Jazz: Sax appeal

Published on Tuesday 28 July 2009 19:49

INTRIGUING, is it not, the way an innocuous handful of notes, informed with a composer's deftness, a player's insight, can take on such potent associations?

Take a tune that has become something of a solo showpiece for New York-based, Fife-born saxophonist Joe Temperley, Duke Ellington's Single Petal of a Rose. It's an exquisitely wistful little number that hangs in the air, and the fact that to play it Temperley switches from his habitual baritone sax to the deep, plummy tones of bass clarinet gives it a rich, lingering resonance.

"There are stories attached to that tune," says Temperley, speaking to me from his home. "One Valentine's night we did a programme of Ellington love songs and played Single Petal of a Rose. There was a lady there with her fianc and she took my wife, Laurie, and me to Paris, with the piano player Dan Miller, and put us up for five nights and we played that one song at her wedding."

"That was the joy," he adds, before telling me the other story: "I played it at a Festival of Ellington we did for high school kids, and a lady sent me a letter afterwards and said that her son, who was 17 years old and played the bass clarinet, had taken his own life. She felt that I was playing the bass clarinet … from him, through me to her, as it were. "It's just a set piece," he muses, "but a wonderful piece of music."

That and other more substantial gems from the Duke will doubtless crop up on 5 August at the Queen's Hall, when Temperley directs a programme of Ellington's music with the newly formed Edinburgh Jazz Festival Orchestra. Part of the Edinburgh Jazz and Blues Festival, which opens on Friday night, it is one of two concerts featuring the EJF Orchestra, which assembles an impressive array of players from Scotland's thriving jazz scene and beyond, courtesy of the Scottish Government's Jazz Expo Fund.

Temperley, an avuncular-looking 79 who has been a fixture in the baritone sax chair with New York's Lincoln Jazz Centre Orchestra these past 20 years and shows no signs of retiring from a hectic schedule, promises classic material in which he is well versed, having played with the Ellington Orchestra.

The cosmopolitan saxophonist who played with such renowned names as Woody Herman, Buddy Rich, Ella Fitzgerald and Humphrey Lyttelton (who regarded him as one of the greatest baritone players in the world), not to mention two decades in the Lincoln Centre band under Wynton Marsalis, blew his first notes in the unlikely sounding environs of the coalmining community of Lumphinnans, outside Lochgelly.

"My brother played trumpet and he bought me a saxophone for my 14th birthday, because he wanted me to play in his band. I was playing around all these little dance halls in Fife."

He found his way into the legendary Tommy Sampson Orchestra, then other big bands such as Harry Parry, Joe Loss and ultimately Lyttelton, with whom he first visited New York in 1959. "I was so taken with the New York scene that I always said I'd come back, and five years later I did exactly that."

Relatively few players have made the sonorous, melancholy-tinged sound of the baritone sax their own. "I guess it's a little harder to manage," he says, "but I liked the range and sonority of it, but what really attracted me to it was Harry Carney (whom Temperley replaced in the Lincoln Centre outfit in 1974]. I just loved his sound."

Another tune that attracts emotional baggage is Robert Burns's peerless My Love is Like a Red, Red Rose – which Temperley has been known to reprise solo. "I started playing Red Rose for my mother when she used to come to my concerts," he explains.

The song will also feature, along with others from the Burns canon, during the EJF Orchestra's other concert, on 8 August, when it will be directed by pianist Dave Milligan in Sylvander and Clarinda, a song cycle inspired by the poet's famous correspondence with Agnes McElhose.

"The festival asked me to write something with a Burns theme," says Milligan, a highly creative jazz player with strong folk connections.

"There were a couple of Burns songs at the forefront of my mind, and both happened to be poems he had written for Agnes McLehose, so I gravitated towards their affair.

"There was a level to the relationship that was almost absurd, and the fact they called each other 'Sylvander' and 'Clarinda' just seems wonderfully bizarre." It may be a song cycle, but Milligan promises plenty of big band sounds, joined by three eclectically-inclined folk singers, Corrina Hewat (Milligan's wife), Annie Grace and Karine Polwart.

"They're perhaps not the most traditional singers on the folk scene, but I think they have an understanding of and respect for the songs of Burns and the language he used better than any jazz singer I know of," says Milligan. "By the same token, we have some of the greatest improvisers from the world of jazz in the orchestra, and there's no way I'm not going to give them space."

It may seem somewhat removed from the more straight-ahead jazz of Temperley and his contemporaries, although Temperley, also an educator who is a member of the Julliard School jazz faculty and a founder of the Fife Youth Jazz Orchestra, speaks warmly of today's younger generation of players, such as pianist Brian Kellock: "I play with Brian when I'm over, and I'm a great admirer of Tommy Smith."

Milligan remembers Temperley from way back: "Joe won't remember this, but I first met him when I was a callow 15-year-old when he came as guest tutor to a jazz course I was attending. I was quite thrilled to meet a real 'jazz star'.

"I grew up listening to Ellington and all kinds of more mainstream jazz, and I still love to listen to it, although I seldom play that style any more. But occasionally you get to hook up with someone like Joe and you get a definite connection to your own beginnings."

&#149 Edinburgh Jazz and Blues festival runs from Friday to 9 August. www.edinburghjazzfestival.co.uk