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Vortex gig reviews by Chris Parker

Chris Biscoe Quartet

Thursday 2 July 2009

Although so-called 'tribute bands' can all too easily become exercises in pure nostalgia, in thoughtful hands, they can also cast valuable light into the obscurer corners of a great artist's music, enabling listeners to form a more accurate, rounded picture of a musical career than that prevailing, which is frequently contingent on fashion, both artistic and political.

Saxophonist/clarinettist Chris Biscoe and drummer Stu Butterfield have some experience in this field, in the band Mingus Moves, so it was unsurprising to find that Biscoe's quartet – completed by bassist Larry Bartley and alto player Tony Kofi (hot from a World Saxophone Quartet gig in Poland on this occasion) – not only contrived to reproduce all the fierce, wailing, joyous urgency of Eric Dolphy's more celebrated themes (they began with a series of definitive Dolphy tunes from their Trio Records album Gone in the Air, 'Serene', 'Les' and 'Out to Lunch'), but also explored the great man's contribution to other composers' music.

'Jitterbug Waltz' may actually be more readily connected (by what used to be called 'modernists', at any rate) with Dolphy than with its original composer, Fats Waller, so powerfully did the American reedsman assimilate it into his repertoire; Biscoe's band utilised their two-alto frontline (after a typically cogent bass solo from Bartley) to strike sparks off each other, trading ever more urgent phrases in their pleasingly contrasting styles (Biscoe all textural adventurousness, Kofi all blazing energy, to oversimplify somewhat).

Thelonious Monk's 'Epistrophy', too (from the Dutch 'Last Date' session), tellingly set Kofi's eccentrically woozy, tart alto against Biscoe's clarinet; Oliver Nelson's 'Stolen Moments' used the same combination to recall Dolphy's ability to apply his highly individual musical vision to relatively conventional (and now familiar) material. (Incidentally, an often overlooked Dolphy session, issued under the rubric 'Sextet of the Orchestra USA' sees him soloing equally memorably on Kurt Weill tunes arranged by trombonist Mike Zwerin; calling these neglected albums to mind is one of the great strengths of projects such as Biscoe's.)

Charles Mingus's classic civil-rights piece, 'Fables of Faubus', saw the band return to the two-alto frontline that is arguably its hallmark, Biscoe and Kofi perfectly illustrating, in the process, the pertinence of jazz writer Brian Morton's comment (on the sleeve of Gone in the Air): '[Dolphy's legacy's] harmonic variations don't pack quite the same alienating wallop as Ornette Coleman's but its melodic and rhythmic integration […] is already more confidently advanced than Ornette's, its sense of jazz as a music rooted in the blues but also in other forms, vernacular and canonical, more fully synthesised than Bird's headlong sampling.'

A wholly enjoyable and thought-provoking gig, in short, by a band complimented by its leader in characteristically modest fashion: 'I think our ensemble sound captures some of the intensity of the Eric Dolphy groups.'

 

 

Chris Parker

Chris Parker was commissioning editor for Quartet Books jazz list and publisher of Wire magazine and has written on jazz forJazz Review and Jazzwise, the Independent, the Daily Telegraph and The Times).

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