John Surman: a lust for life

"If I want to carry on playing and having a decent life, it’s time to get off the road and stay a bit closer to home,” says John Surman.

He’s talking about his announcement (on 3 August) that his current tour supporting his latest ECM release will be his last. Recording and composing will continue unabated – he is not retiring – but after the last few dates of the Words Unspoken tour have been completed, he will no longer be seen on the European jazz circuit, where for over five decades he has been one of its most popular stars.

“I have spent 60 years carrying around a lot of equipment and a lot of instruments and it’s hard work,” he says. “It’s harder than it was – queuing up at airports, queuing for this and queuing for that and carrying instruments on and off planes and all that – I mean it’s not as easy as it was, even 10 years ago.”

Surman’s surprise announcement shouldn’t really have been a surprise, after all, it was made just a couple of weeks short of his 80th birthday. But it was. A true artistic great and one of Europe’s foremost jazz musicians, he will now concentrate on composing and recording. There is no shortage of projects – in fact, he has a bucket list of things lined up to do: “I’ve no ‘big’ plans, but there are some things I’d like to record, my duo with pianist Vigleik Storass, a Norwegian pianist, I’ve done a lot of gigs with him in Italy as a duo, but we have never actually recorded as a duo, so I thought I might do that.

"I want to do something with the baritone saxophone and do [Billy] Strayhorn pieces in a kind of Harry Carney tribute; and during the last two or three years I have been involved with Lucien Bann and Matt Maineri, Lucien is a Romanian pianist and Matt is a viola player from the States, and we have been involved in a Transylvanian folk song project – Bartók made a huge collection of folk songs and Lucien is from Romania/Hungary – and we’ve been working on that kind of music, so there are various things I’d like to do and make myself find time to do them.”

Meanwhile, there is the small matter of completing the dates of what will be his final tour with his Words Unspoken band. On release, the album received great reviews in the European press, and to Surman’s delight, the tour is turning out to be one of his most successful: “The reception performing Words Unspoken has been great, and the audiences and the music have been wonderful, it’s exactly what I hoped it would be, so it’s a nice way to bow out of travelling with something that is really working.”

As with so many things in life, being at the right place at the right time can often create opportunities. As Surman explains it, the Words Unspoken band came about thanks to a lightbulb moment on the occasion of his lifelong partner Karin Krog’s 80th birthday celebrations.

“Words Unspoken really began at a celebration of Karin’s 80th. Both Rob Luft and Thomas Strønen were in the band that was set up to accompany the various soloists who were there for this party, and Karin and I listened to them; I knew Rob Luft from the Take Five course that has been run by Serious since 2005. We’d spend a week with young British jazz musicians, so I knew his playing, and I had worked with Thomas Strønen with Arild Andersen on a couple of projects, and I liked his playing.

“But when I heard them playing together as the rhythm section for four or five different singers singing completely different music – some standards, somebody did quite free things – they fitted together wonderfully, they sounded great and I thought Yeah! I had done an album in 2017 called Invisible Threads with Nelson Ayres, the Brazilian pianist, and Rob Waring on vibes, but it had become too complicated doing things with Nelson, particularly after Brexit and travel from Brazil, and suddenly I heard these two together and I though wow! This could be nice with Rob Waring (I love working with Rob), let’s try that!”

When Surman brought the three different musical personalities together to see where the music would end up, it couldn’t have gone more smoothly.

“For me it has always been based on people, I’ve looked for the musicians first and then it’s my responsibility to come up with things to play,” continues Surman. “I simply brought some ideas along to the musicians and without discussing who would play each element and how the tunes would take shape, we would try and place the elements together just by listening to each other and reacting accordingly.”

The musicians clicked surprisingly quickly. Surman was delighted, and the Rainbow Studio in Oslo was booked in December 2022, the leader keen to capture the music while it was still new, fresh and unexplored.

