As Branford’s band explores post-bop of the heaviest kind, it means the result is not always the easiest to connect to; on their second night at Ronnie Scott’s they even played a piece with a 14-bar structure. Its motif kept returning at moments that seemed odd, so accustomed is the ear to multiples of four.
That tune, however, was compelling, as was the quartet’s opener, an up-tempo number in which the leader’s tenor sax was as garrulous as that of Pharoah Sanders. Under this, a regular four in the bar was laid down by double bassist Eric Revis, while Watts kept the waters boiling by marking the fast swing as much with counter rhythms on the toms as with straight beats on the ride cymbal.Pianist Joey Calderazzo, meanwhile, confined himself to a mere chord or two per bar, keeping the time and harmony anchored. They were the perfect example of a well-structured quartet.Calderazzo was outstanding, producing solos that could have been used by students as textbook expositions of modern jazz styles, from Monk-ish plinkiness to the open fourths and fifths in the left hand that forever recall McCoy Tyner’s heyday, alternating with rich double-handed block chords and fast-flowing explorations in the upper half of the piano. Neither could Revis and Watts be faulted, nor the playing of their leader.However, for all the intensity on stage, there still seemed to be an emotional void at the heart of the music. For this the blame, if blame is the right word, has to be laid at the door of Marsalis.
His tunes require work from the listener, not least because post-bop of this kind sometimes seems determined not to throw the audience too many melodic and harmonic crumbs. This is not to say that all the sound and fury of Marsalis’s band signified nothing; merely that it was not always particularly easy to say precisely what it did signify.. A belated follow-up to his 1998 classic Diwan, Rachid Taha’s latest again pairs the French-Algerian with producer Steve Hillage, once guitarist with proto-trance pranksters Gong, on a selection of songs old and new designed to offer a survey of North African styles and concerns. Musically, this accommodates everything from the cascades of kora glissandi on “Agatha” to the blend of ney flute and oud on “Rani”, with the breathiness of Kadi Bouguenaya’s Gasbar Oranais lending a wonderful grainy texture to the hypnotic desert-blues of “Josephine” and “Ah Mon Amour”. Contrary to the edgy attitudes of some rai music, there’s an underlying good humour and liberality to several songs: in “Agatha”, a cuckolded husband makes light of his wife’s light-skinned baby (“Oh pals, it’s better to take it for a joke/ No need to cry for so little matter”), while there’s more humour in Taha’s corpsing chuckle in “Ecoute Moi Camarade”, whose reggae-beat groove, Arabic strings and muted jazz trumpet is the CD’s most intriguing crossover.
DOWNLOAD THIS: ‘Ecoute Moi Camarade’, ‘Josephine’, ‘Rani’, ‘Agatha’. No one ever became poor through overestimating American youth’s capacity for reproachful self-pity – something which came as a shock to Kurt Cobain, but not to any of the subsequent music scenes built on that capacity for complaint. Emo is the latest such movement, My Chemical Romance its supposedly reluctant figurehead band, trafficking in a pop-metal blend that combines the wretched disgust of Nine Inch Nails with the spunky assertiveness of Green Day. The Black Parade is a concept album about death (than which there is, to use the Spinal Tap terminology, none more black) which opens with someone dying of cancer, pleading for a final morphine overdose; but ends, to the band’s credit, with an affirmation of life: “I am not afraid to keep on living/ I am not afraid to walk this earth alone.” In between it covers, albeit thinly, such familiar issues as parental disapproval, teenage violence, the conflicting pulls of good and evil, and that most vital of rock-star accoutrements, a messiah complex I can’t help noticing how much it all sounds like Placebo.
DOWNLOAD THIS: ‘Famous Last Words’, ‘Dead!’, ‘Disenchanted’. On Saturday 28 October, we are giving away a copy of Madame Bovary free in every copy of the print edition of the newspaper. Based on Flaubert’s classic novel, Chabrol’s beautiful film of the same name details one young woman’s descent into chaos and despair. As Emma Bovary’s romantic fantasies get the better of her and start to impose on her mundane existence, she begins an affair with tragic consequences. Starring: Isabelle Huppert, Christophe Malavoy, Jean-Fran?s Balmer, Jean Yanne, Lucas Belvaux.