The Stan Tracey Quartet – Jazz Suite (Inspired By Dylan Thomas's Under Milk Wood)

I bought this record a few years ago, aware of its reputation as a landmark recording in British jazz from 1965. This left me scratching my head, as what I heard on first listen was what I think of as snoozy Coronation Street theme music, apart from the Starless & Bible Black track, which does conjure up a spooky, gloomy night (in the 1971 movie adaptation, it was a bright, full-moon night - hardly starless - duh). It took me a while to work out where this music was coming from. Reading the rear sleeve notes helped quite a bit in that respect.

The original cover photograph and title theme made me think of a kind of jazz-folk hybrid, although I'm not aware of any such genre existing, more's the pity - where's my my jazz-folk music? To me, UK jazz of the 1960s, outside of the old, trad, rehashed stuff from the 1950s and earlier, is bold, Big City music - inventive, spontaneous, cutting edge, totally urban, challenging (as typified by the Spontaneous Music Ensemble's Challenge LP - on which Jeff Clyne plays, also).

So I looked on Youtube and found they have the radio broadcast of Dylan Thomas' play up there - the 1964 version, narrated by Sir Richard Burton - that presumably was the inspiration to Stan Tracey to compose the music heard here. There's also the 1971 movie, also with Burton, and a whole host of British screen regulars, so I decided to watch the movie rather than listen to the radio broadcast, which I wouldn't have had the patience to sit through.

Wasn't impressed with the movie - endless verbosity from a bunch of post-WW2 local yokels in Welsh seaside village and their mundane daily goings-on. Like watching Wicker Man with none of the horror or the psycho pagan trickster figures out to murder the innocent Sgt. Howie - just a bunch of mostly drunk, harmless, rural eccentrics. Young people living in the provinces in Britain want nothing more to escape the boredom of the countryside, and to move away to the excitement, adventure, and better-paying work to be found in the Big City. Watching this movie brought back to me why they do so.

In the first half of the 1960s, in the UK, there were a number of Jazz-Poetry hybrid records - Annie Ross, Cleo Lane, Belle Gonzalez, several double LPs, maybe best exemplified by the Blues For The Hitch-hiking Dead LP put out by Gearbox a few years ago. The music typically is there to back the vocals. What Jazz Suite does nicely is do away with the (sometimes irritating) vocals and present a kind of provincial mood music of quaint, old, rural, Britain - nothing more, nothing less. This record is not trying to be daring, cutting edge, adventurous. If you can accept it on those , it's a fine listen. I like it as background music for reading. Just don't expect it to wow you, outside of the Starless & Bible Black track, or blow your socks off.

If you do want the complete antidote/antithesis to the mood, quaintness, and verbosity of Under Milk Wood, try watching the Pasolini movie - Teorama, from 1968 (also up on YouTube) - about a listless, wealthy, bourgeois family in Northern Italy who come to various sticky ends. Fewer than 1000 words of dialogue in the whole movie, interesting music score, and much more of an intellectually-satisfying, audio-visual journey than the yawn-inducing goings on in Under Milk Wood. The spirit of Teorama is totally in keeping with that of cutting-edge, revolutionary modern jazz from that time. The only roughly comparable British film of that time I know of is Lindsay Anderson's If...

So, Jazz Suite does effectively capture a mood, time, and place in UK jazz, set to music with no words - thankfully - and unusually, applied to a rural, provincial subject. Personally, I would like to hear a genre called UK jazz-folk - perhaps this landmark record could inspire more along those lines? Ian Carr did Old Heartland, there were brass instruments and colliery bands (Brassed Off movie), but something more musically satisfying needed than old marching tunes and the like. Perhaps rural music is best left to the folkies and guitar-strumming songwriters, maybe with some quaint wind instruments (Third Ear Band - kinda jazzy)?