I’VE always argued that jazz grew and bloomed out of multiple acts of work. 

The great blues singers like Bessie Smith (Washwoman’s Blues) or Big Bill Broonzy (Plowman’s Blues) sang about their aversion to alienating forms of labour, and some of the earliest jazz recordings invoked hard-working lives, including New Orleans pioneers Louis Armstrong and Sidney Bechet in Coal Cart Blues — where Armstrong sings of his boyhood hard labours of hauling sacks of coal — or trumpeter Freddie Keppard’s Chicago cattle abattoir narrative, Stockyard Strut, or Joe “King” Oliver’s paean to all Windy City workers, Working Man Blues.

Even early Duke Ellington tracks like Stevedore Stomp told of the travails of Harlem-based dockworkers.

[[{"fid":"53202","view_mode":"inlineright","fields":{"format":"inlineright","field_file_image_alt_text[und][0][value]":"TALES FROM THE JACQUARD by the Julian Siegel Jazz Orchestra (Whirlwind Recordings)","field_file_image_title_text[und][0][value]":false},"link_text":null,"type":"media","field_deltas":{"1":{"format":"inlineright","field_file_image_alt_text[und][0][value]":"TALES FROM THE JACQUARD by the Julian Siegel Jazz Orchestra (Whirlwind Recordings)","field_file_image_title_text[und][0][value]":false}},"attributes":{"alt":"TALES FROM THE JACQUARD by the Julian Siegel Jazz Orchestra (Whirlwind Recordings)","class":"media-element file-inlineright","data-delta":"1"}}]]Compelling then that a century later, the Nottingham-born (in 1966) tenor saxophonist Julian Siegel should make a brilliant big band jazz album with a powerful work-based authenticity called Tales of the Jacquard, that re-lives working life in an English East Midlands lace factory.

Siegel told me: “I was the youngest of four and my older sisters and brother all played piano. I’m extremely lucky to have grown up in a musical household. My parents ran a lace manufacturing company in Nottingham for over 50 years. Each day after they came home from work and at the weekends, Ellington, Basie, Sarah Vaughan and the great tenor saxophonists Eddie “Lockjaw” Davis, Paul Gonsalves and Ben Webster would be on the turntable as well as a lot of classical music.
    
“My parents were both members of the Count Basie Society of Great Britain and they took us to his concerts many times; and to hear Oscar Peterson, the Modern Jazz Quartet, Buddy Rich, Billy Eckstine as well as to many classical concerts.”

He remembers a beguiling mixture of youthful music: jazz classics of Monk, Coltrane and all the Blue Note albums of pianist McCoy Tyner and saxophonists Dexter Gordon and Joe Henderson, along with his brother’s record collection of rock-indie and punk — the Sex Pistols and Clash. 

“I used to borrow all the Stravinsky albums from Nottingham Central Library and listen to my dad’s box set of Mahler’s symphonies, plus friends’ tapes of Stevie Wonder, Robert Wyatt, Ian Dury and The Specials.”

As he moved into professional jazz he played with some outstanding musicians like Andrew Hill, Mike Gibbs, Kenny Wheeler and John Taylor. 

“One big band that really knocked me out was the Mel Lewis Orchestra. And I loved Gil Evans’s records with Miles Davis and the way he let his soloists play with such freedom — such as the great drummer Elvin Jones on Time of the Barracudas from the album The Individualism of Gil Evans. I was determined that when I had my own jazz orchestra I also wanted to give the musicians as much freedom as possible.”

How did Tales from the Jacquard come about? 

He told me how he had visited the Cluny Lace Works in Ilkeston, Derbyshire, talked to the workers there and studied the Jacquard loom processes, controlled by “chains” of punched cards, making possible the automatic production of unlimited varieties of complex weaving. He made field recordings of the machines at work. 

“They have such a great sound and groove!” he exclaimed. “I remembered my dad saying that listening to the machines in his factory in the ’70s made him want to conduct them!”

He spoke to the factory’s Jacquard card punchers, and they helped him understand their numbers. 

“I used the rhythms from the cards and this led to the initial ideas and sketches for writing the compositions. I wanted to use the field recordings to recreate the factory atmosphere in the music. After writing the music and giving it to the orchestra, I was keen to just let it happen and see in what direction it would go. On tour, the musicians made it different every night!”

The orchestra itself is full of marvellous musicians. 

There are younger virtuosi like saxophonist Tori Freestone and trumpeter Percy Pursglove alongside veterans like trumpeter Henry Lowther and saxophonist Stan Sulzmann who played with both Gil Evans and Kenny Wheeler in their large ensembles. Siegel rhapsodises about: “their sound! There’s no-one like them and their wonderful musicianship. They are both legends of the UK music scene, and it was an honour to have them playing in the orchestra.”

This is a powerfully original album with moments of true beauty born from industrial clamour, tedium and soul-destroying monotony, as when bassist Oli Hayhurst and drummer Gene Calderazzo play along and improvise with the manufacturing realism of the field recordings of the lace machine. 

Liam Noble sets the human tone in his soulful solo piano, Freestone’s flute is like a trapped bird in the factory in Part 2, and Harry Brown’s gruff trombone chorus radiates through Part 3 with Siegel’s and Sulzmann’s full-on tenors and Lowther’s cutting horn.

I’d love to have known what the old legends Bessie, Big Bill, Armstrong, Bechet and Ellington would have made of it, for their living spirit still chimes and throbs in its every note: real sounds, real lives, real jazz.