By Brian Morton
“I once did a concert history of the jazz trumpet, with a script and lots of music, and I reckoned that by the end I’d mentioned 108 trumpeters. At the end I came down and ran into someone I knew, a man who lived upstairs, and his first words to me were, ‘Guy, you missed out Ruby Braff!’ So whatever you do, you’ll always miss something - and the thing you miss is the thing that’s going to be noticed.”
Each year at the EFG London Jazz Festival’s Jazz Voice concert, trumpeter/composer/conductor Guy Barker has begun the second half with a medley for orchestra - usually steered by a relevant anniversary. And after settling this time on the 75th birthday of the Blue Note label, Barker had an even harder time than usual.
Taking on an iconic body of work – and for once the term just about makes sense – means an acute embarrassment of riches and the near-certainty that someone will run up at the end and say: “Guy! You missed out Eric Dolphy/Ike Quebec/Baby Face Willette…” So how did he approach it?
“Well, I listened a lot. I listen a lot anyway. And I had people I wanted to be in there, like Hank Mobley. But you have to think about the shape of the thing. And that in a way answered itself. I started, after some deliberation, with Speak Like A Child and with the way Herbie Hancock voiced that opening chord, with the individual notes played by the strings, forming a pyramid...”
And there it is, at the very beginning, enigmatic and beautiful, like sunrise coming through a blind. After that, the medley goes into John Coltrane’s Moment’s Notice, one of the saxophonist’s most majestic themes and one that orchestrates with complete naturalness.
Barker continues: “You think Blue Note, you think Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers. But what do you pick from that work? After rejecting various things, I came to Hammerhead, and that group with Wayne Shorter, which just screams ‘Messengers’ at you.”
But perhaps the most exquisite moment on the whole medley is when the flutes and flugelhorns play Herbie Hancock’s solo on Maiden Voyage, another pinnacle of Blue Note recording. It comes to an end on an F that seemed destined to go one place and one place only: “Yes, Horace Silver’s Song For My Father. It was so logical, it wasn’t really a choice.”
And there were other non-choices, or rather straightforward musts in Barker’s selection. “I knew I had to do The Sidewinder” – a tune that poured out of New York jukeboxes for years after its release in 1963 – “and to orchestrate Lee Morgan’s trumpet solo on that great track.”
And so, onward from there in a sequence of music that demonstrates not just the variety and individuality of Blue Note’s great years, but also the sense of common cause and collegial invention that the label represented in its heyday.
The project calls for a fitting climax, though, and in this case serendipity played a hand, for it’s also the 55th anniversary of what turned out to be the climactic year of modern jazz, the source of some of its most lasting recording.
In August 1959, Horace Silver made a record called Blowin’ The Blues Away, whose most celebrated track, the antidote to the typhoon-like title tune, is the lovely ballad Peace. There’s never been a better moment to revive it, in music and in the world at large…
By Brian Morton
“I once did a concert history of the jazz trumpet, with a script and lots of music, and I reckoned that by the end I’d mentioned 108 trumpeters. At the end I came down and ran into someone I knew, a man who lived upstairs, and his first words to me were, ‘Guy, you missed out Ruby Braff!’ So whatever you do, you’ll always miss something - and the thing you miss is the thing that’s going to be noticed.”
Each year at the EFG London Jazz Festival’s Jazz Voice concert, trumpeter/composer/conductor Guy Barker has begun the second half with a medley for orchestra - usually steered by a relevant anniversary. And after settling this time on the 75th birthday of the Blue Note label, Barker had an even harder time than usual.
Taking on an iconic body of work – and for once the term just about makes sense – means an acute embarrassment of riches and the near-certainty that someone will run up at the end and say: “Guy! You missed out Eric Dolphy/Ike Quebec/Baby Face Willette…” So how did he approach it?
“Well, I listened a lot. I listen a lot anyway. And I had people I wanted to be in there, like Hank Mobley. But you have to think about the shape of the thing. And that in a way answered itself. I started, after some deliberation, with Speak Like A Child and with the way Herbie Hancock voiced that opening chord, with the individual notes played by the strings, forming a pyramid...”
And there it is, at the very beginning, enigmatic and beautiful, like sunrise coming through a blind. After that, the medley goes into John Coltrane’s Moment’s Notice, one of the saxophonist’s most majestic themes and one that orchestrates with complete naturalness.
Barker continues: “You think Blue Note, you think Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers. But what do you pick from that work? After rejecting various things, I came to Hammerhead, and that group with Wayne Shorter, which just screams ‘Messengers’ at you.”
But perhaps the most exquisite moment on the whole medley is when the flutes and flugelhorns play Herbie Hancock’s solo on Maiden Voyage, another pinnacle of Blue Note recording. It comes to an end on an F that seemed destined to go one place and one place only: “Yes, Horace Silver’s Song For My Father. It was so logical, it wasn’t really a choice.”
And there were other non-choices, or rather straightforward musts in Barker’s selection. “I knew I had to do The Sidewinder” – a tune that poured out of New York jukeboxes for years after its release in 1963 – “and to orchestrate Lee Morgan’s trumpet solo on that great track.”
And so, onward from there in a sequence of music that demonstrates not just the variety and individuality of Blue Note’s great years, but also the sense of common cause and collegial invention that the label represented in its heyday.
The project calls for a fitting climax, though, and in this case serendipity played a hand, for it’s also the 55th anniversary of what turned out to be the climactic year of modern jazz, the source of some of its most lasting recording.
In August 1959, Horace Silver made a record called Blowin’ The Blues Away, whose most celebrated track, the antidote to the typhoon-like title tune, is the lovely ballad Peace. There’s never been a better moment to revive it, in music and in the world at large…
