www.606shop.co.uk

Buy individual tracks from the album Behind The Mask

Up until his untimely passing in late 2008 the late, great British saxophonist Pat Crumly had been playing regularly at the 606. This album from 1992, recorded at The 606 Club, is an enticing mix of re-worked standards and Crumly’s own compositions. The quote below, from British jazz legend Ronnie Scott, should cement in your mind what a powerful jazz figure Crumly was:

“Pat Crumly is one of the saxophone players in this country that I most admire. He plays tenor, alto and soprano equally well and he is an impressive flautist and no mean composer. He seems at home in any context – I’ve heard him play rock music as well as standard tunes and ballads with emotion and feeling. He plays melodically without any of the flavour-of-the-month pseudo hip noises and pyrotechnics that pass for music too often these days. He is a jazz musician.” 

As part of the original Spotlite Jazz CD release the drama lecturer and jazz enthusiast Kevin O’Malley wrote an in-depth article on Crumly and this album, Behind The Mask. Rather than create an imitation you can read the original article below...

Behind The Mask

Considering that jazz is barely a century old, it’s thrown up its fair share of luminaries and loonies in its short history.

Dizzy Gillespie is one such – or both such, according to the viewpoint. Leaving aside for the moment his celebrated clowning, Dizzy is a jazz performer-cum-critic whose pronouncements have often been as trenchant as his performances.

So while settling down with Pat Crumly’s intriguing Behind The Mask, bear in mind one of Dizzy’s early prophecies: like the benediction before the Last Supper, you never know what you are about to receive.

John Philip Sousa once scoffed: “people hear jazz through their feet, not their brains”. But Dizzy disagreed. “For such people music was not to study, to listen to and enjoy purely for its listening kicks. A great mass of people still consider jazz as lowbrow music”. As one of the foremost jazz ambassadors of the second half of our century, Dizzy accordingly draws his own, Splendidly audacious, conclusion: “A great number of intellectuals – particularly younger intellectuals – recognise jazz as art. And I’m told that the number is increasing all the time”.

Enter one Pat Crumly, the maitre d’ of this debate brought into telescopic modern focus by this, his second, Spotlite release – and he’s not kidding about the album title either. How can you be a Dizzy disciple and yet satisfy the pedal extremities at the same time?

His academic credentials are impressive: early jammer on the university scene, tours and gigs with Jack Jones, Cleo Laine, Ronnie Scott and Jimmy Witherspoon – and something of a jazz ambassador himself (USA, Japan, Cuba, The Middle East…) with teaching at the legendary Wavendon squeezed into an already tight itinerary.

But then with a dazzling change, Crumly the intellectual truns into Crumly the Stomper. The face this time is that of the R&B raver who has gustily on occasion thrown reeds into line-ups as diverse as Alan Price and Lulu, Helen Reddy and Dudley Moore, The Drifters and – would you believe – the World Reunion Tour by The Animals.

No wonder the guy wears a schizoid mask.   

His instrumental versatility is bewildering: all of the saxes, both of the clarinets and flute. And if he’s lurking behind some post-Freudian disguise, what’s he trying to hide? Well, you could always begin with that old black magic called emotion. In between the dual title themes the emotional appeals and accusations accumulate: You Don’t Know What Love Is – This Heart of Mine – Tears Inside, and the final anxiety of If I Should Lose You. You’ll discover for yourself that Crumly’s co-players refuse to be intimidated by his formidable powers of expressive invention and immediately be bowled over by the exhilaration of all involved. 

Swinging us through authoritative changes of tempo, they perform seamless arabesques between 4/4 – 6/8 – 3/4 and back again. Crumly’s first joyful accomplice in this salon of the soul being one Richard Edwards – it’s a wonder he had any tongue left after this scintillating opening scorcher. One instant delight is Simon Morton whose responsive drumming, as elsewhere – I’ll Remember April and Carib-Blue in particular – proudly follows in bop footsteps, punctuating the score – not just the beat.

