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Review

Mike Gibbs 18 Piece Big Band

Mike Gibbs 18 Piece Big Band, 80th Birthday Celebration, CBSO Centre, Birmingham, 28/09/2017.

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Photography: Photographs sourced from the Birmingham Town Hall / Symphony Hall website [url=http://www.thsh.co.uk]http://www.thsh.co.uk[/url]

by Ian Mann

October 01, 2017

/ LIVE

A performance by a Mike Gibbs band is always a memorable event.

Mike Gibbs 18 Piece Big Band, 80th Birthday Celebration, CBSO Centre, Birmingham, 28/09/2017.

“And then one day you find, ten years have got behind you…”. I was reminded of Roger Waters’ lyric when I recalled that I’d attended a concert celebrating Mike Gibbs’ 70th birthday at St. George’s in Bristol a decade ago. I don’t know what it feels like for Mike but for me the time just seems to have flown by. That gig at Bristol almost feels like it happened yesterday.

Born in Southern Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe, Gibbs studied piano and trombone as a child and in 1959 moved to the USA to study at the Berklee College of Music in Boston. Something of a global citizen Gibbs has lived and worked in Zimbabwe, the US and the UK and is now currently resident in Spain.

Although an accomplished section player on trombone Gibbs was always a reluctant soloist and decided to concentrate his efforts on composition and arrangement. I first became aware of his writing in the late 70s / early 80s after hearing his compositions on various Gary Burton albums including “In The Public Interest” “Seven Songs for Quartet and Chamber Orchestra” and “The New Quartet”. Gibbs and vibraphonist Burton met at Berklee, where both have held teaching posts at various times.

Gibbs has lived in the UK at various times in his life and has often recorded with British musicians. His album “The Only Chrome-Waterfall Orchestra”, which first appeared in 1975 on the Bronze record label featured an intriguing mix of British, American and European musicians.

Since the mid 70s Gibbs has combined recording and performance with an academic career and following a rush of album releases in the early 70s his output on disc has since been fairly sporadic, although albums such as “Big Music” (1988) and Nonsequence” (2001) remain essential listening.

Despite his relatively low profile I’ve been fortunate to witness Gibbs conducting his bands live (and occasionally playing trombone) on a number of previous occasions. The earliest of these was at St. Donats Arts Centre in the Vale of Glamorgan on a 1983 Contemporary Music Network tour. The twelve piece band was a stellar ensemble featuring American, European and British musicians including twin guitarists Kevin Eubanks and Wayne Krantz and Danish trumpeter Palle Mikkelborg.

In October 1991 Gibbs brought a fourteen piece ensemble to Symphony Hall in Birmingham as part of another CMN tour, this one sponsored by Rolling Rock beer! The Anglo-American band included guitarist John Scofield as guest soloist in a line up that included the American rhythm section of Steve Swallow (bass) and Bill Stewart (drums). The stellar cast also featured some of the most influential figures in British jazz including multi reeds player Tony Coe and departed heroes trumpeter Kenny Wheeler and pianist John Taylor.

In 2007 I attended the aforementioned Bristol show at the kind bequest of Christine Allen who was managing that particular tour. Yet another star studded Anglo-American line up featured Bill Frisell as the featured guitar soloist and with future Impossible Gentlemen Steve Swallow and Adam Nussbaum (drums) forming the deluxe rhythm team.

Also present on that Bristol date was the German born, UK based pianist and composer Hans Koller who has been Gibbs’ musical right hand man for the last decade or so. In 2013 Koller was a key part of the primarily British band that Gibbs led at that year’s Cheltenham Jazz Festival in a performance that celebrated the centenary of the birth of the great Gil Evans, Gibbs’ primary influence as a composer and arranger. Playing a mix of Evans arrangements and Gibbs originals this was yet another memorable performance from a Gibbs ensemble. My review of this event is included in my Festival coverage here;
http://www.thejazzmann.com/features/article/sunday-at-cheltenham-jazz-festival-05-05-2013/

Prior to the Festival performance the band had also entered a London studio to record the album “Mike Gibbs + 12 Play Gil Evans” which appeared on the Whirlwind Recordings label run by the ensemble’s bassist, Michael Janisch.
My review of that album can be read here;
http://www.thejazzmann.com/reviews/review/mike-gibbs-twelve-play-gil-evans/

Fast forward to 2017 and the mini-tour to celebrate Gibbs’ 80th birthday with performances at Scarborough Jazz Festival, The Vortex Jazz Club in London and here in Birmingham, a city with which Gibbs has many close musical links as Tony Dudley-Evans’ highly informative notes in a specially produced free printed programme made clear.

