O’higgins and Luft offer an evening of Monk and Trane
Music O’higgins and Luft Play Monk and Trane is the name of the forthcoming album – and it’s also exactly what we will be getting in Chichester as they tour ahead of the album release. They play Chichester Jazz Club, Pallant Suite, 7 South Pallant, on Friday, September 6.
“And we might just have some cheeky advance copies of the album with us,” says Dave O’higgins (tenor saxophone), who will be joined by Rob Luft (guitar), Scott Flanigan (organ) and Rod Youngs (drums), part of a 40-plus date autumn tour promoting the new CD which will be released by Ubuntu Music.
The album grew out of the natural musical partnership Dave and Rob have discovered between them.
“What happened is that
Rob and I were both aware of each other’s existence. I had heard him when he was still in the National Youth Jazz Orchestra, and I had made a mental note that he was a name to watch, and I watched his early jazz career blossom.
“And then he telephoned me to do some gigs with him, just some casual gigs, in a pub in Croydon. It was two gigs that Rob and I put together where we would just call the tunes out as we were about to play them. And we had such a good time that we thought we should record some of them and possibly get some dates together. And then before we knew it, we had 40-plus dates in the book.
“When you are working with someone, what you are looking for first and foremost is a musical rapport, and also just how natural it is to intuit how to play together from scratch. And it was abundantly clear to us from the off that there was a really strong musical connection going on. What was also really interesting was that Rob seemed to know a lot of
Thelonious Monk tunes, and I am quite into John Coltrane and tunes associated with him, so that we kind of found a theme emerging between us early on. It meant that it was very easy for us to get a set together, and then we thought about pursuing it, with that unifying theme of the music of Thelonious Monk and John Coltrane.
“They made a recording together and they also worked together at many different stages of their careers. They were both iconic musicians originally from the beebop era, although Coltrane spanned a lot of different styles from bee-bop through to avant-garde. But they were both iconic figures with a very strong flavour, and because I am a big Coltrane fan and Rob is a big Monk fan, we just found material that we were naturally attracted to.”
Sometimes when working together seems easy at first, difficulties then emerge; equally, when working together seems difficult, you may yet break through to find a way. But as Dave says, he and Rob quickly and accurately found an intuition that their collaboration would work – and it has: “It is not always very easy to find someone to co-lead a band. It is pretty risky. Often there tends to be someone who is the more dominant partner, but with Rob it has always been completely 50-50. And with the album, I would say that there is about a third of it that has been driven and led by me, about a third of it that has been driven and led by Rob and about a third that has emerged through collaboration. We were quite efficient in the way we did the whole thing. We recorded it in January and we got the whole thing ready to press in a fairly efficient way, which meant that there was a little gap in between us having finished it and now starting the tour, which is good. There is a feeling of freshness, and we are looking forward to hitting the ground running with it.”
And there is plenty more to explore. “Monk wrote something like 72 tunes, and we are not just doing compositions by Coltrane but also music by other people that Coltrane played and recorded, so there is a lot more that we can do. We have got the potential to barely repeat ourselves at all.”.