With Voyage melodic self-discovery is energised by John Pearce’s left hand pinpointing the root notes of the enquiry, while his right hand joins Simon Woolf on bass in seeking the question-mark of the piece: entirely beautiful.

More thrills without frills in I’ll Remember April – Woolf and Pearce take turns in going quietly berserk on bass and piano, discreetly followed by the percussionist. For all of the players an April stroll means more sunshine than showers with every alto phrase as precise as a sentence from Cicero – and the memory of April dissolves into summer.

With You Don’t Know What Love Is – the eternal blueprint of the lover who has been betrayed – but here it’s with more sorrow than bitterness. John Pearce’s piano show us tentative glimpses of a major key – but the soaring soprano and growling bass draw us back into the whirlpool of the lover’s melancholy. A short-lived maudlin trip to his local oasis gives the tenor no time for self-pity (Island) but the melody lingers on – at which point in our drama you’d expect the mask to slip – but not so fast.

In place of naïve blubbering the suspense mechanism becomes even more intriguing. Carib-Blue with its soothing Latin rhythm and deceptively simple flute melody seems all too good to be true. Pearce’s piano carves out minor-keyed danger signals while Morton taps out a Morse code urgency across the Caribbean – but on Atlantic wavelengths – while a cantabile flute worthy of Mozartian improvisation floats above it all.

Crumly’s alto, in empathy with John Pearce is at its unsentimental best as Pat the traveller moves us with the skill of an Olympic gymnast into This Heart Of Mine. The sheer ease of his melodic combinations reminds you of a visual, not musical image. These are impeccable floor exercises in which every gesture is part of an integrated whole. But for real emotional cool, hand about for Ornette Coleman’s composition Tears Inside.

Miles Davis, Dizzy’s fellow-seer once observed simply: “Ornette doesn’t play clichés”. Likewise you’ll hear no platitudes here. The inventiveness is always attached to excitement – if the mask is worn predominantly for a lover, then it slips as tantalisingly as a negligee in a boudoir.

A Little Offbeat is exactly what it says. Phil Lee produces rousing crescendos of anticipation, but our band of five keep their bond like a crooked line trying to go straight, and as Miles once elaborated “It’s like Sugar Ray Robinson bringing dignity to boxing by fighting in a tuxedo.”

Of Czech origin, the polka was originally a lively dance in duple time. But there are more moonbeams than a repetitive series of dots in the quartet’s rendering of Polka Dots And Moonbeams. Crumly’s languorous melodic control on alto is echoed by measured, luxuriant stargazing from John Pearce and should be listened to in awed silence to be believed. It’s a natural link into Contemplation – an introspective number with a momentary return to the 3/4 pastoral wistfulness – the mask slips just a little more: the honoured gap between the private person and the public persona is at its most poignant here.

If I Should Lose You should in principal have been the final emotional fear but our expectations are sidetracked. Simon Woolf’s up-tempo 999 call summons intricate curling figures from a responsive alto and an extrovert piano – closing down before the out with spirited exchanges from Simon, Pat and John.

The exit version of our quest drops the pastoral altogether: the drummer on sticks, the piano on ivories, the sun-burst guitar and bed-rock bass assisting the Jahbero-like flute of our modern Ulysses to weave us through the final stage of their Odyssey.

The stomper, just as the intellectual, needs to get away from behind the mask.

Our cognoscenti of the Last Supper has only ushered us to a glimpse behind the mask: from love to loss, from togetherness to loneliness; leaving us yet again to find ourselves full frontal with albeit a few shared glimpses of self-discovery.

We have been given a rare insight into the workings of creative imagination and, if you examine the mask closely, you’ll maybe see foot tapper supreme – John Philip Sousa – on the front row, his eyes twinkling away and his feet tapping in exact harmony and counterpoint with his brains.