Mike Gibbs Band

Just Ahead (Beat Goes On Records)

IN the ’60s and ’70s exiled African jazz musicians had a powerful and profound effect on the progress of British jazz.

While the refugee Blue Notes from South Africa — Dudu Pukwana, Mongezi Feza, Johnny Dyani, Chris McGregor and Louis Moholo — spread their sounds among London-based progressive jazz artistes with an incendiary influence, another brilliant musical head, a white African, born in colonial Rhodesia in 1937, Mike Gibbs also brought his own original jazz genius, immersed in both African and US traditions, to stir into the mix.

Gibbs took a circuitous route to London. He came via the Berklee School of Music in Boston, Massachusetts, where he prospered under the tutelage of mentor Herb Pomeroy between 1959 and ’63 and the Lenox School of Jazz run by John Lewis, pianist of the Modern Jazz Quartet, where he studied alongside fellow trombonist and great bop pioneer JJ Johnson.

Gibbs returned to Rhodesia, but left when the draft threatened, to South Africa. He found himself “so against the scene there” that he moved on again.So he arrived in London already with a host of musical influences and, as trumpeter Ian Carr once wrote of him, he was ever open to more.

“Mike Gibbs listens to and learns from ‘straight’ music, pop, rock, jazz and anything else that, as he puts it, catches his ear.”

By the late ’60s his compositional and band-leading prowess had come well to the fore, and the ebullient album Just Ahead, recorded from four consecutive nights at Ronnie Scott’s in May 1972, shows his big band alive and thriving with some of Britain’s finest horns, including trumpeters Kenny Wheeler, Henry Lowther and Harry Beckett, trombonists Chris Pyne and Malcolm Griffiths, and saxophonists Stan Sulzmann, Ray Warleigh and Alan Skidmore. Roy Babbington is on bass, John Marshall on drums, Chris Spedding on guitar and electric sitar and Frank Ricotti plays vibes.

All of them were definitely up for it, and Ronnie’s was throbbing and bouncing all that week.

The opener, Grow Your Own, has some Africa-fermented motifs, surging rhythms and roaring ensembles, not unlike some of those themes from McGregor’s Brotherhood of Breath rampaging big band, before Spedding flies out of the horns, his strings palpitating.

Three is almost all Warleigh, fecund and lyrical over the blues-inspired colorations of the other combined horns and Marshall’s presiding drums.

Country Roads, described by Gibbs as “country and western blues,” has an astonishing rock-oriented solo by Spedding and Dave MacRae’s electric piano spitting out its notes.

Trumpeters Lowther and Wheeler step up for Carla Bley’s Mother of the Dead Man, encircling its slow, serpentine theme with beauty and watchfulness as it grows louder and stronger.

Skidmore is the protagonist of Just A Head, with Babbington’s plunging bass and Marshall’s crashing drums urging him on as he plays faster and faster, unleashing chorus after chorus of raw and passionate sound for 10 tempestuous minutes.

Nowhere was written for the US civil rights activist and co-ordinator of the voter registration campaign in Mississippi, Bob Moses, now being played in the heart of Soho.

A gently percussive beginning breaks into a series of solemn, collective horn chords before Marshall’s drums and pounding, booming and splashing cymbals carry the band in huge and wild fanfares to its denouement.

Another Carla Bley piece, Sing Me Softly of the Blues, opens the road for Stan Sulzmann’s muscular and deep-throated tenor, followed by a long and discovering vibes solo by Ricotti, echoing through Ronnie’s rafters, its phrases supported and prompted by the band’s ensemble arms.

Griffiths’s growling bass trombone introduces the 21 minutes of So Long Gone with Spedding’s twanging electric sitar chords closely following, before Pyne’s mournful slides hold the centre.

It is an astonishing big band performance of both time and place — disciplined yet wild with sublimated emotion, its ensembles tightly woven, its soloists, like Pyne and MacRae with his razored electric piano choruses rise almost like nature itself from its fertile soil in the midst of a great European city’s hard and tarmacked streets.

Then as the African rhythms come bursting out, the singular cosmos of the musical mind of their maestro, steeped in the sonic traditions of three continents is marvellously manifest.