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The WestbrookJazz Moving Picture Show has moved here
Remembering John and Margery Styles, founder members of Smith’s Academy.
14 January 2025
No. 89
The music here is not a display of conventional technical wizardry by a conventional jazz piano virtuoso. But it is most definitely a display of wizardry nonetheless. Here Mike Westbrook, solo piano, is celebrating his current considerations on his ongoing inventing of new jazz rituals (to be clear then, he was not intending to reproduce the over-venerated jazz of the past).
Gary Bayley - photo: FKADuckh
piano and me take four cover
As a way in - should you want one! - you could think of this recording in terms of a pianist reading notated complex parts. Dense, rich, textures as found in Olivier Messiaen; disparate and quirky lines as found in John Cage; micro-managed dynamics of individual notes as found in Pierre Boulez. For listeners of music from the jazz museum the listening to be had here is indeed an unorthodox experience. There are no lengthy linear serpentine-flowing-melodic-lines in the right hand with stabbing-chordal-interventions-in support by the left hand. Instead one has to listen, horizontally, down through the layers and pause briefly before hearing - retrospectively - which note(s) will be developed in a new context and thus provide the forward thrust, and also hear which notes will each turnout to have a supporting role, and also hear which notes have led your ear playfully up a cul-de-sac. This is music that requires the listener’s total immersion in a three dimensional sound-world (perhaps, more likely, a four dimensional space-time world!); and consequently I find this recording considered whole, as an artwork, rewards committed involved listening in a very satisfying manner indeed.
If this really was the reading of written out music notation then the pianist would effectively be knowingly performing a piano reduction of material conceived for bigger, very much bigger, musical forces.
piano and me take four - back cover
'But, of course, this music is not written out. Mike Westbrook is improvising. The performance recorded here is surely only possible because Mike has consummate arranging and orchestration skills and composes so distinctively! And as such the control of the sheer number of variables he manipulates seems to me to be an overwhelming challenge for a mere mortal. There is, of course, the big three: melody, harmony, rhythm (the latter always a secure display of exceptional skill by Mike); but also there is episodic short-range development and overarching long-range development, voice-leading, texture, tessitura, phrasing, dynamics (another Westbrook speciality), ..., you name any one and Mike has pulled it out of the air for use in a completely controlled creative and imaginative manner. And besides this considerable intellectual dimension the listening experience is visceral too: I find it regulates my breathing throughout, and in places it is completely breath-taking.
There are no popular (these days) nebulous, sombre, slow moving, impressionistic ‘meditations’ or ‘explorations of an idea’ here. The definite developments are in the expressionistic production of tumbling blocks of sound that come-and-go creating enduring cross-currents and interconnections and significances: ultimately all are consequential with respect to the manufactured whole. Alright, maybe there are after-all some ‘explorations of an idea’, but as he has so many ‘ideas’ fitted-in, juxtaposed, then each exploration is probably of a few seconds in duration, certainly not minutes in double-figures. The rate of musical movement here is astonishing, and this is impressive because it is not at all the norm experienced in solo jazz or classical piano playing: not that nobody else is doing it but that it is doubtful that anybody else is capable of it!
For me to go on about the constituent parts must not be taken to suggest that Westbrook is a cold analytical technical performer. The truth is up at the other end of the spectrum, he is concerned not with analysis but with synthesis, and not with technique but with aesthetics: artistic wholeness. It is because his musical performances are elaborate constructions that I feel that if he stopped touching the keyboard - and adding new sounds, the piano would nevertheless continue to produce all the sounds performed previously!
I mentioned Mike’s sense of rhythm as being a stand-out feature for me. He never just ‘plays along’ using piano sounds as an embellishment. His sounds are structural and he is sure-footed in placing them accurately and precisely into space such that both the sounds and the silences, in being under total control, work for him as artist’s materials. And Mike has a way of stating rhythmic fragments that plant an ongoing rhythm in my head, but a rhythm that isn’t maintained explicitly by him with sound: it is a sort of ‘you get the idea now run with it, do I really need to spell it out?’ that Jaco Pastorius too was a master of.
I also mentioned dynamics as a Westbrook forte(!). Answer me this: how does Mike play so loud without crashing crudely? How does he play so softly yet attack so crisply? How does he voice those cluster chords with each constituent functional note at an intentionally different volume? I can only gloss the answer with the response: ‘because he has put in the hours wood-shedding and now he is an artisan, a master craftsman’.
Perhaps this is the music that late period Keith Jarrett and/or Brad Mehldau could have come up with had they had been equipped with the composing, arranging, and orchestrating, experience of some seventy years. Perhaps this is the music that Berg, Webern, or Schoenberg, could have produced had they been interested in performing for an audience and with a concern for entertainment by effective communication. Whatever! Such comparisons are fun thought-experiments but the best thing to do practically is to listen to this music as it is, on its own terms, as being Mike Westbrook art-music in the Mike Westbrook jazz tradition'.
Gary Bayley
author of
George Russell’s Lydian Concept.
An introductory manual for jazz musicians.
Available for reference at The British Library and all main libraries in the UK
author of
George Russell’s Lydian Concept.
An introductory manual for jazz musicians.
Available for reference at The British Library and all main libraries in the UK
piano and me - take four is available as a download only.
More information
take one, take two and take three are also available as individual downloads.
takes one to four are also available as a single download at a special price.
More information
take one, take two and take three are also available as individual downloads.
takes one to four are also available as a single download at a special price.
Mike Westbrook: Ashburton
by Dr Gary Bayley
the piano and me
Ashburton Arts Centre Devon
6th March 2023
by Dr Gary Bayley
the piano and me
Ashburton Arts Centre Devon
6th March 2023
M i k e W e s t b r o o k
B A N D O F B A N D S
I L L U S I O N S
by Frederick Hollander
karen street kate westbrook
accordion voice
chris biscoe
alto saxophone
B A N D O F B A N D S
I L L U S I O N S
by Frederick Hollander
karen street kate westbrook
accordion voice
chris biscoe
alto saxophone
24 January 2025
Mike Westbrook: Band Of Bands
ILLUSIONS
ILLUSIONS
No. 90
Kate & Mike Westbrook
