‘And so, over to the Graham Bond Organisation, the wildest both musically and in appearance… behind the drums sits Ginger Baker, looking like a Francis Bacon portrait in 3D… and Mr Bond himself, a Balzac in dark glasses…’
Thus said Steve Race, a somewhat po-faced man in the 1960s BBC, introducing Graham, Ginger, Mike Falana and Dick Heckstall-Smith, the 1966 incarnation of Graham’s various legendary 60s bands, on ‘Jazz Beat’ at the Playhouse Theatre.
Three years earlier, as the delightfully looser George Melly declared to an unsuspecting pipe and slippers listenership on the same station, introducing an earlier gang with the dsame Hammond-toting leader: ‘Good evening – ‘Jazz Club’, and not a banjo in sight, but of course it’s been a hard winter…’
And so began a bit of history in the making: the onslaught of R&B on the British jazz world. The three Bond Quartet sessions from 1963 (Bond, Bruce, Baker, McLaughlin) are striking in still being somewhere between jazz and R&B – Jack Bruce still playing double bass, McLaughlin’s guitar definitely more jazz than blues, the repertoire more Ray Charles than Muddy Waters. But it was the still the forefront of a big change.
Trad clubs up and down the country, within a few months, switched to an R&B policy. The Acker Bilk era gave way to the Rolling Stones, the Yardbirds, Manfred’s men and all the rest. Moving between the Flamingo and the Marquee (as not many did at the time), playing anywhere that would take him, carving it all out – both the musical landscape and the physical post-Gaumont cinema pop variety package touring circuit – was Graham Bond.
This fabulous new 4CD collection, ‘Live At The BBC & Other Stories’, compiled by Pete Brown and mastered by Jon Astley and via Repertoire Records – the same team who brought us a previous 4CD Bond set (of remixed and rare mid 60s studio recordings with some live bits) ‘Wade In The Water’ – is available for £20. In my view it’s terrific value for money and a fascinating glimpse of an era in British music and broadcasting: 1962-72.
The previous box set’s USP was the new mixes/sound quality. Its content, though, was very much from the middle 60s, hence a lot of repetition of repertoire (about seven versions of ‘Wade In The Water’ itself, from memory).
This set spans a much wider time period, and hence many more line-ups of musicians. Consequently, there’s much more variety. One feels Graham moving from relatively straight, if quirky, modern jazzer with alto sax in 1962 through the British ‘R&B boom’ of 1963-65 with his Hammond-led Quartet (John McLaughlin, Jack Bruce, Ginger Baker) and then the Graham Bond Organisation (saxist Dick Heckstall-Smith initially replacing McLaughlin, trumpeter Mike Falana later replacing Jack Bruce) and then on into a kind of occult-fixated progressive rock/fusion circa 1970.
This set allows us to hear Bond & co with various guest vocalists, including Bobby Breen (a London-based African-American cabaret singer, which would have had a cachet in itself in the tiny, and very white, British jazz/blues world of the early 60s), the great Duffy Power, and later Graham’s wife Diane and the huge countercultural personality of Pete Brown.
Almost everything from a BBC broadcast here has clearly been sourced from very high quality ‘warm’, atmospheric off-air recordings. We should be grateful that so much has survived in one form or another and has been accessible to the compilers.
This is definitely NOT a release, though, for people primarily interested in sound quality. It simply isn’t possible with even the best quality mono off-air recording from 40+ years ago to deliver a pristine audio experience no matter what Jon Astley or anyone else does to it. It is, however, possible to enhance that sound with careful mastering and make it live and breath – as it does here.
