The Book Cooks
Excerpt from
And Did Those Feet ... Six British Jazz Composers
Duncan Heining
(Jazz in Britain; London)
Excerpt from Chapter 3: Mike Gibbs
2. Five For England
Mike Gibbs Courtesy of Duncan Heining
Fortunately, [Mike] Gibbs’ second attempt at settling in Britain was successful. While in southern Africa, he had corresponded with Graham Collier, his fellow student at Berklee. Soon after his arrival in the UK, Gibbs joined Collier’s Septet and would play on the bassist’s first album, Deep Dark Blue Centre. (Deram, 1967) At this point, Gibbs was still five years away from making his first record. Like most of his peers, he survived through the usual range of music-related jobs – depping for colleagues, theatre orchestras and studio and jingle work. It was on one of the latter that he met fellow trombonist, Chris Pyne.
When I got to England all those guys from bands like Ted Heath’s were still around, I did sessions and sat in on jingle dates with Don Lusher. He was like number one in the studios at the time. Don was such a gentleman but Chris Pyne was my mentor and we did a lot of stuff together. (Heining/Gibbs May 2021)
In fact, Gibbs and Pyne led a two-trombone quintet for a while, making a BBC Jazz Club broadcast together in December 1967. A further opportunity arose while Gibbs was playing in Tony Russell’s rehearsal band. Russell was managing John Dankworth’s band at the time and, knowing Cleo Laine needed a trombone player, he recommended Gibbs. As a result, Gibbs was to play with Laine and Dankworth from 1966-1973. Generous as ever to his musicians and keen to make full use of their talents, Dankworth encouraged Gibbs to write and arrange for the orchestra and two of Gibbs compositions – “Triple Portrait” and “A Family Joy” – feature on Dankworth’s Full Circle LP (Philips, 1972).
Gibbs’ first big break as a composer came when the BBC approached him to form a band for a broadcast from Lancaster University in 1969. The release of the full concert by Turtle Records in 2018 Festival 69: Michael Gibbs with the Gary Burton Quartet, is a real coup for Gibbs’ fans. The three CD set is a fine companion to Gibbs’ debut release, played with passion and verve by a star-studded band, including saxophonists John Surman, Alan Skidmore, and Mike Osborne, his friend Chris Pyne and trumpeter Henry Lowther. But listen, in particular, to the rhythm section of pianist Mike Pyne, Phil Lee on guitar, drummer John Marshall, and Jack Bruce on electric bass. No wonder that John Surman apparently remarked later that the experience of his first gig with Gibbs’ band was like “being run over by a bus.”
Bruce would also go on to play on Gibbs’ eponymous debut album. Gibbs had been introduced to Bruce by Gary Burton when Burton was doing a season at Ronnie’s and Bruce was in the audience. With Cream having come to an end, the bassist was open to offers and, approached by John Marshall at Gibbs’ request, agreed to play the Lancaster date and on Michael Gibbs (Deram, 1970).
In a way, this account illustrates the way such connections work in jazz, not in a “funny handshake” kind of way but rather that opportunities to perform or record often arise more through informal routes than via formal invitation or selection processes. Similarly, it was the Dankworth connection and the fact that Gibbs was also writing for the band which brought him to the attention of other potential employers. Producers would hear his music on the radio or on record and an invite to write the music for a TV show or film would come. In fact, Gibbs would go on to compose the music for some fifteen films between 1971-1999, as well as music for a similar number of TV series. He was musical director for The Goodies TV series for the first five seasons, those same informal processes applying there.
Bill Oddie came to one of my concerts. He was a big fan. He used to buy two or three LPs a day. We – Cilla and I – got to know him and his family socially. They used to have a lot of parties and we used to go. Bill introduced me to a lot of pop music. Crosby, Stills and Nash was one – I really loved their harmonies – and Bob Dylan’s group, the Band. A lot of the pop music I heard back then, Bill introduced me to it. (Heining/Gibbs 2021)
In fact, when Oddie asked Gibbs to do the music for The Goodies, they decided to use a five piece-band built on similar lines to the pop/rock groups, such as the Band, that the comedian was listening to at the time.
The chance to record for Deram came about when Gibbs was playing on a session for Mike Westbrook’s Marching Song album. As he told Ian Carr, it was the ever-generous John Surman, who suggested to producer Peter Eden that he record Gibbs for the label. Before Michael Gibbs was recorded and released, Eden used Gibbs to write the arrangements for songwriter Bill Fay’s first record. (Deram, 1970) Again, this set a pattern with Gibbs being in demand by any number of pop/rock/soul acts as an arranger/MD. For example, in 1971, Eden brought Gibbs and blues singer/songwriter Mike Cooper together on Places I Know (Dawn, 1971). Cooper, backed by Mike Gibbs’ band, even featured on a BBC Radio 1 Sounds of the Seventies broadcast. Cooper later told writer Colin Harper, “It was Peter who suggested working together with Mike Gibbs and that was a great thrill for me because I eventually even did a live BBC Radio Jazz in Britain (or something like that) singing some of my songs with the Mike Gibbs Orchestra as my backing band. I felt like Frank Sinatra for a night.”