Words Unspoken is an album of subtle, shifting moods, from the pastoral title track featuring the romantic drama of Surman’s baritone against a barely discernible electronic colour wash supporting Waring and Luft’s subtly inventive shadings; the brisk, energetic ‘Pebble Dance’ featuring his soprano; to ‘Hawksmoor,’ featuring bass clarinet, each composition fitting seamlessly into the overall storytelling arc of the album’s compositions.

This is music whose timeless contemporaneity numbers it among his very finest work. The wonder of it all is that the shared musical empathy that contributes so much to music’s subtle construction creates a soundscape where the ear never yearns for an acoustic bass filling out the spaces below.

“There’s a sense of the diversity in the material: it’s kind of me, isn’t it? I never have settled into any particular groove, a restless soul!” he explains.

Surman hails from Tavistock, an ancient market town in West Devon. As a youngster his strongest subject was mathematics, and a performance of Bach’s St Matthew Passion gave him a glimpse of the possibilities of music. “I have always had a curiosity about instruments; I have always felt musical instruments were beautiful things. When I was a kid, I was fascinated with the bassoon – without knowing what I could do with it! I just thought it was a great piece of machinery, and that probably led to the baritone.

"I have to say right at the outset that I think finding Mike Westbrook and working with him was a bit of a life changer for me. Had it not been for that early association with him I might not have ended up doing what I do now, so that was a huge incentive for me at Tiverton Arts Centre. He was about eight years older than me, I was still at school really, and he was a strong influence and gave me the confidence to really play. My parents – my father particularly – wanted me to study applied maths, which was what I was doing in high school then, but I just went straight into the music and managed to get this place in music college in London, which was due to the influence of Mike and I owe him a big vote of thanks. It turned out to be a very enjoyable relationship with him because he had many original ideas; so it was a very powerful experience with Mike, he set me on the road.”

In London in 1962, studying music at the London College of Music by day, and playing by night during an extremely fertile period of British jazz, were all factors in Surman’s development as a soloist; playing at Ronnie Scott’s Old Place with Mike Westbrook, and with Harry Miller and Alan Jackson in a trio, Surman quickly achieved extraordinary proficiency on baritone sax and his recordings with Westbrook’s big band of the period, such as Celebration, Release, Marching Song and culminating in Citadel/Room 317, written to feature Surman, are now regarded as classics of British jazz.

“When you think of Marching Song, it was, and is, an amazing piece of music, and it was something in the jazz world way ahead of what other people were doing, this idea you could bring that kind of concept to jazz,” says Surman.

Offered a Deram recording contract, Surman recorded John Surman, and How Many Clouds Can You See, before jumping in at the deep end of John Coltrane’s influence.

“I was working in England in 1969, I’ve got a diary which shows a gig in Coventry with Mike Osborne, Harry Miller and Alan Jackson, £4 and 10 shillings. A quid each, and ten bob for the petrol. I was realising there was only two ways to go at that particular time, one was to be on the session scene, which I didn’t enjoy at all, or the second was to somehow find another way out, and [drummer] Stu [Martin] gave me that, and he and [bassist] Barre [Phillips] took me into Europe and I had a lot of experience playing with them.”

Together they formed The Trio in Brussels in 1969, one of the most vital and viscerally exciting groups of the era: “The Trio was such an important thing for me, it took me out of myself.” In 1971, Surman, in collaboration with arranger and composer John Warren, integrated The Trio into a large ensemble format on Tales of the Algonquin: “I had the chance to do the third album for Decca, The Trio was going on, and I said to John, 'well come on, write something for a big band and a trio with Stuart and combined with Harry Miller and Alan Jackson, the two rhythm sections,' and it was really exciting.”

The Trio recorded two albums in their own right, The Trio and Conflagration in 1970 and 1971 respectively.

