Mike Westbrook

Just over a year after recording his first album ‘Celebration’, in July 1967, Mike Westbrook took his Concert Band back into the Decca studios to record their second album ‘Release’. It was, in many ways I believe, an anti-jazz recording, at least in the sense that it was anti-free-form-jazz which was, in the late 1960s, beginning to take a devastating hold on the music. What his new album did was use the discordant, and hugely powerful sound, of collective improvisation to ‘release’ the nonsense that free improvisation was becoming, at the same time (and often just in time in a musical sense) reaffirming the joy of a thoroughly drilled big band (that swings like the devil), by introducing such well known and iconic pieces as ‘Flying Home’, ‘Lover Man’, ‘Gee Baby, Ain’t I Good To You’, and ‘Sugar’, which spur such soloists as John Surman, Mike Osborne (who became a victim of free-form jazz), and the trombonist Malcolm Griffiths, onto new heights of creativity, and that most powerful of new drummers, Alan Jackson, into a new Gene Krupa.

Now, many who listened to the album then, as now, will probably disagree with me, saying that Westbrook was actually taking the Michael out of those old numbers, out of so called commercial jazz, out of swing. Nothing could be further from the truth. You don’t start a big band to watch the enterprise fail. You start such a band to hear your music, and to get other people to travel miles to hear your music, and shell out money on CDs. You don’t do that by creating music that turns an audience away – something which is never going to win a recording contract.

And you only have to listen to the albums Westbrook made after ‘Release’ – ‘Marching Song’, ‘Citadel’, and ‘Metropolis’ – to see, and hear, that he was somehow clearing the air before creating stunning new pieces of work that would, like ‘Celebration’ before them, make Westbrook one of Britain’s most innovative, and eclectic, composers.

I would encourage anyone to get their hands onto ‘Release’, and the rest of Westbrook’s stuff, because it belongs in the annals of British jazz history as one of those recordings that helped save British jazz from itself.