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| HOW WE MET: JAMES TAYLOR & NITIN |
'We had such different cultural backgrounds, yet there were such similiarities' Published: 13 May 2007 James Taylor, 42, is the leader of the James Taylor Quartet, the influential and prolific band at the forefront of the acid jazz movement. His new outfit is called James Taylor's 4th Dimension. He grew up in Rochester, Kent, where he lives with his family. Nitin and I both went to the local grammar school in Rochester, Kent. We met when we were in the first year. We were both pretty good boys at school, quite studious and fairly quiet and I was often drawn to the music department because there were four piano rooms side by side. There would usually be people doing scales or whatever in there, but one lunchtime there was this amazing sound coming out of one of the music rooms, I think it was some Scott Joplin. I turned the corner and there was this little Indian guy playing piano incredibly fast, up and down the keyboard. I tapped on the door and introduced myself. We had a little chat and from then on we had more little chats from time to time. I have three brothers, two older and one younger and they had a band at the time. My uncle also had a band, a kind of Hammond funk band, so I was also drawn to performing. As time went on, Nitin showed me some things on the piano that I found useful - bluesy stuff - and we started making music together at his house or at mine. We came from such different cultural backgrounds, yet there were such similarities. We had an interesting fusion of ideas straightaway. Nitin had a way of recording stuff using a two-track tape recorder and there was a piano, a sitar and a tabla. There have been gaps when we haven't been in touch for a few years, but unlike with other friends from school, music is always this hook-up point for us. I'm increasingly interested in psychoanalysis, and whenever we meet up, as well as us both talking about music, I do a lot of talking about psychotherapy as well. I can spot Nitin's music a mile away - it gives me the same feeling that I had the first time I went round his house. It's a sense of being in his family house when he was growing up, meeting his mum and dad and feeling a sense of calmness. Those very early days are the thing that I find most inspiring about my friendship with Nitin. I remember him coming to my house and my brothers and my uncle being there and Nitin practising guitar at break-neck speed and everyone in the other room saying "Can you hear that?" - it was so impressive. When we get together we talk about our lives, our relationships; there's quite a parallel process going on. If we didn't know each other, we'd still have both been doing a week at the Jazz Café ¡t Christmas, concurrently. I guess the music scene in London is fairly small but that seems more than just coincidental. And that started when we were 11, or at least that's what I believe. Nitin Sawhney, 43, is a producer, songwriter, DJ and composer. He grew up in Rochester and studied law at Liverpool University before dropping out. His 1999 breakthrough album, Beyond Skin, was nominated for the Mercury Music Prize. He lives alone in south London. I remember seeing James in the music rooms at school and being really impressed by the fact that he could play a blues walking bass really well. Those rooms were a strange place - I ended up getting banned from using them. I was playing Indian classical ragas and you were supposed to have sheet music. One of the teachers came in and had an issue with the fact that I didn't have any sheet music in front of me. But I think that the best music that came out of those rooms was when people were improvising or jamming or just mucking around. James was part of a very popular band around the Medway Towns at the time, called The Prisoners; in fact, the James Taylor Quartet came out of that band. I've got tons of fond memories of James. I remember us going on this really big trip to our local music shop to get James a keyboard and it was a big deal because we were going to get this keyboard and then become a really fantastic band. We used to play in his garage. The whole things about music is that it breaks down barriers; we immediately had that common interest and could empathise with the way each other was listening to music. We could connect a lot better than other kids of our age could. When I first saw him play with The Prisoners after we'd left school I was really amazed because the way he came on stage was so casual and I hadn't seen anything like that before. I thought that you had to present yourself in a certain way, but instead everyone came on and it just looked like they were going for a drink. And then this amazing music came on and the crowd went bonkers. It was such a buzz. Whatever James does he attacks with conviction and passion and lots of enthusiasm. I think he's retained that from childhood - the best people do retain their inner child. He's very loyal to friendship, to his music and to his family - he's a very devoted father. Over the years he's developed in so many ways. He uses the insight that he gets from music through his whole life, and applies it to so many parts of his life. It's led him to psychoanalysis and he's been on a really interesting personal journey that's been inspiring to watch. I believe in the philosophy that events can conspire to create parallel journeys. There's a notion in quantum physics called entanglement where particles can have similar movement no matter how far apart they are. People's lives can take parallel journeys, and I think that's the case with us. |
