Artist: Paul Rutherford

Date of Release: 11/05/2012

Catalogue no: 2070

Label: SLAM

Price: £9.99

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Track Listing

PAUL RUTHERFORD ~ TROMBONE
GEORGE HASLAM ~ BARITONE SAX & TAROGATO
SAMULI MIKKONEN ~ PIANO
UFFE KROKFORS ~ DOUBLE BASS
MIKA KALLIO ~ DRUMS

Recorded Saturday, 31 July 1999 at “RAAHEN RANTAJATSIT”.
Recorded by Pertti Kinnunen.
Realised by Pauli Hallman.
Mastered by Eric Smith, Monstersound.

A recently discovered live recording of Rutherford and Haslam with the Samuli Mikkonen Trio at Raahe Festival, July 1999. A concert of non-stop improvisation with a majestic Rutherford welding together a performance of great international musicmaking. A fitting tribute to the trombonist’s memory.

Reviews

03/09/2012 Massimo Ricci

Nice idea, retrieving this 1999 concert extrapolated from a 2-day event in Raahe, a small town situated in Finland's Gulf of Bothnia. The forward tandem of Rutherford (trombone) and Haslam (baritone sax, tarogato) is supported, complemented and only mildly contrasted by pianist Mikkonen, bassist Ulf Krokfors and drummer Mika Kallio (curiously, a namesake of a rather known Finnish bike rider). For starters, the recording quality is outstanding, a feature that allows the listener to discern and enjoy the various instrumental behaviors over the interplay's general streaming. This approach to the act of listening to jazz should never be overlooked: the opportunity to maintain a focus on the separate sources while being affected by the music's tensions, releases and even contradictions lies at the basis of a better action — in our individual systems — of a series of implicit connections defining the reaction to any given record.
The communication between the participants is somewhat relaxed, definitely not burning with fury. Unsurprisingly, Rutherford and Haslam appear to be in charge of the situation. The former's garrulous flights of imagination, incisive forthrightness and unmistakably superior timbre remind us of what a knowledgeable soloist he was; the latter's near-improbable blend of melodic peacefulness and stimulating swiftness defines perhaps the album's salient moments, during which this writer forgot about the "what" and started taking into account the mere upshot of the interconnecting phrases, abandoning his chair to walk around the room in a semi-comfortable frame of mind. The three-headed counterpart is brilliantly restrained and supportive of the masters through the full set. Mikkonen's pianism reveals a good degree of insightfulness while remaining more or less confined inside the dominion of "unobtrusive shading versus clever counterpoint". Krokfors and Kallio sail across linear designs and perturbed currents with considerable discretion and refinement, ultimately constituting a firm ground for the entire sonic edifice to expand.
Massimo Ricci http://www.squidsear.com/cgi-bin/news/newsView.cgi?newsID=1483

01/08/2012 John Sharpe

UNEARTHED GEM
The English pairing of trombonist Paul Rutherford
and baritone saxophonist George Haslam would
undoubtedly have struggled to make themselves
understood in the fiendishly intractable Finnish
tongue. But such is the universal language of jazz
that they had no problems communicating with
pianist Samuli Mikkonen’s trio with bassist Ulf
Krokfors and drummer Mika Kallio on their first
meeting at the Raahen Rantajatsit Festival in Finland
in 1999. Rutherford died five years ago this month,
making this tribute recording a welcome find. While
the trombonist may be best known for his staggering
solo records, he also contributed positively to any
number of free and structured situations. This
53-minute freely extemporized set with its freebop
approach neatly encapsulates both styles.
Rutherford mixes hums, gurgles and buzzes
with brassy rumbustiousness, demonstrating a
fantastic and unpredictable range of expression.
Even when at his most broodily lyrical, he undercuts
it by interspersing some frog-like croaks. Haslam
makes impassioned baritone statements, but also
cuts an alternately angular and droning line on
tarogato. Mikkonen’s hammered tremolos ratchet
up the intensity and he proves himself a probing
accompanist, his jabbing motifs serving to jostle and
realign the collective trajectory. Neither drums nor
bass solo but provide solid propulsion and apposite,
although slightly over amplified, coloration.
The quintet settled upon a democratic ethos,
which sees the lead switching imperceptibly around
the group. In the liners, Haslam helpfully demarcates
the continuous performance into 15 tracks, which
helps signpost some of the more potent passages,
such as a warm and honeyed duet between the
horns and a wonderful trombone solo supported by
Mikkonen’s knotty comping. While the rhythm
section sound most comfortable with a definite
pulse, some of the strongest sections come when
there is tension between different rates of pulsation,
as when Mikkonen posits measured choppy chords
against fidgety uptempo drums. Borne of shared
experience, the two horns’ bravura interactions are
one of the assets of this performance.

