Back in late 2018 ahead of his Saffron Hall performance, I caught up with the boundary-pushing band-leader to talk Van Morrison, the state of jazz, and being a music fan in the 21st century.
~~ this article is a partial transcript of an interview that was broadcast by Cam FM at 9pm on the 31st October 2018, in conjunction with the Cambridge Jazz Festival. It has been edited for clarity and brevity. ~~
Sidney Franklyn: Orphy’s in Cambridge because he’s doing a jazz - do you wanna talk about it? - a jazz rendition of Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks.
Orphy Robinson: Yeah. It’s been sort of termed as a jazz reinterpretation, but it’s not. It’s like the original; jazz musicians were the musicians that played the album. There was Konnie Kay from the Modern Jazz Quartet, who’d also done Ray Charles and things like that. There was Richard Davis, and he’d done some Eric Dolphy. Warren Smith, who does a lot of things sort of more on the edge. So all the musicians had a different background. And I was just fascinated by this album. They recorded three or four songs on the first day, but the second day was wasted - the difference being that before they’d gone in the evening to record and it just felt right. But on the second day when they’d gone into the studios they went in the morning, and for most musicians the morning doesn’t really exist. It just wasn’t right. And then they went in again on the third day, they recorded the rest of the album and it worked. It absolutely worked. Van Morrison didn’t speak to them much; apparently he went straight into the booth and would basically, you know, strum the beginning of things and then say: “play whatever you hear”. We wanted that thing of the freedom of a jazz musician. There’s a certain amount of freedom that you bring to things.
SF: And you can hear that come through on the record can’t you?
OR: You can really hear that. There’s everything on there. Things are not right at certain stages, but it’s cool, because organically it all works and it’s a sound. It actually sounds like a band, rather than just a bunch of people put together. And that’s hard to do. There’s a fusion of music: folk, touches of jazz, blues. It was really taking a risk at that time, but the music tells you what’s acceptable, what works.
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OR: I was approached to do a tribute to Bobby Hutcherson, and on the night of performing it a friend came along who’d been speaking to me for about three years, saying it’d be great to do an Astral Weeks tribute. I had understood it that he wanted recommendations for people to perform it, but on that night he said: “I really enjoyed what you did with the Bobby Hutcherson, but why would you not have considered doing the Astral Weeks?”. And I said: “I thought you were looking for various people to do it.” And he said: “No, no, I wanted you to do it”. So the penny dropped; I went away and listened to the album for over a month every night. I was there, reading up about things, going through the lyrics, before actually going back to him and saying: “Yes, I am interested in this”. But not in just recreating it exactly as is. We can all do that. It’s to do a response. There’s things there that the musicians hinted at, but we bring them out more.
SF: It’s nice that it’s happened in time with the Cambridge Jazz Festival really getting into the full swing of things. ‘Cause the festival’s very young, it’s only been going since 2014. It’s kind of shocking that this is the first festival in Cambridge of its kind for 45 years, and I was just wondering; for someone who’s had their finger on the pulse of UK jazz for decades now, has jazz always been there, or do you think that this festival is showing that it’s got a new cultural lease?
OR: The parallels are with the 80s. That was a time where we fused other music with the music that we call ‘jazz’. However, jazz has always been a growth, of fusing different elements; we‘ve gone through various different changes, obviously there are so many different types and styles and genres that come under the term ‘jazz’. As we know: one man’s jazz is another man’s folk. So we’ve got now, again, a period with a lot of younger people embracing music, and embracing a fusion of things, maybe more discerning, looking online, finding things and doing the traces, different websites, clicking on things and saying ‘What’s this?’ and ‘What’s that?’. And they will come up with their own version of what can be termed as ‘jazz’. And that’s how it always is ‘cause that’s how the music’s gonna go forward. It’s not gonna stay as one particular thing. We need to go forward, and we need for people to always be grabbing everything and throwing it up in the air and seeing what comes out of that. And if that attracts people that are coming there because it's in fashion or whatever that’s all good. It doesn’t matter as long as their coming through the door, and as long as, for me, they go away having had a good time, or not having a good time or just being made to think. As long as there’s some sort of reaction.
SF: A love of music is a love of music.
OR: That’s right, yeah.
SF: I’ve always thought, listening to your stuff, you’ve been someone who’s always been open to embrace new sounds and new styles into your music. It’s very much more important that the spirit of jazz remains, rather than a particular sound, as is natural for any genre to evolve and grow as the decades go on.
