A new, local, ultra-specialised record label, Sam? Quite sure about that?

Record labels are risky ventures... but this one has an impressive ace up its sleeve

So here we are, well into the internet age, with all the upheavals that the web has meant for recorded music. This has been picked over and dissected on this blog several times. 

The general consensus? The web has returned music makers to a state of penury and servitude not known for over a century. Music flows everywhere, regardless of who has the rights to it. This is nothing new: when Mozart staged his own concerts – he was a star pianist, the best in Vienna at the time – people in the audience transcribed every note. His work was available on the street the next day. And Mozart, in turn, was not above lifting other people's ideas without credit. 

So my general reaction, when I hear of a new record label, especially a label that deals with specialist, adventurous and demanding music, at a time when returns from recordings have hit an all time low, is to wish the people behind it well... and then ask if they are quite in their right minds. 

Sam Slater, on tour with TG Collective

Sam Slater, of TG collective and Stoney Lane, was remarkably cheerful when I threw this question at him.

"I think it's a natural progression for the scene here, almost what the area needs, in the genres that we're working in: Jazz, Classical and various 'World'-related music.  If you look at several major cities around the country: Manchester have one or two artist-led jazz-based labels that have done really well, and really pushed some of their artists internationally; Edition Records grew out of Cardiff and has a great vibe and quality of output; in London there's two or three...... "

...which doesn't surprise me. I'm not disputing the range of talent that you can draw on. We know that there's brilliant talent in the Midlands. The question I really need to ask you is – can this enterprise wash its face? It has to be daunting.

"Absolutely! But not so much daunting as exciting - we've been successful in releasing TG Collective recordings in the past, so I think when the music and personalities are interesting enough, the live side of things is original, dynamic and varied, and the promotion intelligent, people will still listen and buy an awful lot of music. Just that now it is consumed and sold over many more types of media and formats, and you have to be on top of them all, consistently.  Everything has to be of a very high quality, so the music, production, artwork and physical product of everything we release will be just that!  Silly as it sounds, 'success' will not necessarily be solely about financial gain, as a label or as an artist - if it helps to push careers, new artistic directions, opportunities and projects, great happenings, more national and international prominence for the musicians and scene here, and not losing much money in the process, then we're on the right track."

So Sam's not daunted. The label has sprung from the fact that there are maybe half a dozen people thinking of releasing, or ready to release, albums in the region. Kindred souls, ready to go. So why not create a focal point for all this?. 

"There's us – TG Collective, Percy Pursglove who has a fantastic project, there's Lluis Mather with an album done and ready; there's the Mike Fletcher Trio who are putting an album out in January. Chris Mapp's Gambol has recorded too."

"What happens in the Jazz world is – you release an album, you don't really tell anybody, you're a little bit embarrassed. You've made some wonderful music, and you occasionally sell a copy or two for whatever somebody will give you at a gig, in a pub, twice a year.... "

Sam's got a point. Musicians are not necessarily the best at self-promotion. The more involved, the more demanding the music, the more business issues can retreat to the background – often with disastrous long-term financial consequences. 

Jazz record labels have never existed as serious money-making enterprises – but they can be very effective career platforms and reputation-builders. Blue Note, which is celebrating 75 years of often precarious, hand to mouth existence, helped dozens of great musos get stated: Jimmy Smith, Herbie Hancock, Thelonious Monk, Art Blakey, Miles Davis... the list goes on for pages. But it's worth noting, too, that in their early days, before they were absorbed into a conglomerate, that their sessions were recorded live, improvised, and straight to stereo: one take stuff, with no corrections. And that's about as cheap as you can make it when recording Jazz. 

That sort of approach isn't how Stoney Lane will do things in the 21st century. 

"It's more of a collective support thing for everyone on the label. We're all doing this, so let's use this to point to the collective talent here."

You guys can take months, years to get the result you want. Are we talking about Stoney Lane picking up on finished works, acting as a distributor rather than a commissioning label?

