Colin H on Mike Westbrook
A wander down memory lane with Brit jazz colossus Mike Westbrook, published in ‘Record Collector’ in October 2017.
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Take a trip around Ebay and Discogs and you will conclude that Mike Westbrook is a man who makes rare records. Periodically, something from the first decade of his remarkable 50-year career is reissued and within five years it becomes a pricey second-hand prospect itself. Meanwhile, original pressings of those classics go on ascending the twin escalators of legendary greatness and practical inaccessibility. Absurdly, the current resale price for a 2008 Japanese CD edition of 1969’s ‘Marching Song Vol.1’ is around £100 – £20 higher than the (conservative) ‘Rare Record Price Guide’ price on a mint Deram original.
I can think of no other significant British artist whose 60s/70s oeuvre is currently so out of reach. However, with expanded CD editions of his 1972 ‘Live’ on Hux and his long unobtainable two-volume masterpiece ‘Marching Song’ out last year on RPM’s Turtle imprint (including unreleased 1966-70 tracks), with hopefully further expanded RPM/Turtle releases, this golden anniversary of Mike’s singular career in music is also a golden opportunity for new listeners to find out what all the fuss was about. For Mike, 81, is as creative as ever, releasing both the fabulous electric big band 2CD set ‘A Bigger Show’ with his Uncommon Orchestra and a new solo piano album last year.
His position in music has always been unique: known for a series of ambitious, large-scale works – much of his 1967-71 output, and periodic projects thereafter, including his under-appreciated magnum opus/personal favourite ‘London Bridge is Broken Down’ (Virgin, 1988) – his living has nevertheless mostly involved under-the-radar small groups, including his brass quintet ‘village band’ and his piano-based trio, and an ethos of ‘anywhere, anytime’ performing.
A product of jazz, with his music often compared to that of his hero Duke Ellington in the early days, Mike’s London-based flowering in the cultural cauldron of the Swinging 60s saw him with one foot in jazz and the other in whatever caught his fancy (musical theatre, poetry settings, rock music, circus, free improvisation, ‘happenings’) – often to the bafflement of the jazz community and wider media. It was a blessing and a curse.
‘I’m ruled out by a lot of people, who could give me work, because of my jazz connections,’ he told Creem in 1972. ‘I like to be able to play anything that appeals to me and, looking back, that seems to be the only consistent thing about my music.’
Summing up 1970 in Melody Maker, Richard Williams wrote of Westbrook that ‘one hopes that he feels the struggle is worth continuing’. Struggle as it was, Mike did indeed continue and Richard, blogging about a Westbrook solo piano recital in November 2016, could acclaim it as ‘a useful reminder of what age can bring. As always with Westbrook, a massive authority was lightly worn – but its presence was never in doubt, and the result was unforgettable.’
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‘I’ve never really made big conscious decisions, you know,’ says Mike, today. ‘I tend to just respond to the opportunities around and the people around. I’m very lucky because I gave up my day job [art teaching] at the end of the 60s at which stage the music took over, basically. By that time I’d made my first albums, done my first performances abroad, it was starting to happen, and so from then on I’ve managed to somehow survive just doing my own thing, really. (laughs) It isn’t an easy path but I haven’t had to do a lot of commercial work or teaching or whatever; I’ve actually been able to focus on the art.’
Despite the mischievousness and fun in some of his works – including the very recent and heartily recommended ‘A Bigger Show’, featuring a sensational jazz-rock big band, meditations on the nature of celebrity (from Boudicca to Beckham), a ‘Hammer horror’ vibe of camp grotesquery and palpable joie de vivre – Mike is ultimately a ‘serious’ composer and one who views his early works as ‘my apprenticeship’ that led to works of greater maturity, and greater interest to him personally.
Still, those early works are greatly collectable and Mike was kind enough to discuss them, although one was painfully conscious of almost wasting his time in doing so or being somehow disrespectful in not focusing on the works he feels are more worthwhile. Before getting mired in the distant past, I asked him to name his favourites:
‘’London Bridge’ would certainly be one but I would probably have to include the William Blake settings in one of their permutations [‘Tyger’, 1971; ‘The Westbrook Blake’, 1980; ‘Glad Day’, 1999; ‘Glad Day Live’, 2014]. I tend to like the recent thing best because things evolve and you learn, you get better. Another, I think, very good album is ‘Chanson Irresponsible’ [2002], with string quartet – that was my vision of music coming together, jazz and classical, both vocalists and instruments all within a conceived piece. That was very well recorded but has hardly ever been played [live]. Unfinished business. That’s very close to my heart.
