abso-blooming-lutely marvellous

Showcase 27 March 2006 by John Robert Brown

Minghe Morte

Colin Sutton, guitar, bass, bass pedals, sampler and effects.
Christophe de Bezenac, saxophone, vocals, effects.
Chris Bussey, drums and sampler.

“We’ve had a few people say that it’s a very nice name. We don’t explain it,” confides Colin Sutton. "It came from a Thomas Pynchon short story, where a character exclaims ‘Minghe Morte’.” The pronunciation is Ming-Gay-Mortay.

“The translation means screw it to death, which rolls off the tongue - if you don’t know what it means.”

Sutton plays guitar, bass and effects. He’s also the trio’s spokesman. I put it to him that with publicity claiming ‘Ear splitting aggressive metal’, and with a curse for a name, he’s not exactly setting out to appeal to vast numbers of the genteel petit bourgeoisie, is he?

“ ‘No’, is the short answer,” he says. “We have a tendency to work towards quite complex sounds, not always on the ear-splitting aggressive side. When we get into quieter moments, all three of us work along the lines that if we can be doing something else, we’ll be doing that as well; multi-tasking. If we’re trying to create a musical texture, even a very thin texture, it’s still going to be complex. So, if I’ve got a free hand, I’ll be manipulating my sampler, or doing something else to create a small noise. That’s how the whole group works.”

Is this affected by there being only three musicians in the band?

“Partly that,” he says. “Chris Bussey and I decided to get together to see how much we could do with just two people, hence my use of the bass pedals. They enable me to play bass, and either bass or guitar on top of that, or manipulating samples. Chris has a sampler as well. So we are layering samples, creating huge textures.”

French tenor saxophonist Christophe de Bezenac joined just before the first gig. “He became a permanent fixture. He’s been working with real-time computerised manipulation of sounds. He can pin-point particular pitches, transform that sound, then he can select another pitch and transform that sound a different way. He does a lot of surround sound, where particular pitches come out of different speakers. When you play very fast you end up with a swarm sound; you don’t hear the initial line. I don’t fully understand everything he’s able to do. He graduated from Strasbourg. He is doing that at PhD level at Leeds University.”

Sutton is endearingly candid about the struggle to find gigs. “Our music is seen as a little bit risky. What we do is quite close to pop. We play tunes, but it is quite intense. A lot of promoters don’t want to take the risk.”

Modesty is obscuring the truth here. In a world where New Music gigs regularly attract tiny audiences, Minghe Morte can attract 150-200 people to the Wardrobe in Leeds. “That is an unheard of number anywhere in Europe,” Sutton points out.

His ambition is to be playing festivals, to reach new audiences. On tonight’s showing, judging by the considerable audience enthusiasm, I’m sure he’ll manage that.

Matt Ball Quintet

Matt Ball, trombone.
Sean Hollis, trombone.
Richard Weatherall, piano.
Garry Jackson, double bass.
Andy Ball, drums.

Hard bop is the genre here, which, as its name implies, is a development of bop. Both stem from similar influences. Hard bop emerged in the 1950s, at around the same time as cool jazz, and was typically played by musicians from Detroit, Philadelphia and the East Coast of North America. Hard bop was usually performed in small combos, with more than one front-line instrument, the musicians playing arrangements with organised introductions, backings behind soloists, bridge passages and codas.

Matt Ball’s excellent quintet offers the archetype of a hard bop band, in the same tradition as the Horace Silver Quintet, the Cannonball Adderley Quintet or the Clifford Brown-Max Roach Quintet. On their Monday night appearance at The Wardrobe, following a searing, take-no-prisoners selection by Minghe Morte, Matt Ball cleverly establishes a rapport with his audience. “They’ve just played all our set,” he jokes in his first announcement.

Eschewing mutes for most of the set, trombonist Ball and trumpeter Hollis are well matched soloists. Fluent, big-toned and confident players, both have the knack during their solos of slyly referring to the melody, intelligently passing the parcel when tossing a motif around during their exchanges of eights and fours, and generally making good musical sense. Hollis’s trademarks included a fondness for the whole-tone scale, together with the occasional effective use of three-against-four hemiola. Commendably, Ball remembers that he has a slide on his trombone, and makes good, restrained, use of this. He isn’t frightened of exploring the low register occasionally. But both brass players would perhaps benefit from a little more use of mutes, for colour.

