James Banyard scrive per il britannico The Guardian un bell'articolo su Mike Westrook prendendo spunto dalla pubblicazione del doppio cd The Cortège-Live At The BBC 1980, con un rapido excursus su alcune tappe della straordinaria carriera del Nostro e riportando stralci di una recentissima intervista con lui: lo si trova anche online sul numero dello scorso 12 novembre.
For more than six decades, Westbrook has been composing vast, cinematic works. He was the first jazz artist to play at the BBC Proms, created theatre alongside Laurence Olivier, and in the 1970s merged his entire ensemble with the avant-rock band Henry Cow to form the groundbreaking Orckestra. The result is music full of brass fanfares, unusual time signatures, poetry, free improvisation, and genre-bending jazz that invites the listener into a continental circus full of elephants, acrobats, and clowns. Recent health difficulties have made playing hard, so he has spent the last two years digging through his papers, sending piles of scores to archives around the country. Meanwhile, a tape recording languishing in the British Library has become the focus of a salvage mission. This is The Cortège, a monumental two-and-a-half hour jazz suite which has been unavailable for years. The 1982 studio version is trapped in legal limbo, so Westbrook, unwilling to wait for lawyers to iron it out, has reissued The Cortège using raw material from a primitive 1980 BBC Radio 3 recording, done live in one take. “The balance was poor, and the [tape] quality wasn’t very good, so it was a question of: could this be rescued?” Westbrook says. AI software was used to isolate and enhance individual voices and instruments from the mix. Mike is delighted with the result: “It’s one of the best things we’ve done.”