‘’London Bridge’ was a lucky thing. Our manager Lawrence Aston knew Declan Colgan, who ran Virgin’s new Venture label [in 1988], and they agreed to it. We recorded it in Pathé Marconi Studios in Paris and it was fantastic! A great chamber orchestra in a historic studio and the whole band went over to Paris for a week. Those were the days!’
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Born in 1936, Mike became active in music at art school in Plymouth in 1958, initially coming to London with a 12-piece group in 1961, never recorded, which included future AMM avant-gardists Keith Rowe and Lou Gare, and future poll-winning instrumentalists John Surman and Mike Osborne. It was just as Britain’s modern and trad jazz scenes were about to collapse in the face of the ‘R&B boom’. After a period of rehearsing and poverty there was a retreat to Plymouth, but Mike soon returned with his more manageable Sextet, also including Osborne and Surman, and became part of the exciting new wave of British progressive jazz centred around the 18-month tenure of Ronnie Scott’s ‘Old Place’ spanning 1966-68.
Beginning in 1966, this ‘Old Place generation’ was a heady milieu of composers, band-leaders and musicians entirely freed from the shackles of feeling inferior to American jazzers or from any need or expectation to copy them. Aside from Westbrook, Osborne and Surman, names like Chris McGregor’s Brotherhood of Breath, Keith Tippett, Ian Carr, the Spontaneous Music Ensemble, John McLaughlin, Dave Holland, Graham Collier, Mike Gibbs, Derek Bailey and Norma Winstone are among those associated with this scene. Between 1967 and 1972 there would be a marked phase of British labels signing such artists. Nobody knew what was going on in the music industry, but there were an awful lot of progressive sounds happening in the folk cellars, jazz clubs and progressive-rock rehearsal rooms of London in the middle 60s, and surely some of it must sell…
Mike Westbrook, who had previously only recorded a prospective Sextet session with Eddie Kramer and a session on BBC radio’s Jazz Scene, both in 1966, found himself with a contract for Decca’s progressive label Deram the following year.
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‘Celebration’ (Deram, 1967)
A suite of 15 Westbrook compositions, ‘Celebration’ was premiered – as was the Mike Westbrook Concert Band (CB) – at Liverpool University in March 1967. With regular opportunities to get things together at their Saturday night residency at the Old Place, Mike’s Sextet developed into the CB, with more fluid personnel.
The Old Place CB debut, presenting ‘Celebration’, in May ’67 was reviewed in MM by Victor Schonfield: ‘Rich and rugged orchestral textures, fiery and often inspired individuals… Westbrook’s musical adventurousness and scope are remarkable enough, but for sheer uninhibited excitement the band is incomparable. Judging by audience response, LPs would sell like wildfire.’
Schonfield, in fact, had a word with Decca and an opportunity arose. The Sextet album was shelved and an eight-tune distillation of ‘Celebration’ – a gorgeous mix of Ellingtonian sumptuousness and uninhibited 60s energy – was recorded, released in July 1967.
Release (Deram, 1968)
More radical than ‘Celebration’, ‘Release’ (recorded in August ’68) was a 15-tune suite mixing originals with old warhorses like ‘Gee Baby, Ain’t I Good To You?’ that allows a glimpse at the free-improvisation ideas that were fascinating young jazzers in 1968. At times, to this writer’s ears, the mixing of the luxuriant ballads and occasional wild abandon is unsatisfying, but Mike regards it as pivotal: ‘It was such a remarkable band and the idea of using all this unusual material and things from the past… I think it’s okay, myself, but I would, wouldn’t I!’ As one Sunday Times reviewer cannily noted: ‘Ever since the great days of the swing era the big jazz band has been a dust-bowl in which little grew except overblown riffs and tired ensembles… What Westbrook has done has simply let the place grow wild and create a grand new landscape.’
A key moment for the band came with a 1968 booking at the ‘Newport Festival in London’.
Mike: ‘We played opposite Dizzy Gillespie’s big band – we did two shows with the ‘Release’ composition. I think that was the first major exposure and a lot followed from that. It was a huge audience, the biggest exposure any of us had had up to that point.’ Mike would be a regular presence in broadsheets, rock papers and jazz mags for the next few years – to the extent that in December 1970 Sounds felt the need to run an extraordinary full-page piece entitled ‘The Mike Westbrook Myth’, essentially wondering aloud whether the man was overrated.
