Luca Manning: Rising Star

Luca Manning may only have left school two years ago, but the young jazz singer with the soulful, gentle voice already has an award on his mantelpiece (Rising Star at the 2018 Scottish Jazz Awards), a debut CD to sell, … Continue reading

Luca Manning - When the sun comes out (front cover)

Luca Manning may only have left school two years ago, but the young jazz singer with the soulful, gentle voice already has an award on his mantelpiece (Rising Star at the 2018 Scottish Jazz Awards), a debut CD to sell, a CV that many older singers would kill for, a star-studded roster of admirers, and a dedicated entourage which includes a well-kent face from TV.

Manning, you see, is the grandson of Anita – the colourful Glasgow antiques expert on Bargain Hunt – and over the last few years, she and her daughter, Luca’s mother, have become regulars at jazz concerts in Glasgow. Indeed, from being what she described as a “rock ‘n’ roll gal,” Anita Manning now has an impressive jazz collection (“she has loads of Ella Fitzgerald records”) and has helped her grandson by offering him tips on performance, dealing with nerves and keeping energy levels up. “ ‘Eat bananas’ is her top tip for an energy boost,” laughs Manning.

It was always obvious to Luca Manning that his future lay in music – but he only discovered jazz relatively recently. Born in Glasgow’s west end, he attended Hillhead High School where, initially, he dreamt of becoming a rock star – not that he was very keen on practising his guitar.

“I was in a pop/rock band playing ukulele and writing sad songs with four chords,” he says. “I was in a choir in first year – I had a high voice and had to sing with the sopranos. The school had a fantastic, dedicated music department and there was always an outlet for music.”

At home, Manning’s listening tastes were much influenced by his mother who raised him and his older sister by herself. “Mum, who of course is now into jazz, always liked amazing voices – Sinead O’Connor, Jimmy Sommerville, people like that. Great singers with big voices. I went through a lot of phases but the constants were Amy Winehouse (who I think Anita liked first!), Stevie Wonder and soul music. I bought my first album with my mum in Fopp on Byres Road. It was Bjork – Debut and my mum said: ‘If you don’t get it, I’ll get it!’ I think I was 14 at the time.”

Meanwhile, Manning was taking piano lessons, having given up on guitar, and was encouraged by his piano teacher to sing. “I was actually champing at the bit to get singing lessons but I didn’t get any until my voice had broken”.

When Manning was 16 years old, his school suggested he sign up for the weekly jazz workshops run by the Strathclyde Youth Jazz Orchestra. One of his tutors there was the pianist Alan Benzie, and when the course ended, Manning was desperate to continue learning, so Benzie took him on as a student. It was he who helped the youngster with auditions and prescribed listening material for him. “Until I did the SYJO classes, I knew very little about jazz and didn’t really know what I was getting into,” says Manning. “But the more I immersed myself in the music – the more I loved it.”

Among Manning’s early favourites was the iconic Chet Baker, whose eponymous 1959 album he will be celebrating at The Blue Arrow in Glasgow next month, as part of the club’s 59:60 series of homages to classic albums from that pivotal year in jazz.

“I instantly fell in love with Chet, both his singing and his trumpet playing,” explains Manning. I love that melancholy fragility and vulnerability; I have an emotional connection to Chet. Crooners never resonated as much with me as much. Mark Murphy’s later records are in the same vein as Chet’s – it’s a different style but he’s not afraid to stick his neck out, be himself, take risks. I also love Amy Winehouse – in fact, I think I got into her because my gran Anita was always playing her records.”

The summer school run by the National Youth Jazz Orchestra of Scotland proved another invaluable experience for Manning. “I just loved learning. Jazz was like a new musical language, and I remember that it was after that summer school that I came back and told my mum I want to be a jazz musician.” Manning returned to the summer school a further two times, and one of those occasions it led to him appearing at the Proms as part of a choir of students from the course.

