When the riotously innovative Loose Tubes big band sprang to life out of a Greenwich workshop run by the late composer Graham Collier in the early 1980s, its founding generation of twenty-something participants included a thoughtfully lyrical and Wayne Shorter-esque saxophonist from Hampshire called Mark Lockheart.
Loose Tubes took off, went on to play the Proms, tour widely, release four acclaimed albums, and spawn several creative offshoots in its brief but incandescent life between 1984 and 1990.
Fourteen years later, the band had a successor for its stature as a symbol of a British jazz renaissance through the 1990s and into the 21st century. In 2004, an equally inventive UK quartet called Polar Bear began to make a genre-crossing, audience-building impact rare for jazz, but comparable to what the Tubes had achieved before them – collecting nominations for Mercury prizes and MOBO awards, for a quirkily chamber-musical mix of free-jazz, singable folk and pop-influenced themes.
One half of that group’s powerful two-sax front line, shared with the soul-funky tenorist Pete Wareham, was Mark Lockheart.
This often under-the-radar original has always seemed to sense what the apposite sound and phrasing should be whatever the context, and his balance of audacity, accessibility, and an immensely sophisticated general musical awareness brought him a raft of playing opportunities between the Loose Tubes and Polar Bear years, and ever since in his consistently inquisitive musical life. Lockheart counts Duke Ellington, Gil Evans, Nelson Riddle and Burt Bacharach as influences on him, alongside his Loose Tubes and Polar Bear alumni, and folk and classical music, Latin jazz, free-improv and much more are constantly in motion in his head. He has played for Radiohead, composed for classical orchestras and for Germany’s famous NDR Big Band, and led characterful groups of his own including the jazz/folk band Perfect Houseplants and the sax/piano/bass trio Malija, with pianist Liam Noble and bassist Jasper Høiby.
This month sees a personal venture Lockheart hasn’t tried before – a chordless, freely-roaming trio session with adventurous Welsh double bassist and composer Huw V Williams, and Williams’ frequent and likeminded percussion partner Jay Davis. Entitled ‘Shapeshifter’ (for reasons that become apparent to listeners as this fluid and organic music unfolds), it’s a compellingly varied 11-track set joining rhythmically ingenious minimalism, funky hooks, dreamy ambient sounds over arco bass drones, three freely-improvised pieces, and much more.
When we get to talk about it, I start from a premise that I should perhaps have sidestepped in the light of all the ways this gifted artist’s imagination clearly works. Did he have a repertoire of new tunes for this instrumentation before he found the musicians to play it?
Well, he’s Mark Lockheart and he’s a contemporary jazz musician. So of course not. He takes up the story.
‘I’d played with Huw V Williams a couple of times before, but I didn’t know him well,’ Lockheart says. ‘But then a couple of years ago he phoned me up and asked if I fancied having a play at his place. He has a studio set-up in his garden, so that’s where we did it. I went over, and it turned out he’d also invited Jay Davis, a drummer he’s played with a lot.
‘So we just got started, and it turned out to be one of those lovely things where there’s a chemistry there from the beginning, it was immediately nice and easy. We just played standards, but we improvised quite a lot as well. Then we did a couple of gigs, just kind of low-key things. And then I thought, well, this would be really nice to record. I’d never done anything quite like it before.’
It was interesting to hear Lockheart observing that this chance encounter, after what was already a four-decade career shared with some of the most creative musicians on the European jazz scene, felt so different to him. I suggested to him that perhaps, across so many varied playing experiences in so many settings, a rich subconscious vocabulary of resources accumulates that grows progressively more natural and spontaneous to deploy. Maybe formal structures become less necessary to players who know this much about how melodies, grooves, and changing harmonies can be dissected and reassembled on the fly?
‘I think that does happen over time,’ Lockheart says. ‘The past few years, I’ve certainly felt I’ve been going toward a slightly different area, with a bit more harmonic space than I had before. So this trio fed into that idea – the freedom to do something, you know, without chords getting in the way. I find I don’t need harmony so much now. I can kind of imply it myself and hear it myself.