‘Marching Song’ (Deram, 1969)
Premiered by a 15-piece CB at Plymouth’s Athenaeum in March 1967, ‘Marching Song’ was a two-hour-plus anti-war epic. (An embryonic 9-minute version of the piece had been recorded for the Sextet’s shelved 1966 album, and this debuts on RPM’s 2017 3CD reissue of the album.) In March 1968 it was performed at Bangor Festival and London’s Camden Festival, and extensively reviewed. Melody Maker’s Christopher Bird declared its cumulative effect ‘immensely satisfying and moving’.
Mike: ‘It was a time of idealism. We generally thought we could change the world, and there was a sort of freedom to explore and we all encouraged each other – and the media were starting to be receptive. It was very important that the BBC was allowing us to broadcast – there were two programmes every week, one on the Light Programme and one on the Third, featuring the newer British bands. That doesn’t happen today. And there was a lot of writing about what was going on – all the national press carried jazz critics. You could even do a concert and stay up and read the reviews the next morning in those days! There was an immediate aspect about it.’
Decca was clearly queasy about the project – opting to record Release first and then, with ‘Marching Song’ recorded during March-April 1969, opting to issue it in two single LP volumes, although it would be released in the US in May 1970, as ‘Marching Song – An Anti-War Jazz Symphony’, as a double LP, with exclusive artwork.
‘Love Songs’ (Deram, 1970)
Recorded in March/April 1970, in 11-piece form, ‘Love Songs’ stands alone in Mike’s vintage canon as being a vocal album, featuring the exquisite new talent Norma Winstone (who had previously recorded with Michael Garrick and Joe Harriott) and with a guitarist, Chris Spedding, in the band for the first time. It is a kind of era-evocative pop/jazz album in the sense that Pentangle’s 1969 ‘Basket of Light’ is – of ‘the 60s’ yet above it, and in a mesmerising, rich sound-world of its own. The album divided critics at the time, being especially unsatisfying to jazz critics. On reflection, Mike agrees: ‘My least favourite album is Love Songs, which I know a lot of people like. It’s an awkward transition between a jazz approach and a pop approach and I don’t feel it worked.’
Album track ‘Original Peter’ was performed on BBC2’s ‘Review’ in April 1970, as a live ‘happening’ with circus people, and a non-album version along with exclusive B-side ‘Magic Garden’ was released as a single in August 1970 – existing in both promo and stock copies and now ludicrously rare. Although Spedding was with the CB for roughly a year, participating in concert and broadcast performances of Mike’s ‘Metropolis’, ‘Earthrise’ and ‘Horizon’ epics (see below), this would be his only album with the group.
‘Metropolis’ (RCA Neon, 1971)
As with ‘Marching Song’ before it, ‘Metropolis’ was long in gestation. Premiered at London’s Mermaid Theatre in May 1969, filmed at Ronnie Scott’s for BBC2’s long-erased ‘Jazz Scene’ that November, recorded for Radio 3 in January 1970 (still extant at source), recorded by the ‘Love Songs’ line-up for Deram in April (as yet unissued), and then re-scored for a Danish Radio Orchestra broadcast with Mike conducting in June, it finally appeared for purchase in a gatefold-sleeved RCA Neon recording (using the Danish re-write, for a 26-piece CB with Gary Boyle replacing Chris Spedding) in late 1971 – at which point, Radio 3 licensed and aired the Danish recording. It was a labyrinthine end of an era in terms of the Westbrook epics:
Mike: ‘It was, because… well, I don’t know where you go after that. Also, there was a general diaspora going on – people were drifting off into their other activities and a lot of it was musicians having to ‘take care of business’. You just wouldn’t have got a line-up with Kenny Wheeler, Henry Lowther, Harry Beckett and Dave Holdsworth on the trumpets. It was just a time when all those people were still around, still available. But it was very soon fragmented. Surman, actually, had already gone by the time we did ‘Metropolis’. Coming up on the inside, as it were, was this theatre connection. I had the opportunity to get out and around working with different artists, different situations, and the formation of the brass band. So you had this enormous shift from a huge big band playing this high-level jazz-rock, or whatever it was, down to literally Phil Minton, Lol Coxhill and me playing on the street corner! To me I still think it’s amazing, but quite a radical shift, and rebuilt from then onwards.’
‘Tyger (A Celebration of William Blake)’ (RCA, 1971)
Credited to Adrian Mitchell and Mike Westbrook, this was an original cast album that featured an 8-piece band plus several voice artists, from a show that ran at London’s New Theatre over a six-month period. Never released on CD, it marked the start of a long relationship in settings and releases involving Mike and the visionary poet’s works.
