Jon Thorne Watches The Well With Danny Thompson

” In the case of Manchester-based double bassist Jon Thorne, writes Mike Flynn, there’s more than a grain of truth to these words.

Thorne had barely picked up a bass when he crossed paths with Thompson, and it would be a pivotal meeting that would change his life. “I met him very early on, I didn’t have a career then, I’d been playing a matter of weeks, and he was so enormously generous and encouraging to me at that stage. He really lifted me and gave me a lot of belief, so to come in such a wide arc and have the opportunity to write some music specifically for him… wow, it’s hard to put into words really, it’s as personal a project as I’ll ever do I think.”

Thorne is speaking of his wondrously transcendent jazz suite Watching The Well that features Thompson, and his infamously dark and resonant bass he calls Victoria, set in an expansive string-laden sound world. While Thompson is renowned for his versatility and his uniquely melodic approach that has seen him work with everyone from Alexis Korner, Jimmy Witherspoon, and Roy Orbison to jazz luminaries Freddie Hubbard, Red Rodney and Art Farmer, folk heroes Pentangle, Richard Thompson, and Ralph McTell and pop and rock icons such as Kate Bush, Mark Bolan, David Sylvian, Tim Buckley, John Martyn, and Richard Thompson, Watching The Well places him amid a lush hybrid landscape that touches on jazz, classical and folk sensibilities.

It’s something Thorne wanted to achieve when he was first commissioned three years ago to write this as a piece for the Manchester Jazz Festival, but translating it into what’s become a hugely successful album has been a long process. “It’s been like a million piece jigsaw puzzle that I’ve had to put back together… without the box! My prime motivation with it was to try and write something that would frame him [Thompson] in a way that I haven’t heard him before, I’ve not really heard him in a more orchestral setting, and certainly not where he’s been the focus.” Yet unlike many other bass-led albums it’s all refreshingly spacious and free of any grandstanding clichés that can plague other bass chops fests. It’s also remarkable for the fact Thorne self-produced the album after taking lessons in Logic recording software at his local computer store, in the process making him a self-sufficient solo artist.

Thorne’s own 20-year career mirrors Thompson’s genre-blind pursuit of all things musical. With his similarly ‘deep’ bass tone he’s rocked huge festival crowds with trip hop dance band Lamb, showed his more esoteric side with percussionist Trilok Gurtu and ambient guitar guru Robert Fripp, and his highly attuned jazz skills with own Oedipus Complex group. So this new project may surprise those who have managed to keep tabs on the low-end chameleon. Featuring Thorne’s wife Jojo’s haunting operatic vocals, a choir, Gilad Atzmon’s keening Eastern-flavoured clarinet and Stuart McCallum’s chiming washes of guitar, it taps into Thorne’s long held love of ECM. “I suppose,” Thorne says, “it’s coming out of a more European style of jazz, ECM records had a very big effect on me when I discovered them through my friend Mark Brighton gave me a bunch of recordings on tape when I was 23, people like Keith Jarrett, Jan Garbarek, Gary Peacock, Dave Holland, and Eberhard Weber. I’d never really heard any music like that before, which took a jazz sensibility and melded it to classical sensibility and I absolutely fell in love with it. People like Ralph Towner are still the people I look up to the most I think for compositional sensibility, so I wanted to bring a lot of those elements into this as well.”

For those wondering what the sum of all these intersecting influences sounds like, Thorne is keen to pass more of his mentor Thompson’s advice. “The man himself inspired me in that way, he said to me very early on when I met him ‘just keep your mind completely open to music – there isn’t good or bad music there’s just the music that moves you, and gravitate towards that and just concentrate on that.’ And that’s something I’ve tried to do in my career, and this record is a reflection of that.”

For more visit www.jonthorne.co.uk