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John Surman: From Boy Choirs to Big Horns
"With a heavy instrument like the baritone, unless you have the most enormous case it's always risky. I've got, as far as I know, one of the best flight cases money can buy, but my baritone got completely wrecked on the way over to the session."
Fortunately, for Surman, Tim Barcone was available. "It was that chap in Kingston, New York, who turned out to be a baritone player himself," Surman explains, "and had maintained Howard Johnson's horn in the past. He got up early in the morning, worked for four or five hours, and put together what was an unplayable instrument for me, so he really deserved his little mention there"—there being the liner notes to Brewster's Rooster (ECM, 2009), Surman's latest in a three decade-plus string of releases for the German label, and his first "jazz" recording, at least in the more conventional sense of the word, in many years.
Brewster's Rooster
Brewster's Rooster features friends old and new—guitarist
John Abercrombie
guitar1944 - 2017
Jack DeJohnette
drumsb.1942
Drew Gress
bassb.1959
Chris Laurence
bass, acousticb.1949
Surman's distinctive voice on both baritone and soprano saxophone—a pure tone that eschews the more nasally soprano tone normally adopted by post-
John Coltrane
saxophone1926 - 1967
"So it's nonsense and it becomes a bit of a drag. I understand that
Dave Liebman
saxophoneb.1946
Surman's decision to bring together Abercrombie, DeJohnette and Gress for the session was an easy one. "I had just finished up Rain On The Window with Howard [Moody] here is Oslo, and [ECM head] Manfred [Eicher] said, 'Maybe it'd be nice for us to do a jazz album, and what would you fancy?' Jack [DeJohnette] came to mind, and John Abercrombie immediately came to mind, and what also came to mind was the fact that Jack had said to me, at least a couple years before, 'You should check out Drew Gress, he's a really nice bassist, and you might like to play with him.'
"I heard him playing with
Uri Caine
pianob.1956
With a series of dates at Washington, DC's Blues Alley and Birdland in New York, Surman and his quartet will have the opportunity to expand on the instantaneous chemistry of Brewster's Rooster in a live setting. With nothing more than a single rehearsal—"I was more comfortable to just say 'Hi' to everybody before we walked into the studio," Surman says—the quartet entered Avatar Studio, in New York, to lay down tracks that, in the fullest spirit of spontaneous creation, were little more than melody lines and changes, in order to allow the most freedom while still possessing a basic roadmap.
Armed with one standard, a number of new tunes written with this group in mind, and two that have been a part of Surman's live repertoire but are recorded by the reed man here for the first time—the elegant oddly named waltz, "No Finesse," and buoyant closer, "Going for a Burton," the latter recorded by Chris Laurence on his long overdue debut as a leader, Nice View (Basho, 2007)—Brewster's Rooster mixes fiery near-free improvisation with more structured concerns. "I knew what we were going to do so I dug around," says Surman. "I thought, 'Well, it'd be nice to play those pieces with these guys,' and then I thought, 'What else might work?' So I sat down and wrote two or three new lines that I thought fit the work, and a couple of others that aren't on there that we didn't get around to. There were a couple of possibilities that we didn't do. I though about doing a beautiful ballad of
Wayne Shorter
saxophone1933 - 2023
Take care of itself, it did. Brewster's Rooster may feel largely like a mainstream album, but the depth of the interplay amongst the four players, and the spontaneous flights of fancy on tracks like "Haywain" prove that it's possible to be both freely intended and thematically focused at the same time. "There just happened to be the line "Haywain" lying in front of us all on the music stand," Surman explains, "and that was more or less it. I just hinted at it; if you don't know the whole melody, I just played a little bit of the beginning and the guys went, 'Oh, yeah, okay,' and that was the end. I don't think we discussed it at all. So that was completely free improv. Jack said, 'Come on, let's just play,' so we did."
What little was on the chart left plenty of room for everyone in the group to do what they do best. Other than the basic melody and, in most cases, a set of changes, nothing else was specified, including chord voicings. "It's very open; I think there were one or two places where I suggested [voicing] possibilities and, for the life of me now, I can't remember whether he [John Abercrombie] followed them or not," Surman recounts. "This method of working with musicians who can improvise and are of that quality, this is the way I like to work.
