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Every Time I Think of You
Alan Broadbent and Strings

Alan Broadbent – Autumn Variations
Alan Broadbent – Every Time I Think of You
From Every Time I Think of You: Artistry Music [Buy]

There are probably two jazz pianists born in New Zealand who can be said to have ‘made it’ on the world stage – Mike Nock and Alan Broadbent. Which for a country with the population the same size as greater Birmingham (UK), is not a bad record…

A third contender might be Mark de Clive-Lowe, who is carving a fine reputation in the future jazz/dance sphere, and has all the potential to be a major force in the music. And while all three make regular trips back home to work with their old kiwi collaborators, New Zealand is not a practical permanent base for an international career in music: Nock lives in Sydney, de Clive-Lowe in London, and Broadbent in Los Angeles.

Alan Broadbent’s new album Every Time I Think of You is a fine summary of his particular journey so far through the jazz world: well-proportioned and well-behaved, and in some ways, very, very deep. Like the Carol Robbins record mentioned here a couple of months back, it’s a mostly quiet album that reveals itself over time.

In my experience, the format of jazz group plus string ensemble can lend itself to insipid muzak, yet this sub-genre has produced a few genuine classics – Charlie Parker with Strings and Stan Getz with the Eddie Sauter Orchestra immediately spring to mind. Every Time I Think of You deserves to be considered alongside them: there is real emotion here, and the Tokyo Strings along with Broadbent (p) Brian Bromberg (b) and Kendall Kay (d) give Broadbent’s arrangements direction and substance.

Broadbent, a little like Fred Hersch perhaps, is an unashamed romantic of the old school – both in terms of choice of songbook material, and from what he takes from the classical/symphonic world. In a newspaper interview in New Zealand I read, he mentioned Mahler as an influence on his arrangements, and on this album’s rendition of the Davis/Evans Blue in Green, he gives some unmistakably Tschaikovskian counter-phrasing to the strings.

It is fair to say that Broadbent is probably best recognised as an arranger rather than a pianist. He has won two Grammys for the orchestral settings on albums by Natalie Cole and Charlie Haden’s Quartet West, and cut his teeth working for Woody Herman and Nelson Riddle. But Broadbent is a focused and imaginative instrumentalist in his own right – check out Autumn Variations.

Easy listening? Quite possibly. But if musicians like Alan Broadbent are tracing the middle of the road in jazz these days, then we are assured of a journey that lacks nothing in intelligence and good taste.

Read another review of Every Time I Think of You on blogcritic.org

In other Blogs…

For you Mingus completists, Kellen Yamanaka at Song with Orange has a review of the recently re-released recording of the 1965 Mingus band at UCLA.

One of those road-trip moments… the view of Mont Blanc over Lake Geneva

Lewis Taylor – Bittersweet

From Lewis Taylor: Island CID 8049 [Buy]

Lewis Taylor – The Way You Done Me

From Lewis II: Island CID 8098 [Buy]

It’s been a while between posts, mainly because the dayjob has become a bit of a nightjob and an awayfromhomejob for the past few weeks. Moving to a new job in the UK, and the chance to travel around Europe again has been (mostly) a great decision, although pretty exhausting at times! Here’s some recovery music.

So the sun was just about gone from the sky, and we were driving back up the A39 across the vast rolling expanse of the Champagne region (the dreary countryside doesn’t quite match the reputation of the eponymous drink).

All the way from Geneva, we’d been listening to just about everything you could imagine – R.E.M.’s Automatic for the People (still one of the perfect pop albums ever), a compilation of 1930s black gospel, Eminem, James Brown’s Living in America. And the GPS tells us our overnight hotel in Reims is still an hour away.

I whack on Lewis Taylor, and the Citroën’s stereo selects Bittersweet as the first track… the hints of trip-hop are only an overture to a sprawling masterwork that touches every soul reference point you can shake a stick at: Stevie Wonder, Prince, Earth Wind and Fire, Marvin Gaye. The smile is back on our faces for the day’s final stretch of road.

