Mike Westbrook: ‘Jazz is freedom of expression’

One of British jazz’s most enduringly experimental, provocative and playful figures, the composer and pianist Mike Westbrook, has finally encountered something that intimidates him: cataloguing his own vast body of work.

For more than 60 years his output has ranged voraciously across small-group jazz and big-band brass, settings for poetry, agitprop extravaganzas, opera and orchestral works. He has spent a lifetime exploring and melding influences as disparate as Duke Ellington and Kurt Weill, Hollywood and Rossini, all with a fearless disregard for convention and boundaries.

So when we meet at Westbrook’s home in Dawlish, a picturesque coastal town in his native Devon, to discuss his forthcoming projects at the 2021 EFG London Jazz Festival, it’s no wonder he admits to a certain lack of progress. “I can’t cope with it all,” he says. “I’ve got a ton of the stuff.”

Westbrook, who turned 85 this year, isn’t noticeably taking it easy, with three different gigs for the LJF. They include a solo, improvised piano performance and a club performance alongside his partner, Kate Westbrook, and her Granite Band of Earth Felt the Wound, a John-Milton inspired lament for a wilfully damaged world.

The centrepiece is a concert hall staging of The Westbrook Blake, whose roots stretch back to Tyger, a riotous 1971 genre-bending collaboration with the poet Adrian Mitchell, who introduced Westbrook to the work of the Victorian poet-radical William Blake.

Mitchell and Westbrook knew each other through the mass of radicalised arts events that bubbled up through the 1960s. Mitchell’s Tyger was commissioned by the National Theatre and ran for six months, with its confrontational mix of cabaret and agitprop theatre riding crazily over live music from Westbrook’s freewheeling pit band that channelled hymnals, music hall and free jazz. “There were actors in riot gear training guns on the audience; Bill Fraser played Mad King George the 50th as a grotesque demagogue,” Westbrook recalls.

It’s the only material we do from way back. Some of [Blake’s] lyrics are very savage

These rearranged Blake songs were slimmed down for the fluctuating personnel of Mike Westbrook’s Brass Band, then expanded for the 1978 one-off show Glad Day, written by Mitchell for Thames TV. In 2018, the Westbrook Blake songs were performed in Moscow, featuring the Moscow College Choir.

“Blake has continued to evolve,” says Westbrook. “It’s the only material we do from way back. Some of [Blake’s] lyrics are very savage. We performed ‘London Song’ [based on Blake’s poem ‘London’] in St Giles church in Soho. You go out and it’s just like that now, people sleeping rough, people going to the opera in evening dress stumbling over poor old drunk people. It hasn’t changed, not really.” 

Blake’s writings on slavery are equally resonant, he adds. “I don’t just mean slavery in the sense of plantations. I mean people in factories, office jobs, or people who are not where they want to be and are being exploited. It goes on everywhere, including poor musicians slogging away in West End shows.”

For the LJF gig, two of the original singers, Phil Minton and Kate Westbrook, join a choir conducted by Paul Ayres and a Westbrook quintet playing new charts for accordion, violin and sax.

It’s around that notion of freedom that, for Westbrook, jazz and Blake combine. “I think that he’s about liberation . . . a kind of freer spiritual life. That’s what jazz stands for, jazz is freedom of expression.” 

Freedom of expression has driven the self-taught Westbrook for most of his adult life. He formed his first band while studying at the Plymouth School of Art; he went to art school quite late “having failed dismally at other things”, and went on to train as an art teacher. But jazz already had him in its grip: “I had this colossal primitive urge to express myself playing trumpet and learning about music on the piano.” 

He moved to London, though, just as many jazz gigs were switching to R&B. “The Marquee Club, then in Oxford Street, [used to have] jazz seven nights a week.” But then Alexis Korner presented a regular night of blues, Mick Jagger came to jam, and suddenly there was nowhere to play. “It was a sea change . . . ” Westbrook and his 11-piece band trailed around far-flung places to play in an interval slot for a fiver. He trained as an art teacher, and combined teaching in the day with low-paid gigs at night.

But, fired by the momentous changes in 1960s American jazz — from John Coltrane, Ornette Coleman, Charles Mingus and Albert Ayler — Westbrook’s writing evolved into a more schematic approach. He investigated new time signatures, explored non-jazz music and combined free improvisation into preset structures. “The real work was not on albums but trying to scrape a band together, trying to scramble some material together.”

In 1969, he received a commission from the Arts Council to write Metropolis. By then he was head of art in a London school — but the £500 award was enough to spur him to quit the classroom. He also collaborated on large-scale events with John Fox and his revolutionary site-specific Welfare State International theatre company — The Apocalyptic High Dive into the Pit of Molten Fire, performed at the Tower of London in 1972, captures the tone.

I’m getting, I think, more accomplished at being able to make things work with very few resources

In 1973, he took to the road with a small group called the Brass Band playing street music “with whatever we could carry”, confirming a turn towards a more theatrical approach. It was at this point that Kate Westbrook joined, adding lyrics, vocals, piccolo and tenor horn. She has been a constant presence and equal collaborator ever since.

And for Westbrook the composer, there remain challenges to relish. “I’m getting, I think, more accomplished at being able to make things work with very few resources,” he says. Jazz remains the driving force, but Westbrook doesn’t want to rule anything out. “I like all genres of music, they are all possible if you know how to use them.”

The Westbrooks kept going through lockdown by posting weekly edits from their archive of filmed performances under the banner of “The Westbrook Jazz Moving Picture Show”. Kate, as much a painter as a musician, is also documenting the resilient melancholy of the lockdown experience on canvas.

“These are different times,” says Westbrook. “Things are in such a state. But we have some very strong material and we will continue to try to respond to the situation we find around us. I just think we’ve got to be out there, in the real world.”

EFG London Jazz Festival runs November 12-21; efglondonjazzfestival.org.uk

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