambers and Trevor was trying to do a Jimmy Cobb. John was influenced by Wynton Kelly but as
time went on the band really matured a lot.”
For Dave, Michael Garrick’s arrival later in ’64 signalled the
change. “We started utilising a lot of
Indian type compositions Michael used to write and the whole band became really
strong after Michael joined.” Ian feels
there was something uniquely poetic about the group’s music. “I think that was one of the reasons people
liked it so much. It wasn’t hard-driving
like a lot of American Jazz of the time.
We had different kind of focuses than the Americans. We were into texture and different
rhythms. And Michael Garrick was steeped
in Indian Music as well. We found we
could do so many things that we never thought of before.”
Michael
Garrick echoed this when we spoke last year.
It was about one’s own roots. As
he said then, “Whether we like it or not we’re English and I wasn’t born in
Chicago or New Orleans but in Enfield,” he said. The recent release of The Rendell/Carr
Quintet Live in London (Harkit HRKCD8045) shows how fast they were
developing. Their compositions leapt
from the group’s shared identity. There
was no policy decision to feature original material, as Don explained, “It was
quite brave in a way because we had so many originals with Michael, Ian and me
writing. Suddenly we’d gone a whole
concert without using a standard. It
just happened.”
However,
as Trevor Tomkins explains, it soon became a question of principle. “We did a
BBC Jazz Club broadcast and wanted to do all original stuff. There was quite a heated discussion because
they said, ‘Can’t you throw in a few American Standards?’ We insisted and I think we were the first
band they had do a set of totally original music. At gigs we’d get requests for original
material.” With Warren Mitchell and Sam
Wannamaker amongst their fans, ‘the Five’ attracted ‘a nice class of
audience’. There’s a wonderful group
atmosphere that comes across on “Live” and the Harkit recording – it’s Warren
Mitchell’s ‘ribald comments’ you can hear on “Live”. This is a band doing it, as Don says, because
they love it.
Dave
Green recalls, “We always used to travel and room together. Somehow we got the gear in Trevor’s Vauxhall
and we all piled in. It was so
exciting. I was absolutely thrilled to
be with that band.” And as Trevor
Tomkins points out, it was clearly a group, not two great horn players plus
rhythm. He told me recently, “That was
really my schooling. All of us
contributed in lots of different ways.
It was a group effort. If Ian
came in with a new composition it wasn’t, ‘this is how it’s got to be
done.’ It would be ideas and
experimenting with things and almost letting it grow naturally.”
Perhaps
Dusk Fire is their most popular record and backed with Shades of Blue it makes
of a hell of a package. But Phase
III/“Live” reveals a developing band. As
Don points out Phase III saw changes in Ian’s writing. “Ones like Crazy Jane and Les Neiges D’Antan
were approaching Free Music, no time with no harmonic structure, (while) I’d
always written time and harmonic structure.”
With Garrick stretching the group with his Indian-influenced pieces and
Don’s ‘Coltrane out of Lester Young’ approach, the Quintet could go in any of a
number of directions and frequently did.
And
they worked regularly. “We played a lot
of Poetry & Jazz, mainly through Michael Garrick,” Don remembers. “The poets were normally the same ones –
Vernon Scannell, John Smith, Danny Abse and Jeremy Robson. There were tours. The northern tour took in Liverpool, Stoke,
Leicester, Coventry and Ian coming from Newcastle fixed us to play there a few
times.” But apart from Antibes and
Montreux, they never played in Europe and despite Ian’s best efforts a US trip
never materialised. However, a Poetry
& Jazz concert for the BBC with Vernon Scannell (Epithets of War) got them
on TV and they also did a BBC2 documentary.
Mike Dibbs, who did Ian’s Miles’ programme for Channel Four, was the
producer. Dave Green tells me, “He
filmed us at the Phoenix on Cavendish Square and as I was getting married on
March 1st ’68, he tied the wedding into the filming. Mike had previously written this piece called
Wedding Hymn so it ended up with the band playing it in the church filmed by
the BBC. It was extraordinary.”
In
1967, Ian’s wife Margaret had died shortly after giving birth to their daughter
by Caesarean. That’s her on the cover of
Shades. That night he rang Trevor who
came over immediately, so Ian wouldn’t be alone. “Some people think that’s why I put so much
of myself into music and, in a way, music was my salvation,” Ian explains. Perhaps that shows itself most in his
contributions to Phase III and “Live” but by ’69, somehow the steam was going
out.
Ghanaian
percussionist Guy Warren had begun playing gigs with the group at Ian’s behest
but, as Dave points out, this ‘didn’t meet with everybody’s approval’. For Dave, ‘Things started to unravel for no
particular reason I can remember. Ian
started getting quite frustrated. I
think he wanted it to go in a slightly different direction and Michael had his
own ideas.” Ian left at a gig in
Camberley in ’69. “Maybe I was just
jaded,” he says now. “I just went home
and didn’t communicate with anybody for a few days. I just felt the band was over.”
Nucleus
would follow and Jazz-Rock certainly wouldn’t have sat easily with either Don
or Michael. For Michael, the whole
Pop/Rock thing had little to do with the Jazz he loved. For Don, it was a question of different
priorities. “Ian wanted his own band
which was a different kind of music from what we’d been doing. I didn’t have the Jazz Music commercial
ambition that Ian had. As a believing
Christian I just didn’t want to do a month’s tour of the States or that kind of
thing. I’m a family man, I guess.” With hindsight, Change Is tries to contain
too many potentialities at one time. The
very thing that had made the group great – its breadth, its bravery, its quiet
bravado – were its inner contradictions that eventually destroyed it.
Looking
at the scene then and now, both Don and Trevor express concern at the ‘chops for chops’ sake’ attitude they see in
some young players, though both feel that most young players have now moved on
from that. As Dave Green suggests, “You
can’t really compare one particular period with another. Things that weren’t happening then are
happening now and vice versa.”
The
Don Rendell-Ian Carr Quintet
by
jazzman
Editor’s
Note: This article first appeared in Jazz UK in the July/August 2004 issue.
With
minor changes, the text is adapted to the needs of this post.
See
original:
http://www.jazzinternationale.com/540/
If
you find it, buy this album!
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