Michael Gibbs was incredibly well-received by critics and record-buying public alike, with Gibbs featuring in critics’ and readers’ polls in Melody Maker and Jazz Journal. An article in the Times Educational Supplement by Jim Bergman from 1971 did, however, put this success in perspective. Bergman noted, “Even more remarkable, in a country where a jazz LP which sells 500 copies is considered a huge commercial success, Michael Gibbs (Deram) has already sold 1,300. Decca, Deram’s parent company are delighted ...”
That said, it was universally agreed – in the jazz and, even, in parts of the pop/rock world – that Mike Gibbs had arrived. Michael Gibbs is a remarkably complete and coherent debut. Though lacking the raw excitement of the live recording from Lancaster or of the Jazz in Britain reissue of tapes from two 1970 BBC Broadcasts, Revisiting Tanglewood 63: The Early Tapes (Jazz in Britain, 2021) the studio recording gives full expression to the sumptuous harmonies and textures of Gibbs’ compositions. But the debut adds something else as well. While the Lancaster performance featured just electric bass and guitar, the band now included electronic keyboards, as well doubling the guitars and basses at several points. Gibbs told Bergman that he did not see himself as “merging jazz and rock.” Rather confusingly, he added, “The improvising soloists, I suppose, provide the jazz element on the album, and the rhythm gives the rock element. But they’re not really two different things.” If anything, it is the use of electronic instruments alongside the 4/4 rhythm that gives the rock feel to the music but Gibbs also uses the keyboards, in particular, to create new colours in the music. One wonders what a synesthete would make of this music but, listening, I hear/see oranges, yellows, and reds with occasional blue flashes and that is entirely without artificial stimulants.
There is a genuine sense of joy about the music, as well, which also comes across in the solos. But there is also something of a reluctance to commit on Gibbs’ part, as if he is both keen to embrace the sonic textures offered by electric instruments but loath to let go of his primary debt to jazz. In contrast to the Lancaster concert, Michael Gibbs features Chris Spedding and Ray Russell on electric guitars in place of the more straightahead jazz style of Phil Lee at Lancaster. In fact, the combination of Russell with the twin bass guitars of Jack Bruce and Spedding on the first part of “Some Echoes, Some Shadows” seems to have involved an almost seismic shift in musical perspective over a period of just nine months. By contrast, “Liturgy” with solos from Chris Pyne and Lee, despite its Messiaen-influenced introduction, offers a performance that would not be out of place on an early-seventies’ Dankworth date. That said, its success as a piece derives essentially from Gibbs’ beautifully lyrical orchestral charts. Further, the second part of “Some Echoes, Some Shadows” still shows Gibbs’ determination to remain true to his roots in jazz, as a later reading with Norma Winstone and the Nordeutscher Rundfunk Big Band (Here’s a Song For You, Fuzzy Moon, 2011) would confirm.
There is a grace and delicacy to “Feelings and Things” and “Sweet Rain” with a hint of wistfulness that could almost be a signature. In a way, from the second section of “Some Echoes, Some Shadows” through “Liturgy,” “Feelings and Things,” and “Sweet Rain,” Michael Gibbs offers a remarkably successful contrast of mood between the two opening numbers and the closing three tracks with their heavier, even darker sonorities and grooves. For example, “Nowhere” offers dirge-like brass choruses contrasting with keening woodwinds over a short repeating motif from electronic keyboards and Gamelan-like percussion from John Marshall and Frank Ricotti – hints of Messiaen, perhaps. Marshall’s solo set against stabbing, screeching brass choruses would be repeated with even greater panache on Gibbs live double album, Just Ahead (Polydor, 1972). However, the influence of Messiaen is at its strongest on the closing pieces on the record, “And on the Third Day” and “Throb.” On “Throb,” where the use of two cellos is a hugely effective device.