‘Live’ (Cadillac, 1972)
Pragmatic as ever, in January/February 1972 a unique 5-piece band went on the road under the Mike Westbrook moniker. It would be a fleeting but brilliant moment, captured on ‘Live’ – originally a 55-minute LP, this month expanded to a 75-minute CD on Hux, remastered by Jon Hiseman. Cadillac was a label co-founded by Mike, as RCA had inexplicably turned the self-recorded album down. Alan Jackson (dr) and George Khan (sax) had been with Mike for years, with former Brian Auger Trinity guitar-hero Gary Boyle present on both ‘Tyger’ and ‘Metropolis’ and former Battered Ornament Butch Potter (bs) debuting here. Gary would go on to form Isotope, while the rest would form the basis of Solid Gold Cadillac.
Mike: ‘That band was terrific, and I’m glad that live record is still around. The tapes that worked on the album tended to be the rock, electric stuff. But in fact we played a great variety of jazz material, ballads… Gary was into forming his own band and playing his own material, and Butch – lovely guy, brilliant musician, much missed – couldn’t stay in one place for long. Things were constantly changing and one had to accept that.’
Solid Gold Cadillac – ‘Solid Gold Cadillac’ (RCA, 1972)
Solid Gold Cadillac – ‘Brain Damage’ (RCA, 1973)
With the riveting jazz-rock quintet of the ‘Live’ LP drifting into legend, Mike somehow found RCA receptive to a rather odd kind-of jazz-rock-satire band, like a politer, English Frank Zappa outfit.
Mike: ‘We were given the opportunity by RCA to do the rock thing, an open-ended recording situation, the sort of thing you hear about but jazzers very rarely do – going into the studio and experimenting, trying things – at enormous expense! Most of the gigs we did were part of the Cosmic Circus, very much related to the experimental theatre side. It wasn’t a great success. Actually, the personnel weren’t very stable.’
Nevertheless, an appearance on BBC2’s ‘Full House’ and two Radio 1 In Concert’s were recorded, with broadcasters clearly thinking that this must by Mike presenting something in the pop/rock vein. The music remains quirky, with one’s appreciation or not of Phil Minton’s vocals key to one’s enjoyment. Phil would go on to be a stalwart Westbrook collaborator up to recent times.
‘Citadel/Room 315’ (RCA, 1975)
‘Love/Dream And Variations’ (Transatlantic, 1976)
Credited to the Mike Westbrook Orchestra, these two releases (recorded in March ’75 and February ’76, neither yet on CD) really were the last hurrah for the era that had begun with ‘Celebration’.
Mike: ‘I was just doing brass band and theatre music [by then]. But this opportunity came along from Sweden’s Radio Orchestra, to write something for them with John Surman. I got a commission and had about a year to write a piece. We went to Sweden and did it and there it would have stopped – but I was very pleased with the composition and with John’s performance and I thought, ‘Let’s see if it can be released as an album’. Richard Williams was A&R man at Island and he said, ‘Yeah! Let’s do it’.’
Alas, a couple of the Swedish players weren’t happy with the idea. As of old, Mike threw caution to the wind:
‘I got a tour together with Arts Council funding and rounded up a big band that was no longer working at all – just brought people together again to rehearse this piece for the tour. It needed a composition for the first half so I wrote ‘Love/Dream & Variations’ and another piece called ‘Electric Fanfare’, so we had a whole evening of music. That was the only reason we reformed the big band, but having got it together again then it carried on for a bit, as these things do. As well as doing ‘Citadel’ and that programme, then I got a broadcast and a festival and wrote another couple of things. And then it stopped really. It was something of a throwback – John [Surman] and I haven’t worked together since. But I think was a very special piece.’
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Mike’s musical path and discography went down many and various avenues thereafter, with one constant being collaborations with his second wife, singer/lyricist Kate Westbrook.
Mike: ‘’Mama Chicago’ [a double LP mixed by Tony Visconti] was a jazz cabaret idea which we made at the end of the 70s and we have gone on from there. We’ve worked constantly on songs – we’ve written operas, settings of European poetry. We’re really a song-writing team.’
It was nice to see that brass player Dave Holdsworth, a Westbrook veteran from ‘Celebration’ onwards, was present on ‘A Bigger Show’ 50 years later, in 2016. Like the Hotel California, one checks in to Mike Westbrook’s musical universe but one never quite leaves. Mike’s works from the 60s and early 70s remain richly evocative, varied and exciting with half a foot in the era they were part of and half in the rich traditions of jazz. Anyone fascinated with the period or keen to sample a golden era for British jazz should dive in. Mike himself rather hopes that any whose interest is kindled by his juvenilia might investigate his subsequent output.