Thanks to IanB at RetroBabe! for introducing me to Lewis Taylor, an English soul genius who really deserves a lot more recognition than he currently gets. And good luck with your new blogging project Ian – looking forward to seeing what form it takes

* For Bonus Music Points: track the time signature changes all the way through The Way You Done Me – it’s definitely 7/8 in the chorus but I haven’t quite nutted out the verses yet.

On the N5 through the Jura, eastern France: hints that autumn is here…

Charles Trénet – Swing, Troubadour
Charles Trénet – Que Reste-t-il de nos amours?
From The Very Best of Charles Trenet: PLATCD 488 [Buy]

Irène Némirovsky

The Second World War was an occasion for immense trauma in many countries around the world. But the case of France, for a number of reasons, has always particularly fascinated me. One of the books I’ve been reading recently is Suite Française by Irène Némirovsky. It was published this year in English (US edition is by Knopf, UK edition by Chatto and Windus), and first published in France in 2004.

Suite Française is remarkable because it is a work of fiction set in the Second World War actually written during the first two years of the German occupation of France. It is quite possibly the first recorded reaction by any novelist to the events of that conflict. After escaping from Paris with her husband and young daughters following the German invasion of France in June 1940, Némirovsky set out to write a fictional account of the events she saw around her. Her plan was to write the story in a series (”suite”) of 5 novellas that charted the course of the war.

Only the first two novellas were completed, because on July 13th 1942, French police arrested Némirovsky. She was of Russian Jewish descent. A series of trains took her to Auschwitz, where she died of typhus barely a month later. Her husband was similarly arrested a few months later and perished in the gas chambers. The two Némirovsky children survived the war, passed between a series of families and safehouses around France. Némirovsky’s last written work remained in the possession of her daughters after the war, largely unread for 50 years until her daughter Denise decided to transcribe the two novellas and get them published.

When Suite Française finally appeared in France in 2004, it caused a sensation. It won the Prix Renaudot that year, the first time the prize had been awarded for a posthumous work. Not only were the circumstances of its writing remarkable and poignant, but the book itself is fantastic. The communities described are disrupted, scattered. They are trying to gain back something like normality. Suite Française reveals a full spectrum of human behaviour and emotion in the midst of chaos and dislocation – cowardice, pride, kindness, betrayal, courage.

Which sort of (I hope) brings us to the songs of Charles Trénet, a singer and songwriter who didn’t quite emerge from the war with his reputation intact. Like most professional entertainers in occupied France, he was obliged to make certain accomodations with the German authorities in order to ensure he continued to find work… he performed in French P.O.W. camps in Germany, as well as for German officers and officials in Paris. And as a gay man at risk of denunciation, imprisonment or deportation himself, he was barely in a position to be defiant.

Just as Irène Némirovsky found a way to confront the reality of her world at war through piercing prose fiction, Trénet’s wartime recordings sometimes sound like attempt to describe his own situation, within the confines of the censors.

Trénet’s stock and trade were songs that often leant heavily on nostalgia or on an image of the imagined Douce France, but Que reste-t-il de nos amours? (”What Remains of our Loves?”), from 1943, seems especially heavy with regret for a past that seemed so much happier.

In Swing, Troubadour, (1941), Trénet’s self-reference is perhaps even more obvious: the portrait of a brokenhearted musician who sings love songs even though his own spirit is no longer in it…

Swing Troubadour,
Rien pour toi n’peut effacer
Les beaux jours du passé même si dans ta voix y a d’la joie.
Quand tu souris,
Tout comm’ toi, je pleure en secret
Un rêv’ chérie,
Un amour timide et discret.
Moi j’n’ai plus rien
Mais, comm’ toi j’chant’ pour mon bien
La plus belle des chansons d’amour,
Swing Troubadour.

Swing Troubadour
Nothing can erase for you
Those beautiful days past, even if your voice is full of joy
When you smile
Just like you I cry secretly for
A sweet dream
A timid, discreet love
I have nothing left
But like you I sing for my own good
The most beautiful songs of love
Swing Troubadour