Where Rivers Meet

Programme Notes by Dr. Mike Tucker Since its launch by director Tommy Smith in 1995, the Scottish National Jazz Orchestra has gone from strength to strength. A large and impressive range of imaginative concert tours – with eminent guest soloists drawn from Britain and Europe, Scandinavia, America and Japan – has been matched by a critically lauded series of contemporary and historically rooted yet freshly conceived recordings. Gershwin and Mozart, Robert Burns, Saint-Saëns and Prokofiev have joined, for example, Ingrid Jensen, Eddi Reader and Laura Jurd, Arild Andersen, Bobby Wellins and Courtney Pine, Branford Marsalis and Mike Stern, Kurt Elling and Makoto Ozone in contributing to a CV unmatched today by any other big band in the world. As befits its title, the latest project from Smith and the SNJO – Where Rivers Meet – essays an especially inspiring confluence of material and means, music and meaning. Recasting and revivifying key elements of the potent, often blues-charged free expression which fired the so-called “New Thing” or “Free Jazz” which emerged in America some sixty years ago, Where Rivers Meet sets in a distinct and fresh light the music of Albert Ayler (1936-1970), Ornette Coleman (1930-2015), Dewey Redman (1931-2006) and Anthony Braxton (b. 1945). Such light owes much to the characterful symbiosis evident in the work of, respectively: Geoffrey Keezer (arranger) and Tommy Smith (tenor saxophone) on the Ayler pieces; Smith (arranger) and Paul Towndrow (alto saxophone) on the Coleman material; Towndrow (arranger) and Konrad Wiszniewski (tenor saxophone) on the Redman items, and Paul Harrison (arranger) and Martin Kershaw (alto saxophone) on the Braxton numbers. The overall aura of this vivid, shape-shifting project derives equally – if not especially – from the contributions of the Moscow-born but Edinburgh domiciled painter and multi-media artist, Maria Rud. Rud has long established a considerable reputation: not just for her chromatically rich, soulful and spiritually charged images, with their transfigured overtones of Picasso and Chagall as well as early Russian icon painting, but also for the visceral resonance of the large-scale digitally projected works which she has created in the various AniMotion Show performances she has given with musicians such as Evelyn Glennie and DJ Dolphin Boy. Much of this work’s practically shamanic intensity and joy must have struck a special chord with the saxophonist whose four-part Sonata no. 2, ‘Dreaming With Open Eyes’ – recorded with pianist Murray McLachlan and released in 1999 on Gymnopédie: The Classical Side of Tommy Smith – opens with a segment entitled ‘Call of the Shaman’. Smith first met Rud in 2012 at an event in the National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh, when Smith “played a few notes”, as he puts it. As evinced by his 1995 quartet recording Azure, which was inspired by the work of the Catalan painter, printmaker and sculptor Joan Miró, Smith has long had a literate interest in – and passion for – the visual arts. One of his special memories is the jam session he had early in the new millennium with the great Scottish painter and pianist Alan Davie, before playing another telling “few notes” to introduce a major show of Davie’s work at the University of Brighton. So, it was only natural that Maria Rud’s suggestion, in 2006, that Smith and she might one day work together, should come to fruition – as it does so strikingly in Where Rivers Meet. The magnificent venue for this project is Edinburgh’s St Giles Cathedral, which could not be more appropriate. One recalls the reproduction of Jackson Pollock’s White Light which formed the cover of Ornette Coleman’s 1960 double quartet Free Jazz recording, just as one recalls the belief of some of the Abstract Expressionist generation that they wished to create cathedrals “out of themselves”. For Smith – whose 2017 quartet recording Embodying The Light offers tribute to another giant of the Free Jazz era, John Coltrane (1926-1967) – “This is all about expression, the deepest expression of your voice. It’s not about the material so much as how you play it. To reach the sort of space where melody and forms that are rhythmically fluid might fuse to summon soul and spirit – that was the challenge and the achievement of much of the best of the free jazz of the 1960s and beyond. And that’s what we’re after here.” © Michael Tucker Dr Michael Tucker was Professor of Poetics at the University of Brighton until his retirement in 2012. A long-time contributor to Jazz Journal, his many publications include Dreaming With Open Eyes: The Shamanic Spirit In Twentieth-Century Art And Culture (1992), Jan Garbarek: Deep Song (1998) and Alan Davie: An Inner Compulsion (2018). He wrote the sleeve-note for Tommy Smith’s 1995 Azure recording on Linn Records.