"I don't really dot Is and cross Ts with people like that because their inspiration is, nine times out of ten, more interesting than stuff that I might put together for them. In this kind of context, this is the joy of this kind of open style of making music. I have other projects that I do, like the string quartet stuff, where there's a great deal of dotted Is and crossed Ts—that's that music—but to play with these guys, I'm interested in them feeling comfortable, so they can slip into the pieces like a comfortable set of clothes. I want the music to be comfortable for them to play so that they can as much make it their own as mine, really; that it gives them a springboard to be themselves and we can play together in that way. That's the idea of it all, so it's as open as possible without being so vague as to be a waste of time."
While Manfred Eicher is listed as producer on the session, and did provide his usual input in sequencing the finished tracks into the order heard on Brewster's Rooster, this was a relatively rare occasion when he wasn't on hand in the studio, to contribute ideas during the session. "At the original recording session, Manfred was ill," says Surman, "and he couldn't come. So I engineered the results and he more or less said, 'Well, you'll be okay, won't you, you'll be happy doing it with Jack.' And I said, 'Yeah, no problem at all.' So that was it. We did it [mixed the record], and there were a couple of e-mails exchanged, where Manfred made one or two suggestions about what he thought would be a nice order of the pieces—and which was more or less what I thought—but he did contribute, as usual, one or two constructive ideas, and that was it."
In the pursuit of the freshest possible take, Surman used largely first takes— or, at least, the first take that was usable, but for reasons not related to the actual performance. "Usually when we get in the studio, the first one [tune]—I forget which—we usually do two or three times, because it's usually about getting comfortable hearing each other and everything" Surman explains. "I don't think there was much to choose musically between takes, usually you hit a music stand, or there's a pot on the amp, or the amp goes. There might've been a few takes but it was never a case of having to do things or edit stuff together. It's more or less as you hear it. Usually you might run something down just to get it until it feels right and then do a take."
As original as it is, there's an aspect of Brewster's Rooster that recalls an earlier, overlooked ECM classic on which Surman also played: guitarist Mick Goodrick's In Pas(s)ing (1979). With a parallel line-up featuring DeJohnette and bassist
Eddie Gomez
bassb.1944
Still, despite Goodrick being credited with the writing, the melodic content sounds very much like something Surman would write. As it turns out, it's a lesser-known truth about the recording. "Someone else I spoke to recently also pointed out that they hear [
John McLaughlin
guitarb.1942
As is often the case, live performances become more outgoing, with the group feeding off both itself and the audience in ways that don't happen in the studio. A live, 2002 BBC radio broadcast of Surman's longtime group with pianist
John Taylor
piano1942 - 2015
John Marshall
drumsb.1952
"There's a consciousness about being recorded that may make one a little more careful. When you do it, some chaps are going to listen to it and say 'Oh gosh, is he playing out of tune?' whereas when you're live, you're out in the world, and it's in the air. Like
Eric Dolphy
woodwinds1928 - 1964
In the more perfect environment of a good studio, it's possible to hear the decay of every note, and everyone in the group can hear each other, even if (as is often the case) the drummer is separated out into a drum booth—as is the case at Avatar, though it's still possible for everyone in the group to have eye contact. "The tendency is that you get to hear more detail, so perhaps you react in a more detailed kind of way; where maybe there is sometimes more nuance in the recording. I do enjoy the recording process anyway—I can certainly say that it's different than the live experience. Whether it's more valuable or less valuable, to me it's just different, equally interesting and exciting. There are things that work in studios that are harder to bring off outside, and maybe vice versa. What will happen with this group [Abercrombie, Gress, DeJohnette] as we get going live, I have no idea, but I can imagine it'll head off in a number of different directions, and each night stands a chance of being quite different. If Jack and I play together, it's often quite different from night-to-night, so adding John and Drew to the mix is only going to make it head off to even more different places."