OR: Yeah! I taught quite a lot at a venue in London called the Hackney Empire and it had a program we put together, whereby we taught music. But it wasn’t really ‘teaching’ music, it was more an appreciation for different types of music and for different ways of writing. I deliberately didn’t teach jazz; whatever they were in to, whether it was hip hop, grime, whatever, that was fine. ‘Cause it was all music. I didn’t force jazz on them. I just forced the thing of ‘have a go’.
SF: A kind of approach?
OR: Yeah, have a go! And you know we can break things down, we can look at why something’s termed a ‘polka’ or a ‘waltz’, they’re all mechanics. But they’re all language, that’s just looking at different languages that you use. Hip hop and rap guys, they’re more attuned to the jazz sensibilities of using sounds and words to tell a story. They are the libretto’s of tomorrow. And it’s up to us, the audience, to go with that and decide what we like. And if we don’t like it, that’s all good! We haven’t got to love everything. That’s fine!
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SF: I remember seeing a Facebook comment a couple of weeks ago, it was this whole war of arguing about what the best decade of music was. And then there was this one comment that silenced them all, that said: “The best musical decade to live in is this one because you get to listen to all the others”. Back in the day you’d go to a club to seek out that specific style of music, but now, since the rise of the internet, those genre boundaries have broken down, like you were saying. I completely agree with you in that it’s a good thing and that the response to the music is more important than crystallising a particular sound as if its sacred.
OR: Yes, without a doubt. I’ve always liked pushing the boundaries. For me, it’s always good just to see what that process and what that meeting of things is, and what comes out of that. We’re lucky now, also having gone into the 21st century we have all these other means of attracting audiences or audiences being exposed to things that would’ve been really difficult to be exposed to before. Vinyl’s coming back, which is great. But what I also think is incredible is that now you can have your own record shop online. You can have these amazing websites like Bandcamp, and Soundcloud, and Mixcloud - all these different places you can go. And you can go “yeah, I like that actually”. That’ll go straight to the artist. Or I can go to some bigger ones where the artist gets hardly anything.
SF: Yeah, I was about to ask you. As many pros as there are to this kind of saturation of genres, with the internet age, what are your thoughts on Spotify, in a nutshell? What are your thoughts on mass music streaming? Because, I don’t know, speaking to other young people I find there is still a kind of ‘album’ cult-following. People who really love music do seek it out, but that idea of the benefits going straight to the artist, I feel is slightly lost with streaming services like Spotify.
OR: Things have changed drastically from how they were. We saw Pharrell [Williams] put up his financial statement from some of these streaming services, and he’d had a huge hit with ‘Happy’ I think it was. And I forget how many millions accessed his music through one of these streaming services. But you saw how much he was paid … pffft. Yeah, it definitely didn’t add up. And he’s a known artist! Imagine all these other artists that are nowhere near that.
SF: I remember reading this scandal that Spotify got exposed to. You know they’ve got those big genre playlists? They had this one for ambient music, and they got in trouble because instead of putting actual ambient artists on the playlists, and playing them - well as you said they completely underpay people anyway - but paying them what they should be, they were hiring really small people to create their own ambient music for Spotify specifically, and then paying them even less to avoid paying distinguished artists. I just thought it was so laughable almost, so Black Mirror, to be manipulating what people are listening to without them even realising it.
OR: That’s right. There’s a lot of different things going on that will come to light. So there’s that side. But there’s lots of good things about the internet as well. I did a concert with an American musician called Wadada Leo Smith. And when we came out onstage, he asked the audience: “Is anybody going to film it and put some stuff up on YouTube?” And you could see the audience go ‘errrrrr’ and he said: “No please do! I was kinda forgotten ‘til people started discovering me on YouTube,” he said, “and that’s how I get my gigs.” That’s why I’m here now, why you know about me; it’s because people have seen things online and gone ‘I wanna see that. Let’s go and check that out’. So some great things have happened …
Orphy Robinson is an award-winning British jazz multi-instrumentalist known predominantly for his vibraphone work. In a distinguished career spanning several decades, Robinson released several acclaimed albums as a bandleader during the 1990s on Blue Note, in addition to playing with musicians such as Don Cherry, David Murray, Henry Threadgill, Courtney Pine, Jazz Warriors and Andy Shepherd. He has composed for film and television including 'In Answer To Your Question' for the Balanescu String Quartet and '42 Shades of Black' for Phoenix Dance Theatre, which was performed at the 1996 Olympic Games in Atlanta. In 2018 he was awarded with an MBE for his services to music.