Compositionally, “And on the Third Day” is perhaps the most interesting piece. It takes the opening scale of the fourth movement of Messiaen’s L’ascension (“Prière du Christ montant vers son Père”) and builds its structure upon its opening theme. It was the surprise of the use of the D7 as tonic coupled with the slow pace of the piece that struck Gibbs, as he explained: On hearing Messiaen’s L’Ascension, particularly the fourth part “Prière du Christ montant vers son Père,” two things really grabbed my attention. Firstly, the tempo and tonality! The tempo was so tantalisingly slow, slower than any piece I had heard up to then. And the tonality with a fundamental tonic of a pure D7 chord – D, F#. A, C♮ - just as a jazz blues but here it sounded different fresher than I knew it, which I could only assume was because of the context created by the harmonisation of the chromatic five note lead into the downbeat in the third bar - the pure D7 tonic chord. Then, the chromatic ascending lead in - C#, D, Eb, E♮ - are each harmonised with four notes from mode 2 of Messiaen’s Modes of Limited Transposition and the 5th note of the intro, F♮ is harmonised with mode 1 or in more common parlance, wholetone scale, which Messiaen seldom used, as he felt it belonged to Debussy. These five chromatic notes have now arrived at their resolution with the downbeat of the third bar) - the pure D7 - and as I say, sounding so fresh and unlike other times I’d heard it. With my emotional response to hearing this opening and wanting so much to own it, I came up with what is now my piece “And on the Third Day.” (Heining/Gibbs Email 2023)
One might add that the progression from D# with A7 as passing chord before the D7 creates a kind of unresolved tension. But more than this one does hear in Gibbs’ music two other echoes of Messiaen – firstly, in the use of contrary motion, as if certain sections of the orchestra are flowing in the opposite direction to another part; secondly, in the rich brass-led choruses that Gibbs uses. Moreover, to hear how different Gibbs work sounds in other hands, compare the version of the opening track here, “Family Joy, Oh Boy!” with the take on Dankworth’s Full Circle (1972). On the Dankworth version one hears a modern take on the jazz tradition but on Michael Gibbs one hears a music forged both from that tradition but which has taken full account of the music being made in the UK in rock and from America of Miles’ Bitches Brew and Weather Report, as well as these notable influences from Messiaen.
Gibbs’ second album, Tanglewood 63, saw a further development, a new influence alongside those of Messiaen and Gil Evans. The title track was actually written for a performance of Gibbs’ band with the Gary Burton Quartet in Belfast in 1969 and can be heard in that version on Festival 69: Michael Gibbs with the Gary Burton Quartet. Along with “Sojourn,” “Tanglewood 63” suggests for the first time that Gibbs is taking something from his homeland in Southern Africa. The writing throughout the record is superlative but, particularly on the title track, one hears a lilt that is highly infectious and even danceable. Layers of complex rhythms, stabbing brass choruses and bubbling electric bass from Roy Babbington underpin the solos of Frank Ricotti (as fine in his own way as Burton), Henry Lowther on trumpet, Chris Pyne on trombone and Tony Roberts on tenor.
With “Sojourn,” the influence is more subtle with its use of cello, electric bass and washes of cymbals from John Marshall and Clive Thacker. But it is in the horns that one hears the cadences of South African music most vividly. One can hear the Southern African gospel church, as John Surman on soprano and Alan Skidmore duet over the slow-moving modal chords of the piece. It is quite lovely with Ricotti’s tinkling vibes echoing thumb piano and xylophone.
Such influences were late in coming into play in Gibbs’ oeuvre, as he acknowledged:
You know, when I (first) became interested in jazz and at university, I took for granted what I was hearing around me and but never studied it. It was the moment I set foot in America, that I realized what I had missed, how I hadn’t paid attention to the music that I heard on the street. I mean, Africans walked because they don’t have cars. And on the street as they walked they would play a mouthbow and also the mbira. But it was more than the instruments, it was the rhythm feel. (Heining/Gibbs May 2021)
Perhaps, any such influences on “Tanglewood 63” and “Sojourn” were unconscious – but they are most definitely present.
These two tracks bookend “Fanfare,” a more apt description it is hard to imagine. A feature for the remarkable, thunderous drumming of John Marshall and soprano of Stan Sulzmann, its highly chromatic brass choruses feel almost overwhelming. Again, it is hard not to hear something of Olivier Messiaen in the composition. It is over far too soon. Messiaen’s Turangalila Symphony informs “Canticle” more in mood and its sensuous spirituality, as Gibbs told Ian Carr in 1973. It is one of Gibbs most beautifully executed pieces. Incredibly slow-moving and with neither pulse nor fixed key centre, its solos flutter in and out of the mix. Gibbs makes no mention of this to Carr, however one has that same sense here of that gossamer-like translucence that one finds in Gil Evans’ work. It is that effect that the composer achieves on “Canticle.” The record closes with “Five for England,” primarily a vehicle for Chris Spedding and the rhythm section with occasional riffs and interjections from the horns. Fine though the original record is, Revisiting Tanglewood 63: The Early Tapes adds further lustre to an already fine recording. Where the original holds back, this recent release gives a greater sense of how the music must have sounded live.
It is important to recall, that these two records and Just Ahead from 1972 were made for major labels with clout and money to spend, who backed these releases with substantial advertising in the trade papers. This both reflected Gibbs’ growing standing amongst British jazz critics, while also validating that standing. Gibbs’ debut scored in the 1971 annual poll in Jazz Journal and Melody Maker, coming second to Duke Ellington’s 70th Birthday Concert in the former and second to The Trio (Dawn) in the latter. His big band was also highly placed in both, with Gibbs seen as a rising star as a composer/arranger and bandleader. This feat would be repeated the following year and he saw similar success amongst the paper’s readers and critics in 1972-1974.
© 2024 Duncan Heining