Out of the Long Dark: The Life of Ian Carr

230 Pages·2006·4.347 MB·English

by  Alyn Shipton

Out of the Long Dark
introduction and acknowledgements i
PPPPPooooopppppuuuuulllllaaaaarrrrr MMMMMuuuuusssssiiiiiccccc HHHHHiiiiissssstttttooooorrrrryyyyy
Series Editor: Alyn Shipton, journalist, broadcaster and
former lecturer in music at Oxford Brookes University
This new series publishes books that challenge established orthodoxies in
popular music studies, examine the formation and dissolution of canons,
interrogate histories of genres, focus on previously neglected forms, or
engage in archaeologies of popular music.
PPPPPuuuuubbbbbllllliiiiissssshhhhheeeeeddddd:::::
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Alyn Shipton
The Last Miles: The Music of Miles Davis, 1980–1991
George Cole
Jazz Visions: Lennie Tristano and His Legacy
Peter Ind
Chasin' the Bird: The Life and Legacy of Charlie Parker
Brian Priestley
FFFFFooooorrrrrttttthhhhhcccccooooommmmmiiiiinnnnnggggg:::::
Lee Morgan: His Life, Music and Culture
Tom Perchard
PREZ: The Life and Music of Lester Young
Dave Gelly
Sunshine and Shade: The Life of Sonny Criss
Nic Jones
Lionel Ritchie: Hello
Sharon Davis
Gone in the Air: The Life and Music of Eric Dolphy
Brian Morton
In Search of Fela Anikulapo Kuti
Max Reinhardt and Rita Ray
ii out of the long dark
Out of the Long Dark
The Life of Ian Carr
ALYN SHIPTON
introduction and acknowledgements iii
Published by
UK: Equinox Publishing Ltd., Unit 6, The Village, 101 Amies St.,
London SW11 2JW
USA: DBBC, 28 Main Street, Oakville, CT 06779
www.equinoxpub.com
First published 2006
© Alyn Shipton 2006
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or
transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including
photocopying, recording or any information storage or retrieval system, without
prior permission in writing from the publishers.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Shipton, Alyn.
Out of the long dark: the life of Ian Carr/Alyn Shipton.
p. cm -- (Popular music history)
Includes discography (p. ), bibliographical references (p. ), and index
ISBN 1-84553-222-8 (hb)
1. Carr, Ian. 2. Music critics--England--Biography.
3. Jazz musicians--England--Biography. I. Title. II. Series.
ML423.C2854S55 2006
781.65092--dc22
2006006882
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN-10 1 84553 222 8 (hardback)
ISBN-13 978 1 84553 222 2 (hardback)
Typeset by S.J.I. Services, New Delhi
Printed and bound in Great Britain by Lightning Source UK Ltd., Milton Keynes
and in the United States of America by Lightning Source Inc., La Vergne, TN
iv out of the long dark
contents
List of illustrations vi
Introduction and Acknowledgements vii
1 Northumbrian Sketches 1
2 From King's College to Queen's Commission 15
3 On the bum 28
4 Stephenson's Rocket – The EmCee Five 39
5 Affectionate Fink – Harold McNair and 1960s London 53
6 Shades of Blue – The Rendell-Carr Quintet 60
7 Elastic Rock – The Formation of Nucleus 86
8 United Jazz and Rock, and the Long Dark 108
9 Old Heartland 130
10 Into the media 152
List of recordings 169
Notes 201
Index 209
introduction and acknowledgements v
list of illustrations
1 Ian and his parents, circa 1935 5
2 Three Novocastrian intellectuals in London 19
3 Gerald Laing 24
4 The EmCee Five at the Downbeat 42
5 The Harold McNair band in Newcastle 55
6 The New Jazz Orchestra recording in London, 1965 64
7 The Rendell-Carr Quintet 65
8 Ian's wedding to his first wife, Margaret Bell 68
9 The rooftop view from Ian’s Spitalfields flat 70
10 Margaret Carr and the dog that caused the incident in
Spitalfields market 72
11 Nucleus win the band contest at Montreux, 1970 91
12 Roy Babbington 101
13 Dave McRae 105
14 Ian and the first VW band bus he bought for Nucleus 119
15 Nucleus, France, mid-70s 121
16 A 1970s visit to Morey Cottage 127
17 Ian's daughter, Selina 128
18 Orchestra UK, with Kenny Wheeler 154
19 Shakespeare's Birthday 1993: Ian and Sam Wanamaker 162
20 Don Rendell and Ian reunited, Royal Festival Hall 163
21 Researching Miles 167
22 Researching Miles: Ian with Miles Davis's nephew 168
23 Researching Keith Jarrett 169
vi out of the long dark
introduction and
acknowledgements
Every other year in the late 1960s and early 1970s, for a week in May,
the nave and chancel of St. Andrew's parish church in Farnham, Surrey,
turned into the country's leading concert hall for young musicians. The
Farnham Festival, the brainchild of my school music master, the late
Alan Fluck, brought young players from the surrounding area into direct
contact with the leading composers and players of the time. Thus it was
that as a primary school pupil of seven, I clip-clopped my way through
the percussive burglar's footsteps of Thea Musgrave's Marco The Miser,
with the composer in attendance. Later Malcolm Arnold conducted our
school orchestra through one of his specially written Little Suites, and we
gave premieres of new works by, among others, John Addison, Don
Banks, Alan Rawsthorne, and Richard Rodney Bennett.
Alan Fluck's vision was about breaking down musical barriers. Along
with a classical education, he gave me and my contemporaries every
encouragement to play and hear jazz, folk and rock music. Five friends
and I formed a jazz group at Farnham Grammar School, and played our
way through stock arrangements, as well as going to hear as many bands
as we could in concert, including Humphrey Lyttelton and Alex Welsh,
as well as Bruce Turner and Kathy Stobart.
In 1969, when I was fifteen, the Farnham Festival announced that one
of its major commissions that year would be a huge jazz cantata by the
pianist Michael Garrick, who then lived locally in Camberley. At the
time, as well as being a prime mover in the poetry and jazz movement,
Michael was the pianist in the Rendell-Carr Quintet, a cutting-edge band
that my contemporaries and I constantly read about in the music press,
