Michael Garrick Trio & Sextet - Farnborough Technical College 1965 (February 2022 British Progressive Jazz)

Recorded live at Farnborough Technical College on 23rd October 1965.

From the private collection of Roger Palmer. Previously unheard. Monophonic sound.

'I was an apprentice at RAE Farnborough from 1962-7 and discovered all the things I really wanted to do - music (I'd started playing bass), photography, archaeology - and one of the things that helped the music side were the weekly gigs that Michael organised at The Highwayman where I and a couple of other jazz lovers were regulars. I'd give a lot to be able to revisit those gigs - Michael's trio, trio plus guest (including Joe several times and sometimes with Shake, Ronnie Ross, Don Lamont, etc), Tubby, the early years of Rendell-Carr quintet (or not so early if Michael was on piano). The New Jazz Orchestra squeezed in a few times with some huge sounds and there were other treats, Dudley Moore trio, Johnny Scott quartet, and many I will have forgotten...

An offshoot of my music interest was that I and another apprentice, Derek Wickham, formed a 'music society' at the tech which enabled us to buy the Ferrograph that was used to record Michael's concert and rent records that we could play to members of the society. I did the jazz, Derek did classical - alternate weeks. Derek was also one of the Highwayman crowd and I guess that we hatched up the idea of the concert and asked Michael for a price.

I remember driving to Michael's house late in the morning and everyone was crowded into a room in his house rehearsing. Michael had agreed that we could record it - all from a single mic if I remember correctly... The hall would have been just that - a basic college hall in the 1960s with a stage and not much else. It certainly was not good enough for the annual review that we apprentices put on and used a 'theatre' known as the 'RAE Assembly Hall' (or 'rooms') which even had a couple of lights. I was in the wings on the same side as Coleridge (Goode) where I guess we had the tape recorder too... To an extent, these were musicians we knew slightly from the Highwayman, but I had the opportunity to chat a little with Coleridge...'

Roger Palmer - February 2022 

1. Leprechaun Leap 09:57

2. Promises 06:52

3. Song By The Sea 05:14

4. Parting Is Such 06:50 video

5. Childe Rolande 06:21

6. Requiem 05:07

7. Portrait Of A Young Lady 14:21

8. I Got Rhythm 04:46

9. Webster's Mood 14:15

10. Second Coming 09:25

Michael Garrick - piano

Joe Harriott - alto sax

Tony Coe - tenor sax

Ian Carr - trumpet

Coleridge Goode - bass

Colin Barnes - drums

All tracks composed by Michael Garrick ℗ 1965 except:

8 Gershwin/Gershwin ℗ 1930

Original recording - Roger Palmer

Consultation - Gabriel Garrick

Restored and produced by Matt Parker for British Progressive Jazz

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Don Rendell Ian Carr Quintet - Blue Beginnings (April 1, 2021 Jazz In Britain)

Subversion Through Jazz examines the beginning of the British progressive jazz (BPJ) movement from 1956 to 1964, attempting to identify and plot the progress of its coming into being. This eight-year period of inception was set against the backdrop of two specifically relevant world events: the failed Hungarian revolution in 1956; and the Cuban Missile Crisis, a potentially apocalyptic nuclear standoff between the United States and the USSR in the Gulf of Mexico in 1962. Like many art forms in the UK, British jazz underwent a paradigm shift during this period, transforming from imitator to innovator. A new generation of post-war musicians - spearheaded by the West Indian alto-saxophonist Joe Harriott - discovered their own sound, no longer aping American Jazz traditions but instead seeking out their own methods of expression within improvisation, embracing hugely diverse influences such as Blues, Indian music, twentieth-century Classical music, Rock’n’roll, African music, classic and contemporary poetry and literature, Caribbean music, Folk, R&B, and Soul, forging them into a uniquely British identity which would in turn influence musicians across the globe.

The obsession with British art and culture which was all-pervasive in the pop and rock music of the UK from 1965 onwards had its roots in BPJ. The musicians involved in the movement were the first post-war contemporary jazz players outside the U.S. to meld an artistic nationalism to their music, introducing non-musical influences from the worlds of British and European art and literature, left-wing politics and musical influences from outside the sphere of jazz, such as the abstract classical compositions of Cornelius Cardew and Anton Webern, brass bands, and the music-hall traditions of Victorian and Edwardian Britain.

The location of most of these artistic developments – an area of roughly four square miles in and around Soho, London - was simultaneously the covert battleground of the British Secret Service department MI5 and their adversaries the Soviet Russian KGB, an old empire pitted against a new one, and at least one significant Communist of concern to MI5, the Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm, took a very serious interest in the British jazz scene at this time. Inspired by his cousin, the British jazz record producer and label-owner Denis Preston, and the Italian Communist intellectual Antonio Gramsci, Hobsbawm embedded himself in the movement, authoring a study of it in 1959 entitled The Jazz Scene, for which he adopted, as jazz writer for the New Statesman magazine, the pseudonym Francis Newton, an alias he had been developing for three years prior, unbeknownst to the British agents who were surveilling him.

1. Blue Doom

2. Autumn Leaves

3. Garrison '64

4. Shades Of Blue

5. Sailin'

6. Latin Blue

7. You'll Never Know

8. Big City Strut

Previously unreleased.

Live in London.

1-4, 6, 8: Recorded 16th November 1964. From the Neil Ardley tape archive.

5, 7: Recorded 4th April 1964. From the Dave Green tape archive.

Don Rendell – soprano, tenor saxophone

Ian Carr – trumpet, flugelhorn

Colin Purbrook – piano

Dave Green – bass

Trevor Tomkins – drums

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