Along with Alan Benzie, the much-loved English singer Liane Carroll played a huge part in Manning’s development. Not only did she point him in the direction of the vocal jazz workshops run in Scotland by fellow singer Sophie Bancroft – with tutors including herself, Sara Colman and Fionna Duncan – but she also invited him to sing with her at her Christmas show at Ronnie Scott’s in 2017. She is, as Manning says, “a very generous person and musician”.

Carroll has also been a significant influence on the young vocalist. “Her singing is so honest; every word is so true and she just makes you feel something. No matter which genre she’s singing in, you are guaranteed to be told a story and she has so much fun onstage doing it. It’s infectious. She’s a very natural improviser which I love as well.”

It was during a particular listening phase around 18 months ago, that Manning – who is currently midway through the four-year jazz course at Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London – had the surreal experience of being invited to support the singer in question at a jazz festival gig.

He explains: “I was really getting into Georgie Fame – I love his Portrait of Chet album; he’s an amazing singer – and was listening to him a lot early in 2018. I sang one of his vocalese numbers at the launch of The Blue Arrow club and Jill Rodger, the director of the Glasgow Jazz Festival, heard me and said: ‘Georgie Fame is playing at the jazz festival this year. How would you like to open for him?’”

And so it was that Manning and the similarly youthful pianist Fergus McCreadie came to be the support act for Fame last year, and then Ruby Turner this summer. (The pair have now, separately, been nominated in the Newcomer category of the prestigious Parliementary Awards, taking place in London in December.) Understandably, this was a pretty daunting experience, but Manning took his cue from his more experienced, then 20-year-old, musical partner. “We decided not to tailor the music to the person we were supporting. Fergus reminded me never to compromise as a musician. He said: ‘Let’s just do our thing unapologetically’.”

It’s little wonder, given the trust he has in McCreadie, that Manning chose to record his debut CD, When the Sun Comes Out, with him earlier this year. The original idea was not to record an album, but just to make some recordings together. “Sara Colman, my mentor and tutor at Guildhall, and I had spoken a lot and she suggested we go in and record enough material so I could make a CD if I wanted. We recorded at the National Youth Orchestra of Scotland’s HQ – a room that we were already familiar with – and that was a great way of minimising stress, by being in familiar surroundings. Sara sat in on the recording and helped produce which also helped me feel more comfortable and confident.”

His confidence was further boosted by the involvement of leading alto saxophonist Laura Macdonald, who had given him sax lessons at school before he took up singing. “I love her energy and her playing. We’ve always stayed in touch, and she has been a really good mentor to me. I wanted to have a duo on the CD – but then I thought it would be nice to have a guest and Laura was the first person to come into my head. And it was the idea of having her, rather than the idea of a sax. It turned out just as I envisaged: she came in on the second day and completely changed the energy. I was almost pinching myself. Everyone in the room loved it. Fergus hadn’t played with her before. We had a quick run-through. It was very much of the moment.”

The bottom line for Manning was that this debut CD was an accurate reflection of what he does in a gig. “All I wanted was honesty. I didn’t want multi-tracking or mixing, and I wanted a maximum of two or three takes. Some of the songs were new to us; some we’ve done before. There is no theme to the album but the songs are connected in a way because there are themes of home, identity and love. I was thinking about how there is pressure to release ALL new music that’s innovative and new, but I didn’t want to write ten new tunes – I wanted to do what I’d do on a gig.

“At the end of the day, it’s an honest snapshot of who I am. And I just love great songs.”

*When the Sun Comes Out is available now; Luca Manning – Chet Baker: Chet is at The Blue Arrow, Glasgow on Thursday October 24; www.thebluearrow.co.ukLuca 2 solo pic.jpg

Text (c) Alison Kerr, 2019; album cover artwork by Irenie Blaze-Cameron; portrait by Delilah Niel

Bob Wilber Obituary

Bob Wilber, who has died at the age of 91, was a champion of classic and traditional jazz and one of the world’s leading jazz soprano saxophonists and clarinettists. During a career which spanned more than six decades, the quiet-spoken … Continue reading

Bob Wilber, Ed Jazz Fest 1992Bob Wilber, who has died at the age of 91, was a champion of classic and traditional jazz and one of the world’s leading jazz soprano saxophonists and clarinettists. During a career which spanned more than six decades, the quiet-spoken New Yorker was a living link to the great jazz originals who had inspired him – in particular the legendary Sidney Bechet, whose protégé he was in the late 1940s – and a musical chameleon, able to emulate both Bechet’s sound and that of the clarinet king Benny Goodman.

