‘I’m happiest in the studio, naked and drinking mezcal’: is Buika the most liberated performer on Earth?
She is the ‘singer from everywhere’ who belts out numbers ‘with her heart ripped out’. As the flamenco fusion phenomenon blazes into Britain, she reveals all about her new superpowers – and the exoplanet she hid on during Covid
Etan Smallan
Tuesday 12 March 2024
Buika has forgotten about our interview. The Spanish singer-songwriter was in her studio, preoccupied. “Completely stoned with my music,” she says, once her manager has given her a prod and she connects with me via video call from the Dominican Republic. “I’m so sorry.”
‘It’s dangerous for a man on fire to stand still’ … cover art for Pink Floyd’s Wish You Were Here. Photograph: Aubrey Powell
Pink Floyd's burning man: Aubrey Powell's best photograph
‘A gust of wind blew the fire into the stuntman’s face. His team piled in with blankets to put him out – but he still lost an eyebrow and some of his moustache’
Interviews by Joobin Bekhrad Wed 12 Aug 2020 14.34 BST
Storm Thorgerson and I had created most of the artwork for Pink Floyd’s albums, including Dark Side of the Moon. One day we were asked to Abbey Road Studios to listen to tracks from the band’s new record. The lyrics were mostly about absence, and the album’s title, Wish You Were Here, was a reference to Syd Barrett, who had left the band some years earlier due to issues with LSD. They were also making a statement about record company executives who regarded musicians as money-making machines, demanding one hit song after another – an absence of a different kind.
Accra SheppSaxophonist Archie Shepp performing with the pianist Jason Moran at the Whitney Museum, New York City, September 27, 2019
‘The Story I’m Telling’: An Interview with Archie Shepp
Accra SheppSeptember 29, 2020
My father, the saxophonist Archie Shepp, has recorded more than 110 albums since 1962, performed all over the world, and received numerous honors, including the 2016 Jazz Master’s Award from the National Endowment for the Arts. In the 1960s, he helped define “free jazz,” a new idiom in which the details of melody, harmony, and rhythm are all improvised to create a grand conversation: voices rise and fall, sometimes echoing one another, sometimes dissonant and discordant. In the 1970s and 1980s he wove the blues into his music, extending our understanding of this tradition. His cultural influence reaches far beyond the realm of jazz, touching artists as diverse as Ntozake Shange and Chuck D.
Bob Parent/Hulton Archive/Getty ImagesOrnette Coleman with Don Cherry at the 5 Spot Cafe, New York City, November 17, 1959
Torrential, Gut-Bucket Jazz
Geoff Dyer
June 20, 2015
It happened that on the day the great saxophonist and composer Ornette Coleman died I was watching a preview of a recently salvaged film by Sydney Pollack of the making of Aretha Franklin’s Amazing Grace. The album was recorded live at the New Temple Missionary Baptist Church in Los Angeles, the city where, in the late 1950s, Ornette and his collaborators, Charlie Haden (bass), Don Cherry (trumpet), and Ed Blackwell or Billy Higgins (drums) had formed the quartet that would soon declare the shape of jazz to come. The idea for Amazing Grace was that Aretha would record an album of the gospel music she’d grown up hearing and singing in her father’s church in Detroit. This was in 1972. John Coltrane had died in 1967, Albert Ayler—the tenor saxophonist who, along with Ornette, had played at Coltrane’s funeral—in 1970. Martin Luther King, Jr. had been dead for four years. The unifying grace of the civil rights era had given way to the fractured militancy of Black Power and revolutionary struggle.
Awopbopaloobop Alopbamboom: The book that declared pop music dead
Nik Cohn thought John Lennon ‘self-pitying’, Led Zeppelin ‘embarrassing’ and rated Del Shannon’s ‘Runaway’ above Van Morrison’s entire career. Bob Stanley revisits his 1969 book Bob Stanley Saturday 16 February 2016
‘Great ducktail plume and lopsided grin’ … Cohn’s Awopbopaloobop Alopbamboom is full of praise for Elvis. Photograph: Corbis
In the spring of 1968, the former Queen magazine pop columnist Nik Cohn rented a cottage in Connemara on the west coast of Ireland. All of 22, he had fallen out of love with pop music, and he hid himself away for two months to write a cross between a memoir and a farewell letter. For Cohn, it felt like the end of an era of pop that was “intelligent and simple both”, that carried its implications lightly, that was “fast, funny, sexy, obsessive, a bit epic”. He sniffed pretension in the air as pop turned to rock, and he wanted to get it all down on paper before he completely lost interest. The confidently titled Pop from the Beginning moved from Bill Haley’s Rock Around the Clock in 1955 to the ebbing tide of psychedelia and the return to roots (Dylan’s John Wesley Harding, the Beatles’ “Lady Madonna”) of early 1968. Published in 1969, just as the Beatles disintegrated, Pop from the Beginning was the first definitive text on pop music. Cohn wrote in fast, short sentences; the book read like a series of 7in singles, with no room for deviation, no long solos, no flab at all.