| We're jammin': James Taylor Quartet |
'If it's great, it's amazing; if it's bad, you die a thousand deaths' Pascal Wyse with the James Taylor Quartet |
From The Guardian - Friday January 13, 2006 No wonder James Taylor needs a little lie down: he's about to play his 125th gig at London's Jazz Cafe. That's his 125th just in this venue; the grand total would need to take in to account that his band is celebrating its 20th anniversary this year, releasing its 20th album, and keeps up a tour diary of up to 100 shows a year. "Yeah, if it's alright with you, I'll put my head down," he says, before the rest of his Funk Orchestra (the expanded version of the James Taylor Quartet) arrive. Oh, and by the way, James is also training to be a psychotherapist, but more on that when he wakes up. |
The easiest way to get James Taylor in to most people's heads is to say "Starsky and Hutch" and "Hammond organ". If they took enough acid jazz in the 1990s they will crouch down and scope the dancefloor with a pretend shooter as if you had just shouted: "Cover me! I'm off to the bar." Or you could mention that James was one of the Prisoners, and has played for the Wonderstuff, Manic Street Preachers, the Pogues and U2. Earlier on the evening of the gig he shows me round the Hammond. With its massive Lesley (a spinning speaker housed in a wooden cabinet), and imposing casework, the instrument looks like a kind of pulpit. "It does become part of you - a big instrument that you get locked in. The Lesley is spinning, the valves are burning away and there's a real excitement to all that." The late synthesizer pioneer Robert Moog felt sure that machines have consciousness, and James is getting more and more in to this line of thinking, partly because he is very influenced by Carl Jung. "Jung became very interested in the connection between mind and matter when he discovered Wolfgang Pauli's work with light photons being influenced by human consciousness," he says. The Pauli Effect, in fact, refers to the mysterious failure of technical equipment in the presence of certain people. "I've definitely seen that in the studio." He demonstrates the Hammond sound. "All you are doing is building intensity. You start off with a flat sound and you are pumping the volume pedal to build intensity, then at a certain point you kick in the vibrato, then at some point switch on the Lesley - a devastating final kind of smack round the head. To get the timing of that right you have to clock the reaction of the audience to work out when and how - a million things to consider. "We've been accused of being retro, using old-fashioned instruments, but we're doing it in quite an aggressive modern way. Jimmy Smith and those other artists don't play the way we play. We try to rip it up and really go for it, as in a bunch of geezers who listened to the Sex Pistols when they were growing up, rather than ... I dunno what!" Cocktail jazz? "Yeah." Later, in the dressing room, the band is gathering and James is coming round. The venue is packed and boisterous; and with its balconies it is like a fishbowl, with the audience above, below and behind you: "They can be a tough crowd here. When it's great, it's amazing; if it's bad, you die a thousand deaths." But there are no casualties, even on the mean streets of Starsky and Hutch. The band's impressive live reputation holds fast - like the Hammond organ, it takes jazz and funk and gives it a righteous, spinning roar. I join in on a tune called The Exorcism. I try to build a solo up slowly; it's all too easy to peak too soon and blow it, especially if you don't do this 100 tines a year. But it's no good: the band comes up behind like an overtaking juggernaut and someone roars in the crowd, which I take as permission to basically play, well, random loud notes; as Chris Morris once wrote: "A bomb made of jazz and feathers." "Nice one, mate," says one of the trumpet players. "Better than my journalism anyway." James presides calmly over the party behind his machinery, letting the crowd come to him - pedals pumping, speakers spinning, like a little factory. After the gig some of the band head in to the crowd for some of what James, these days, doesn't do: "I had an alcohol problem and went into therapy for it. I was too ambitious. An ambitious man is a man who is open to whatever schemes will help him. He becomes a puppet. Now my approach to music is more pure. Music is an aspect of my life that is creative, enjoyable and healthy rather than a means to an end." So what were those ends? James laughs: "Oh, God, the usual stuff men want. Women, mainly - and power, and money. Pleasure! I felt I needed to get out. I wanted the band to gig hard and tour hard - we still do - that feeling of just heading off on the road. It's a massive draw. But when you are touring America, for six or seven weeks, that process can eat in to your head quite a lot. You play New York or LA or San Francisco, they are well attended. But out in the backwaters, you're literally playing to two geezers who are there to see the other James Taylor, you know? Who then leave! So you're drinking hard to cope with that. And taking drugs. Then two days, see the family, and off again for six weeks. You love it. But too much. "A friend of mine, Billy Childish - a rock'n'roll guitarist who influenced people like the White Stripes - had been an alcoholic and said, you can't deal with it on your own. I got over the alcohol and drug addiction thing and decided to take it further and go into psychoanalysis. That was back in 1998. Later I enrolled on some courses." He is now starting to work with clients. "I wouldn't want to just do music, I wouldn't want to just do therapy. What was unhealthy was this monotheistic approach. Funny, my placement on the course is with addicts - I've changed chairs basically." · The James Taylor Funk Orchestra will be playing this year's Cheltenham Jazz festival on April 28 |