In later life, he became a generous mentor to the younger players who followed him, not least the mighty tenor saxophonist Scott Hamilton with whose young band Wilber recorded in 1977, thereby attracting the attention of the record company which ultimately signed him.

In Scotland, he is remembered for his involvement in gala or one-off concerts at the Edinburgh and Nairn Jazz Festivals – in particular the handful of reunions of the 1970s jazz “supergroup”, Soprano Summit, which took place twice in Edinburgh in the 1990s, and twice in Nairn in the 2000s, and he appeared with Scott Hamilton the final edition of the much-missed Nairn Jazz Festival, in 2009.

Robert Sage Wilber was born in Greenwich Village in New York City in 1928. His father was a partner in a small publishing firm which specialised in college textbooks. His mother died when Wilber was just over a year old, and Wilber and his sister were raised by their father and the second wife he married soon afterwards. When Wilber was six years old, the family moved to Scarsdale, an affluent commuter suburb to the north of the city.

Wilber was just an infant when he first heard jazz – his father, who played some jazz piano, played him the Duke Ellington Orchestra’s recording of Mood Indigo when it had just come out. Wilber would hear the band live, in 1943, when the whole family went to Carnegie Hall for the historic Black, Brown and Beige concert. Not that this was the young boy’s first experience of live jazz; his father had already taken him to Manhattan’s Café Society nightclub to listen to the elegant and swinging pianist Teddy Wilson.

Like many of his peers, Wilber, who took up clarinet in his early teens, became hooked on traditional jazz which was enjoying a popular revival in the 1940s. He wrote in his 1987 memoir Music Was Not Enough: “I had discovered jazz. It seemed to me to celebrate the very joy of being alive. How very different from the rest of my life!” At school, he helped establish a record club and formed a band which held lunchtime sessions.

Aged 15 years old, Wilber and his jazz-mad classmates would go into the city every Sunday afternoon to hear some of their favourite musicians playing in a jam session. They even persuaded them to come to play in an end-of-term concert at their school. And so it was that such well-known names from the jazz world as pianist Art Hodes, bass player Pops Foster, trombonist Wilber De Paris and clarinettist Mezz Mezzrow played at Scarsdale High.

Instead of pursuing an Ivy League education, as might have been expected, Wilber finished school and moved to New York to continue his studies in the jazz clubs of 52ndStreet and in Brooklyn, where he studied with the great New Orleans clarinettist and soprano saxophonist Sidney Bechet.

“He had a ramshackle house with a sign, ‘Sidney Bechet’s School of Music’,” Wilber told the New York Times in 1980. “I was virtually the first student and the only serious student. After a month Sidney suggested I move in with him.” By 1948, Wilber was so immersed in Bechet’s style of playing and sounded so like him that when the older man was unable to accept an invitation to play at the Nice Jazz Festival, his student went in his place.

Wilber had formed his first band, the Wildcats, in 1945. It comprised contemporaries including the dazzling pianist Dick Wellstood. But, says Dan Morgenstern, the Director Emeritus of the Institute of Jazz Studies at Rutgers University, it was the second incarnation of the Wildcats which was Wilber’s most important band.

Morgenstern says: “Apart from Bob and Dick, the other members were veteran blacks, old enough to be their fathers or even grandfathers. Between them, these elders had worked with a veritable who’s who of early jazz including King Oliver and Jelly Roll Morton, as well as Louis Armstrong. The interracial aspect was almost as unusual, for that time, as the age one.”

When he was drafted into the army in 1952, Wilber – seeking to emerge from Bechet’s shadow – swapped his soprano sax for a tenor. He didn’t restrict his interest to classic and traditional jazz – he explored modern jazz by studying pianist Lennie Tristano, and he formed a band named The Six which combined elements of traditional and modern jazz.  He also studied classical clarinet, and toured with the most celebrated swing clarinettist, Benny Goodman. It wasn’t until the 1960s that he was first introduced to the instrument for which he will be best remembered – the curved soprano sax.

