Agli ascoltatori del suo programma Jazz Progression su One Jazz Mike Gavin ha proposto qualche giorno fa un breve excursus nella discografia - ufficiale e non - di Keith Tippett, coinvolgendo Martin Phillips, autore della bella biografia pubblicata da Jazz in Britain, Mujician. Tra i vari brani ha incluso Stately Dance for Miss Primm, This is What Happens, A Man Carrying A Drop Of Water On A Leaf Through A Thunderstorm e un estratto da Frames. In apertura ha voluto offrire anche un omaggio al compianto Mike Westbrook - i cui funerali si erano tenuti appena qualche giorno prima - con I See Thy Form, nella versione tratta dal doppio cd Enja del 1999 Glad Day (Settings Of William Blake).

https://www.onejazz.net/mike-gavin-presents-jazz-progression

Al pianoforte che fu di Keith Tippett - che come si sa è custodito da Janinka Diverio nel suo locale Three Cups a Malmesbury, nel Wiltshire - è dedicato un bel passaggio del libro di Martin Phillips Keith Tippett: Mujician – The Authorised Biography.

"Keith maintained long term friendships and working relationships with musicians, a trait extended to his own piano. When he and Julie moved in to their first shared flat in Beckenham, they acquired the instrument which would remain with him until the end of his life. “I bought that piano,” Julie remembers. “I paid forty quid for it. It was a Collard and Collard. A real beauty. It had a lovely mellow tone. I used to play it myself sometimes. I composed things on it. Keith played it every day when he was at home.” From the Beckenham flat, it moved with them, first to a cottage in Dyrham and then on to the living room in Tortworth. After Keith’s death, when Julie moved out of the cottage they and the piano had shared for over forty years, she didn’t have room for it in her new flat. Inca put out a post on social media asking if anyone would be able to house her dad’s instrument. By return, Janinka Diverio, who had worked very closely with Keith and Julie in the early 2000s, replied “Consider it done.”

“When Inca asked, I didn’t have a second thought,” Janinka confirms. She arranged to have it moved to the pub she had recently taken over, The Three Cups in Malmesbury. “Although the piano had been sitting in the cottage unplayed for a few years, it wasn’t in too bad a state. I had it re-tuned and gave it a polish. It’s got the odd note that’s duff, but that adds to its character. I’m going to get some further restoration done on it. We use it for some of the gigs we run [at the pub], and sometimes people ask if they can play it. But I don’t think of it as ours. We are just the current custodians of it. One day it might move on somewhere else.”

To welcome the Collard and Collard to its new home, Janinka invited Matthew Bourne, a friend and collaborator of Keith’s, to give an inaugural concert on the instrument. He remembers being quite intimidated by the thought of performing a solo recital on Keith’s piano. “When I got to the pub and played it, I knew it was going to be really hard work. When I’d first visited him in his cottage, he’d showed me the piano – but he didn’t want me to play it. ‘Oh, it’s got a few dodgy notes,’ he’d say. So on the [Three Cups] night, I wrestled with it through the gig and at the end I said to someone ‘Now I know why he never wanted me to play it!’ It was the perfect piano to practise on because it’s really hard work to get anything out of it. I can’t help thinking that the things he would have practised on that piano would have been so hard to achieve, so when he then performed on a nicer one, he’d be like ‘oh, this is great!’ So there was method in having a really tricky old instrument.”

For the time being, the Collard and Collard has pride of place in the bar of The Three Cups. It has one photo of Keith on the top lid. Another is placed on the wall directly behind the piano so that Keith can observe those playing it. Open the lower lid and you can gaze on the keys which Keith’s fingers have touched a million times. Countless scales have run up and down these eighty-eight notes. The ivory and ebony strips are where Septober Energy was born. Where the motifs for Frames, A Loose Kite, Cider Dance and many, many more first drew breath. This keyboard has been worked hard. Some of the white notes are browning slightly, signs of sweat from Keith’s fingers as he worked and reworked ideas, sending those upper-register spirals and thunderous bass rumbles swirling around the Tortworth living room. Were he to look down on his instrument now, nestling in the Three Cups bar, he’d be thinking of it not as an old adversary but as a faithful friend."

http://www.three-cups.co.uk
https://www.facebook.com/thecupsmalmesbury

Il libro biografico di Martin Phillips su Keith Tippett ha visto ufficialmente la luce qualche giorno fa a Bristol nel corso di una calorosa cerimonia cui hanno preso parte alcuni tra i più cari amici e collaboratori del Nostro, con Julie Tippetts, Maggie Nicols e Larry Stabbins oltre naturalmente all'autore e agli editori di Jazz in Britain, John Thurlow e Pete Woodman. Dello speciale evento circolano sui social alcune immagini, mentre nel frattempo nuove recensioni del libro sono apparse su Jazzwise, The Wire e UK Vibe. Per ottenerne una copia ci si può rivolgere, oltre che direttamente alla casa madre, anche a Soundohm: Keith Tippett: Mujician – The Authorised Biography.

Scrive Steve Williams: "Martin Phillips’s authorised biography arrives from Jazz In Britain in a limited hardback edition of 1,000, with a double CD of previously unreleased recordings and a foreword by Richard Williams. The Williams foreword matters. He was there in print during the years the dossier above describes, and his judgment - that Tippett’s body of work matches “any British musician of his generation, its range surely without rival” - carries the weight of someone who has watched the whole arc unfold. Cecil Taylor, no easy man to impress, once called Tippett “one of the most interesting and original European pianists in jazz and free music.” That assessment, and Williams’s, are not the language of a hagiographic project. They are evaluations, and Phillips’s book earns them. Where the book is at its best is in the relationships. The chapter on the South African family - the Blue Notes circle, and above all, the long partnership with the drummer Louis Moholo-Moholo - is the one I keep returning to. Two musicians from opposite ends of the world and opposite sides of history, both shaped as children by chapel and church music, both committed to a form of free playing that never lost its rootedness in song: Phillips finds the human shape of that pairing, and the book is richer for it. The seventies, often the thin chapter in jazz biographies of this generation, are given their honest weight here too. Phillips does not pretend the decade was easy, or that the institutional warmth of the late sixties did not cool. He stays with the difficult years, and the book is stronger for the staying."

https://jazzinbritain1.bandcamp.com
https://www.soundohm.com/keith-tippett-mujician