A new room in the Great Pyramid': lost 1963 John Coltrane album discovered
An album of previously unheard original compositions by the legendary jazz saxophonist has been discovered, 55 years after its recording
Ben Beaumont Thomas
Friday 8 jun 2018
A lost album of originals by John Coltrane, the American saxophonist who took jazz to new heights of freedom and expression, has been unearthed.
The album, being released on 29 June as Both Directions at Once: the Lost Album, was recorded in a session on 6 March 1963, at the Van Gelder studios in New Jersey. Joining Coltrane in the quartet that also recorded classic albums such as A Love Supreme, Coltrane, and Ballads, are Jimmy Garrisonon double bass, Elvin Jones on drums, and McCoy Tyner on piano.
The master tape left in the studio was lost, and it’s likely it was destroyed in the early 70s when the label, Impulse!, was trying to reduce storage fees. But Coltrane gave his own reference tape of the recording to his wife Naima, despite their then disintegrating relationship – the pair divorced in 1966, and the tape has stayed in her family’s possession ever since.
Sonny Rollins, a peer of Coltrane’s and also regarded as one of the greatest jazz saxophonists of all time, described the discovery as “like finding a new room in the Great Pyramid”.
Among the seven tracks are two completely unheard original compositions, called Untitled Original 11383 and Untitled Original 11386, both of which are played on soprano saxophone. Another composition, One Up, One Down, has been heard only in a live bootleg from the Birdland jazz club, and never before in this studio version.
The sessions capture Coltrane at a crucial juncture in his music. It was still two years before Ascension, where he opened up his quartet into an experimental, spiritually minded big band, but he was already heading towards its “free jazz” sound. Impressions (1963), recorded across the previous two years, features some unmoored and raw soloing quite different from the previous bebop era. Nevertheless, he was still in love with melody: Ballads, recorded during the same period and also released in 1963, features some of his most accessible material.
The 11386 recording similarly sees the quartet play in a traditional style, revisiting a melodic chorus theme between solos, and the album also features Coltrane’s first, never before heard version of Nat King Cole’s Nature Boy – unlike the freer 1965 version, the Both Directions at Once version is a straight three-minute take without solos.
Ben Ratliff, former New York Times jazz writer and author of Coltrane: the Story of a Sound, told the Guardian: “This is Coltrane’s quartet starting to move into the last stages of their stable and authoritative phase, when they were often playing the same handful of songs. There’s no concept or grand design here. But he’s trying some new tunes, and playing a strange blues, and fine-tuning Impressions – and that’s a lot.”
Both Directions at Once was recorded at an intensely fertile time for Coltrane and his quartet – as well as Ballads and Impressions, he also released a collaboration with Duke Ellington in 1963. The lost session was recorded during a two-week run of shows at Birdland – Coltrane played the club straight after the session – and the following day, 7 March, he recorded the album John Coltrane and Johnny Hartman with the jazz singer (its tracklisting changed on the way to the studio, after the pair heard Nat King Cole singing Lush Life on the radio and decided to include their own version).
Saxophonist Wayne Shorter, interviewed for the album’s liner notes, says the title Both Directions at Once came from a compositional tip Coltrane gave to him: “about starting a sentence in the middle, and then going to the beginning and the end of it at the same time.” The Guardian’s jazz critic John Fordham finds another meaning: “Coltrane was looking back at bebop – the virtuosity and melodic resources of which he had stretched to breaking point – and the song-based lyricism of jazz he had recently explored with Duke Ellington, and was about to with Johnny Hartman. But he was also looking forward to imagining the more intense, mantra-like, spiritually-driven music that produced A Love Supreme in 1964.”
British jazz and improv saxophonist Evan Parker meanwhile told the Guardian: “This release is most welcome – the ‘classic quartet’ was where Coltrane did his best work.” He picked out Coltrane’s interplay with drummer Elvin Jones as being “the core of the music ... which reached astonishing levels of intuitive understanding.”
