Good Days is the highly acclaimed ensemble, Beats & Pieces Big Band’s third studio album release. Out on Friday 27th January 2023 in CD and digital formats on the Efpi Records label.
“Heirs to the eclectic big-band traditions of Loose Tubes, they make their own sounds from many styles” – The Guardian
“A return to the idea that contemporary jazz for big band can still generate the kind of direct impact more associated with rock and pop music, but without undermining its essential craft and sophistication” – Jazzwise
“An irresistible energy, powered by Cottrell’s sly way of investing the familiar chords of jazz with a startling new energy… pleasingly ambiguous, hectic and calm at once” – The Telegraph
“Beats & Pieces has little to do with big band as we know it and rather offered up a madhouse of sharps, flats, and contusions… I couldn’t be happier” – Rochester City Newspaper
Think of big bands and you’re most likely to think of the halcyon days of mid-twentieth-century jazz and the likes of Duke Ellington and Count Basie. This would infer that big band music is an obsolete format, a relic rom decades of yore. Founded in 2008 and directed by conductor, composer, arranger, and producer Ben Cottrell, Beats & Pieces give the lie to that notion. With their latest album they show once again that big band music is a living, expressive thing, more than capable of continuing development in our own times. Put simply, there are things a big band say and do that cannot otherwise be said and done, and on Good Days,
Beats & Pieces say and do plenty, with exhilarating immaculacy and imagination. This ensemble swings, twenty-first century style. Good Days harks back to the great, soulful origins of big band music, ranging emotionally from the funereal to the exuberant, the ecclesiastical to the profane, the pacific to the chaotic. Fleetingly, you think of Charles Mingus, Keith Tippett, Gil Evans, Charlie Haden’s Liberation Music Orchestra… But there’s also a post-rock undertow to many of these tracks which shows a consciousness of such contemporaries as Björk, Radiohead, or Everything Everything.
Work on Good Days was initiated in Bern, where Cottrell was living (2018–2020) and recorded in Scotland in January 2020. Good days, indeed, in which, like the rest of us, the ensemble was still oblivious to the pandemic and the attendant, lengthy hiatus it engendered, an enforced break that was to prevent the group from gigging again until February 2023. Cottrell broke with his usual working method of bringing pretty much fully formed compositions to the band, opting instead to workshop these pieces over a period of months if not years, lending a more communal, ensemble feel to the writing that reflects the conviviality of the sessions. There’s a real feeling that “soul” need not merely be a cathartic, solo, performative experience, but something that can be achieved collectively.
Good Days swings, not least in its musical range, switching and melding styles and moods in a trice. Opener ‘wait’ features the sweet meandering of a Rhodes piano, whose notes fall like droplets against the avian strains of a forest field-recording. Nothing here prepares you for the following track, ‘op’ – in which brass parts come together in urgent, ‘Pork Pie Hat’-like discussion over a sleek, faintly John Barry-ish backbeat and Tullis Rennie’s subtle yet driving sound design. The sobering, authoritative rumination of Richard Jones’ piano settles matters temporarily, only for the brass section to rise to a choral tide – a cleanser before the air expires gently to nought, as if from dying bellows.
The melancholic, post-rock instrumental languor of ‘elegy’ follows, above which floats Oliver Dover’s solo saxophone, dreamy and wistful. As ever with Beats & Pieces, the agility and unexpectedness of the chord changes prevents any hint of lethargy or blandness; these notes, these tunes, these pieces never land predictably. Supportive phrases of assent ensue – the conversations on Good Days are always lively, animated, gripping, arriving excitedly at an agreement on a proposition – before Dover takes charge, in his singular, plaintively insistent style. Deep down beneath the celestial soloing, however, it’s the discreet little details that count here – the rustling little fretboard runs, the keyboard comments, the supporting and eventually enveloping horn lines – that inflect the vibe, à la Jan Garbarek.
‘db’ takes a sudden cinematic turn, commencing with a field recording of a Berlin railway station, like an opening shot before a sudden eruption of brass – giddy and swerving, a squalling free-for-all that can only end in a crash, (and does…) before we’re back on the station platform, a passage of urban near-silence. Roll the credits
There’s a contrast once more on ‘cminriff’ between the limpid ambience of the keyboards and the warm, garrulous, colourful consensus of the brass section behind Anthony Brown’s tenor solo. Tullis Rennie’s sound design is again central here, particularly in the second half of the piece where an unexpected shift of atmosphere kickstarts a build which points to and teases a climactic and cathartic release that never truly arrives.
On the playful ‘(blues for) linu’, the various instruments engage in what sounds like a childhood whispering game, mumbling the same terse, quirky phrase in each other’s ear as piano tinkles below before the piece coheres into a cheerfully assenting, swinging jamboree. But then, Graham South’s cheeky breakaway trumpet goes into business by itself, before fast-paced bass and manically expert percussion lead the charge up hill, down dale. This is artful, this is fun.