10/07/2012 Chris Searle

Morning Star Tuesday 10 July 2012

Raahe '99 SLAM CD
Paul Rutherford and George Haslam

Scandinavian bootlegs
Secret recordings made on a Finnish beach have resurfaced

Two British jazz prophets better known in Finland than in their own country?

Unheralded and largely unknown beyond their free improv admirers, George Haslam, Preston-born baritone saxophonist and introducer and master of the Hungarian tarogato horn into jazz, and Greenwich-born trombonist Paul Rutherford have both created canons of enormous stature and originality.

Rutherford was introduced to the saxophone by his elder brother, switched to trombone and learned his craft during his two years of national service in the RAF where he met fellow jazz free spirits John Stevens and Trevor Watts.

He performed and recorded free music from the off and spent a musical lifetime at his slides in uniquely avant garde contexts, becoming one of the genuine jazz greats of its century of history.

Haslam has been excelling in free jazz settings since the '60 s but without similar opportunities to record until the '80s, when he set up his own SLAM label and cut some powerful albums, in particular a pair of duo sessions with the US pianist Mal Waldron.

Rutherford and Haslam both travelled restlessly to find appreciative listeners and companions, Rutherford throughout Europe and the US, Haslam much further afield, particularly in Latin America.

He performed in Mexico, led the first British jazz ensemble to play in Cuba and established a musical base in Argentina, recording with some powerful local musicians including the compelling 2006 album September Spring.

Long before Rutherford died in 2007, the two veterans had established a formidable horn partnership and had shared notes on several SLAM albums.

Rutherford became renowned as a solo trombonist - his solo album for the Emanem label 'The Gentle Harm of the Bourgeoisie' is a free jazz classic unlikely to ever be equalled.

But he and Haslam were kindred spirits and mutual forces of inspiration, as evinced by the duo album '1989 and All That' recorded at the Holywell Room in Oxford, a venue of near-perfect jazz acoustics which brought out the musical uniqueness of both artistes in a larger group format.

The album 'Raahe 99' is a memorial to Rutherford, recorded in July 1999 in Finland at a "jazz on the beach" festival. Rutherford and Haslam had no idea that the performance had been recorded, and its 53 minutes only emerged some 12 years after the event.

Rutherford had not met pianist Samuli Mikkonon, bassist Ulf Krokfors and drummer Mika Kallio before the concert, so it was an event of sheet spontaneity.

Mikkonen's ominously beautiful phrases which commence the first movement with Kallio's deep drum-struck sounds certainly do not presage a beach party.

When the horns enter there are sensations of any angry, vituperative sea followed by a harrowing baritone chorus with the trio's empathy of strangers transforming to a union of fresh companions.

After a horn interchange there is the genius of Rutherford's London slides and multiphonics, as if a complete voice box has slipped down inside his instrument.

Nobody in jazz ever played a trombone like Rutherford. The Finns were hearing it here on their blessed beach, and when Haslam's deep baritone returns it is as if he is responding not to a summons but an oratory.

The second movement opens with Krokfor's emphatic bass and Mikkonen's assured and splashing surf-like solo, more horn sparring and an astonishing passage of Rutherford wit, artistry and glory which makes you marvel how far the trombone has travelled since those early 20th century Crescent City days, when the tailgate slidemen played their trombones from the backs of parading wagons.

It leads into a sequence of profound baritone beauty, where Haslam's sound recalls the Ellingtonian wonders of baritonist Harry Carney's rhapsodic recorded performance of 1947, Sono.

In the third movement Haslam's terse and worrisome taragato enters, and Rutherford's trombone howls beside it as if two aging British griots are marking something about the millennium to come on that Finland beach below the almost Arctic sky - another uncanny leap for a music which has its provenances where the Mississippi delta pours out into the Caribbean Sea.

Yet with such a fusion of sound and intention all sounds of history and the present harmonise.

What is remarkable about this record is that not a note is superfluous or egotistic - five men meet on a faraway beach, make wondrous music and cease, not knowing that their sounds are being captured, then they travel on and make more.

Then one of them dies and is brilliantly remembered forever alongside his companions.

Such is jazz, such is life.

Chris Searle