Ratliff adds that “most of all, Both Directions at Once is a study in how seriously strong the band was, and how powerful his intent, or his concentration, had become.”
Winning performance of the Funakoshi Trophy at the 2010 Los Angeles Showcase, Burbank, California. Taryn Jurgensen skating to "Hallelujah" by Alexandra Burke, choreographed by Karen Kwan-Oppegard.
You, in whose arms
Eternity has placed
My life
You who dreamed
of another world, other flames
But I don't know for whom I exist
Oh lifeless shore
Of my unhappy state
Unhappy state !
Like one who no longer sees the sky
Your heart is in darkness
Like one who looks so much
At the eternal night ...
Pull me away1
There above
What do you know ?
Of bewildered, febrile
Waiting
Where ...
Where are you ?
While your exiled captive
Awaits you ...
But I don't know for whom I exist
Oh lifeless shore
Of my unhappy state
Unhappy state !
Like one who no longer sees the sky
Your heart is in darkness
Like one who looks so much
At the eternal night ...
Ah !
Like one who no longer sees the sky
Your heart is in darkness
My mind wanders, wanders ...
Pull me away
Between his first recording session in 1944 and his death in 1991, Miles Davis changed the course of music many times. The first of these came with the short-lived lineups he assembled for a New York residency and three studio sessions between January 1949 and March 1950. The nine-piece lineup was unusual – few jazz bands used a French horn – and the gigs attracted little attention. The sessions produced a handful of singles for Capitol Records, later collected as an album called Birth of the Cool – these ensured the band’s shadow would prove longer than all but a handful of its contemporaries.
The recordings were the result of hanging out after hours at arranger Gil Evans’s basement flat. The punchy, brightly coloured Venus de Milo was one of three tracks the group recorded that was composed by saxophonist Gerry Mulligan. The epithet “cool” isn’t entirely helpful, suggesting a prizing of style over substance: this music is never aloof or detached. Rather, this is what you got when you tuned down the frenzy of Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie and allied it to the kind of sophisticated big-band arrangements Duke Ellington pioneered. Davis was a fan – and a part – of both traditions: not for the first time, what he crafted was a fusion of preceding forms that changed what would follow.
2. Générique
Touring Europe had a profound effect on Davis. In France, he felt respected as an artist without question or caveat: this had never been the case in his racially segregated homeland. Certainly, he was sure he would never have been approached by a movie director during a US nightclub residency and asked to compose music for a film. When Louis Malle made just that offer to Davis in November 1957, Davis accepted the challenge. The soundtrack to Malle’s Ascenseur pour l’Échafaud (Lift to the Scaffold) was recorded in two days in December. The band – a local pick-up group, including expatriate American drummer and bebop pioneer Kenny Clarke – were given little more than some rough ideas Davis had jotted down in his hotel room the night before. On arrival at the studio they found the film’s star, Jeanne Moreau, holding court at a makeshift bar; loops of footage from the film were projected while they improvised, with Davis suggesting that whatever they played be in counterpoint to the images on the screen. It wasn’t the first jazz soundtrack to a film noir, but it’s an exemplar of the form: Davis’s careful, vulnerable, vibrato-less playing – sometimes using his mute, at others gently enhanced with echo – was tailor-made to snake through black-and-white shots of night-time city streets and imply turbulent moods swimming through shadowy rooms and behind inscrutable faces shot in stark closeup.
Davis had already formed and fired the group that would become known as his “first great quintet” (drummer Philly Joe Jones, pianist Bill Evans, bassist Paul Chambers and John Coltrane on saxophone) when, days after returning from Paris, he re-recruited five superb musicians and began working as a sextet. Lineup tweaks were frequent, and by March 1959, the group featured Jimmy Cobb on drums, Wynton Kelly on piano, Chambers, Coltrane and additional saxophonist Cannonball Adderley. Yet for one of two sessions on 3 March, Bill Evans returned to the piano stool, so fundamental did Davis feel his style was to the material the group was about to record. The two March sessions – and another on 22 April, again with Evans taking Kelly’s place – would give the world Kind of Blue, on which Davis and friends once again upended convention and took jazz off on a new expedition. The set texts tell how Kind of Blue broke the mould, with the players rejecting chords as the basis of improvisation and adopting modes. Another way of thinking about it would be to do as Davis seems to have intended: reflect on the album’s title and listen while six master musicians reconfigure the blues for a new era.