but had never heard at first hand. So it was a thrill to discover that Don
Rendell and Ian Carr themselves would be in the Michael Garrick Sextet
for their concert in St. Andrew's church, along with the choir of
Farnborough Grammar School in which some of my friends were
singers.
introduction and acknowledgements vii
By special dispensation, the members of my little group were allowed
to take the day off from school and sit in on all the rehearsals for
Garrick's new work. For the concert itself we sat in the very front row,
trying to learn all we could from watching and listening to Don, Ian,
Mike and their colleagues, Art Themen on tenor, John Marshall on
drums and Coleridge Goode on bass. They played with a brash
confidence, and the memory of Ian's flugelhorn cutting through the dusty
atmosphere of the old church above the swish of Marshall's ride cymbal
still makes the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. Along with my
enthusiasm for traditional and mainstream jazz, I became an immediate
convert to what was going on in the British modern scene. My weekly
haul of new and second-hand records from the local shops, where I
traded my used discs for new ones, stretching my pocket money and
part-time job earnings to buy everything I could, suddenly became
packed with music by Joe Harriott, Amancio D'Silva, Mike Westbrook,
and above all, the Rendell-Carr and Garrick groups.
If there is a reason beyond the music for this, it is that the members
of Michael Garrick's group were incredibly nice to us. They did not
shrug off our teenage enthusiasm with the hardened carapace of
unpleasant professional cynicism which Ronnie Scott later presented to
me when I was a fledgling journalist, nor did they look down on our
efforts to learn and absorb from them, as well they may have done, given
our very amateurish beginnings. When I later played with Don Rendell
in the resident big band at the Ritz in the 1990s, he greeted me with
warm enthusiasm, and the same spark of interest that he had shown
back in 1969. In our many meetings over the years, Michael Garrick has
been similarly encouraging. But overall, it was hearing Ian Carr that
inspired me. Awkward, bearded, implacably Northern in our safe
Southern world, there was a rugged lyricism and beauty in his playing
that I had never previously heard in live jazz.
When the Rendell-Carr band broke up, my friends and I followed
Ian's career with Nucleus avidly. Our shared copy of Elastic Rock was
almost worn out on the sixth form gramophone, and our school
drummer Phil Lockhart began to wear vests and neckscarves like John
Marshall's, even though he still modelled his playing (and his kit) more
after our other idol of the time, Ginger Baker. As every new Nucleus disc
appeared, we not only bought it, but listened avidly and discussed the
nuances of each track over endless supplies of Nescafé and buttered
toast.
Being caught up in Ian's story in this way, as I suspect many of my
generation were, means that it's not always easy to be objective. In the
past, I have tended to write about American jazz, often visiting and
viii out of the long dark
interviewing the founding fathers of the music on home turf, but
nevertheless writing from the safe distance that the Atlantic creates
between our two cultures. Although jazz is an international language,
the American dialect has tended to predominate, and I have been
captivated by its intoxicating shades and nuances. But in the last few
years, both delving further into the academic study of oral history while
reading for my PhD at Oxford Brookes University and simultaneously
working with George Shearing on his autobiography, I have realised that
as an English writer, my attentions should be equally devoted to the
strong British accent in jazz.
The contribution of British musicians, and the development of the
music in the UK have often helped the main current of jazz to take some
surprising turns, and Ian Carr has been there for more than a few of
them, from the pioneering Newcastle bebop band the EmCee Five to the
Rendell-Carr Quintet, from the free jazz of John Stevens and Trevor
Watts to the roaring big bands of Neil Ardley and Stan Tracey, and from
the timely world-music-meets-jazz experiments of Joe Harriott, Amancio
D'Silva and Guy Warren of Ghana to the early days of jazz-rock fusion
in Britain with Nucleus. Students from his various educational activities
are now making the running in British jazz themselves, while Ian has
shifted his main attention from playing not just to writing books about
jazz, but being actively involved in making prize-winning documentary
films as well.
So when John Smallwood proposed to me the idea of writing a book
about Ian, I accepted with alacrity. As I began to explore Ian's story I
found interesting parallels with my own. My mother's family had
academic and social connections with Durham, where my great-
grandfather Samuel Blackwell Guest-Williams had been head of
Durham School, a Dean of the Cathedral and rector of the nearby village
of Pittington. In the same era, Ian's great-grandfather had been principal
of St. Bede College. One of my great uncles had been a student at Ian's
university, King's College, in the early days of its federation with
Durham, and he and his brother later lived in Christleton Old Hall in
Cheshire, not much more than a stone's throw away from Eaton Hall,
where Ian underwent his army officer training.
Furthermore, Ian and I have both done our time as boy choristers,
while simultaneously discovering the joys of recorded jazz. By the
1990s, of course, we were both regular presenters on BBC Radio 3, and
have subsequently shared much information on aspects of jazz history.
Ian was a vital contributor to several of my programmes, including a
long series on jazz education, and so I hope this book goes some small
way to repay the debt I owe him, both for fostering much of my initial
introduction and acknowledgements ix