Decca Records initiate their British Jazz Explosion reissue series with a vital collection of hard to find UK jazz cuts from 1965 to 1972

Pandemic concerns aside, the UK jazz scene couldn’t be in better health. Creatively bold and informed as much by club culture and hip-hop as jazz’s rich history, today’s artists are as comfortable occupying the outer reaches as they are chasing a groove. The influence of spiritual jazz and key figures such as Alice Coltrane and Pharoah Sanders looms large, as much for the deep, difficult to pin down sounds as the artists’ uncompromising aesthetics. It can therefore seem much easier to join the dots to American jazz of days gone by, rather than seek out more local inspirations, but there is also older UK jazz running through contemporary musical veins. Which is something that is made evident here.

Key British jazz records from the 1960s and 1970s can be, to put it mildly, difficult to find and without unlimited funds, almost impossible to bring home. This is however being addressed, with reissue labels slowly making these works available to a modern audience: Jazzman with their series of Don Rendell / Ian Carr Quintet reissues (some of which are themselves becoming scarce), alongside the likes of Gearbox (Michael Garrick Sextet’s Prelude to Heart Is a Lotus) and Mr Bongo (Ian Carr’s Belladonna). Enter Decca Records to further speed up the process with their British Jazz Explosion project, which launches with this quite frankly essential compilation, Journeys in Modern Jazz: Britain. Forthcoming full album reissues include the Manet-referencing Le Déjeuner Sur l’Herbe by The New Jazz Orchestra and Spacewalk by Don Rendell Quintet. Remastering work is courtesy of Gearbox Records.

Journeys in Modern Jazz: Britain certainly offers a plethora of delights, the cumulative magic of which the few highlights here can only hint at. Ken Wheeler and the John Dankworth Orchestra initiate proceedings with “Don the Dreamer”, a swinging trumpet-led piece that maintains quite a pace. There’s a motif that sounds like the British equivalent to a French new wave score (Georges Delerue for Truffaut perhaps), in tune with the romantic and comedic without abandoning depth of feeling or meaning. Similar to the new wave’s modernist take on classic Hollywood, Wheeler and company forge a future from big band materials. Elsewhere, “With Terry’s Help” by John Surman and John Warren folds in some Eastern flavours in the Yusef Lateef mode, whereas “Some Echoes, Some Shadows” from Michael Gibbs makes orchestral and honky-tonk moves before going full-tilt jazz-rock fusion. “Angle” by The New Jazz Orchestra feels particularly cinematic, in a slightly dark and peculiarly British way, sitting somewhere between Stravinsky and London noir. It has an absolute sense of drama, yes, but also maintains a lightness throughout. The standout cut might just be the Mike Westbrook Concert Band’s sublime “Waltz (for Joanna)” which hits the sweet spot where the late-sixties British jazz sound meets the spiritual and cosmic, as if Pharoah Sanders had done a Stanley Kubrick and set up shop outside London from the 1960s on.

Decca Records

Stewart Gardiner
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