Not content with reinventing small-band jazz with the quintet and sextet, Davis was at the same time in the middle of a series of recordings with Gil Evans that bore more similarities to classical orchestral scores than what was generally considered jazz. Sketches of Spain was the third of these releases and is perhaps the most ambitious. Davis had already begun exploring Spanish music when he was introduced to Joaquín Rodrigo’s Concierto de Aranjuez early in 1959. Davis and Evans worked up an arrangement of the second movement for trumpet rather than guitar: its ubiquity as a piece for brass bands today underlines how influential this reading would become. That it showcases some of Davis’s most confident playing is only part of the story: what matters is that he inhabits the character the notes suggest, and, through his trumpet, finds a truth in the music only the greatest artists could ever have located.
There was a constant churn of collaborators through the early 60s but, with the recruitment of long-time target Wayne Shorter as the eventual replacement for Coltrane on sax in September 1964, Davis finally had what many have described as the greatest group in jazz history. That appraisal may do the “second great quintet” – Davis, Shorter, bassist Ron Carter, drummer Tony Williams and pianist Herbie Hancock – an injustice: they’re clearly one of the finest bands ever assembled, in any genre of music.
By the end of 1965, the new quintet were more than familiar with their leader’s counter-intuitive mindset, and keen to take him out of the comfort zone of a live repertoire that stuck to standards and ignored the adventurous new material they had been recording. Before a December residency at the Plugged Nickel in Chicago, and behind Davis’s back, Williams – barely out of his teens – suggested to Carter, Shorter and Hancock that from the first note of the first set they should play the opposite of what tradition, convention and their leader’s improvisations implied. The four musicians agreed, and didn’t waver even when, on arrival at the venue, they found out that the shows were being recorded by Columbia. The first night wasn’t taped – Davis was arguing with the label – but seven sets from the next two nights were.
Over the course of these performances, released in full in the mid-1990s as the box set The Complete Live at the Plugged Nickel, you can hear the band as they work out ways to become even greater than the considerable sum of their parts. It’s hard to pick a single moment to represent the combination of genius and madness all five were channelling, but by the third night, when Davis has begun to understand what was going on, the group found a way of combining the outre adventurousness of Ornette Coleman’s and Coltrane’s bands of the time with the sharp-suited cool Davis had made a visual and audible trademark. An unexpected roll through Jerome Kern’s Yesterdays from the last set finds the group in total command of this new way of working.
The album the quintet cut during the first studio visit after the Plugged Nickel shows, Miles Smiles, wrings every last drop of creativity out of a band relishing newly unleashed senses of purpose and possibility. The sessions were quick: a few minutes’ rehearsal, then one live take. The recordings crackle with risk-taking, and it’s difficult not to get swept away by the infectious sense of unshackled creativity every player brought to the table. The way Freedom Jazz Dance emerged from the mists is particularly fascinating. The initial run-throughs (released last year on an absorbing box set, also called Freedom Jazz Dance) show Carter struggling to hear the tune anew, having played on its original recording with Eddie Harris a few weeks earlier. After he finds a fresh heartbeat, ideas quickly take shape, but it isn’t until Davis suggests to Williams that he play triplets on every beat (“I can’t play it that fast!” the drummer complains, yet barely a minute later is doing so) that the last piece of the puzzle falls in to place. Davis comes in early but they keep going, Shorter’s and Hancock’s solos conversationally addressing the questions Davis had posed in his opening bars, Carter and Williams achieving what ought to be impossible by keeping the bedrock solid while ensuring it constantly moves and changes.
The quintet dissolved following Carter’s departure and there was never really a constant, consistent Davis studio band afterwards. The British guitarist John McLaughlin’s appearance in the studio for the sessions that became the 1969 album In a Silent Way was unplanned: he was in New York to start work with Lifetime, Tony Williams’ new band, and was invited to the studio by Davis the night before. They weren’t familiar with the material, and the version of the title track that ended up on the album is effectively the sound of the musicians gently and carefully feeling their way through the complicated melody. The results – almost unbearably fragile, and feeling all the more precious for the sense that it could all fall apart at any second – are astounding. It’s a piece of rare and intense beauty, infused with both a wonder and a gradually unfolding understanding that seem to have been as real and unexpected for those playing as they are for the listener. Miraculously, it retains this sense of revelation every time you play it. Taking advantage of every development available – from amplified instruments to multitrack recording and postproduction techniques that anticipate sampling – Davis was taking his own ideas and music through the doorways technology and culture had newly opened.
