Big Band Harriott The Music Of The Joe Harriott Quintet
Mike
Garrick Jazz Orchestra
Jazz Academy, 2004
CD £11.99
track details
SLEEVE NOTES:
MICHAEL GARRICK: Had Joe Harriott, superb altoist and ground-breaking
thinker in British jazz not died at forty-four, this, we feel, is what
his dreamed-of big band might well have sounded like.
It's not so much Joe Harriott revisited as Joe Harriott reborn, re-embodied
into a broader dimension. The seeds for such expansion were always there
in potential but have not, up till now, borne this kind of rich new fruit.
Joe believed in free collective improvisation - painting pictures in sound
he called it. It's been many a musician's credo since, but few have appreciated
the value and flavour of his compositions in which the free imagination
is framed. He realised clearly that true free-form is the opposite of
formlessness, a miserable fate to which much improvisation can succumb.
Our starting materials were already there in the 1960's recordings Freeform,
Abstract, Movement (on Columbia) and Genius (Jazz
Academy). Rather than overdubbing, everything is brought together on the
spot; things such as harmony drawn from single lines originally improvised
by Joe and Shake is spontaneously integrated so that all the free-form
pieces are live throughout. There are also four Harriott tunes based on
chord sequences. (Of these, Coleridge Goode's bass solo on Morning
Blue, which becomes three choruses of orchestration, was taken from
the 1989 tour by the Harriott Memorial Quintet).
Harvey Pekar, Downbeat magazine reviewer who famously awarded the
first 5-star award ever to a British jazz LP (Harriott's Abstract)
said forty years later "I thought, and still think, that Harriott
and Keane were among the finest avant-garde artists in the early sixties"
- quoted in Fire In His Soul by Alan Robertson, published by Northway
Books, 2003.
By using the Harriott legacy as we have, we hope to have opened up something
of a new approach to big band performance.
GABRIEL GARRICK: I once asked Dad (when I was maybe 7 or 8), who was
this man with a saxophone on the wall? The picture (reprinted on Genius
JAZA 6) hung in a prominent position at home all my life. I soon forgot
the answer; after all he had died in January 1973 when I was seven months
old. But something in Dad's voice made me remember how important it was
to him. Well, now I know and, in turn, have realised how important he
is to me. My feeling is that he is over all the most significant figure
in British jazz and, as a player, was second only to Parker - and this
is only because Parker came along first.
His phenomenal blowing over chord changes (try Confirmation on
Genius) proves the point he was keen to make: that jazz was a universal
impulse not limited by its U.S. origins. Ornette Coleman has rightly garnered
huge credit for his innovations: Harriott, more revolutionary and vastly
more accomplished in established styles, precious little. His free improvisation
for a whole ensemble together in 1958/59 was absolutely new.
Mike has translated Joe's themes and his players' lines into big band
parameters so that we play alongside them. Textures are many and varied,
and true spontaneity is the key. It requires attention: you need to be
as free and creative when listening as if you were actually playing yourself!
To take part is hugely enjoyable and a marvellous emotional release. It's
an honour, these forty-five years later, to do so.
Michael Garrick Jazz Orchestra
with Michael Garrick (p); Mark Armstrong, Steve Waterman,
Gabriel Garrick, Quentin Collins (tr); Martin Hathaway, Matt Wates/Tom
Richards, Bob McKay, Jamie Anderson, Mick Foster (reeds); Mark d'Silva,
Jimmie Adams/Adrian Fry, Dave Eaglestone (tromb); Dominic Ashworth (g);
Paul Moylan (b); Alan Jackson/John Marshall (dr).
TRACKS:
[1] Tempo
[2] Salypso Sketches
[3] Morning Blue
[4] Coda
[5] Straight Lines
[6] Little Poem
[7] Abstract
[8] Tonal
[9] Spiritual Blues
[10] Subject
[11] Count 12
[12] Formation
[13] Cry Of The Bitterne (Garrick)
Recorded in May, 2004. TOTAL PLAYING TIME 78:00
All Compositions by Joe Harriott (except track 13 by Michael Garrick).
