625 at the Maltings

In 1968, pop was absorbing the impact of Sergeant Pepper and evolving into rock.  DJ’s John Peel and Pete Drummond, who had abandoned the pirate radio ships as they were sinking, brought the likes of Jefferson Airplane, The Dead and Captain Beefheart to our ears via the newly established BBC station, Radio 1.  Yet, for the music fan, television offered little outside of Top of The Pops and mainstream MOR with the likes of Lulu and Val Doonican.

 

At the age of 15 - and not long before my family upped sticks to London - the living room telly died somewhat unceremoniously. Up until then, television viewing, exclusively in black and white for us, was a mixed bag on the only two existing channels.  BBC 1 provided an assortment of entertainment, childrens’ programmes, news, current affairs, sport, comedy, documentaries, movies and some drama predominantly aimed at a family audience.  ITV offered more of the same, albeit with a brow that was slightly lower but whose programmes, as now, were plagued by adverts.

The hastily purchased replacement Morris Family TV received the much heralded 625 lines.  Bravissimo, Dad!  I could now tune in to the then mostly wonderful BBC2 which had eventually reached southern England some time after its 1964 launch in London and the Midlands.  The delights of World Cinema  – which I think was broadcast on a Wednesday evening – opened me up to The Apu Trilogy, Alain Resnais’ ‘Last Year in Marienbad’ and all things Godard, Louis Malle and Bergman.  I can also remember the first showing of Ken Russell’s ’Isadora’ and Theatre 625’s ‘The Year of the Sex Olympics’ a groundbreaking drama that was broadcast around the time of the Mexico Olympiad.  There was also ‘Late Night Line Up’ a hip Arts programme with the estimable Joan Bakewell – with whom I once subsequently ate lunch in the early years of my career as a media lawyer.

However, the programme that made the biggest impact on me and which introduced me to a totally different music genre was ’Jazz at the Maltings’.  An audience seemingly consisting of intense, bearded and bespectacled thirty something males were gathered in the round in a converted agricultural building somewhere in East Anglia.  Hushed and in awe, they sat with diligent reverence as the Gary Burton Group played live and did their thing.  I had never heard anything like it and I never forgot it, even if I did not then quite appreciate the dexterity of Burton’s four mallet vibraphone technique and Steve Swallow’s innovative funky bass guitar style.

It was some time later, five years to be exact, when I first acquired an album by Burton and who I have subsequently seen play live on many occasions.  That album is ‘Gary Burton & Keith Jarrett’, one of many collaborative ventures in which Burton has engaged.  It was also the first jazz album I actually bought.  At the time, I spent every spare penny I could scrape from my parsimonious student income on buying rock albums.  Buying a jazz album meant one less rock album for my collection, which was already then becoming envied by many of my student contemporaries.

Consisting predominantly of original compositions by virtuoso pianist Jarrett – with one by Swallow – the music moves through various contemporary moods and styles.  On tracks like ‘Grow Your Own’ and ‘The Raven Speaks’, the band dwells on the riff based forms that became popular with jazzers in the early seventies.  There is also strong melody – ‘In Your Quiet Place’ and Swallow’s Latin-tinged ‘Como in Vietnam’ and blowing – ‘Fortune Smiles’.  The band’s line-up was completed by drummer Bill Goodwin and, inevitably in a Burton-led group, with a guitarist, Sam Brown.

Although I had been going to some jazz gigs for a few years, it had taken a lot for me to persuade myself to buy a jazz album instead of a rock album.  This was the case even though this was music that was clearly influenced by the nascent jazz-rock fusion genre that was then becoming popular.  Buying a jazz record was an act of devotion and commitment to the form.  Shortly afterwards the floodgates opened and it became increasingly easier for me to make the choice to buy music as eclectically as I had long been prepared to listen to it.

‘Gary Burton & Keith Jarrett’ is a vinyl album and is a US import produced by Joel Dorn for Atlantic Records and first released in 1971.