ABitches Brewwas the record to really scare the jazz purists away: a chaotic, crowded, often cacophonous double LP, it was as extreme as Davis had got. That he was accused of “selling out” at the moment he pushed his music to the limits of listenability probably says more about his detractors than it does about the man or his creative output. The Jimi Hendrix influence is often cited as reaching its apogee on this track, with the title’s nod to Voodoo Child; but in truth, this is Miles, the native son of East St Louis, going back down the Mississippi to reconnect anew with his blues roots. The album version differs dramatically from the one the live band had been playing, and not just because twice as many musicians had been assembled for the session. It’s slower, anchored by a simple drum track played by Don Alias, who had been brought in to play congas: he’d heard a rhythm on a visit to New Orleans and felt it would fit this track better than the one the two drummers (Jack DeJohnette and Lenny White) had tried on earlier, aborted takes. Note, too, that title: Davis isn’t stalking or hunting his prey, hiding in the undergrowth ready to pounce – he’s out there in the open, letting his quarry know that he’s on its tail. That sense of fearless indomitability is there in every note of what is, even in a career brimming with standout moments, a notably thrilling and strident performance.
From the point where Hancock first used an electric keyboard on a quintet session, detractors had been complaining that Davis was making rock music. Among the many problems with that view was: if In a Silent Way was “rock”, what on earth was Bitches Brew? Davis was operating beyond genres, pigeonholes and categorisations. He’d been using the slogan “Directions in music” on his album sleeves for years. He remained, as the 1957 album title put it, Miles Ahead.
Yet in the first half of 1970, Davis finally made a rock album. A Tribute to Jack Johnson was released in a muddle and failed to replicate the impact of Bitches Brew – partly, its maker intimated, because it was the soundtrack to a film about the controversial black heavyweight boxing champion and was suppressed by those who still felt threatened by the thought of black success in a white-dominated world. There were only two tracks, both Teo Macero-edited patchworks, both clocking in more than 25 minutes – but there’s no arguing with the music. Again, the session relied on accident and happenstance. Herbie Hancock wasn’t supposed to be there – he only dropped in to the studio on his way home from the shops. The basic boogie riff that kicks the record off wasn’t what they’d planned to record: it was just McLaughlin, bassist Michael Henderson (a teenager Davis had stolen from Stevie Wonder’s band) and drummer Billy Cobham jamming while they waited for Miles to get ready.
In the control room, Davis heard the warmup and told Macero to run the tape: Hancock set down his groceries and was ushered to the Hammond organ stool. Davis left the control room to prowl the studio, waiting to hear where he could fit in: after couple of minutes, McLaughlin changed chord but Henderson didn’t, and Davis took his opportunity. His first note is the only one that features in both chords, its blast from his trumpet resolving the tension of the apparent mistake with a moment of astonishing musical acuity and insight. Davis proceeds to solo for the next eight minutes, some of the strongest, most strident playing of his life: as if the simple format of the rolling blues-based stomp had freed him from the uncertainties and doubts that often made his playing so emotional, yet could sometimes leave him sounding tentative. By the time McLaughlin quotes Sly and the Family Stone’s Sing a Simple Song, the track has taken us off into another galaxy of sound and imagination.
10. Prelude
Influenced by everything from funk bands to avant garde classical composers, Davis’s ensemble became ever less bound to the past, even as its reliance on grooves and cyclical riffs (particularly from the rhythm section) re-emphasised its debts to blues. But whatever this new music was, it certainly wasn’t pop.
Evidence of what his mid-70s band were up to exists in several supersized portions, doled out across three official live albums and a slew of bootlegs. Nothing sounded like what this septet were up to back then, and nothing has sounded like it since. The first track on Agharta, recorded in Osaka in February 1975, is a 35-minute collision of ideas, structures and sounds given the title Prelude on the record (but which is, in effect, a medley that includes the tracks Tatu and Maiysha as well as Agharta Prelude), that is among the most singular musical moments of the 20th century. Themes and moods are built and destroyed; ideas are assayed, discussed between the instruments, then rejected, only to be replaced by something else. It’s as if the ceaseless quest for something new, the defining characteristic of his creative life, had intensified as Davis found himself skating ever closer to the edge. Though Davis continued to record, this marked the end of the parts of the journey that took him furthest and deepest into the great musical unknown.