Jack DeJohnette
When Surman references "Jack and I play[ing] together," he's speaking of their longtime duet. This began with the studio disc The Amazing Adventures of Simon Simon (ECM, 1981), has continued in the ensuing years and was documented live on Invisible Nature (ECM, 2002), and has now expanded to include African kora master Foday Musa Suso and the reed man's son Ben (as engineer and remixer) as The Ripple Effect, releasing one album to date, Hybrids (Kindred Rhythms, 2005). DeJohnette and Surman are also linked personally, with Ben Surman marrying the drum icon's daughter, Minya, a few years ago.But Surman and DeJohnette's relationship dates to before they actually began playing together. "Jack was playing at Ronnie Scott's [in London, England] with
Bill Evans
piano1929 - 1980
Dave Holland
bassb.1946
"Somehow he got introduced to a couple of the new comedy shows that were hot at the time, one in particular called The Goon Show, and I was a good a mimic of those guys so I got him laughing about them. We had all those sayings and catch phrases, and I think it was more in the early stages, where we'd bump into each other, or the odd phone call where we'd get into this hysterical laughter at these things. We became friends on that basis before anything really happened with the music, but we had played together for a bit, and I did go over to Woodstock in 1973 or 1974 and stayed there for several months, as there wasn't a great deal going on after The Trio. I went up with [drummer]
Stu Martin
drums
Alex Foster
saxophoneb.1953
Peter Warren
b.1935Beginnings
Surman first emerged in the mid-1960s, a time that was considered something of a Golden Age in the UK, but as the saxophonist points out, "the time was pretty exciting, whether you were in England, Norway, or in Germany." But the real roots of Surman's music—a vulnerable tone on his horns and an approach that's profoundly lyrical and deeply emotive, regardless of context—go back to the days before he'd even considered picking up an instrument. "It's probably worth going back my early experience making music as a boy soprano," says Surman. "I had quite a special boy soloist voice, and I did a lot of singing when I was growing up in Plymouth, as part of a chorus in church. Once a few people discovered I could really sing I did the oratorial thing as a soloist at Christmas and Easter, so that whole experience of singing is inside me."The pastoral, even spiritual aspect of some of Surman's music surely comes from this early experience, where he was exposed to the works of British composers like Benjamin Britten. "I suppose I must've started singing when I was ten, until my voice broke," Surman continues. "So at that time, I had maybe four years of singing and I really enjoyed it, and I would work with organs and choirs, and sometimes other orchestras. So I got this music inside me. The music going on at home was more based on classical radio, and my dad played piano but tended to play Beethoven, although he did have a soft spot for
Fats Waller
piano1904 - 1943
"But I didn't really get to hear any jazz until I was in my early teens, and then I started to hear
Alexis Korner
guitar1928 - 1984
"If I grew up in Chicago, with the blues, I would have a different sound, and it would be a different music. But all of us are influenced by the first music that we get inside, that moves us. Music is a very emotional attachment to people; it gets inside you, and you identify certain music with certain moods and certain times of your life. Considering the first twelve years of my life, since I wasn't exposed to jazz there's a lot of weird and wonderful stuff inside that finally ends up getting mixed in. But I think it's important to say that once I got to this point being interested in jazz I discovered that there was Peter Russell's hot record store in Plymouth. He was a mail order specialist, which you really needed in those days, to get records from the States and so forth. He just happened to be in Plymouth—he could've been anywhere really—and he took me under his wing. When he first met me, I was listening to British traditional jazz bands and I think he said, 'Listen, this is
Louis Armstrong
trumpet and vocals1901 - 1971
Bix Beiderbecke
cornet1903 - 1931
With alto and tenor saxophones the more obvious horns of choice, how Surman came to the baritone is, perhaps, more obvious than might be expected. "There were two saxophones in the music store window, and one was an alto, the other a baritone," Surman explains. "Both were 37 pounds, 10 shillings, and I thought, 'Wow, value for money!' Plus, being fascinated by instruments, I thought, 'Ah, I have to know what that sounds like.' I had a paper round, and I borrowed money from my dad.
