Classical music and jazz: Preview - Trumpeter Ian Carr's music at QEH
Published 4 February 2010
by SEBASTIAN TAYLOR
FRIENDS and musical associates of trumpeter, band leader, teacher and composer Ian Carr are putting together a concert later this month at the Queen Elizabeth Hall on the South Bank, a year after his death at the age of 75.
Many key figures in British jazz who will be playing at the event were involved in a series of landmark collaborations that stretch back to the 1960s when Ian Carr arrived in London from his Northumbrian home.
In the 1970s, he founded the jazz workshop at the Interchange arts centre in Kentish Town, the forerunner of the Weekend Arts College in Hampstead. Some of today’s leading Kentish Town jazz musicians were his students. Among them are pianist Dorian Ford, bass player Tom Herbert, drummers Milo Fell and Tom Skinner and guitaristists Hawi Gondwe, Simon Bild and Dario Rosetti Bonell.
In addition to helping budding jazzers in Kentish Town, Carr was a teacher at Gospel Oak School in the early 1970s when Ron Lendon was headmaster.
The highlight of concert will be a band assembled by renowned pianist Michael Gibbs that will seek to replicate the Don Rendell-Ian Carr Quintet of the 1960s.
This was the ground-breaking band which was the first to develop a style of modern London jazz different from the imported American standard.
Tenor saxophonist Don Rendell is expected to make a very rare appearance alongside vocalist Norma Winstone, trumpeter Henry Lowther, saxophonist Art Themen, bassist Dave Green and drummer Trevor Tomkins.
Michael Gibbs will conduct Northumbrian Sketches, Carr’s 30-minute suite for trumpet and string orchestra. Commissioned in the 1980s, this will be the London premiere of the piece demonstrating Carr’s consummate talents as a composer as well as an instrumentalist.
The concert will finish with a performance by Nucleus Revisited, mostly made of members of Carr’s great 1970s and 80s jazz-rock fusion band, Nucleus.
Carr died last February after prolonged suffering from Alzheimer’s disease. Any surplus from the concert will go to the Alzheimer’s Society.
• Ian Carr: a Celebration of a Life in Music is on February 23 at the Queen Elizabeth Hall, South Bank, SE1. 0844 847 9910 www. southbankcentre.co.uk