Material played included Cole Porter’s clever I Love You, with its daring sick-octave opening, Cannonball Adderley’s Things are Getting Better (with changes reminiscent of Ja Da), John Surman’s Moonlighter, a fascinating arrangement of Easy to Love and a nice Andy Ball original, Andy’s Street Beat Blues. Less successful was Flamingo, played as a rumba, where the tension eased. This could easily be fixed, perhaps with energy injected to give the rhythm section a scored, punctuating background beneath the soloists

Garry Jackson is a strong double-bass player, with good soloing skills. On this occasion the room wasn’t kind to the bass, sometimes making it hard for one to name the notes being played. Richard Weatherall’s pianism was thoughtful and supportive, contributing some innovative and dissonant comping in the out chorus of Andy’s Street Beat Blues.

With good presentation, communicative announcements, tidy matching black jackets and open-necked shirts for the front-line pair, a thoughtful programme, and a twelve-bar sting to end the set neatly, the Quintet provided an enjoyable and professional performance. Given a small amount of work to increase the colour and variety of the ensemble – such as a little counterpoint between the soloists, some silence here and there, the occasional key change, more a cappella passages, plus the odd shock or novelty to keep impact and audience attention at its maximum (it’s a competitive world out there) - one could imagine the Quintet making effective appearances at festivals such as those at Brecon or Cork. Promoters, please note.

We Free Kings

Toby Greenwood, tenor saxophone.
Andrew Colman, trumpet.
Simon Pugsley, trombone.
Jamil Sheriff, piano.
Richard Hammond, bass.
Luke Flowers, drums.

Saxophonist Toby Greenwood is full of surprises. Born and brought up in Leeds, he had the courage to pursue a self-taught musical path. He must be one of the few aspiring young jazz players in Leeds NOT to have been through the LCM jazz course. Greenwood does all of the writing for the band.

“I drifted into the cycle of making a living by playing. I knew most of the guys doing the jazz course. Even though I wasn’t on the LCM course, because I knew so many people that were, I took the route of picking up information as I went along, learning in the old school way, I suppose,” he says.

“If you are intending to compose and arrange for ensembles, then you’ve got to learn a lot of the academic side of things anyway, haven’t you? I know several rhythm section players who aren’t academically taught, but they’ve developed through the tradition of playing. But I’ve always been very curious about how people put music together. Or if I’m listening to something, I’m thinking: ‘What have they done there, what device did they use?’ A tempting thing for a leader in an ensemble would be to cast themselves as the lead voice, to showcase their own playing. Whereas in this band, even though I’m directing it, and it’s all my own material, it really is an ensemble."

“I chose the instrumentation from a writing point of view. And it is person-specific - but not because they are mates. I’ve done a lot of three-man section work, mostly in an R&B setting. So I’ve come to writing in a roundabout way. I’ve had to learn what to give a guitarist, how to write a drum chart. With the people that I use, the sound of the three front-line is dense, in-the-middle, rather than acidic and biting. It would be nice in the future to expand the idea to include a couple more horns."

Nevertheless, what he's done with the present instrumentation is appealing and totally competent. Persia is an easy latin-jazz eight-eight lope. The gentle Tmesis- defined as: "the separation of the parts of a compound word by the intervention of one or more words" - would certainly make an appealing TV or radio theme. Soloists Pugsley, Colman and Sheriff are all justifiably highly regarded on the Yorkshire scene, Colman nationally, as the 1999 Young Musician of the Year. All sound comfortable with Greenwod's tunes. Greenwood himself is an effective saxophonist with an instantly recognisable contemporary tone and vibrato and a good sense of how to create space in a solo.

Greenwood is highly appreciative of the showcase. “A fantastic idea, “ he says. “Which ran spectacularly to time. Geoff Amos really does know how to run a stage. I don’t know who came up with the idea in the first instance, maybe Nigel Slee, but I think it’s great.” He feels that with We Free Kings not being an established name on the jazz scene, together with the band’s material being wholly original, a showcase can ease any promoter anxieties.

He has no need to be concerned. As with its two companions on this showcase, this band sounds professional. All that it now needs is a protracted period of playing every night in front of an audience. The showcase could be the means to achieve that.

There are more showcases yet to be heard at The Wardrobe. Catch them if you can, for this one was abso-blooming-lutely marvellous - to use an example of tmesis.

John Robert Brown www.john-robert-brown.com