"His idea of disaster would be for me to have a career in music, and this is growing up after the war, and growing up in Plymouth with the idea that job security is important. So I went into the store and blew on this baritone, and when I got down to low C I think I had my first serious sexual experience; my whole body vibrated. Then I said to Peter, 'I've got this baritone.' He put on
Harry Carney
saxophone, baritone1910 - 1974
Surman did study music in college, but at the end of the day most of what he's done has been through self-study and collaborating with others. "It sounds a bit strange for someone who went to music college for three years," says Surman, "but in point of fact I have to be brutally honest and say I don't think that there's much I learned at music college that really showed me how to deal with the music that I write now. We did an awful lot of basic harmony. But there were no jazz studies in those days and it was like going from high school into another high school, like 'Yes sir, no sir,' and you couldn't study the sax because it wasn't an orchestral instrument, and on and on. Very basic; lots of rules, and writing counterpoint was kind of useful, maybe, but I don't think my head was there at all. I was eventually working my way into a few big bands, becoming a professional musician and playing blues with Alexis, who didn't gel too well with harmony."
Emerging in the '60s and '70s
Surman quickly found himself in the burgeoning avant-garde scene in England, alongside other soon-to-be-big-names like trumpeter
Kenny Wheeler
flugelhorn1930 - 2014
Tony Oxley
drums1938 - 2023
"I think, simultaneously with this very entertaining stuff going on in the UK, this sort of thing was happening when we went to the festival in Switzerland with
Mike Westbrook
composer / conductorb.1936
Karin Krog
vocalsb.1937
Jan Garbarek
saxophoneb.1947
Arild Andersen
bass, acousticb.1945
Jon Christensen
drums1943 - 2020
Palle Mikkelborg
trumpetb.1941
"I remember doing a workshop in Hamburg with
Erich Kleinschuster
b.1930
Albert Mangelsdorff
trombone1928 - 2005
Sonny Rollins
saxophoneb.1930
The 1960s was a time where cross-pollination wasn't just going on, but was completely natural; considered nothing more than what people did. And so, while Surman was working on the outer edges of jazz, he was also intersecting with musicians from other arenas. It was great playing in the sixties in London," Surman says, "and one of the most exciting things was the diversity of the music. You had on one hand, the movement of Alexis Korner's Blues Inc, from which emerged
Eric Clapton
guitar and vocalsb.1945
Ginger Baker
drums1939 - 2019
Jack Bruce
bass, acoustic1943 - 2014
Chris McGregor
b.1936
Michael Gibbs
tromboneb.1937
It was, if fact, Surman's interest in calypso that led to his first, self-titled 1968 album and a three-record contract with Decca/Deram that also included his first collaboration with
John Warren
composer / conductorb.1938
But John Surman was about far more than calypso, and the music on the flip side of the original LP demonstrated a far more adventurous side to Surman, at a time where that kind of eclecticism was encouraged. Still, while many look to that time in England for its more forward-thinking music, the tradition continued to live on, and became another part of Surman's DNA, right up to Brewster's Rooster, where he delivers a tender reading of
Billy Strayhorn
piano1915 - 1967
Tubby Hayes
saxophone, tenor1935 - 1973
Johnny Griffin
saxophone, tenor1928 - 2008
"I know that [the man] who was on the door sort of looked at me, and said 'I'm looking the other way mate,' as I slipped in the door, and they were just having such fun. It was unbelievable. And the rhythm sections, the bass players were flopping over, trying to keep pace with these guys but it was just great. It wasn't that British jazz evolved from absolutely nothing;
Ronnie Scott
saxophone, tenor1927 - 1996
Victor Feldman
multi-instrumentalist1934 - 1987
But at the same time that Surman was exploring a multitude of styles on his first three Deram albums, he'd met bassist
Barre Phillips
bassb.1934
The Trio would become well-known amongst the more experimental-minded, releasing two important records—the double-LP set, The Trio (1970) and Conflagration (1971), both on Dawn. Both have been collected into Glancing Backwards: The Dawn Anthology (Sanctuary, 2006), a three-CD set that also includes a 1976 all-improvised duet date for Surman and Martin, Live at Woodstock Town Hall (1976), and Where Fortune Smiles (1971), which has also been available under John McLaughlin's name in the past. A quintet date for Surman, McLaughlin and Martin, alongside Dave Holland and German vibraphonist
