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Buy individual tracks from the album Flamingo

Up until his untimely passing in late 2008 the late, great British saxophonist Pat Crumly had been playing regularly at the 606. On Flamingo, his second Spotlite CD release, Crumly offers the listener considerable variety, with three tunes featuring the additional horns of Guy Barker (trumpet) and Richard Edwards (Trombone), including the title-track arranged by Charlie Mingus. The enjoyable and technically impressive playing – which bears traces of Adderley and Pepper, alongside more recent touches – exhibits a real feel for the modern mainstream.

"Whenever Crumly played at the Ronnie Scott Club, Scott would join the audience to listen, absorbed"

Steve Voce - The Independent

As part of the original Spotlite Jazz CD release jazz critic Dave Gelly wrote an in-depth article on Crumly and this album, Flamingo. Rather than create an imitation you can read the original article below...

Flamingo

I have been trying to fix the moment when British musicians began speaking jazz, not as brilliant linguists but as native speakers. I think I first noticed it in the late 70’s, listening to the National Youth Jazz Orchestra (NYJO), which at the time happened to contain an absurdly young Guy Barker in its trumpet section. It occurred to me then that people of his generation, born in the late 1950s, had been brought up from their earliest years to the sound of black American music and that this must affect their musical thought at the most basic level.

But it soon became obvious that this could not be the whole story, because everybody, regardless of age, seemed to have gained a new confidence and ease with the idiom. It was simply no longer necessary to make allowances for Britishness. I still don’t know how the change came about, but I do know that a record like this could not have been made before it happened.

The neatest description I can think of for the music on this CD is modern mainstream. It is thoroughly contemporary – yet everything about its form would have been familiar to jazz listeners before 1960: horns with rhythm section playing a mixture of standards, blues and originals; straight time with occasional Latin touches; arranged themes and improvised solos. It is the perfect form for jazz because it provides a framework and leaves everything else up to the musicians.

Listen for instance to The Days Of Wine And Roses – a tune you might think had been worn threadbare with overuse by now. Pat Crumly’s ripe-sounding alto weaves a wonderfully tortuous path through Mancini’s sturdy harmonic sequence, neither dwelling on the obvious, nor getting the listener hopelessly lost in the process of following him. He still thinks of alto as his main instrument, simply because it was his first, but he sounds equally as distinctive on soprano and tenor saxophone and also flute, the fourth instrument he plays on this album.

Crumly is a fiery player, with a forceful, biting sound and remarkable fluency of technique and ideas. For a taste of his spontaneity try the first few choruses of Three Little Words – this time on tenor, which he takes at a formidable pace, yet paradoxically contrives never to sound hurried. The rhythm section too displays this same attractive light airy life. This quality has caused more than just one visiting musician to these shores to remark on the calibre of such players as John Pearce, Simon Woolf, Alec Dankworth and Simon Morton.

For a sample of Crumly the soprano saxophonist turn to the ballad My Old Flame. The soprano has become unfortunately typecast latterly because of its popularity among fusion players as just the thing for banshee wailing effects. I am sure this was not John Coltrane’s intention when he rescued the soprano from the junk shop of history back in the late fifties and here Pat brings out the instrument’s delicacy and warmth treating it, as did Zoot Sims, like a kind of miniature tenor – which in a way it is. 

The final instrument in this array is the flute, which has become almost de rigueur as a ‘double’ for saxophonists nowadays, as was the clarinet during the 1930s and 40s. His flute performance on It Might As Well Be Spring could hardly be described as a makeweight with its full, secure tone, and rippling flow of notes. 

The title piece Flamingo takes as its starting point an arrangement by Charles Mingus from his 1957 album Tijuana Moods. By a happy accident Pat Crumly watched a television documentary about Flamingos, was reminded of the Mingus arrangement, and after digging out his old copy of the album began getting the seeds of an idea for his second Spotlite CD release…

“I received the 12” LP as a gift when it was first issued and after watching a wildlife documentary on BBC TV had the happy experience to rediscover it and was reminded that my favourite track on the album was Mingus’ charming arrangement for the old romantic song Flamingo – so we stole it for this CD! I was searching for a theme for my next album and after having watched the stunning documentary March Of The Flame Birds had my mind made up. The end result is, I think, a pleasing update of the Mingus chart and a batch of appropriate titles relating to the flamingo and its amazing powers of endurance… a bit like that old album! I got John Pearce to transcribe the arrangement, brought Guy Barker and Richard Edwards in on the frontline and along with Bosco Deoliveira to play percussion think we get pretty close to the original.” 

Guy Barker is a trumpeter of international repute; his own Spotlite album Isn’t It (CD545), voted by many their album of the year. Appearing in a supporting role here, he demonstrates once again his extraordinary knack of being able to fit into any context yet sound like nobody but himself.

Richard Edwards, who can also be heard on Pat Crumly’s first Spotlite album, Behind The Mask (CD549), as well as Don Rendell’s If I Should Lose You (CD546), is one of that disconcerting new generation of players who seem able to move between jazz and classical music. But you would never guess from his warm tone and relaxed phrasing here that he had another musical life at all.

With Flamingo acting as the centre piece Crumly explains that;

“We put other titles around it, three more with the Mingus line-up and eleven with the quartet. I wrote three of the numbers – Eucalypso, Slow Burn and Flamebirds – and the others are a mix of standards and pieces by other writers. I suppose my playing nowadays is a mixture of my earlier influences, like Phil Woods and Cannonball – who incidentally recorded Flamingo on one of his first record dates – along with the newer ones like Sanborn and Brecker. 

It includes listening to everything, taking it all in, not shutting out new musical experiences. It’s the only way to grow.”

Dave Gelly