“We get hate mail after parties!” The towering visions of UK jazz legend Mike Westbrook | jazz

MIke Westbrook reflects on his 89 years from his seaside cottage in Devon. Sitting with him in his cozy, book-filled living room under a signed photo of Duke Ellington, next to his Broadwood grand piano, is a quiet and peaceful experience.

His version of jazz is anything but. For more than six decades, Westbrook has composed wide-ranging cinematic works. He was the first jazz artist to play at the BBC Proms, established theater alongside Laurence Olivier, and in the 1970s merged his entire group with the avant-garde rock band Henry Cow to form the Pioneering Orchestra. The result is music filled with brass fanfare, unusual time signatures, poetry, free improvisation, and a jazz-bending riff that invites the listener into a continental circus filled with elephants, acrobats, and clowns.

Recent health difficulties have made playing difficult, so he has spent the past two years rifling through his papers, sending stacks of scores to archives around the country. Meanwhile, a tape recording held at the British Library became the focus of the rescue mission.

This is The Cortège, a massive two-and-a-half-hour jazz suite that has been unavailable for years. The 1982 studio version was stuck in a legal limbo, so Westbrook, unwilling to wait for lawyers to settle the matter, re-released The Cortège using raw material from a crude 1980 BBC Radio 3 recording, done live in one take. “The balance was poor, and [tape] The quality wasn’t very good, so the question was: can this be salvaged? Westbrook says. Artificial intelligence software was used to isolate and enhance individual voices and instruments from the mix. Mike is happy with the result: “It’s one of the best things we’ve done.”

Having risen to the forefront of British jazz during the 1960s and 1970s, re-establishing big band music as a progressive force, Westbrook’s artistic vision culminated in The Cortège. As well as being inspired by his work in film and theatre, the work grew out of his experiences touring thousands of miles around Europe with his wife Kate in the late 1970s, when “we wanted to be full-time artists, and we were broke”.

The duo, along with singer and trumpeter Phil Minton, wrote the material as they went, incorporating it into what Westbrook calls cabaret jazz. “I think cabaret is a useful term, because it means you can do whatever you want: a comedy song, a serious piece of music, a poem. When we were in France, Italy and Germany, they really resorted to these ideas – there’s a bigger tradition of mixing genres. At one point, we were playing as a circus band in France, which led to a lot of collaborations.”

Cortège’s band came together in 1978 at a street festival in Santarcangelo, Italy and represents a combination of all his influences playing in rock bands, cabaret, street performance, circus and theatre. A track of the pavilion, named after the festival, contains a copy of Jerusalem by William Blake, who was a major influence on Westbrook. In 1971, he composed the music for Tiger’s play Blake, directed by Adrian Mitchell, which also became a kind of cabaret. It was shown at the National Theater when the creative director was Laurence Olivier, “whom I admire greatly. He was kept away from underlings like me, but when he walked around, it was like the Pope visiting with his bodyguards. While under his watch, all sorts of shenanigans were going on: jobs for the boys, all that sort of thing. And it paid the rent for a while.”

Britain in the 1970s and 1980s was a golden period for the arts. “The BBC had a jazz chief. This guy had a certain amount of freedom to listen to the bands and invite them back into the studio.” The Arts Council was also generous, and took risks; By the overwhelming support for bold new music, I was encouraged [concert] Promoters of trying new things. This generated “very good audiences” for The Cortège, and the BBC made a documentary about it.

Opening track “Starts Here” is a blast of energy, driven by a sinuous 11/4 beat; Elaborate saxophone lines weave over powerful trombone blasts, creating a complex wall of sound. “It’s in your face. It’s pure energy, and it’s not about anything,” Westbrook says. “It’s an introduction, which then transitions into something different and something different again. The question is: Can the audience handle these changes?”

As for Santarcangelo, it’s based on the 11/8 time signature, which Westbrook admits is “difficult to play. I didn’t really start with a plan… I wrote a little bit of television music for the Stephen Poliakoff movie Caught on a Train that used a brass band. One of the scenes I wrote was about a speeding train at dawn, and that was all I had in mind.” And the use of Jerusalem? “Suggested by Kate: It has the perfect feel for contemporary popular music.”

Throughout his musical career, Westbrook successfully broke down barriers and tried new things: after The Cortège came the London Bridge Is Broken Down project in 1987, a large-scale composition for voice, jazz orchestra and chamber orchestra. Critics praised Westbrook’s range and control of orchestral color. The Irish Times declared it “out of classification”.

In 1992, he led the first jazz orchestra to play at the BBC Proms, performing big band versions of Rossini. They faced a hostile reaction. “At first, the partygoers stood with their backs to the stage. Then they gradually came back, and by the end when we played a rock version of William Tell’s overture, they were all dancing. But we got some hate mail after that.”

Even at 89, and despite health difficulties, he is learning new things: at the moment, it’s church bells, a collaboration with composer Marcus Verget in a disused church in Highhampton, Devon. Kate, who remains his central creative partner, wrote the lyrics for the piece. “This has led me into a completely new and somewhat strange area, which I can’t even begin to describe. It’s a completely different musical language,” he says. “You have three bells, A, C, and D, and I’m trying to find out what you can do with all these bells.”

As he continues to count scores and records throughout his life, he knows how lucky he has been. “I’ve been allowed to experiment, make mistakes, spend a lot of time on the road, and figure out what it’s all about. Music is serious business.”