Talking The Groove: Jazz Words From The Morning Star
Chris Searle
Jazz In Britain, £16.99

CHRIS SEARLE’s jazz column is to the Morning Star’s arts pages what Farringdon’s racing tips are to its sports section — both having built something of a trademark for the paper over nearly 30 years, and for many as indispensable as its editorial or crossword.

He has written or edited more than 50 books and Talking The Groove is his third on jazz, following 2008’s Forward Groove and 2013’s Red Groove.

This worthy compendium brings together reviews and interviews of more than 150 artists from our intrepid “jazz correspondent” — a writer whose passionate and at times poetic style defies anyone, even the jazz haters, not to be in some way inspired.

A review from London’s Cafe Oto in 2016 of saxophonist Andy Sheppard, drummer Eddie Prevost and bassist John Edwards, entitled A Newfoundland Of Sound — a nod to the famed album Newfoundland by AMM, the free improv group Prevost founded in 1965 — being a case in point.

Here Searle shows his feel for the music in typical fashion as he describes Prevost’s “shimmering cymbals” and how his “skins boom” while Sheppard’s “soprano horn, soft and mellow at the outset, is a series of ruminations alongside Edward’s menacing, vibrant bow.”

The instrument, for Searle, becomes the wordless expression of the soul where he hears the sounds of love, hope, joy, struggle, freedom and resistance.

As Searle himself writes in the book’s introduction, he believes jazz has “always been the music of the oppressed, the cry of resistance and the sound of a new and more just world a-comin’ ...it is without doubt the timbre of co-operation, of sharing, of a sonic vision of a better life.”

He is as adept at showcasing seasoned pros — the octogenarians of jazz like Prevost, reed player Sammy Rimington, drummer Barry Altschul, saxophonists Wayne Shorter and Trevor Watts, pianist Mike Westbrook and guitarist John McLaughlin — as he is of rising stars.

McLaughlin, whose credits include Miles Davis’s Bitches Brew and In A Silent Way, is not only a pioneer of jazz fusion but a proud pro-Palestinian, having played solidarity concerts on the West Bank.

Paying homage to his work across three articles is a wonderful review of a live album recorded at Ronnie Scott’s with McLaughlin’s band the 4th Dimension, where his song Gaza City is performed.

Carrying the headline Guitar Over Gaza, Searle describes the tune as resonating with “the living reality of epochal moments of people’s struggles” with his “blues-soaked melody reaching out to all those entrapped within Gaza’s imprisoned frontiers” — the vivid description being all the more poignant given the current ongoing genocide.

But Searle is no mere purveyor of jazz greats. Among the many rising stars featured include an interview with Welsh-Barbadian singer-songwriter Kizzy Crawford.

The 27-year-old says Welsh, her first tongue, is a “poetic and emotionally expressive language” and that singing in it is closer to her heart and musical soul.

Then there’s saxophonist Xhosa Cole, winner of the BBC’s Young Jazz Musician of the year in 2018, whom Searle interviews after witnessing him play a particularly memorable gig at Dalston’s Vortex in East London, where he displayed “the swinging verve of his horn” and his “powerful urge to improvise.”

Tuba virtuoso Theon Cross, of modern jazz supergroup Sons Of Kemet, also opens up to Searle about how the tuba connects with people in ways other bass instruments don’t.

As if to concur, Searle recalls how his tuba “flies and throbs with huge and rampant rhythms” when he saw the group live.

Mary Halvorson, avant-garde composer and guitarist, who never ceases to amaze with each release, also speaks candidly about working with the great Robert Wyatt on her Code Girl record Artlessly Failing.

A double CD accompaniment includes a breathtaking Trevor Watts performance at a Rock Against Racism Festival in Hastings in 1980 and two tracks from the Bruce Turner Quartet's show in London in the same year for Jazz Against Racism, believed to be the only one, which Searle helped organise.

Long live Searle's jazz column — a masterclass in creative writing.