Folk, Jazz, etc: Plaudits for the 'little big band' well above average

Published on Tuesday 7 July 2009 19:15

THERE should be any amount of back-slapping, plus some fond reminiscences going way back at Arbroath's long-standing jazz venue, Hospitalfield House, on 18 July, as guitarist Jim Mullen takes the stage in the company of Malcolm "Molly" Duncan, long-time saxophonist with funk rockers the Average White Band, Paul Harrison, switching piano for the organ much favoured by Mullen these days, and drummer Stu Ritchie.

Harrison and Ritchie should be feeling well pleased with themselves, having won piano and drums categories respectively in the recently inaugurated Scottish Jazz Awards. Hospitalfield House itself was nominated in the "Jazz Venue of the Year" category. As for Mullen, now 63, he has collected more than his share of awards and plaudits in a distinguished career that stems back to the earliest days of Sixties jazz-rock fusion. In fact, he tells me, he can trace it right back to the mid-Sixties and an establishment called the Blue Workshop, an R&B-jazz melting pot within the unlikely sounding environs of Perth's County Hotel, where Mullen, the Glasgow-born embryonic jazzer, used to mix it with Duncan and Average White Band co-founder and bassist Alan Gorrie.

It must have been among the earliest tentative rock-jazz fusion jams, Mullen agrees, talking from his home in London, where, he says, he is "rarin' to go", following a prostate operation which caused him to miss his billed spot at the recent Glasgow Jazz Festival.

"I remember Alan when he was in a band from Dundee called the Vikings. They used to come up to the Blue Workshop and I came with a bunch of guys from Glasgow doing a sort of jazz thing. It sort of predated a lot of the whole fusion thing and it was what really got us all involved a little bit deeper in music, because we all had different careers at that time. Molly was studying architecture in Dundee and I was a journalist, working on the Daily Record, and I used to come up in the train with my double bass."

And Alan Steadman, who has run the Hospitalfield venue these past 19 years, used to play with Duncan in the Angus Youth Orchestra. "So there's a lot of history there," says Mullen. "Now we're all in our sixties, it's still a lot of fun to play together."

Mullen guested on a couple of AWB albums while carving out his own reputation as a guitarist, initially in such early Seventies jazz-rock outfits as Pete Brown's Piblokto and organist Brian Auger's Oblivion Express before establishing his celebrated 16-year partnership with the late saxophonist Dick Morrissey. In recent years he has favoured combining his fluid, thumb-picked guitar lines with the chunky tones of the jazz organ, on which Harrison will be doing the honours at Hospitalfield. The organ, says Mullen, "is like a little big band. Even when there are only three guys, there's a hell of a lot of sound at your disposal. It can go from a whisper to a scream."

Mullen regards Harrison – probably associated more with piano – as an excellent organist. "He does the bass lines and everything that a real bass would do. He's a very versatile musician is Paul."

The Hospitalfield gig has virtually become an annual rendezvous, particularly as the Montrose-born Duncan, who now lives in Germany, often flies in to join him. "We never know what the hell we're going to play, but it always works out great. The only thing is," he laughs, "we always have to do Pick Up The Pieces… Molly's going to have to play that tune for the rest of his life. But we don't mind and the audience likes it."

&#149 Jim Mullen, Malcolm Duncan, Paul Harrison and Stu Ritchie play Hospitalfield House, Arbroath on 18 July. Tel: [phone]