"Initially, mostly yes, although the time it takes to record will really vary depending on the band, orchestration, complexity and their ideas for the vibe of the recording. We've got no serious money, as is always the way.  Most of the projects are recorded. Mike's had already been recorded. Lluis – I think he did a couple of days live studio recording, and a live performance recording with that band, and Chris did something similar.  So in some shape or form, all of the albums have been funded – self-funded in many cases; a bit of sponsorship and artist grant support here and there.." 

So far so good. But that doesn't allow for really big, ambitious projects. Listen to this early sketch of an extraordinary work from Percy Pursglove. I think it is amazing, fresh and ambitious. You can find it on the Stoney Lane Soundcloud page:

"When I first heard this, I found it really, really exciting. But that's a big, big project of you want to do it right. The album we will hopefully do, if ECM doesn't pick it up first, which would be wonderful, by the way... will be one from Percy Pursglove. He came to the end of a fellowship project which produced a piece, about a month ago, called 'Far Reaching Dreams Of Mortal Souls'... which was pretty heavy." 

I think it's breathtaking; absolutely wonderful. I wouldn't call it Jazz, though.

"No! This the exciting thing that I like about the label. I'm not shy to have it as a Jazz-based label, because that's what's here. But in time it would be great to branch out. Percy's is a mix of jazz and classical contemporary composition. It's composed for a choir and a seven or eight piece jazz band with space for improvisation within the work. It's all written around famous speeches and quotations from historical figures. We've got a nice live recording, but that's the first outing of the work. They had one day to rehearse it. The reviews are wonderful."

If that's a first recording, then the piece is very likely going to evolve and shake down.

"Probably, But now we've got the small tasks of raising funds to record it properly. With that many people and that level of musician involved, we're talking a fair amount to record it." 

Ouch, You'll have to bring in a lot of kit – a decent digital desk, a lot of mics, and a seriously good engineer. And you'll need a place with great acoustics, to house maybe forty or fifty musicians and singers. I can see why money is an issue. 

"We may have the venue, and we have the engineer. The guy who recorded the last TG Collective CD – Alejandro Merola – he's done a lot of work with us already. He recorded Percy live, and his attention to detail is way above and beyond." 

So it's really down to finance

"Yes. We're looking at a mixture of crowdfunding, and maybe grant bodies. Three or four different pots of funds."

The label has grown from the existing Stoney Lane operation. TG Collective's last album, 'Release The Penguins' came out on a Stoney Lane 'label' because it made sense. But now it's rather more ambitious. Distribution is sorted; promotion, where funds allow, is in place. But the big ambitious project is Percy Pursglove's. That's at least a year away, but what a goal to shoot for! I wish them all the success in the world. 

And if it does pay off, they there's a new Birmingham focal point for some very adventurous music-making.

Links
Stoney Lane Records website

The roster
TG Collective
Lluis Mather  Chris Mapp  Mike Fletcher
Percy Pursglove

See more posts on music business and infrastructure on Radio To Go

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We do it because we love it. All you have to do is find it

Great, unusual music, there to be explored and enjoyed. Free. Bring your curiosity and a sense of adventure.

Zirak Hamad plays the Daff hand-drum. Amazingly.

I first met Zirak Hamad at one of Paul Murphy’s Songwriters Café sessions. Zirak is a lovely guy, irrepressibly enthusiastic, and a terrific musician. He has a hair-raising background, which makes his current situation all the more remarkable. Zirak is largely responsible for a fascinating new musical development in Balsall Heath, an inner city part of Birmingham: Musikstan, which, every other Thursday, gathers musicians to play together from, literally, around the world. It runs on love and goodwill. 

Entry is free, but you really should make a contribution when they pass the hat around; there are musicians' expenses to pay and the event has running costs to cover. Zirak’s music is great – there’s a Musikstan clip or two to enjoy after the jump. And while it’s a worldwide music thing, chances are you’ll catch some delicious local musical collaborations, as some of Birmingham's finest have started to drop by.