Mike: ‘I still get royalty statements showing that I owe Sony thousands of pounds! So I’m not so keen on the reissues for that reason. Most of the important records [in my view] have been made for European labels, not on the whole with our dear British companies. But, I mean, fine, it’s like classical repertoire, it’s there, it’s for people to enjoy!’
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The Unrecorded Works
Alongside the large-scale works that were recorded and relatively often performed during Mike’s 1967-71 period of intense activity and intense media coverage, there were several large-scale works that were never recorded including some designed for site-specific one-off performances, usually in tandem with theatrical elements provided by John Fox’s Welfare State. Among these latter were ‘Circus Time’ (Bradford Festival, February 1970), ‘Spring Event’ (Exeter University, April 1970) and ‘Dr Strangebrew’s Diorama’ (Instowe beach, Devon, August 1970). ‘Circus Time’ was described as ‘almost totally unnoticed, yet nevertheless amazing’ in Creem, while Jazz Journal’s review of ‘Spring Event’ mentioned seven new Westbrook compositions within it, ‘constant variations on [a] hard rock theme’, occurring alongside a tower of lights, gymnasts, mountaineers, stuffed animals and a game of football.
There were, however, three more substantial pieces in terms of both media attention and Mike’s artistic progress: ‘Earthrise’, ‘Horizon’, and ‘Copan/Backing Track’.
‘Earthrise’ was premiered at the Mermaid Theatre, London, in November 1969, having been commissioned by impresario Bernard Miles on the back of the success of ‘Metropolis’ at the Mermaid.
Mike: ‘It was he who chose the title ‘Earthrise’ because we were in his office and it was the day of the Apollo landing, with this incredible picture from outer space of the Earth rising over the moon. Some people came to the concert expecting a ‘Metropolis Part 2’ and what they got was this huge, epic thing that did include a big band but included all these other things as well. I found it very exciting. [My first wife] Caroline wrote lyrics for those numbers, which then became part of the repertoire for a while. And then I started working with the Welfare State theatre group – oh, this is so complicated! – who were a very interesting touring group, and I worked for a while as their Musical Director, so-called, trying to create music for various bizarre situations – not usually in a concert hall but quite often on top of a mountain or in a churchyard or whatever, with whatever musicians were available. John Fox wrote a lot of lyrics for that.’
The premiere line-up included trumpeter Ian Carr, alto saxist Mike Osborne, singer Norma Winstone, trombonist Paul Rutherford and bassist Barry Guy, all praised by reviewers, although some picked up on the presence of several deps to the usual line-up, and some were sniffy about the mixed-media goings-on. Still, as Gerry Moore wrote in Crescendo: ‘It simply has to be experienced – and more than once, probably. Not for the elderly and not for the musically bigoted or deaf. But exciting.’
Described as ‘a space age entertainment with music, lights, films, puppets and magic’, ‘Earthrise’ was periodically performed at festivals and universities during 1970-71. Extracts from the show were recorded for BBC Radio 3’s Jazz In Britain in July 1970, broadcast twice that August.
Mike: ‘To me it was part of a general opening up. It was rather like pop art in painting. Having spent the earlier part of my career in a jazz cocoon, the opportunities I was getting, the people I was meeting were from other fields – poets like Adrian Mitchell, filmmakers, theatre people, as well as improvisers, and rock musicians.’
The next ‘lost epic’ was ‘Horizon’, which was commissioned by the Plymouth Festival and performed there in August 1970. It was repeated at London’s ICA the following month, at which point Ray Warleigh replaced long-time Concert Band soloist Mike Osborne, off to pursue his own path (as John Surman had done a year before). Jazz In Britain broadcast some of ‘Horizon’ in February 1971, but thereafter it slips from view.
The third lost epic – and it really was – was ‘Copan/Backing Track’, a multi-media piece based on the Mayan calendar, commissioned for Guildford Festival, March 1971.
Mike: ‘I invited seven improvising musicians and devised a composition in which there was no notated music but there was a timescale, tightly structured in terms of who played when, and used pre-recorded tapes and a light show. It went on for 7 ½ hours. The light show locked into a certain cycle as well. It was brilliant – the cycles all worked together. Actually, it was played again, at another university, but it wasn’t the sort of thing you could tour or record – it would have been horrendous!’
