‘Objets Trouvés’ liner notes

This is my first record. I’ve been around a little while, made my way happily enough as a journeyman, jobbing saxophone player. I’ve been lucky. I’ve played and toured with some truly extraordinary musicians. Some famous names too - Tom Jones, Amy Winehouse, Mark Ronson. And I’ve loved it. Until now though I’ve managed to remain continent.

There’s an embarrassment of reasons to hand for the indefinite postponement of a solo project - not all of them bogus.

The readiest are the brute logistics of time and money. More imposing though are the existential factors. The sheer hubris - who do I think I am, John Coltrane? Anxiety about the judgment of one’s peers. And of course, the longer you leave it, the more definitive the results have to be, to justify the wait.

Mercifully though, it seems that impatience eventually wins out. All at once the ground of pusillanimous, exculpatory, bad faith prevarications becomes just too tiring to sustain. It turns out you’re old enough and ugly enough to stop giving a shit in quite the same way, and hey presto, a record is born.

At least, that’s how it was with me.

And so it was that in May of this year, I called Mark Rose and booked in a date at his Rokit studio, two weeks away. All I needed now was music to play and musicians to play it with.

There is a roster of trumpet players I revere as musicians and treasure as human beings, but tenor and guitar is a sound I’ve always loved, and that instinctively felt right for this record. James was my first call. He is as natural a musician as they come, with bags of soul, groove to put a smile on your face, and yet a capacity for disarming tenderness (Losing Game). Andrew is a piano player who arrests the ear, hip but never affected. A killing Hammond player, he has great time and swings hard, but he also has touch. The piano in Mark’s studio, a Yamaha upright, is a fine instrument, and Andrew makes it sing.

Bass and drums, runs the stale cliché, are the heartbeat of the band. As so often though, the phrase is hackneyed for a reason. With the wrong rhythm section, a band is dead on its feet. Phil and Darren have spent a whole lot of time in each other’s company these past couple of years; with the resulting mutual intuition they operate almost as a single entity. Phil’s bass sound is full-bodied yet pleasingly sinewy. He plays with a defining pulse, and given the chance states a melody with poise and sweetness (Antonia). Darren’s effortless musicality as a drummer is just a joy. His dynamic range and almost orchestral conception make possible the more evocative moments of the record - the rolling seascape of Downeaster Alexa, the unhinged fairground of Pussycat. And he swings.

And then there’s Sumudu, my good friend and a dream of a singer. A beautiful soul and musical omnivore, there’s pretty much nothing she can’t do as a vocalist, which is why she’s incessantly busy. Somehow she found time to squeeze in half an hour with us before a flight to Beijing, and knocked out three gorgeous takes (two more than we needed!) of Stevie’s Think Of Me As Your Soldier.

It was on one of those precociously sultry spring days that we recorded; with the quintet plus Mark squeezed into the live room at Rokit it was warm. We ran the session in the old manner - all in a room, no cans, one or two takes per tune. I had sent out a handful of arrangements in advance, but we went in with no rehearsal, and what you hear is this music being played for the very first time. We also had a full album to record in a day.

I am supremely grateful to Darren, Phil, Andrew, James and Sumudu for their artistry, their sheer musical generosity. There’s nothing guarded, nothing careful about the playing on the record; just a commitment to the ensemble somehow sustained for the full sweaty length of the day.

I feel very proud to have these fine musicians on my album.

A word then about the musical choices.

‘Just Friends’ is not the great jazz standard, but Amy Winehouse’s song of the same name. I joined Amy’s band shortly after the release of Back to Black; her music by now feels a part of my musical DNA, and ‘Just Friends’ I’ve always particularly liked. A song of doomed love, it captures the rapturous delirium of an infatuation bound to be thwarted. The musical conundrum was how to escape the psychedelic reggae of the original. Amy’s sinuous, push- and-pull vocal offered a way out. She consistently phrases the melody in triplets, suggesting to me an Elvin Jones 12/8 feel, which Darren makes his own.

A jazz record needs a blues, and I opted for McCoy Tyner’s ‘Blues On The Corner’. It’s an exuberant, rambunctious blues, a blues to get the blood flowing, and we all enjoy the romp.

For a number of years now I’ve been lucky enough to be involved in my good friend and master singer-songwriter Elio Pace’s Billy Joel Songbook. I wanted to include something from that rich catalogue, and finally settled on ‘Downeaster Alexa’. It’s a song of the sea (as Elio says, “Who else writes songs about trawlermen?!”), and I love it for the obstinate purity of its minor tonality. Voicing Billy’s vocal melody on tenor in fourths and fifths with James’ guitar gives (I hope) a sense of the broad, open seas. Darren’s marching snare evokes the seaman’s fatalistic discipline. I extended and slightly reharmonised the solo section, and had us all blowing as the waves grow, before settling on a suspended chord for the drums to bestir the waters before the head out.

Next is Pat Metheny’s gorgeous ‘Antonia’. Nobody writes a lyrical melody like Pat. I’ve been entranced by his music all my adult life, and the fact that he barely ever uses a saxophone player in his band is almost an invitation to have a go. A pure indulgence - sorry Pat. Phil is just a treat at the top of this one.

‘Song of Old’ is the only original on the record. A composition of mine from a long time ago, it has something that makes me come back to it periodically; it won’t quite leave me alone, and I wanted to hear what this band would do with it. I handed out some dog-eared chord charts, and we recorded a single take. Andrew and James’ solos - on a tune they’d been introduced to five minutes ago - are just sublime.

‘Late Night Willie’ is another shameful indulgence really. Keith Jarrett is, with Pat Metheny, the great jazz composer of my lifetime. This was a bonus track on the first record of his I ever bought, as a callow sixth former, ‘Personal Mountains’. It is in effect another blues (of sorts), and a chance for the band to groove. It’s a pleasure that feels almost illicit, to play tunes that you love this much.

As many sumptuous ballads as the jazz canon contains, here I did wonder what I might bring to, say, Autumn in New York, that Dexter didn’t. I found myself landing on a second Amy song, a monument of tender resignation, ‘Love is a Losing Game’. For all its simplicity (six chords!) it is itself a small masterpiece. Again we laid down a single take.

Much of the ten years preceding the pandemic was for me spent on the road with the legendary Tom Jones. ‘What’s New Pussycat’ is a tip of the hat to the great man. Playing it every night, I used to wonder this bawdy, off kilter piece of Bacharachalia. A heavy-footed waltz, it carries a whiff of eerie fairground, of demented merry-go-round. Special mention here to James for the scronkiest G, C & D triads he could muster in the choruses; the idea then was for the machinery gradually to fail and the wheels come off through our group improvisation. This was another one to have single go at, and we had fun.

We close with Sumudu, and an exquisite rarely-heard Stevie Wonder love song, ‘Think Of Me As Your Soldier’. (Imagine writing a song this good and having it sink into the murk of your back catalogue!) I hadn’t originally planned for this to be last in the track listing, but as the closing Gb major seventh chord subsides, only silence feels welcome.

***

Thanks go to my wonderful Mum and Dad above all. To Rebecca, Arno & Sophia, who are everything. To Mark Rose, for hosting us at Rokit (gyozas!), and for his expert ears and infinite patience getting the mix right. To Tim Debney at Fluid for his wizardry and astonishing powers of concentration. To my good friends Stuart Anning and John Matta (fine musicians both) for photography and cover image respectively. To Charlotte Lehmann for shooting stills & video on the day. To Paul Jeffrey for overall cover design. And finally to Chris Keats and Packaged Sounds for producing the vinyl/CD you have in your hands!