Zirak’s Musikstan gigs are by no means the only music gatherings in town that run on similar lines. Once a month on Sunday afternoons on Moseley, you can catch stunning musicianship, organised by the magnificent percussionist Joelle Barker at the Dance Workshop. On top of that, the City centre Island Bar hosts the Free Love Club, an all-dayer of a folk-ish bent, for free, on Sundays; Sue Fear’s Moseley’s Muso Monday, also (logically) on Monday nights, works on the same principle, there are regular gatherings of different music stripes at the Tower Of Song; and of course there are many more such events.  If I've missed yours out, I apologise - but please do let me know for future reference. 

Here's Zirak, at Musikstan, tearing it up on the Daff hand-drum. I recorded this in September.


Zirak kicked off Musikstan in March of this year. It’s got a clear and simple goal.

Zirak Hamad: Musikstan is about sharing and bringing people together. The business side of music is important, but having music just for music’s sake is important too.  A friend of mine, Andrew Bland, invited us to play at the Old Print Works, and accompanied us on piano.  And it gave me an idea to do something regular. So that’s how it started. Musikstan is based on bringing different musicians together, from different backgrounds and different styles. People are able to ask questions about the music, about the backgrounds and the styles of each type of music. 

In the six months since you started, how has the network of musicians developed, with different people coming in to play?

To start, because I’m a musician, I can bring in many musicians that I know. But then word got out – word of mouth – about Musikstan. Session by session, it developed; musicians contacted me to come and play. We keep it very informal. Musicians are invited to join us, and we leave time for the audience to ask them questions at the end of their set.  We aim to have one musician from Birmingham, and one from outside of the area, because we want musicians to meet and exchange ideas and music, and play together. 

What about your own music?

I have a Kurdish band, and I also have a band called Village Well, which has an Indian tabla player, and a Caribbean steel pan player. I also play in a gypsy band with an Albanian and a Romanian musician…. 

Tell me about your band Village Well….? 

We got the idea in 2010, with a Khora player, me on violin, and Indian Tabla from Pritham Singh. Unfortunately, the Khora player, who lives in London, could not stay with the band, so we added Norman Stewart on Steel Pan instead. This brings all kinds of people together.  Some Kurdish people might come to see me, and Indian people because of Pritham… and Caribbean people because of Norman. So we really are bringing people together through music. 

If you went back to the old country now, after your years in the UK, what would happen? How would people react to you?

Kurdistan has changed a lot since Saddam Hussein’s regime. Kurdish people are more open-minded now. When I went back, I was made very welcome. When I left Kurdistan, I had 24 hours. I found out that a friend of mine – who was working with the Intelligence services under cover – that the next day, they were coming to arrest me, and god knows what would have happened to me afterwards.

So it was: don’t go to work tomorrow, and sort yourself out to get away, because everything was going to end for me. I left Kurdistan straight away. After ten o’clock, they went to my house, and my family said they didn’t know where I was. And that was the truth – they didn’t know where I was, or how I had left. I went to Iran, and then to Turkey, and then  in the end I came to England.

Are your family …OK?

They weren’t. They arrested them and tried to force them to tell where I was. But they didn’t know, because I didn’t tell them what I was doing. So the secret police accepted this - in the end. Now, after Saddam ‘s regime, they’re all right. We have our own government; people are more liberal, and more free…

Did you come to the UK and claim asylum? 

Yes, they gave me asylum. I had to pay a smuggler to get me to the UK. My family supported me, though friends, not directly. We couldn’t use the phone or anything like that….  

So this must have cost your family a fortune in the end.

About 8000 dollars. That’s a lot of money in Kurdistan. 

It’s an extraordinary story, but Zirak might well say that everyone is extraordinary. Now settled in Birmingham, Zirak runs school workshops in middle eastern dance and  music. In 2003, he organised a Kurdish band: Daholl Kurdish Ensemble, as Birmingham didn't have any Kurdish musicians at the time. And his dream is to see Muzikstan become a world music festival in the UK. 

So now he’s  back doing what he loves, which is making music, and working with other musicians. And, as always, this being a Birmingham thing, there’s a lot of collaboration. Paul Murphy has played at Musikstan, as has Joelle Barker, and there’s some mighty collaborations planned for the future. Live, experimental cross-cultural collaborations in an intimate acoustic environment: it’s not something you can bottle. You have to experience it. . Long may it continue

Links: 

Muso Mondays at the Station, King's Heath, Birmingham

Tower Of Song -

Songwriters Café 

Urban Folk Quartet; TG Collective. Two GREAT bands. Folk, Jazz, Latin, World. Your call.