‘I used to be very into Gerry Mulligan you know, those records he made without keyboards, like that fantastic late-‘50s band he had with Art Farmer on trumpet. And he would do such lovely voice-leading, playing lines that said everything he needed to hear about the harmony, just implying it. And of course Sonny Rollins did that with ‘Way Out West’ and some of the trio records from that time. So I think those things have always been in my head whenever I play in a trio set up like this – whether it’s just a straight-ahead thing or something looser, it’s always in my head that you can imply the harmony just with a couple of notes, that’s all you need’.
We consider these thoughts in relation to repertoire on ‘Shapeshifter’, and the ways that undercurrents change in this music as if they were eddies in water. The title track and opener swells out of a fragment of material, a looping 12-note sequence that keeps modulating and changing its resolving figures, while the bass and drums are closely entwined in spontaneously shifting rhythms and tonal hues. ‘Come On Over’ is a catchy hook on a tight groove, while ‘A Good Place’ opens on an arco-bass hum and a kaleidoscope of changing horn harmonies and echoes. The latter emerged from a completely improvised opening mood, as did the slow soprano-sax feature ‘Mustering’, and the same horn’s brittle, ducking-and-diving ‘Tangs’.
‘That title track started as just a motific thing I was practising on the sax,’ Lockheart recalls. ’Just a shape. And then it kind of moves around, slightly changing, a bit like the way minimalism works. I’ve always loved Philip Glass and John Adams, and I guess there are some connections to that music in it. ‘Come On Over’ is almost poppy I guess, and it was the first single we released. It ended up with a really locked-in groove, but it wasn’t quite working when we were rehearsing it, and then I think Jay said “do you know the groove on ‘Working Down The Coal Mine?’ It was an Allen Toussaint song that Lee Dorsey had a hit with in the ‘60s, and we listened to it and that became the groove. But some of the titles just come by chance. I was walking down a street when I thought of the melody for the track ‘Leeds Place’, but I only called it that because when I put it in my phone, it told me that was the name of the street I was in!’
It feels almost inevitable that we should return to Mark Lockheart’s most personal and substantial musical influences – out of many in this open-minded artist’s life – before we part.
‘Well, of course Django (Bates) and Loose Tubes were massive influences on me,’ Lockheart says. ‘I never wrote for Tubes, I was a bit too intimidated because there were so many great composers in that band. But it helped me on my way with all the ideas that were circulating in it, and I learned so much from Django that influenced the way I wrote for Perfect Houseplants later. And then came Polar Bear and Seb Rochford, which was another kind of learning experience – working in a band that was so into space and pacing, and all the things that no-one can really teach you, you know. It’s amazing to feel I’ve been part of two such incredible things.
‘How I got into Polar Bear in the first place is a story in itself,’ Lockheart chuckles as we move to a close. ‘I did a gig at the 606 Club one night, I was living in Tunbridge Wells at the time. Next morning I got a call, and it was Seb. He said, “I’m Seb Rochford” and I said, “oh, we haven’t met, have we?”. He said, “no, but I was at your gig last night at the 606”. I said to him, “why didn’t you say hello?” He said, “oh, I don’t know, you looked as if you were busy.” And then he said “would you like to be in my band?” I didn’t know who he was back then, so I said, “can you send me a CD?”
‘So he sent me a recording of the first version of Polar Bear, and as soon as I played it I realised it was fantastic and I called him back straight away. And that was it. It brought me an amazing second career, and I learned a great deal about subtlety. I hope some of that comes through on “Shapeshifter”, and I really hope it might be the first record of a few from us, with all three of us writing. The lovely thing for me is we all do write for it, and I think it’s got the potential to grow that way, as a lasting collaborative thing. I don’t want Shapeshifter to disappear as just another band name, you know.’
TRIO
Mark Lockheart – saxes, bass clarinet and electronics
Huw V Williams – bass
Jay Davis – drums and percussion
HEAR SHAPESHIFTER LIVE
13 March – Vortex, London (album launch/ two shows)
14 March – The Hive , Shrewsbury
20 March – 1000 Trades, Birmingham
21 March – Listen, Cambridge
14 May – The Marr’s Bar, Pierpoint Street, Worcester