Knocking for six Rick Wakeman’s oft-told tale of having a curry delivered onstage during a long solo by someone else at a Yes concert, Norma Winstone (one of Mike’s seven) actually went off for a sit-down Indian restaurant experience in the middle of the show.
Mike: ‘As long as everybody stuck to their time schedule what they did in between really didn’t matter. There were different cycles going on and sometimes on three levels – one a short one, one medium, and one a very long one. Everybody played in sequence but sometimes they were playing against a recording of themselves for a period. Sometimes you’d even get three of them at the same time. It was actually a fascinating idea. I asked everybody to wear white lab coats, so we were like people working in a factory, doing our job.’
There are three other minor strays in the Westbrook oeuvre of the time. The first is the composition ‘Too Late, Too Late’ (never recorded by Mike) performed by Ronnie Scott and a fabulous 9-piece in October 1968 for their 1969 Columbia album ‘Live at Ronnie Scott’s’. The second is ‘Hyde Park Song’ recorded live at the October 1971 Warsaw Jazz Festival on the Polish V/A LP ‘Jazz Jamboree ‘71 – Vol. 1’. The third is ‘The Lot Song’. Mike: ‘It was one of John Fox’s lyrics. I don’t think we performed it much but we did broadcast it [on Radio 3 in October 1971].’
Regrettably, only one of Mike’s 16 BBC radio sessions/concerts spanning 1966-71 survives at source (a January 1970 ‘Metropolis’ concert) though quality non-official copies of several exist.
Thanks, Colin – a great read. In a civilised. country, Mike Westbrook would be in the House of Lords (though perhaps he’s turned down an offer, who knows?) It’s remarkable that the man who is, arguably, our greatest living composer is virtually unknown, outside jazz circles.
He turned the offer down in ’78 – Callaghan was a fusion tragic.
PS. “Where are we? We’re nowhere!” – AWTS
Strange synchronicity. I was playing an “unofficial” Mike Westbrook Orchestra recording (“Bar Utopia” from the 1995 Bath Festival) last night. Very fine performance, with a lengthy and very raucous rendition of “Alabama Song” as the encore.
I went to an excellent performance of “The Westbrook Blake” last March at Kings Place in London.
Mike Westbrook on piano with Phil Minton & Kate Westbrook – vocals/narration, plus the London College Of Music Chorus, Chris Biscoe – saxes, Billy Thompson – violin and Steve Berry – double bass. A beautiful concert.
I’m afraid Phil Minton’s voice is a deal-breaker for me…
I suppose I sort of put up with him on this because what he was singing is so good.
It’s strange that neither his nor Kate’s voices are very good on their own, but when they sing harmony it works somehow.
Thanks Colin for increasing our knowledge of this extraordinary chap.
In a bit of cross thread fertilization, could I please request a suggestion of one track we should listen to for myMoonlighting composers thread
I’ll leave the suggestion to Mike…
I’ve been bingeing on Westbrook today, thanks to this thread. Citadel/Room 315 is an obvious album choice to start with. This track, originally from his 1985 album “On Duke’s Birthday”, is pretty darn good.
(Checking In At Hotel Le Prieure)
The film footage is incomplete so some stills have been used to fill in.
Fingers crossed, Mike, there could be a 2CD+ package of ‘Citadel’ + ‘Love/Dream and Variations’ on RPM/Turtle in due course. Neither yet on CD and two sides of a creative coin/moment.
I have the Beat Goes On CD edition of Citadel/Room 315 from 2009. It’s great – large ensemble progressive UK jazz at its finest!
I stand corrected. I have the vinyl.
Actually not only has Citadel/Room 315 been out on CD twice, Love Dream & Variations also came out on CD some years ago. It was issued on Transatlantic at the same time as the Brass Band album “For The Record”. The pictures inside the sleeves were of the other album in both cases and Mike said at the time they should have given them away for free.
Thanks for that Colin, as always a great article…..
Thank you, Bingster.
For a second on Updates I thought Bingo Little had come to this thread and my cognitive dissonance was ready to go nuclear.
Westbrook’s “Paris” solo piano album is currently reasonably-priced (£9.99) on CD at Amazon.
Thanks for sharing this, Colin. I foolishly forgot to buy Record Collector when it came out. I was lucky enough to see ‘Earthrise’ at The Mermaid in November 1969. The whole of Manfred Mann (in their Chapter Three phase) were sitting just behind us. Plus we bumped into Joe Harriott at the bar during the interval.
Glory days…