"A saxophonist with an unusual turn of phrase, a persuasively gentle sound and jazz allegiances that don't follow the usual Coltranesque paths but veer instead toward the fifties Cool School. Martin Speake is not just a distinctive improviser but a striking composer too." John Fordham -The Guardian

Martin Speake’s Constellation
Tolbooth, Stirling
4 stars
Martin Speake is not the most obvious saxophonist to be paying a 50th anniversary tribute to Charlie Parker. He will readily admit that he is not a bebop player, and his approach to Parker’s legacy reflected his own more oblique take on jazz forms, rather than retreading the master’s familiar strategies.

They began relatively conventionally with Chasin’ the Bird, one of Parker’s many tunes based on the chord progression of I Got Rhythm. The quartet’s crisp, cleanly articulated delivery demonstrated that their subsequent departures from bop orthodoxy were launched from the base of a firm grasp of the form.

Speake had sought out some rarities in putting together the set, and largely steered clear of the most familiar Parker staples, although they did throw in versions of mainstays like Dizzy Gillespie’s Bebop, Miles Davis’s Donna Lee and Parker’s own Koko, as well as the less famous Bird Feathers. A tune known as both Segment and Diverse offered a rare excursion into a minor key, and allowed guitarist Mike Outram (very much a coming name
in the UK jazz scene) to throw in some subtle pedal effects. Visa, an uptempo blues, saw Speake and Outram trading 12-bar choruses for much of its length, a refreshing variation on longer solos. Several ballads were included in the set, including a feature for bassist Simon Thorpe on Embraceable You and versions of I’m In The Mood for Love and My Old Flame that alluded to rather than stated their melodies. They threw in a slash of Caribbean colour in the vibrant Sly Mongoose, another fairly obscure tune that was recorded only once by Parker, and that in a live broadcast.

One particularly intriguing re-working came with a fairly obscure blues composition that Parker called The Hymn. Originally a short uptempo theme, Speake took the implication of the title literally and transformed it into a solemn and evocative hymn at ballad tempo. The band did not allow a lamentably poor turnout to put them off, and delivered Speake’s conception of Parker’s music in committed fashion.

The saxophonist’s alto playing was typically inventive and full of unexpected nuances, while Mike Outram’s guitar work provided an ideal foil, both in his own solos and in the clever intertwined lines they constructed. Simon Thorpe and drummer Dave Wickins remained attentive to the twists and turns of the often complex music. They play several dates around Scotland this week.

Kenny Mathieson article, Inverness Courier, 12/4/05:

Saxophonist Martin Speake will celebrate the 50th anniversary of the death of Charlie “Bird” Parker with his own tribute to the legacy of the bebop giant. Parker died on 12 March, 1955, in the apartment of Baroness Pannonica de Koenigswarter, a Rothschild known as “the jazz baroness”, while watching Tommy Dorsey on television. The saxophonist was only 34, but the ravages of alcohol and drug abuse meant that the doctor who examined his corpse put his estimated age between 50 and 60. It was a sad and shocking end to a career that had burned with incandescent brilliance in the second half of the 1940s, when Parker joined forces with the likes of Dizzy Gillespie, Bud Powell, Thelonious Monk and Max Roach to forge a new musical style. The complex harmonies, sizzling tempos and extended soloing characteristic of bebop came as a culture shock to jazz fans raised on traditional or swing styles, and served to promote a Dixieland revival around guitarist Eddie Condon in the late 1940s.

As the new music of the day, it caught the imagination of young musicians and fans everywhere, and many British musicians made the pilgrimage to New York – often working passage as musicians on the Atlantic liners – to drink in the music at its source. Ironically, Martin Speake is not a musician that anyone would really associate with bebop or its later bop derivative. His approach to jazz has always seemed more oblique and less tied into conventional idioms, and informed by an interest in rock and in ethnic music, especially Indian music. So what brought him to create a Parker tribute?

