It’s like field research going to a jazz club some days. Check a couple of minutes of Charlie Stacey drummer Jamie Murray for instance in action jamming on a standard at the weekend with pianist Rick Simpson and saxophone aces Zhenya Strigalev (in shadow, heard first on alto) and Can of Worms’ George Crowley (tenor) with the bassist Dave Manington playing ‘Stompin’ at the Savoy’ videoed by the Mark Murphy-influenced singer Robbie Chard who was in the Vortex downstairs audience. Listen as the tune wings its way from the loping modernistic collision of bop and beyond back to the distant past and echoes of the more plainly spoken melodically swinging Chick Webb era bundled up in the resolutely chipper optimism and jaunty feel of jazz on the cusp of swing that the jammers delight in.
Moreover there’s no point just musing in your ivory tower about who the great new talents of the future happen to be. They are doing it, live, out there now. But it’s not taking place in the library and these guys aren’t even much in any index anyway let alone the stars of a monograph printed on dandruff-receptive pages or the subject of some preeningly geeky PhD thesis that nobody much understands let alone reads but should lead the author to a happy tenured life with any luck in blameless obscurity.
“People can lose their lives in libraries. They ought to be warned,” – Saul Bellow