He later wrote: “I played one note of curved soprano sax and I remember saying this is different from the straight. I can do something on this which is different than Sidney Bechet. And that started my second career on soprano.”  Indeed, it was on soprano that Wilber was featured when he became one of the charter members of Yank Lawson and Bob Haggart’s modestly monikered World’s Greatest Jazz Band in 1968.

In 1969, Wilber earned a Grammy nomination for his album The Music of Hoagy Carmichael, which featured his arrangements and his serene soprano sax playing. (He won the Grammy in 1985 for his recreations of Duke Ellington’s 1920s music for the movie The Cotton Club.) It also marked a comeback for the wonderful swing era singer Maxine Sullivan, with whom he recorded another album that year, Close As Pages in a Book.

Wilber may have had to talk Sullivan into her comeback, but when he called Marty Grosz to ask if he would like to join Soprano Summit, the response was: “My bags are packed.” The much-loved guitarist, vocalist and purveyor of side-splittingly funny anecdotes had been working for the US Postal Service but he gave it up and headed out on the road with Soprano Summit; a move which launched Grosz’s career as a solo star who was a favourite of Edinburgh and Nairn audiences through the 1990s and 2000s.

Soprano Summit was created on impulse by a promoter desperate to revive an audience jazzed-out after a full weekend of wall-to-wall jazz. He suggested that Wilber and Kenny Davern “do a duet with soprano saxophones and wake everyone up”.  The two, who had rarely performed together, quickly talked through a head arrangement of Duke Ellington’s moody and magnificent The Mooche for two soprano saxophones – a combination, amazingly, never before used in a working jazz band.

“We got a rhythm section together,” explained Wilber during an interview in Nairn, in 1995. “By a fluke Dick Hyman, Bucky Pizzarelli, Bobby Rosengarden and Milt Hinton were all there – and we got up and did the number.” Davern continued: “We finished it off on two high notes in thirds, and to our amazement people just rose up in applause – 650 folks just screaming with delight – and it was then that we realised that we had something different.”

In December 1972, the infant Soprano Summit cut its first album. Then, after a second LP, the second incarnation of Soprano Summit was born. The main reason for change was an economic one: as a six-piece band, Soprano Summit was an expensive package. The band also wanted to travel light, so the piano had to go. Marty Grosz was signed up to replace Pizzarelli, who was tied up with studio work.

Grosz shared with Wilber and Davern a love of tunes which were off the beaten standard track. Indeed, Soprano Summit’s basic ground plan was to be different and to make a feature of the fact that this was a working band with a varied working repertoire. Davern added: “That was the basic sound of the group – two sopranos, or clarinet and soprano, and the guitar held it together like glue.”

In a typical Soprano Summit number they bounced the melody backwards and forwards between them like a football, with one taking a step back to play the obbligato and create a space for the other to lead the way with a solo. There was always a balance between the arranged and the spontaneous, though one sensed that much of the arranging was going on as they played. Wilber and Davern’s intuition about one another’s direction also meant that they complemented each other’s playing.

As British clarinettist and saxophonist Alan Barnes says: “Soprano Summit brought together two highly individual and virtuosic reed players who, great as they were individually, found an interaction together that was very special. Taking the pre-swing era as their inspiration, they gave the material a contemporary edge and struck real sparks off each other in series of exciting exchanges that stood comparison with any of the other two reed combinations in jazz.”

Even years after Soprano Summit broke up, when Wilber and Davern got together, they still produced spine-tingling music – as anyone who attended one of their reunion concerts will testify.

After settling in the Cotswolds in the late 1980s with his second wife, the Sheffield-born singer Joanne “Pug” Horton, Wilber performed in Scotland every few years until around 2010, when he made his last appearance at the Edinburgh Jazz Festival in a concert entitled Festival of Swing which also featured fellow octogenarian Joe Temperley and tenor saxophonist Scott Hamilton.

