bodyType

customContents

entityId

entityUuid

articlePageQuery

filter

article

articleBaseAdvertisingInfoArticle

articleListArticle

articleSeoArticle

hooksArticleAcknowledgementGateOverlayArticle

hooksTrackPageViewArticle

hooksContentInterestArticle

articleLinkingDataContent

hooksAmpRedirectArticle

articleSchemaContent

liveArticle

advertZone

sentiment

contentLock

topics

types

sections

paywallTypes

createdDate

publishedDate

sponsorType

urlAlias

moreOnThisArticles

commentCount

authorLocations

authors

corrections

displaySlideShow

multimediaEmbed

printHeadline

seriesContainer

articleSpeeches

socialHeadline

headline

images

flag

firstTopic

glossary

flattenTypeIds

image

relatedLinks

relatedNewsletters

__typename

sponsor

pdfFiles

seriesReverseOrder

series

disableOffPlatformContent

published

updatedDate

summary

subHeadline

body

keywords

readingTime

customTimezone

liveContents

Robin Lynam

Trumpet players seem to have dominated my listening this past week. Two of them are sadly no longer with us, but I remember seeing both in concert here. The third is still in the land of the living and will play City Hall at the end of the month.

Let's start with the living. Chris Botti appears on October 30 in the last of the LCSD's current Jazz Up series of five concerts, which, while generally entertaining, has been fairly light on serious jazz content.

Manhattan Transfer perform jazz among a lot of other styles. Fourplay's jazz is of the smooth, easy listening variety, which generally pays its own way, and Chris Botti who considers himself a pop artist doesn't claim to play jazz at all.

'After I came to New York,'  says Botti on his website,  'I realised I didn't want to be a jazz musician. I love improvising, but you really need to live the bebop tradition in order to play it.'

What he liked about jazz was its 'atmospheric quality', citing Miles Davis playing ballads  such as Stella By Starlight and  My Funny Valentine.

'I've tried to marry that feel to the textures and melodies you might hear on a record by Peter Gabriel or Bryan Ferry,' he says.

Not quite what the LCSD is supposed to be presenting then, but having said that, what Botti does,  he does very well. His emergence as a solo artist is relatively recent, but he has been a well-respected sideman on stage and record for some years.

He toured for 15 months with Paul Simon in the 1990s and for two years with Sting in 2000  and 2001. Both are known to be  selective about whom they hire, and Sting has since made a number of guest appearances on Botti's solo CD and DVD projects.

His attempt to appeal to as wide a range of tastes as possible means that it's impossible for any one listener to like all the tracks, but Botti's playing is thoughtful, and appealing, in a  Davis-meets-Chet Baker sort of way.

For his Hong Kong performance, he won't have the guests or the orchestra, and is coming instead with a five piece group, including pianist and arranger Billy Childs, who does have serious jazz ability - he started out accompanying Freddie Hubbbard - so there may yet be a bit more substance to the evening than Botti's own assessment of his music and recent recording projects suggest. We'll have to wait and see. Either way, for the next Jazz Up series the populism needs to be a little less blatant.

Botti's version of My Funny Valentine sent me back to Davis',  but it's rare in any case for a week to go by without my playing at least one of his recordings.  You can't really be interested in jazz and not be constantly drawn back to him.

I'm not sure that People magazine would have considered  Davis beautiful, but I still remember 20 years ago when  he walked on to the stage at  the Queen Elizabeth Stadium here being struck by the most powerful stage presence I ever saw in my life. Not only was the audience in awe of him - the band actually looked scared.  No jazz musician  has been more extensively written about (and  an abundance of scholarly studies exists), but there's  also a prurient interest in his colourful private life, fuelled in part by Miles the Autobiography, published in 1989.

There is, it seems, more to come. Next month  will see the publication of Dark Magus by Gregory Davis. Clark Terry, a close friend and teacher  of Miles Davis, endorses the book, describing it as 'a brilliant and engaging revelation of  Davis' character, through the recollections of his oldest son'.

Let's hope so. Tell-all books by aggrieved children of the famous usually make depressing reading, but it's perhaps possible to forgive Gregory Davis for feeling that he has a score or two to settle with the old man.

In his own book, Miles Davis observed: 'Kids can be a big disappointment for their parents and I guess my two eldest sons are a big disappointment to me.' He had at least the grace to add, 'And maybe I was to them'. We'll now find out.

In conclusion: Maynard Ferguson. It's hard to imagine a more different exponent of the trumpet to Davis or Botti than the forceful Canadian who died on August 23 this year, and is being commemorated by a  series of memorial concerts.

Thinking back to Davis in 1986 and forward to Botti I found myself remembering Ferguson, also at City Hall. It's a few years ago now, but I do remember the astonishing energy of a trumpeter already well into his 70s blowing like a man half a century younger.

Richard Cook put it nicely: 'There are few sights more impressive in animal physiology than the muscles in Maynard Ferguson's upper thorax stretching for a top C. Unfortunately, on record there are no such distractions; putting a Ferguson disc on the turntable evokes sensations ranging from walking into a high wind to being run down by a truck'. He was absolutely right. Of course, we still have the records, but that's one of the things about jazz - nothing beats being there.



Blow me down: sound the trumpets, new and old