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Gary Husband’s Force Majeure: Live at the Queen Elizabeth Hall, London RSJ Groove Productions – RSJFM007DVDGary Husband is one of the most versatile musicians working in Britain today, playing piano, keyboards and drums at the very highest level across every style thinkable for the last 30 years. He began at 16 on drums with the Syd Lawrence Orchestra, before beginning a long association with pioneering jazz-rock guitarist Allan Holdsworth, working with Jack Bruce, Gordon Beck, Gil Evans, Ray Russell, Mo Foster, Jim Mullen and Billy Cobham both on piano and drums, as well as leading his own trio. His roots are in jazz (his father was NDO flautist Peter Husband), but he has also made considerable inroads into the pop world, working with Level 42 on and off since 1988. This 2-disc set captures a March 2004 show by his new band, Force Majeure, in which Husband himself alternates between piano and drums. Of the lead players, trumpeter Randy Brecker has a pedigree going back to the Mel Lewis-Thad Jones Jazz Orchestra back in the 1960s, while violinist Jerry Goodman was a mainstay of John McLaughlin’s Mahavishnu Orchestra. The only relative unknown on the frontline is British trombonist/bass trumpeter Elliot Mason, described at one point by Husband as “a trombone-playing Kenny Wheeler”. It’s a good description and much more will be heard of Mason ere long. Supplying electrified keyboard sounds is American Jim Beard, along with his long-standing collaborators Matthew Garrison on bass and impish percussionist Arto Tuncboyaciyan, who supplements his conventional armoury with various home-made fancies. It’s official, you can lay down a groove with an enamel saucepan part-filled with water. Disc 1 contains the first half of the concert, which comprises Husband’s Evocations suite, each movement inspired by a musician admired by Husband – first, Burt Bacharach, then the Icelandic singer Bjork, concluding with John McLaughlin. The Evocations are not in the style of their inspirations, though. They are very much Husband’s take on each figure. The suite was commissioned by Arts Council England’s Contemporary Music Network. In some professional circles, the phrase ‘Arts Council music’ is used in a pejorative sense, to denote unlistenable tosh that would not exist without Government largesse. That is emphatically not the case here. This is challenging, exploratory music, but it never meanders meaninglessly. Just when you wonder where it’s all going, it goes somewhere else unexpectedly. Ethereal sparse textures are followed by dense, thunderous grooves and vice versa, to great effect. The second half of the concert features his Radio 3-commissioned Stone Souls suite, again evocations, but this time of architecture rather than people. The stand-out movements for me were the swaggering, filmic Final Curtain, inspired by a derelict theatre; and Grand Old Lady of the Sea, a solo piano piece evoking the once-beautiful West Pier in Brighton. As an encore, Husband tips the hat to Stan Kenton – an early hero – by calling Hank Levy’s Chiapas, which features some superb trombone work from Mason. Elsewhere on the discs are numerous extras, including interviews, rehearsal footage, and audio tracks from other nights on the tour, bringing the running time of the package to just under 4 hours. Husband writes well and it’s a great band, so there’s much for the open-minded to enjoy here. Forced to compare it with anything, the closest I can manage is Mahavishnu-meets-Joe Zawinul. That’s no disgrace, but there is a great deal of originality here too. The company behind the DVD, RSJ Groove Productions, may be small, but they seem to know what they’re doing. This is a full multi-camera recording, with, glory be, the cameras pointing at the right musicians at the right time. This might sound obvious, but when BBC Four relayed a Prom last year with Wynton Marsalis and the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra, every solo was accompanied by a shot of the next musician along twiddling his thumbs or a long-shot of the band from the rear. The sound here (Dolby 5.1 surround for those with the capability, stereo for the rest of us) is mostly exemplary, but the audience response seems slightly muffled. At £34.99, it is an expensive proposition compared to the heavily-discounted DVDs sold on the High Street. However, recording this show to such a high standard will not have come cheap, and the sales potential is limited. I don’t know if Husband has any plans to reconvene Force Majeure for another tour de force, but in the meantime, this is a worthy souvenir. Available from RSJ Groove Productions, PO Box 240, Ashford, Kent, TN27 9ZB (01233 840612 – or www.rsjgroove.co.uk) |
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