By this time, he was in the habit of taking control of the line-up with which he was working, and, rather than following the programme and leading the all-star group in its entirety for a finale, he assumed leadership from the off, putting together a first set which overran by 45 minutes. Nobody in the band said anything, despite being 45 minutes’ overdue their pints, but Wilber – as one musician remembered it – “got a massive bollocking from the wee lady who sold the ice-creams – which had melted in the meantime.”

Bob Wilber, born March 15, 1928; died August 4, 2019.

A shorter version of this was published in The Herald on August 30.

Text (c) Alison Kerr; Photo (c) Donnie Kerr

Colin Steele: Joni, Mary and All That Jazz!

One of the most magical moments at last year’s Edinburgh Fringe came from the bowels of Chambers Street where a room-ful of punters could be heard softly singing Feed the Birds, the beautiful ballad from the Disney film Mary Poppins … Continue reading

colin steele low res-5004One of the most magical moments at last year’s Edinburgh Fringe came from the bowels of Chambers Street where a room-ful of punters could be heard softly singing Feed the Birds, the beautiful ballad from the Disney film Mary Poppins – to the accompaniment of two of Scotland’s leading jazz musicians as they performed their Poppins-themed show at the Jazz Bar.

This hour-long concert – which united tiny tots, senior citizens, hippies, hipsters, seasoned Fringe-goers, diehard Disney fans and jaded jazzers in song – became one of those shows which grew busier as its run went on. Word of mouth boosted its ticket sales and the memory of how special it was prompted its stars – the duo of trumpeter Colin Steele and pianist Brian Kellock – to be persuaded to revive it for this year’s Fringe, for just two performances.

But Mary Poppins, the jazz version, is just one of a raft of diverse gigs that Steele is preparing for. While other dads might be looking forward to easing off work during the school holidays, Steele is limbering up for the busiest couple of months in his calendar.

The acclaimed 51-year-old jazz musician – and father of three – is bracing himself for a festival season which this year sees him headlining two concerts at the Edinburgh Jazz Festival (and serving as sideman on a further seven) and four shows (each with multiple performances) at the Fringe, plus so many as a sideman that he has already lost count. “Some days I have three gigs,” he says, “so I’m practising like crazy, building up the chops.”

Steele – who has just spent the weekend zooming between the Glasgow Jazz Festival, where he played in up-and-coming singer Georgia Cecile’s band; Loch Lomond, where he is renovating a holiday house, and his hometown where he had gigs at both the Barony Bar and Soderberg – seems to be ahead of the game in terms of building up his stamina for mid July. But it’s not something he takes for granted, having suffered a catastrophic crisis with his playing ten years ago.

Left unable to play, he had to re-learn his craft and he is now much more aware that he shouldn’t push himself too hard. “Nowadays, I know that if it’s not working, then I need to put the trumpet away for a bit. I used to get anxious and push myself too far and it would all collapse,” he explains.

As his busy, cross-country weekend and heavy Fringe schedule illustrate, Steele is an extremely versatile musician who is at home in any number of jazz settings and has absorbed inspiration from a vast range of horn players. He cites Chet Baker – whose, cool, swinging, pared-back “West Coast” sound he channels with ease – as his biggest influence, and names Louis Armstrong, “whose creativity, originality and emotional playing is second to none”, as his favourite trumpeter. It was playing Baker-style jazz that made Steele’s name back in the 1990s, but recently he has played more traditional jazz thanks to his membership of various bands led by the singer Alison Affleck, a tireless champion of early styles of jazz.

[Affleck, Steele and their cohorts may have helped to fuel the revival of interest in traditional jazz in Scotland but it has,unfortunately been pounced upon, rather cynically, by some musicians who seem to view it as a way of landing gigs, rather than because it’s an area of jazz that they are passionate about and well-versed in. Even more disheartening is the fact that jazz festivals are lowering their standards by booking these groups which have jumped on the trad bandwagon.]