New CDs launching this and next month. Shared musicians and connections. Academic rigour, passion and skill. 

New nujazzfolk albums abound in Birmingham this spring. They’re all different, but with common threads. The musicians all work with each other, for a start. Tracking who plays where is bewildering. It’s musical promiscuity of the highest order, and as always with promiscuous behaviour – let’s put this delicately - cross pollination will take place. I think I’ll stop exploring that analogy any further before I get into trouble. 

Both bands here are as much into Jazz as they are Folk. The key is experimentation, adventure, and a lot of fun on the side. The danger is that we take this brave and appealing work for granted. Please, don’t ever do that. Savour it; appreciate it, support it if you like; but don’t take it for granted.  


Urban Folk Quartet

UFQ: Broughton, Trigas, Moon and Chapman

Less than three years ago, UFQ – short for Urban Folk Quartet - didn’t officially exist. Three albums on, they’re one of the guvnor UK folk bands. They set a fearsome standard, effortlessly winning must-book status on folk and festival circuits across the UK and Europe. Teaching forms a large part of their background, the widest of wide musical experiences another, jaw-dropping technical skills a third, and genial enthusiasm and experimentation a fourth. 

I caught their first two gigs – opening for Jo Hamilton at the Glee Club in Birmingham City centre, and their official lunch at the Cross in Moseley. Both were lovely, musicianly, powerful, confident affairs. I loved them, but I wondered then how they would fare. I didn’t have to worry. For a brand new operation, they’ve done really rather well…

“We were quite careful about when we became a brand new operation”, explains UFQ cajonista Tom Chapman. “We probably did a little bit more prep and rehearsal before we started gigging. After our first Birmingham gigs, we headed out to Belgium, Spain and Italy. It’s always been part of the ethos of the band to try and get work abroad. With Joe and Paloma s' histories, having travelled widely and built up some ready made connections, that’s how that part of things came together”. 

It doesn’t hurt that they’re well connected. Joe Broughton teaches at Birmingham Conservatoire, of which more later, and he and Paloma Trigas teach at the Guildhall School in London. Tom also works with Joe for Music For Youth, and at the Barbican in London. So there is a certain academic cast to the band. Frank Moon, the fourth member of the band also teaches, has probably played in more bands in Birmingham than anyone else (of course, maybe you know better) .and is an examiner; and they all teach workshops too.

“Joe and I do a workshop called Folkworld in Devon, which is rather fun. Joe led a group at the Last Night of the School proms, with Music For Youth. They let me play cowbell…  The workshops are all about live music and getting kids going, getting them really excited about music. We don’t use any notated music at all. No music stands… everyone’s standing up ”

Tom’s background includes the excellent Old Dance School, who are also about to release a new CD, and session work with Katrina Gilmore and Jamie Roberts, TG Collective… and a lot of jazz. In fact, many of the nufolk musicians I’ve talked to recently are also seriously into jazz. So this is where I shot myself down in flames: 

Why do you think the Folk scene is so much healthier than the jazz scene?

"Oooh. That’s an interesting one. It depends on how you define ‘healthy’. The jazz scene in Birmingham is amazing; there are so many people playing. It’s harder to create a full-time career out of it." 

Who would you cite as doing really interesting jazz in Birmingham at the moment?

“Michael Fletcher is really good. He runs a night at the Spotted Dog in Digbeth, every Tuesday. The bands that he gets up, every week, are fantastic. He’s a really good example of a graduate musician (from Birmingham Conservatoire) who’s doing really well. And Soweto Kinch, obviously. He’s someone who has managed to have a bit more mainstream success.… “

UFQ’s Birmingham CD launch gig is right at the beginning of the March tour, March 3rd at The Yardbird. While you’re waiting, here’s something from 'Off Beaten Tracks' to whet your appetite.