“Good question,” he laughed. “Last year about this time I did a week at Ronnie Scott’s club, playing my own music with my quartet. There was one night that my drummer, Tom Skinner, couldn’t make it, and I thought, well, I’ll do some Parker tunes with Dave Wickins on drums. We had such a good time, and I thought after that there was something to be done there.

“Coincidentally, at about the same time one of my students had been playing me some Parker things I hadn’t heard before, particularly a disc called “The Washington Concerts”, which is where Parker sat in with a big band he had never rehearsed with or anything. “The music he makes is incredibly inspiring, and that was quite late in his life, when he was treading water a lot of the time. But on this his playing is incredibly creative, and he is hearing everything – he doesn’t know the charts at all, but if the band change key he gets it in one second. Fantastic.”
From there, Martin began to investigate Parker’s recorded music more deeply.
“I started listening to a lot of the live albums where he played a bit longer than on the great early studio stuff, and it isn’t as worked out. I then realised that the 50th anniversary of his death was coming up, and I thought, well, I might as well try and celebrate that – I haven’t done this stuff before, and it gave me a chance to investigate his music properly and do it a bit more justice, and also to add my own thing to it.”

That element of adding his own thing is likely to be crucial to the music we will hear when he makes his Eden Court debut on Thursday, with a quartet featuring Mike Outram (guitar), Simon Thorpe (bass) and Dave Wickins (drums).

“I’m not really what you would call a bebop player,” he acknowledged, “but then Parker didn’t like the word either, although he did play the music. I’m still working with the material all the time, thinking of ways to do things a wee bit differently on lots of the things he played.

“I see it as a bit similar to playing my own music, to be honest. I play in the same way as I do in my other bands with my own material, so I’m subtly changing it – I’m not dramatically reharmonising them, though, and there are occasions where I use a little bit of his own solos in various things. “There are some things we play quite straight-ish,” he added, “but the way we play, and especially the way Mike Outram plays, brings a contemporary feel to it anyway. It’s a whole mixture of things – we’re not really doing the very obvious Parker tunes, and we are constantly looking for new material, so it’s still an evolving project in that sense. We have recorded an album, though, which we hope to have out by the time we come to Scotland.”

The presence of a guitar player amounts to almost a signature in Speake’s bands over the years, and he explained his preference for guitar over piano in the band setting.

“I think it’s because I grew up listening to lots of rock music,” he admitted. “The first band I ever saw was Led Zeppelin, and I think that has stayed with me forever. Also, one my big conceptual influences in music is drummer Paul Motian, and he has used guitarists in his bands pretty much for the last 30 years, including his trio with Bill Frisell and Joe Lovano.

“Piano is a bit too fixed tonally and pitch-wise for me, somehow – guitarists can do a lot more bending of pitches, and that musical landscape they have seems that little bit wider. They can’t fill things up quite as much, either, so there is more space in the textures. I love piano, don’t get me wrong. I listen to pianists a lot – Keith Jarrett is one of my favourite musicians, but for my own group I lean to guitar and that sound. The piano-saxophone quartet seems more of a fixed jazz thing and a more familiar sound.”

Martin has worked with pianists as diverse as Nikki Iles and The Bad Plus’s Ethan Iverson, often in duo settings, and has also used the duo as a vehicle for combining with guitarists Colin Oxley and Phil Lee, with their more intimate, acoustic sound. His current guitarist, Mike Outram, took over from a long-standing associate, John Parricelli.

“Mike is a fantastic player– I’m very lucky to have him in my band in succession to John. He is not afraid of the jazz tradition, but he's not locked into it either, he has a lot of other influences coming in. I played with John for almost 20 years, but it reached a stage where he was really too busy to commit to my projects, and he wouldn’t have been right for the Parker project anyway.

“It’s been interesting at the Parker gigs – we have been getting the older bebop fans, but we have also been getting much younger audiences as well, and I think that may have something to do with the guitar.”