“It was very intense,” continues Surman, “especially with Stu, and my feeling about that year I was playing [with them] was I was really obsessed, as most of us were, by Coltrane, with the whole Ascension thing of high-intensity playing, it was ‘of the time,’ and I was that time, this is the way we played, and I kind of burnt out with that, and that was the moment I realised, ‘Where am I, and what are these other things I want to do. Is it jazz, or what is it?’ And in my curiosity about multi-tracking in the studio I hired this eight-track studio and went in to see what would happen.”

The result was the solo album Westering Home, a reaction to the intensity of Coltrane-inspired freedom that marked the beginnings of his fascination with electronic sounds.

“It was formative for me, again another exploration into finding out what could be done. A bit of musical curiosity I suppose,” he says.

The 1960s and early 70s in Surman’s career might be represented as a period of self-discovery; as he told The Guardian newspaper: “An eye-opener for me. It taught me a lot about music and life, and it was a turning point when an identifiable jazz music that reflected American achievements but liberated us as Europeans, was invented.”

By the end of the decade, Surman had formed an association with Manfred Eicher of ECM Records: “I think Manfred was interested in me at The Trio time, but in those days we had contracts with record companies, but as they fell away, there was a record date [for ECM] with Mick Goodrick, and Eddie Gomez and Jack DeJohnette, and the album was called In Passing, and I was suggested as a horn player. And I showed up for that, and that went very well, and Manfred spoke to me later and asked what I would like to do.

"That would have been in 1979, and that was Upon Reflection, a solo album, and the reason for doing a solo recording was because all that period during the 1970s I had been doing a load of work with dance [with the Carolyn Carson dance company at the Paris Opera], using synthesisers and everything, so I was primed for that, since that was what I was doing. And so it seemed like a nice starting point, and the follow-up to that was The Amazing Adventures of Simon Simon with Jack. That was my beginnings with Manfred.”

The Amazing Adventures of Simon Simon won the Record of the Year Award in Poland’s Jazz Forum readers' poll while DownBeat called it, “unrestrained delight!”

It was an auspicious beginning to an impressive discography that continues to this day with Words Unspoken. Perhaps Surman’s most highly regarded band (with the British public at least) was John Surman and John Warren’s The Brass Project (1993): “That was fantastic – I mean the Brass Project went on for quite a while and played a lot of really nice concerts. And of course I had with me Chris Laurence and John Marshall. We had a quartet with John Taylor [The John Surman Quartet album Stranger Than Fiction from 1994] and they were part of my life until JT passed away, then John Marshall, and Chris has retired, and all the time running parallel to The Brass Project were concerts with the quartet with John Taylor, Chris and John Marshall.

"And, of course, the string stuff I did was based on Chris Laurence, and he recommend musicians from St Martin-in-the-Fields to make up Trans4mation [Corruscating from 2000 and The Spaces In Between from 2007].”

In truth, there is no shortage of classic albums in Surman’s discography; everybody has their favourite, as he suggested in the liner notes of John Surman Rarum XIII, not least Upon Reflection, Road to St Ives, A Biography of the Rev Absalom Dawe, Brewster’s Rooster, Withholding Pattern or Saltash Bells. These will be joined in time, no doubt, by Words Unspoken.

Looking back on a career crowded with incident and highlights, Surman asserts: “I was in Ronnie Scott’s a few weeks ago, and I remember when I was standing there the first time in 1968, and if I’d thought, when I first joined The Band [a nonet Scott led between 1968-9] of the things I have done between the two times I was on that stage, all the people I have played with, I would never have believed it, all those things I have done.

"So I have had a very full and wonderfully exciting life, musically, and I have been very lucky to have played with some absolutely amazing musicians, in a lot of amazing places to a lot of perfect audiences... I have been very, very lucky.”

This article originally appeared in the September 2024 issue of Jazzwise. Whether you want to enjoy Jazzwise online, explore our Reviews Database or our huge archive of issues, or simply receive the magazine through your door every month, we've got the perfect subscription for you. Find out more at magsubscriptions.com