The high esteem in which Gibbs is held in Birmingham was reflected by a capacity crowd at the CBSO Centre, which was fuller than I’ve ever seen it for a jazz concert. The supportive audience were rewarded with an excellent performance from an all UK based band assembled specifically for the project by Koller and Janisch. The line up was;

Mike Gibbs – conductor

Ryan Quigley, Henry Lowther, Percy Pursglove, Nick Smart – trumpets & flugelhorns

Mark Bassey, Jeremy Price, Rory Ingham – trombones

Richard Henry – bass trombone, tuba

John O’ Gallagher – alto sax

Jason Yarde – alto & soprano sax

Alex Garnett – tenor & soprano sax

Julian Siegel – tenor sax, bass clarinet

Hans Koller – piano

Mike Walker – electric guitarist

Michael Janisch – double bass

Andrew Bain – drums

Tonight’s performance saw the ensemble playing straight through, without the benefit of an interval.  Gibbs’ unique approach to orchestration with its distinctive horn voicings was immediately apparent on the opening piece, an extraordinary arrangement of the 1930s standard “You Go To My Head” with Alex Garnett on tenor the featured soloist, his feature including an unaccompanied saxophone cadenza.

Gibbs paid tribute to the late, great Kenny Wheeler by first explaining that his (Gibbs) original composition “’Tis As It Should Be” was inspired by Wheeler’s arrangements and imaginative use of timbres on the late trumpeter’s final large ensemble album, 2012’s “The Long Waiting”.  A lustrous arrangement featured the trumpet section, with Lowther, Pursglove and Smart taking turns to come to the front of the stage, all of them delivering graceful and eloquent solos on flugelhorn, the instrument that became Wheeler’s main form of expression.

A segue of Bill Frisell’s “Throughout” and Gil Evans’ “Las Vegas Tango” saw the versatile Rattigan moving from french horn to accordion. Unsurprisingly Walker was the featured soloist here, his soaring fluency punctuated by staccato brass and reed stabs and powered by Bain’s dynamic drumming. Following this rousing passage Koller’s meditative passage of unaccompanied represented a complete contrast, as well as providing the bridge into the Evans piece which was finally announced by Janisch’s bass motif and the patter of Bain’s hands on drum skins. The timbres were softer here with muted trumpets a distinctive component, but the energy levels were subsequently raised by the spirited trombone dialogue between the experienced Bassey and rising star Ingham, the latter last seen with the youthful sextet Jam Experiment. Walker was also prominent again on guitar in an arrangement by Evans of his own tune.

Gibbs was one of the arrangers invited to adapt the Eberhard Weber composition “Maurizius” for performance at a special concert in Stuttgart to celebrate the German bassist and composer’s 65th birthday in 2005. Weber later suffered a stroke and is no longer able to perform, which is a great loss to music in general. Gibbs has maintained Weber’s essential compositional format (the piece was originally written for the 1982 small group recording “Later That Evening”) but inevitably the work sounds very different in a large ensemble context. Koller and Rattigan featured on the piano/accordion introduction with Koller taking the first solo. O’Gallagher, an American musician with strong Birmingham connections, impressed with a typically fiery alto solo while Gibbs’ long, minimalist style closing passage put something of his own stamp on the piece and owed something to the style of Alexander Scriabin. Acknowledging the applause of the audience Gibbs singled out Quigley for particular praise due to the difficulty of the lead trumpet part.

“Django”, written by pianist John Lewis of MJQ fame, commenced with a horn chorale shadowed by Bain’s mallet work before adopting a more orthodox big band swing feel with solos coming from Yarde on alto, Smart on Harmon muted trumpet and Price on trombone. When Yarde returned for a second bite of the cherry the music took an innovative turn into more avant garde territory as the soloist’s alto brayed and whinnied on an acerbic solo sax cadenza.

Gibbs reminded the audience that his composition “Meant To Be” had been performed at Symphony Hall on the 1991 tour with John Scofield. Tonight it was to be Mike Walker, whose playing has often been favourably compared to Sco’s, who impressed as the featured guitar soloist while Yarde enjoyed another cameo on alto. A word too for the explosive drumming of Bain, which helped to power the piece along.

Introduced by a gentle guitar and piano duet another Gibbs classic, “And On The Third Day”, featured a mellower, almost lush, horn arrangement from out of which emerged an engaging twin trumpet dialogue featuring Lowther and Quigley. Siegel subsequently took over on tenor, his fluent soloing gradually becoming more powerful as the music increased in intensity.

This was to have been the final number of the set but the warmth of the audience reaction, with many members of the crowd getting to their feet to applaud, ensured that an encore was inevitable. This proved to be another Gibbs original, the blues tinged “Tennis, Anyone?” with O’Gallagher wailing on alto above a cushioning backdrop of trombones and muted trumpets. Quigley took over on soaring, high register trumpet but the final solo went to Gibbs’ right hand man, pianist Hans Koller, who teased the audience with a series of false endings. Great fun, and a wonderful end to a good natured performance presided over in avuncular fashion by the unassuming Gibbs, whose seeming vagueness sought to disguise a still razor sharp musical mind.

A performance by a Mike Gibbs band is always a memorable event. Let us hope that time will be kind to the great composer and arranger and that there will still be more to come. Gibbs has a special place in the hearts of Birmingham jazz audiences as the warmth of the reaction from tonight’s capacity crowd demonstrated, with many getting to their feet again as Gibbs and the band finally took their leave.

The band’s performance at Scarborough Jazz Festival will be broadcast on the Jazz Now programme on BBC Radio 3 at 11.00 pm on the evening of Monday 2nd October 2017.

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