| SWING AMONG THE CHAVTASTIC BLING BLING |
Ignore thise whining retailers and their lowest ever christmas sales figure. A high percentage of the couples at the jazz cafe the other night were too preoccupied with their new toys to enjoy the music. Miniature coloured screens glimmered in all directions as diners and dancers captured each others' latest jewellery and evening wear on their mega-pixelled digital cameras,or videoed the band with their state of the art cameraphones. More sensitive souls might have been dazzled by the combined bling of this chavtastic lightshow, but not the James Taylor Quartet. Clubland favourites who have courted glamour for years, they are now a hard edged outfit with more than enough hammond organised power to grab the attention of the most indifferent audience. Their recordings tend to be cheesey affairs, featuring overblown guest stars like Tom Jones and Tina Turner and such glossy movie theme covers such as mission impossible and Starsky and Hutch, but live on stage they pack a genuinely solid punch. Imagine Jimmy Smith doing Jesus Christ Superstar with all the big band fervour of his Verve records period the shrieking, unsubtle but exciting sound generated by Taylor, a master og the controlled keyboard smear. With much head nodding and the meaty support of drummer Neil Robinson, Fender bassist Gary Crockett and nimble, country and western forged guitarist Chris Bestwick, the Medway Monarch romped through a series of minor key boogaloo numbers that saw energetic girls free-bopping amid the dancefloor crowd. During their xmas week residencey Taylor's core quartet are bolstered by the two man brass section of tenorist John Willmott and trumpeter Graeme Flowers, a forceful, no nonsense pair supplying crisp backing riffs. Flowers is better known for his work with the quintet led by Kyle Eastwood, Clint's bass playing son. Willmott, very sure of his King Curtis licks, also doubled on flute arrangements tightly rehearsed right dwn to those sudden stops known in the trade as brick-wall endings. Something essential was missing, though. A band as brash as this cried out for a frontal figure to give the show proper visual and aural focus, and nearly an hour had elapsed before they finally produced one in the athletic shape of Yvonne Yanney.Not until her songs - Its All Over , Without You, Feel the Earth Move, Love the Life - did the band come fully alive, Yvonne's sassy vocals joined the dots between jazz-funk and soul-showbiz school of James Brown, a theatrical area which is the JTQ's natural home. Jack Massarik, Evening Standard, 31st December 2004 |
| THE OSCILLATOR LAUNCH GIG |
JTQ will be playing The Mean Fiddler in London on 12th September. This is THE OSCILLATOR album official launch gig so be there!!! |
| Hammond Tuition & booking JTQ for live gigs |
If anyone is interested in Hammond tuition please email James for more details. If you're interested in booking JTQ for live gigs please email gigenquiries@jtq.co.uk |
| THE OSCILLATOR - New Album! |
The new album was released on 28th April 2003 and JTQ are touring too. Check out the Tour Dates page for more details. Click here for a taster of 'The Millionaire'. |
| Read James Taylor's Jazzwise interview |
Selwyn Harris interviewed James Taylor for the July 2002 issue of Jazzwise. His interview appears on the JTQ website courtesy of Jazzwise. |
| Swinging London |
In a sense JTQ have come full circle with “Swinging London”. Easily their most lost-in-time release since “Mission Impossible”. Kicking off with the anchor track “Mister Twister”, this is a hip upbeat number bringing back fond memories of “Whipped Cream And Other Delights” and “Peter Gunn”. |
What strikes me about this album is its flow is without comparison. The first 4 tracks are light and feel good, “Do It” almost gives me goose bumps it’s so bouncy. Definitely dig the Schifrin meets Smith vibes. Then with “The Scene” it gets really dirty, and I’m a total sucker for blues harmonica (“Blues Stomp”), some more Smithisms on “The Block” trick you into anticipating being brought down a notch on “Weekender”, but the guttural guitar and organ won’t let you off so easy! But suddenly there you are with a Beatle-ish sitar and some happy hands (“Stand Up”) and some easy flute and sneaky bongos (“Return of the Hipster”), and a groovy re-build with “Zoot Suit”. “Faster Pussycat” digs in with a final helping of super-hammond with enough reverb to peel the latex off your go-go boots. |
This sucker is short, like finishing your popcorn during the trailers, but that only means that you can get a replay that much faster. Thanks to JTQgroove |
