Fight for your right

This month’s rediscovered phantom tube station on music’s secret underground map: an avant-jazz suite on the futility of war.

As the Vietnam conflict raged in 1969, and people took to the streets in Britain and America to protest, Mike Westbrook’s Concert Band, comprising the cream of British jazz, were in Decca’s West Hampstead studio voicing their own feelings on the horrors of war. The result, Marching Song Vol 1, wasn’t written specifically about Vietnam, but was marketed as “an anti-Vietnam jazz symphony” in the US. A corybantic babel of trumpet, trombone, sax, flugel horn and tuba, punctuated with moving Ellington-like interludes, it’s one of the most potent pieces of stand-tall jazz to be made on these shores; it’s also arguably the moment the avant-garde entered the vernacular of British jazz. “I honestly don’t think anyone else was doing anything like Marching Song back then in the UK,” says the 80-year-old pianist, composer and bandleader, Mike Westbrook. “I hadn’t set out to be particularly innovative, but that was the form it took. But for me jazz was always synonymous with political expression. From the beginning, it felt exciting, subversive, part of an alternative culture.” His love affair with jazz began as a teen living in Torquay in the late-’40s, ordering second-hand Jelly Roll Morton, Fats Waller and Louis Armstrong 78s from Dobell’s jazz shop on Charing Cross Road. Witnessing Lionel Hampton play Bournemouth in the mid ’50s while on National Service opened the self-taught trumpeter and pianist’s ears wider. “My first time seeing a big band,” he says. “It was fantastic. I saw what was possible.” His first group, founded in 1958 while studying art in Plymouth, took its musical cues from John Coltrane, Albert Ayler and Ornette Coleman. On graduating in 1962, he moved to London just as jazz was starting to give way to R&B in the clubs, and the chance to play became limited. Still, Westbrook founded an 11-piece, then a sextet, with baritone and soprano saxophonist John Surman and guitarist Keith Rowe at their core. “Gigs were few and far between,” he says, “but the breakthrough came when the offer of becoming house band at Ronnie Scott’s The Old Place arose. But the landscape really had changed by then. Clubs had started putting on blues nights, musicians switched from jazz to playing R&B, people like Brian Auger, Graham Bond. But I was only interested in the freedoms that jazz provided.” A deal with Deram let him explore such freedoms. 1967’s Celebration and its 1968 follow-up Release, both worked up after hours at the Gerrard Street club, captured his progressive approach and laid the foundations for Marching Song. The idea to sketch the legacy of war on record was rooted in Westbrook’s National Service experience of bombsites and ruined cities in West Germany in the 1950s. Songs were crafted in his bedroom, then aired with his sextet at Ronnie’s. Westbrook was also playing Tuesday nights the Little Theatre Club on Garrick Yard, where it occurred to him to expand certain passages. “I started inviting musicians to join us on some of the tracks at the Little Theatre,” he recalls, “and then we got asked to play a concert at the Plymouth Arts Festival so we performed it there in its entirety, and it went down really well.” Initially conceived as a double album but issued at Decca’s request as two separate volumes, Marching Song Vol. 1 was recorded live in just three days with producer Peter Eden. Over six selfauthored pieces, ranging from just a few seconds to over 15 minutes in length and utilising groups comprising six to 20 members, built around Westbrook, the aforesaid Surman, alto saxophonist Mike Osborne, tenor saxophonist Alan Skidmore and trombonist Malcolm Griffiths, the process of war is mapped. Hooray!, a joyous big band swing, interspersed with crowd cheer and trilling flute, scores the exhilarating rush of patriotic optimism on going into battle. The title track, meanwhile, soundtracks the realities of conflict: tenor and alto saxes scream, drums pound, then the piece descends into full ensemble improv. The effect is quite devastating. At the end of the year, Westbrook topped Down Beat magazine’s critics’ poll for composition. “The recognition was nice,” he says. “But although music was always the focus, I was still teaching art to make a living.” Diversifying into music theatre in the next decade allowed Westbrook to give up the day job, with impressive works like 1971’s Tyger, a celebration of William Blake, receiving huge acclaim. He has continued to push boundaries with large-scale concert works such as 1988’s London Bridge Is Broken Down with wife and musical partner Kate Westbrook, and this year’s jazz rock oratorio A Bigger Show with his Uncommon Orchestra. But it’s Marching Song that is the point of reference for a new generation and for Westbrook himself. “Everything feeds into it,” he says. “Each project starting with a small band at street level, with the possibility of building up to a full big band in front of an audience. And importantly, the conveying of expression through creativity. That began with Marching Song.” Lois Wilson

“I WAS ONLY INTERESTED IN THE FREEDOMS THAT JAZZ PROVIDED.”