Rosiña's Story by The Urban Folk Quartet

On Saturday 3rd March, UFQ played a scorching and very showy set at the Yardbird in Birmingham. The crowd? seething and seriously up for it. You don't get that too often with Folk music. Great skill and musicianship I expected, and got; what really knocked me out was the old-fashioned showbiz savvy they built into their show. Haven't seen that since Horslips, ages ago..

  
TG Collective

TG Collective: Barker, Pursglove, Fekete, Slater and Jones

About a month later, the first official CD outing from the TG collective arrives: It’s called ‘Release the Penguins’, and TGC have also kindly allowed me to include some material from it.

The kernel of TGC - Sam Slater and Jamie Fekete - were two thirds of Trio Gitano; when   Sophia Johnson, departed for Western Swing and Country with Toy Hearts, Slater and Fekete settled into a more flexible line-up as TG Collective. 

You’ve got a lot of different people working with you in the Collective. That implies flexibility.

“It’s fairly settled”, explained Sam Slater this week. “We are six musicians. Occasionally we’ll get special guests in, and have fixed deps when we need them.  Depending on our set and venue, we also sometimes perform with Ana Garcia, a great flamenco dancer.”

There’s a degree of musical promiscuity in Birmingham, where people fly from band to band, infecting each other with musical ideas…

“It’s true! There’s a lot of cross-breeding going on.”

And how is it that the Folk/NuFolk/Experimental sector, which you are seen to be part of, is so much more prominent  than Jazz? What’s your take?

“I suppose Folk has always been popular and perceived as more accessible for audiences, from the fifties folk revival onwards… And Jazz has (often unfairly) sometimes got ‘that’ image if people don't know much about it. If you sell yourself solely as a ‘jazz band’, it has to be different. It can’t be just another standard bebop tune if you're trying to do something new.  And you have to be an incredible instrumentalist.  In Birmingham it’s actually going rather well, with the Spotted Dog sessions, Cobweb Collective stuff, Harmonic Festival and Birmingham Jazz.  I don't think we're particularly 'folky', but folk (especially some festivals) now seems to encompass a lot of broader styles all with their own followings – you can include singer-songwriters, world music, and an awful lot more. Even the Destroyers can find a place there”

TG Collective - On The Run

After all this time, this is a first album for TGC. The album was recorded in a cottage in Shropshire, with two London-based engineers, Joe Peat and Alex Merola, both friends of the band, using portable kit.

“They took all the gear in; you could work to your own hours. If you wanted to do something at 2 in the morning, you could. It was a really nice vibe. Most of the material was put down there, with a couple of overdubs in London. It feels… right.  Alex is Uruguyan, so has a different perspective on things, and that added to the mix.  Him and Joe were just as important as musicians in the band, and now do our live sound as well.  Gypsy Jazz is one element, Flamencos’ a second, and Contemporary Classical another ”

And there I was thinking I was going to write up experimental Folk….

“Of course! But it’s quite hard to put your finger on it and say this is what we are”

It’s been a long time coming.

“Yes. We didn’t finish with Trio until 2006, and the Collective didn’t start until later that year. It’s been a while.  It took a year or two until we settled on a line-up that we were happy with. Logistically, recording was tricky. Various band members – there’s that promiscuity thing again - had other projects and family obligations.”

Percussion is a newer element. Players who are part of the collective include Tom Chapman (see above) from UFQ and Joelle Barker from ADO and half a dozen other outfits. Louis Robinson of the Destroyers takes a key role; Percy Pursglove - Jazz lecturer at Birmingham Conservatoire - is now a fixture on trumpet and double bass. 

Release the Penguins - TG Collective  

All this is making me think about the role of the Conservatoire in supplying players, teachers, mentors and musos who have chosen to live and work in town. And the next steps for TGC?

“After taking god knows how many years to produce this album, finances permitting, we’ve certainly got another couple we’d like to do pretty soon. We quite like the idea of having a couple of full band pieces, and then me and Jamie working up two-guitar pieces, but with different guest players on Kora, Sitar… a different recording direction”

Links:
Urban Folk Quartet site  
TG Collective site