To my ears (as a non GB diehard, but a listener fascinated with progressive British music in the 1960s), the whole set is a terrific listen, and one that I’ve already played through several times since getting a copy a week or so back. Another aspect of it as a listen is the ability to be transported back into what it was like to listen to BBC specialist radio in that era, as several of the presenter introductions have been left intact, dripping with ‘period charm’ – from the wittily scripted George Melly (a ‘trad jazz’ singer who went on to write an extremely good, very early, history of pop in book form, in 1970) in 1963, through the rather starchy Steve Race and on to the near-comatose murmurings of John Peel in 1970 and the ill-prepared hipster ramblings of someone else (possibly Johnny Walker) in 1972. It adds massively to the allure and listener experience – like a potted history of 60s British broadcasting let alone a fabulous ‘alternative history’ of Graham Bond’s career.
One of the stand-out moments for me is the 1963 performance of ‘Summertime’ by the GB Quartet with Duffy Power – the interpretation is far from standard (with a song that’s now become a bit of a bore when performed by rock or blues based acts, in my view) and John McLaughlin’s solo is, unpredictable, slinky and sublime. It’s a song neither Duffy nor McLaughlin nor GB recorded elsewhere.
Graham’s own composition ‘Elsie And Ena’ (inspired by a couple of characters in ITV’s ‘Coronation Street’, which the announcer clearly isn’t allowed to say!), performed with himself on alto, with the Don Rendell Quintet in 1962, is another highlight – again, never recorded elsewhere, to my knowlege. Don Rendell, incidentally, died only in the last week or so.
There’s a stoned magic about ‘Beak Suite’ by Bond & Brown in session for ‘Sounds Of The 70s’ in 1972, a great Detroit-ish jazz-rock groove with Pete Brown’s magnificent growling extemporisations about establishment figures and ‘agents who owe us money…’ and the like.
Also fascinating, and a bit chilling (if one has read Harry Shapiro’s excellent GB biography), is hearing Graham converse with presenter John Peel in the middle of the Graham Bond Initiation’s performance on 1970’s ‘John Peel Sunday Concert’ about the dark side of ‘magick’. His ‘Love Is The Law’ from this era is a mesmerising piece of progressive jazz-rock with a message, and wonderful flute and guitar, like a British version of Santana, with Graham’s ‘barking Londoner’ voice replacing the sun-drenched tones of Santana’s people! This was a richer palette of sounds for Graham to use in presenting his music, a real development from the punchy, tight R&B of the 1965-66 period that he’s probably best-known for.
The Graham Bond Quartet and then Organisation effectively CREATED the British rock circuit through their piecing together of viable provincial venues during 1963-65, trekking up and down the country in a second hand ambulance in a time when there was only one (short) motorway in Britain. Graham, a former fridge salesman, was a natural hustler, full of energy, willing to put in the hours and weeks to try and get somewhere. After six months, McLaughlin had had enough of the backroads discomfort. The GBQ began in a time of a handful of club-type gigs in London and two or three elsewhere (like Manchester); they saw out the last days of the cinema variety package tours, with half a dozen pop stars doing 15-20 minutes each in Gaumont cinemas up and down the country, in mid-1963 (touring on one package with Duffy Power in support of their joint single release of ‘I Saw Her Standing There’ – only the second ever recorded cover of a Beatles song); and then they went on the pioneer the national club circuit that made tours for so many British R&B, soul and rock musicians in the middle 60s possible. This was exactly the circuit that Cream later toured in Britain (arguably, through having a stuck-in-the-mud agent, Cream missed out on the next development, of psychedelic clubs and the ‘university circuit’ from 1967 onwards – a circuit best captured in aspic by the Who’s ‘Live At Leeds’, recorded in the canteen at Leeds University).
Graham Bond is hugely important as a pioneering figure and mentor in British music history. It’s to Pete Brown’s credit that he’s honouring that memory, whatever Graham’s flaws as a human being, with this box set and indeed the previous one. The one period barely represented on both, for licensing or availability reasons, is the 1966-67 line-up with Jon Hiseman on drums, replacing Ginger Baker. The best place to hear that era of Bond is on the 1971 double LP ‘Solid Bond’, featuring a 1967 studio session and a 1963 amateur live recording of the GBQ with McLaughlin.
