‘A Celebration of Keith Tippett’

(Pig Records. 266 minutes – Blu-ray/download review by Mark McKergow)

Pianist, composer, improviser and educator Keith Tippett died in 2020 aged 72. A fearless musician whose career took him from a secondary modern school in Bristol’s Southmead to the Royal Albert Hall to Top Of The Pops, around the world and back to his native Gloucestershire, the Brunel-sideburned, cider-drinking Tippett was very proud of his roots. His latter-day reputation rests a good deal on solo piano improvisations but his career encompassed the huge 50-piece Centipede project, groups in many configurations, the Mujician improvising quartet and the Dedication Orchestra who performed large-scale arrangements of tunes by the South African Blue Notes who fled to London in the mid 1960s.

It was fitting that this series of concerts celebrating Keith Tippett should be organised in Bristol, featuring many musicians from the city who had worked with the maestro over the years, along with guests from around the country. These six sets, each around 40 minutes, took place over a single day in October 2021.

They have now at last been released for us all to enjoy; in the old days this would have been a six-LP box set at a high price, so the asking price (£15 for download, £20 for a Blu-Ray disk of the whole thing on video) is a steal.

The first of the six sets sees Matthew Bourne paired with Glen Leach on two grand pianos. Bourne performed with Tippett in a two-piano feature from 2017-2019 including a show at London’s Union Chapel which turned out to be Keith’s last. There’s a good deal of working inside the piano, plucking and holding strings, with glorious bass rumbles and tense rippling before a sublime transcendent finish fades away. 

The next set sees vocalists Julie Tippetts (Keith’s widow) and Maggie Nicols in another improvised duo. They start out in almost telepathic connection with notes, phrases, words, rhythms spilling out in a flow of mesmerising music. Nicols moves to the piano and adds another dimension. The performance spills into bickering noises and words, thumb piano rhythms tinkling away. When Julie Tippetts intones “He was a force to be reckoned with”, we know to whom she is referring. The audience applauds wildly – but the show isn’t over. Nicols says that she can’t do the splits any more (in her 70s) and then sees if she’s right or not. (You’ll have to get the Blu-Ray to find out.) Musical boxes (another Tippett favourite) appear before the performance fades into breathing.

Tippett’s 2011 suite From Granite To Wind is recreated by a strong septet including three saxophonists (Kevin Figes, Ben Waghorn and James Gardiner-Bateman) from the original recording. Bristol’s go-to pianist Jim Blomfield has the unenviable task of opening the piece with Tippett’s piano introduction and proves himself very much up to the task. The moment the swinging South African-inflected melody appears is total joy – worth the price of admission alone. Jake McMurchie (Get The Blessing) takes an extended tenor saxophone solo to great effect, while the engine-room of Al Swainger (double bass) and veteran Tony Orrell (drums) powers along with energy and verve.

Double Dreamtime has trumpeter Jim Dvorak leading a distinguished cast recalling the Dreamtime group with whom Keith Tippett was a key player from the 1980s onwards. The ‘double’ elements mean that each instrument is doubled as per their Double Trouble recording; the musicians coming in two by two in a nod to Tippett’s love of this format, most notably in his Ark unit. Original members Jim Le Baigue (drums) and Roberto Bellatella (bass), along with Paul Dunmall (saxophones) and Kevin G Davy (trumpet) and Mark Sanders (drums) from the Double band are joined by Harrison Smith (tenor sax), Paul Rogers (bass), and Alan Tomlinson & Richard Foote (trombones). A highlight of this set is Tippett’s tune Billy Goes To Town, a swaggering twelve bar blues with Dunmall and Smith seizing their moments.

The Paul Dunmall Quartet set inevitably brings back memories of Mujician, the improvising quartet led by Keith Tippett with Dunmall and Paul Rogers from the 1980s. Here Mark Sanders is on drums replacing original member Tony Levin whose death in 2011 brought down the curtain on the band, and Liam Noble is at the piano. Of course, the music produced by the four is of the highest quality; one section sees Dunmall on alto duelling with Rogers’ double bass, while Sanders lets rip with a terrific drum solo towards the end. These musicians are all masters in listening as well as playing, and they make space for each other seamlessly as the performance goes along.

The finale of the event sees the Celebration Orchestra, led by Kevin Figes and specially constituted for the occasion, play some of Keith Tippett’s large group music. Miles Levin joins on drums, another link to Tippett’s life and work. Keith’s own arrangement of Harry Miller’s tune Traumatic Experience opens the set, followed by part of Centipede’s Septober Energy with Julie Tippetts, daughter Inca and Maggie Nicols joining in for the vocal section. A Song and May Day both feature alto sax leads, with Figes and James Gardiner-Bateman stepping forward with confidence and sensitivity. The show closes with Dudu Pukwana’s tune MRA, arranged by Sean Bergin for the Dedication Orchestra – a fine display of all-in section playing to bring the event to a rousing finish.

This ambitious and successful tribute was put together by Kevin Figes along with an organising committee including Janinka Diverio, Ian Storrer and Nod Knowles. The sound quality of the recordings is excellent (bravo engineer Jonathan Scott) and to have it all on one video means that the visual and physical exchanges so key to this music are captured for us all to enjoy. This set is a worthy reminder of the maverick, hard-working and totally committed life that Keith Tippett led. His belief in the power of music, particularly improvised music, to transport audiences and transform the world was unshakeable. “Unite for every nation, unite for all of the lands, unite for liberation, unite for freedom of man”, he wrote for Centipede in 1969. Like so much of Tippett’s music this is still current and still vital.

LINKS: Full details / purchase link for A Celebration of Keith Tippett on Pig Records
Tony Dudley-Evans’ LJN review of the original concerts

from https://londonjazznews.com