‘woody’ is as close to ‘trad’ in feel as this album gets, but that’s to extoll its great virtues rather than to suggest a lapse into retrograde nostalgia. What’s more, the reverberant sweep of its undertow and caustic reminders of ‘classic’ big band techniques and devices signal that when Beats & Pieces throwback to the ideas of the twentieth century, it’s always through the prism of twenty-first century musical plurality andstylistic freedom. Moreover, this shapeshifts rapidly, as Beats & Pieces are apt to, from brassy squalls reminiscent of John Coltrane’s Ascension to an ‘A Day In The Life’-style orchestral full stop, before fading outon perhaps the most pleasing sound of the urban environment, the drone and sonic immersion of Sunday morning cathedral bells. Finally, the briefest, brass reprise of ‘wait’ brings an Amen to proceedings.
Good Days is a wonderful monument to so many things – to virtuosity, traditional jazz values, and the avant garde, to the myriad choices for a modern-day arranger highly versed in great decision-making, to soul, towarmth, to musical fellowship and conviviality. It feels like an album by old friends you haven’t met.
photo by Daniela Gerstmann
*** Biographies ***
Beats & Pieces Big Band
Beats & Pieces is not your average big band, rather a band that’s big. These 14 musicians have been playing together for fifteen years and have become a tight-knit bunch, individually and collectively open to a huge diversity of music. The influence of artists such as Björk, Radiohead, David Bowie, The Beatles, The Beach Boys, Loose Tubes, Gil Evans and Kenny Wheeler pop up in their performances and in the compositions of bandleader and conductor Ben Cottrell. Pre-Covid the band toured regularly across the UK, Europe and further afield, marking their 10th
anniversary in 2018 with their debut North American tour. Their third studio album ‘Good Days’ was recorded in January 2020 with support from Help Musicians and MOBO Trust, and will be released on Efpi. Records on 27 January 2023 followed by long-awaited live shows in February 2023.
Ben Cottrell
Ben Cottrell is a conductor, composer, arranger, and producer who is best known for his work with Beats & Pieces Big Band, which he founded in 2008. Other projects include New Seeing (trumpet, strings, rhythm section, live electronics), born from a 2016 Manchester Jazz Festival commission. As a conductor/director, Ben has recently worked with Mike Westbrook’s Uncommon Orchestra, BBC National Orchestra of Wales, Carwyn Ellis & Rio 18, and Ivo Neame. He has also worked as an arranger with/for a diverse range of artists including Laura Mvula, Everything Everything, and Goldie, and his arrangements have been performed worldwide by ensembles including London Symphony Orchestra, Metropole Orkest, and The Heritage Orchestra.
Artist: Beats & Pieces Big Band
Title: Good Days
Label: Efpi Records
Release date: Friday 27th January 2023
Format: CD / DL
Cat No: FP042
Tracklist:
01 wait
02 op
03 elegy
04 db
05 cminriff
06 (blues for) linu
07 woody
08 wait (reprise)
Credits:
Ben Cottrell: director
Anthony Brown, Emily Burkhardt, Oliver Dover: saxophones
Simon Lodge, Rich Mcveigh, Phil O’Malley: trombone
Owen Bryce, Graham South, Nick Walters: trumpet
Anton Hunter: guitar
Richard Jones: piano/Rhodes
Stewart Wilson: bass
Finlay Panter: drums
Recorded by Garry Boyle at Castlesound, Pencaitland 20–23 January 2020
Additional recording by Biff Roxby at The Wood Rooms, Manchester 6 January 2021 and Seadna McPhail at
Airtight Studios, Manchester, 27 September 2021
Sound design by Tullis Rennie
Mixed by Garry Boyle at Slate Room Studio, Pencaitland
Mastered by Stuart Hamilton at Castlesound, Pencaitland
Produced by Ben Cottrell
Executive produced by Ben Cottrell and Daniela Gerstmann
Artwork and design by Ten
‘wait’ and ‘wait (reprise) composed by Anthony Brown, arranged by Ben Cottrell
‘op’ composed by Finlay Panter, arranged by Ben Cottrell
All other tracks composed and arranged by Ben Cottrell
‘op’ features Richard Jones (piano)
‘elegy’ features Oliver Dover (alto saxophone)
‘cminriff’ features Anthony Brown (tenor saxophone)
‘(blues for) linu’ features Graham South (trumpet) and Finlay Panter (drums)
‘woody’ features Phil O’Malley (trombone)
Forest field-recording from Dählhölzliwald, Bern, 4 April 2020
Train station field recording from Berlin Hauptbahnhof, 16 March 2016
Bells field recording from Münsterplatz, Bern 26 July 2020
All field recordings by Ben Cottrell
Supported by Help Musicians and the MOBO Trust
C&P 2022 Ben Cottrell under exclusive licence to Efpi Records
Efpi Records
Based in Manchester and run by Beats & Pieces Big Band leader Ben Cottrell, Efpi is both an independent record label and an umbrella organisation working to promote the activities of an emerging generation of musicians working across all areas of contemporary jazz, improvised and experimental music. Formed byBen in 2009 alongside fellow Manchester musicians Sam Andreae and Anton Hunter to bring together theirvarious projects under a single banner, Efpi quickly expanded from its Manchester roots and now worksclosely with an ever-growing number of musicians living and working across Europe, including Adam Fairhall,Johnny Hunter, Kuster-Ferrari-Byrne, Richard Jones, Trio Riot, and Silence Blossoms.