Under his own name, Steele has performed and recorded Celtic/folk-influenced jazz with his own band. At last year’s Edinburgh Jazz Festival, he acknowledged his past forays into pop by performing a jazz concert of music by the Glasgow band The Pearlfishers, on ten of whose records he had played. The success of the Pearlfishers project – the concerts and a very well-received album – inspired another pop-themed jazz project for this year’s festival: the Colin Steele Quartet Play Joni Mitchell.

“I’ve had a deep love for Joni Mitchell for a long time; I’d always known her music – and I felt her songs deserved to be better appreciated. She’s known primarily as a poet, but her melodies are fab and stand on their own two feet. Plus, there’s already a jazz connection because she worked quite often with jazz musicians – Charles Mingus, Michael Brecker and Jaco Pastorius are just some of the jazz guys she worked with.”

There were other contenders for this next jazz-meets-pop project, however. “Ricky Lee Jones was high up on the list too,” says Steele before returning to the subject of how he convinced himself that the Joni Mitchell idea could work. “Actually,” he explains, “I probably wouldn’t have gone for this Joni Mitchell idea had Brian Kellock and I not done the music of Mary Poppins at the Fringe last year. It’s so far away from jazz – it just shows what you can do. Someone said to me after the Mary Poppins show that if you can make something as fab as that out of Mary Poppins, then you can do anything. It’s all about melody, and if you have a really strong melody, then it will work. Also, Brian can make anything possible!”

Over the last five years, the Steele-Kellock double act has become a fixture on the Fringe; the two longstanding friends and colleagues seeing it as an opportunity to explore themes or songbooks that they hadn’t delved into before, and to harness the anything-goes spirit of the Fringe to up the level of spontaneity and fun. And, of course, to make a feature of audience participation.

Steele recalls: “The first Fringe show we did together was My Fair Lady in 2014, then the following year, Brian suggested that we do a Glenn Miller show and it sort of took off from there; it became an annual jamboree. It just worked so well; the audience loved it. We had air raid sirens, singalongs (Pennsylvania 65000 etc) and everybody knew a lot of the tunes. The strength of the melody and the arrangements are so great, and playing that music in a small group gives you so much space. When I’ve played it in a big band, I’ve not been satisfied because you can’t really be creative – and I do like to improvise.”

In 2018, Steele and Kellock retired the Glenn Miller show so they could concentrate on their Mary Poppins one. Its slow sales at the outset suggested that there was some ambivalence that it would work but ultimately it assumed the status of being one of those shows that people kick themselves for having missed because those who were there talk about it as a life-enhancing event.

Steele says: “On the fifth and final day, there was a big group of musicians who came in and they said it was the best, most fun, gig they’d ever seen and I felt that way too. It really was one of the most beautiful experiences of my life – everyone singing Feed the Birds. It was so special. I felt it would be a shame not to do it again.”

In addition to reviving Glenn Miller for the Edinburgh Jazz Festival and Mary Poppins for this year’s Fringe, Steele and Kellock are celebrating two of the original giants of jazz – Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington – in another Fringe show that will have five outings.

What is it about working in a duo that so appeals to Steele?  “There’s a real intimacy and a responsibility that you both have – you can’t take a back seat. It’s lovely to work with someone with such musicality and of course you have to remember that there’s also the beauty of no drummer! There’s so much space because there’s no drummer. Anything can happen in duos. With three or four people it’s more complicated. The duo offers more possibilities, more freedom but also harder work – there’s a lot of sweat going on.

“I’ve no doubt that Brian is the greatest of all Scottish jazz musicians and we’re so lucky to have him and I’m so honoured to play with him. We all feel that. It’s always a challenge: he’s not an accompanist – he’s there for the creativity, he’s always pushing. I’m more reticent, he pushes you into different areas. It’s always scary, always a joy.”

*Colin Steele plays the Edinburgh Jazz Festival on July 15 (Glenn Miller, with Brian Kellock) and 17 (Joni Mitchell with his own group); www.edinburghjazzfestival.com for details. For details of his various Fringe shows, visit www.edfringe.com ; Mary Poppins is on August 18 and 20.