Karl Berger
vibraphone1935 - 2023
Mahavishnu Orchestra
band / ensemble / orchestrab.1971
Surman's broad purview, what would become a defining characteristic of his entire career, also entered the space of
Miles Davis
trumpet1926 - 1991
Soft Machine
band / ensemble / orchestrab.1966
Country and continent-hopping, by the mid-'70s Surman had amassed a sizable discography both as a leader and guest; but most important was, whether he was playing in a more completely free context with Stu Martin or in the more composed context of his larger ensemble work on How Many Clouds Can You See?, his voice on bass clarinet, soprano and baritone saxophones, and the relationships that he had built with a large cadre of players, established him as an important voice on horns that rarely got a lot of frontline feature. With his inherent eclecticism, and some of his musical associates already finding their way to ECM Records, it was only a matter of time before he was approached by Manfred Eicher. "As I remember, Manfred had been interested in recording me and maybe even The Trio way back in the seventies, but I was already on the record contract thing," says Surman. "I was kind of spoken for much of the seventies, and then I got absolutely fed up with these old-fashioned contracts, which usually meant your album comes out, and a little fuss about it; then the second one...hmm, they kind of realize jazz is not as commercial as they thought it might've been; and the third one, where you try and get rid of it as quickly as you can."
Coming to ECM
"We [Surman and Stu Martin] did [Barre Phillips'] Mountainscapes (ECM, 1976), and that's when the dialogue began. Then Jack [DeJohnette] called me and asked if I'd do a Mick Goodrick album [In Pas(s)ing]. I was in the studio with Manfred and he said, 'Let's do something,' so I proposed that I do the solo album, which I thought would be an interesting sound, and so did he."That album, Upon Reflection (ECM, 1980), would be the start of a lifelong relationship with ECM as both a leader and guest, as well as the first in a series of completely solo albums, where Surman would layer saxophones, bass clarinet, keyboards and more to create, orchestral combinations of in-the-moment spontaneity and preplanned composition.
That first project also established a strong working relationship with Eicher. "The solo project for Manfred was interesting," Surman says, "because we got involved together very much from that. When you're alone in the studio recording then it really is useful to have someone in the control room that's got a really good ear. You do one track, and then you multi-track, and then you can ask Manfred how was that and he says, 'Great, great, go on to the next track,' so you can keep the immediacy, you can keep the vibe.
"We managed to get a way of working together straightaway, and I think he enjoyed that work, he was brilliant at it because I might do seven or eight takes, and he has this ability, this very good memory, for what's happened, so when we came to put it all together he said, 'What you want to listen to is this," and, 'Check that,' and so we had good cooperation there and that's why it worked out quite quickly."
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John Surman
Interview
John Kelman
John Abercrombie
Jack DeJohnette
Drew Gress
Chris Laurence
John Coltrane
Dave Liebman
Uri Caine
Wayne Shorter
eddie gomez
john mclaughlin
John Taylor
John Marshall
Eric Dolphy
Bill [Evans]
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Stu [Martin]
Alex Foster
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Alexis Korner
Louis Armstrong
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Harry Carney
Kenny Wheeler
Tony Oxley
[Mike] Westbrook
Karin [Krog]
[Jan] Garbarek
Arild Andersen
Jon Christensen
Palle Mikkelborg
Erich Kleinschuster
Albert Mangelsdorff
[Sonny] Rollins
Eric Clapton
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Jack Bruce
Chris McGregor
Mike Gibbs
John Warren
Billy Strayhorn
Tubby Hayes
Johnny Griffin
Ronnie Scott
Victor Feldman
Barre Phillips
Karl Berger
Mahavishnu Orchestra
Miles Davis
Soft Machine
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Niels-Henning Orsted Pedersen
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