Personally, this box set is my favourite of the two Bond sets, for the variety and the sheer period atmosphere, but there are wonderful performances on both. At only £20 it’s fantastic value. It’s history, and it lives.
Having been through the 281-odd minute 4CD set, here’s my rough guide to quality:
13 1/2 mins studio masters (two rare EP/LP tracks plus one studio demo)
181 mins very good-to-near master quality off-air (mono and stereo)
61 mins 1962 rehearsal tape which is surprisingly good in my view, and very listenable (much better than the Beatles Hamburg tapes quality-wise!) but which is, naturally, a ‘mic in the room’ and below the BBC off-air quality
26 mins of ‘poor’ quality audio: one live 66/67 track, one live 69/70 track and 11 mins of the 1963 off-air mono ‘Pop Go The Beatles’ session, which I’m happy to have had a hand in getting added at the last minute – which are there as a kind of bonus (Pete Brown says in the notes that there was more from those live sources but they chose the one best-quality example).
Even if you set aside both the surprisingly decent 61 mins set and the low quality bonus audio (personally, I’m glad both are there but you could certainly argue that this might have been a 3CD set, dropping those sources), you’re still left with over three hours of eminently listenable and atmospheric material in remarkably good quality for its age/source. I’m glad, personally, that Pete & co went to the effort of collecting this material and making it available. The booklet also contains one of the only set of pics of the 1963 GB Quartet, with McLaughlin. I couldn’t afford to license one (for well into three figures) for my McLaughlin book in 2014, so good on Repertoire for either sticking two fingers up to a greedy agent or paying him.
(PS The audio clip is the GBQ from the ‘Wade In The Water’ 4CD set with ‘Untitled Abbey Road Blues’, 1963. I wish I could remember the name of the studio it was recorded in…)
Thanks for the heads-up Colin, I’d missed this one somehow. Purchased.
I quite like Steve Race’s comment about Ginger Baker. I can see what he means.
However, set against this, Mr. Race also hosted ‘My Music’, probably one of the most insufferably smug programmes ever broadcast on Radio 4 – and that’s up against some pretty stiff competition (© E. Blackadder).
His comments about yobbos with guitars or somesuch (clearly meaning the Beatles) on a one of the 1963 ‘Jazz 625’ TV shows, when introducing a jazz guitarist guest to the MJQ (I think), was smugness multiplied tenfold (and wrong).
Top review Mr H, my mouse finger is itching.
One thing: I saw Cream at Warwick U in Autumn 66 playing stuff from Fresh Cream, so they’d cracked the uni circuit by then at least.
Nice work Colin. I’ll be getting that.
Steve Race and his somewhat wooden delivery always fascinated me. The BBC seemed to pitch him as the know-all jazzer who was prepared to tolerate pop to a degree, as long as he could talk about it patronising terms.
Who can forget how he primly introduced the Beatles recording All You Need Is Love on the famous “Our World” live TV broadcast in 1967? Certainly not me as I’ve just spent half an hour transcribing it from the bootleg LP.
“This is Steve Race in the Beatles’ recording studio in London, where the latest Beatle record is, at this moment, being built up. It’s not just a single performance, but a whole montage of performances. With some friends in to help the atmosphere, this is quite an occasion.
“(Sound of tape being wound back at speed) There’s several day’s work on that tape. For perhaps the hundredth time the engineer runs it back to the start for yet another stage in the making of an almost certain hit record. The supervisor is George Martin, the musical brain behind all the Beatles’ records.
“(Sound of trumpets etc warming up) There’s the orchestra coming into the studio now and you’ll notice that the musicians are not rock and roll youngsters, the Beatles get on best with symphony men. The boys began by making a basic instrumental track on their own. Then they added on top of that a second track of vocal backgrounds and they’ve just added a third track.
“Now comes the final stage. It brings in a solo vocal from John Lennon and, for the first time, the orchestra.
“Here, then, is final mixed track take one of a song we offer to the whole world: All You Need Is Love”.