John Rae reconvenes award-winning trio for launch of new jazz label

There’s a certain piquancy in my telephone conversation with John Rae: I’m looking out on a spectacularly dreich morning in Portobello as the summer shuts down; the Edinburgh-born jazz-drummer, band leader and composer is enjoying the more equable climes of Wellington, New Zealand, where he has lived for the past 15 years.

We’re discussing this month’s UK launch of his label, Thick Records (NZ), led by a welcome trio album from his longstanding playing partner, pianist Brian Kellock, with Rae on drums and Kenny Ellis on double bass. It’s a collaboration they have maintained over decades, with Rae returning to join them for gigs most years, although Think About It is their first album as a trio since Live at Henry’s, recorded at Edinburgh’s fondly remembered jazz cellar in 2002, promptly winning the “best album” category in the BBC Jazz Awards.

Think About It was recorded at the Sound Café studio at Nine Mile Burn south of Edinburgh and it sounds as if it was quite a reunion (it was, Rae confirms, adding that it was also his birthday), as the trio hit the ground running with the old standard East of the Sun. There’s further exuberance, sometimes explosively so, in Gone With the Wind and the Kenny Barron number Voyage, as well as tasteful ballad playing, not least in Kellock’s lingeringly tender treatment of Hoagy Carmichael’s Nearness of You.

It’s highly empathetic musicianship from all three. “It was nice to hear Brian stretching out a bit,” says Rae of the June 2018 recording session.

Kellock, a pianist of international stature who released a warmly received solo album, Bidin’ My Time, last year while also scooping “Best Instrumentalist” title in the Scottish Jazz Awards, agrees that the session was fun and is characteristically unassuming about it: “It’s just the stuff that we were playing at the time. John’s always keen to get these things down for a rainy day. Or,” he laughs, “for a supervirus.”

He particularly likes The Nearness of You, “because it was just one take. There’s atmosphere. And I loved Voyage, because it is like a journey, that track, like a train journey almost. It’s just all the interplay, because we’ve played for so long together.”

That wasn’t the only recording session Kellock did at Nine Mile Burn with Rae. This month’s UK launch of Thick Records (NZ), currently issuing its albums for download only, also sees the release of Where the Wild Clematis Grows, which Rae and Kellock recorded there with Kiwi bassist Patrick Bleakley, based around Rae’s 2015 commission marking the centenary of the First World War.

Also out on the label is the splendidly titled Uncouth and Without Form, in which Rae and his New Zealand sextet develop the kind of folk- jazz fusion mounted back in Scotland with such memorably exuberant outfits as Celtic Feet. The name comes from a remark Duke Ellington reportedly made to a Scottish interviewer about his music being panned by a critic who described it as “uncouth and without form.” Ellington suggested that it resulted from lack of understanding, mischievously suggesting that the ill-acquainted might say the same about bagpipe music (and indeed, Rae’s Kiwi colleagues have been learning about pibroch).

For his part, Kellock, like any other musician, is fretting for a return, whenever that may be, to live performance and plans he has with reedsman John Burgess to record a duo album of vintage jazz, for which he’s been honing his stride piano technique.

As for the present album, he gives a quirkily anecdotal explanation of its title. Harking back to the days when the late, great Edinburgh pianist Alex Shaw used to play at Platform One, “there was a guy who used to sit at the front table, and he’d clap his hands and shout, ‘Alex Shaw, Alex Shaw … fantastic!’ then point at you and say, ‘Think about it.’”

For information and downloads, see www.thickrecords.co.nz

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