As regular readers may be aware, I’ve been a great admirer of the composer, bandleader and pianist Mike Westbrook for many years. If memory serves, the first music I ever heard by him (thanks to John Peel, I suspect) was the 1972 jazz-rock album Solid Gold Cadillac; certainly the first time I saw Westbrook perform live was more than 50 years ago, on 18 October 1974 at Cambridge’s Lady Mitchell Hall, when his orchestra played the music from the albums Citadel/Room 315 and Love/Dream and Variations. Thereafter I bought many subsequent releases – not to mention some of the earlier ones from the ’60s – and saw Westbrook perform live whenever I could.
One of Westbrook’s many strengths has been his versatility as a composer; entirely open-minded about musical style and form, he has embraced jazz, rock, popular standards, classical and opera, musical theatre, religious and ritualistic music, poetry and the spoken word and much besides, working with ensembles large, medium-sized and small. Maybe that’s why the entry on Westbrook in The Penguin Guide to Jazz claimed, ‘If he is also an improviser, and there is no doubt that he is, it is not as an instrumentalist. Instead, he improvises with genre and with the boundaries of genre.’ Now, while it’s perhaps true that Westbrook’s primary importance is that of a composer-arranger, to argue that he doesn’t improvise as an instrumentalist is nonsense, as Westbrook’s latest release makes abundantly and quite gloriously clear.
The new digital album the piano and me – takes one to four is comprised of four solo recitals recorded between June 2022 and March 2024 in Dartington, London, Topsham and Ashburton. Westbrook has made solo albums before – I’m pretty certain that 1978’s considerably less improvisational Piano was the first non-classical piano record I possessed – but this latest is his most substantial yet. (It’s possible to buy the four albums separately or, I’d recommend, as a single set.) The third album, recorded in Topsham, is subtitled The Birds of Dartmoor, and consists largely of original compositions; the other three do include some Westbrook tunes (most notably View from the Drawbridge from Citadel/Room 315), but mostly offer takes on numbers by some of his favourite composers (Ellington, Monk, Mingus, Lennon and McCartney), with the hymn Just a Closer Walk with Thee, L’amoroso e sincero Lindoro from Rossini’s The Barber of Seville, Lover Man, Falling in Love Again, As Time Goes By and Skylark added in for good measure. Oh, and My Way is there too, a song entirely appropriate for this most distinctive, distinguished and deeply personal musician, who has always done it his way.
That Penguin Guide claim notwithstanding, Westbrook’s creative personality is consistently discernible in his playing and thinking, whatever the material. The opening track of the first album here is She Loves You, yet so searching is the pianist’s contemplative account of the melody and harmonies that much of it is barely recognisable as the Beatles’ upbeat hit. Returning repeatedly to a clutch of favourites – Mood Indigo, Jackie-ing, Johnny Come Lately, Goodbye Pork Pie Hat, Sweet Kentucky Ham and Because among them – Westbrook probes, fragments, elides, embellishes, condenses, stretches, circles and reinvents the originals in endlessly imaginative ways, so that everything feels fresh. If the mood is predominantly thoughtful, measured, minor-key and intimate, rather than virtuosic or flashy, that certainly doesn’t make for repetitiveness. Rather, I was constantly aware that I was listening to the live creativity of someone steeped in musical memories and possessed of a profound knowledge of – and profound love for – a wonderfully wide range of musics. As an occasional birder I was particularly intrigued by the evocative portraits on the third album (wisely, for the most part Westbrook doesn’t try to root his melodies in birdsong, but seems to be thinking rather of personality, movement, landscape and mood). But elsewhere I loved the rewardingly considered, tangential approach he takes in tracing his way to, around and away from the core of the various classics and standards; surprises are frequent and illuminating. Just try this as a sample.
One last point. I recently underwent an unusually enervating bout of ‘flu, so weak I couldn’t even listen to music or the radio, let alone read or whatever. When I finally began to feel a little stronger and up to using my ears, I opted for the piano and me, and it proved a fruitful choice; simply by listening quietly and closely, without distraction, I could immerse myself in the music’s constant and subtle shifts, its humane sense of scale, its unemphatic but gently penetrating beauty. It’s music, in other words, that requires and amply rewards attention.
Mike Westbrook’s the piano and me – takes one to four is available on Bandcamp or from westbrookjazz.co.uk. Artwork for covers by Kate Westbrook.
notes and observations by Geoff Andrew 