Andrew McCormack
First Light
(Review: Tom Mooney)
There is something of the night about First Light, the debut solo release by English pianist Andrew McCormack since he quit Old Blighty for New York.
By that I mean there is an intimate, club-like tone to the quite outstanding nine tracks, all composed by McCormack, with the notable exception of Pannonica, which both closes the CD and points the way ahead.
It is said that McCormack has a quintessentially British emotive aesthetic and that his move to New York would result in a greater depth to his swing, interplay and mesmeric live sound.
If so, the transformation has been stunningly rapid.
McCormack eschews the temptation to showboat on what is his first solo venture, but the aura of polished maturity is a natural inheritance of a driving force in groups fronted by Kyle Eastwood and Jean Toussant.
He has had, for one in his thirties, a lifetime’s experience gigging with the best, and as such you can expect a relatively leisurely but confident swagger to his pianism. In other words, this is not frenetic jazz, with a serrated edge to the rhythm. On First Light, McCormack throughout is a cool customer, ice unmolested by a rise in temperature.
What I like about the final track, Pannonica, is McCormack’s inclination not to mimic the idiosyncrasies of Monk, and instead display the breadth of freshness he can summon to a legendary classic, without entirely neglecting the tonal and modal influence of Monk.
There is too the small matter of the inspiration behind the Monk composition: Pannonica de Koenigswarter, like McCormack, left her native England for New York in search of pastures new, and discovered jazz.
Her book, later in her long life, Three Wishes: an Intimate Look at Jazz Greats, is a must for anyone curious about the club scene in New York at a time when Pannonica was a patron to many musicians, including Charlie Parker, Miles Davis and, of course, Thelonious Monk.
First Light is a melting pot of various confluences – the composer’s background, the urban vibe of New York, the wizardry of fellow musicians, bassist Zack Lober and drummer Colin Stranahan, but is never less than fresh.
McCormack can unfurl contrapuntal lines with clarity, but they are never forced, and Lober and Stranahan dovetail to his various pianistic colours.
The longest track, and my favourite, Gotham Soul, is almost eight minutes of this trio at its zenith, where the distinctive sound and urban soul of First Light, is realised in the effortless dynamics between drum, bass and piano.
Greatness in a CD must join up the musical miniatures of a band and although McCormack’s piano is to the forefront in etching out each note, all three have their part in creating a mood that is exclusive to First Light, which is unlikely to ever gather dust.
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Kolyma Diaries
Jacek Hugo-Bader
Piotr Semyonovich Naumov was a 40-year-old bed ridden invalid and semi blind father of six living on a pension of £160 a month in a one room flat in Yakutia near the desolate and infamous Kolyma Highway in Russia, when his wife suddenly died.
He coped with his grief and general bad luck by running. That was twenty years ago. When Jacek Hugo-Bader, a travel journalist and writer who prefers to get about on foot and bike like Dervla Murphy and who was hitch hiking along the Kolyma Highway, caught up with him, Naumov had just completed a 58 kilometres per day run from Kaliningrad to Vladivostol, 12,000 kilometres away, which took him 206 days.
Naumov is just one of hundreds of eccentric characters Hugo-Bader encounters during his epic trek across the most inhospitable terrain on the planet, notorious because the Kolyma Highway was constructed by victims of Stalin’s purges from the 1930’s. One chapter, superbly written (translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones), concerns itself with the fate of Natalia Nikolayevna, adopted daughter of one of Stalin’s most ruthless stooges and henchmen, Nikolai Ivanovich, the Robespierre of the Russian revolution, who with blood curdling diligence, had thousands executed on the merest of paranoid pretexts, until the monster he unleashed devoured him.
Many of his victims, if they weren’t shot, tortured or strangled, sometimes by himself, even though he was five foot nothing, ended up in the Gulag system, north of the Sea of Okhotsk, digging for gold for the State, or excavating the Kolyma Highway, until they died and were covered by the lengthening road, as if under lava.
Hugo-Bader calculates that if all the victims of Stalin’s camps in furthermost Siberia were laid head to foot along the road, they wouldn’t all fit in: it is believed that two million prisoners were sent to Kolyma, whether they either died from slave labour, or went mad.
If there is such as place as purgatory on the planet, life along the Kolyma Highway might just be it. There are stories of man eating bears and bear eating dogs and so many salmon in a river you could walk across their backs to the far side, and then there are the locals: prospectors, hunters, dreamers, ex-KGB agents, hucksters, politicians and drunks.
Hugo-Bader recalls a marathon card game of blatnik between two friends which lasted, non stop, for eighteen hours, fueled by endless supplies of caviar and vodka. He spots, in the distance, billowing smoke: the only ecological method to dig fresh graves in the permafrost is to thaw the ground by burning old tyres.
Kolyma Diaries is unsparing with facts and unflinching with specifics: during the Stalin period, over 55 out of every 100 children born in the USSR died; 200,000 prisoners died from hunger or the cold; prisoners slaved away outside until the temperature reached minus 55 degrees centigrade.
Hugo-Bader, always curious if not always sympathetic about the Russians he encounters, translates vykluchilo mnye: it means ‘to wander off.’ Young Russian men here seem to do often, even when driving. Sometimes fatigue is blamed, sometimes vodka. It is consumed a lot in this book, particularly in winter, by everyone, even the cats and the dogs.
The author himself hits the nail on the head: Kolyma is place of beauty without spirit, inhospitable and yet a home for survivors.
