• Stan Tracey - Piano - Vibes - Celeste
• Jackie Dougan - Drums
• Dave Green - Bass
• Bobby Wellins - Tenor Sax

1. EVERYWHERE DERRIERE
2. LOVE NOW, WEEP LATER
3. SWEET USED TO BE
4. LOVERS' FREEWAY
5. TWO PART INTENTION
6. UNDERCOVER LOVER
7. AMOROSO, ONLY MORE SO
8. THREE TIME LOSER, THREE TIME BLUESER*

There's a well substantiated story that tells how a pianist who happened to be in the audience at Ronnie Scott's old club one night was invited (some say challenged) to sit in. As the guest slid onto the bench to take over from the regular pianist, Stan Tracey, he was rather disconcerted to hear Stan, indicating what looked in the dark to be about an octave and a half of keyboard, whisper warningly: 'From here to here they don't work'.

According to who's telling it, the implication is either that it was Stan Tracey's own eccentric attack that had brought the instrument to this condition. or that Stan's strikingly original style, including those jagged leaps and those gaptoothed runs, had evolved as a result of a lifetime spent trying to camouflage the deficiencies of orphaned club pianos. The fact is that they are simply two ways of making the same observation: that in the generally trim herbaceous border of British semi-modern jazz, the prickly figure of Stan Tracey stands out like a cactus. For many this rogue growth too closely resembles Thelonious Monk for comfort. Tracey himself vehemently denies any such influence; the only influence he's consciously aware of is Duke Ellington, and this begins to make sense if you refer to some of Duke's recorded solos, particularly those on two LPs featuring himself and Johnny Hodges. There you can hear the striking resemblance that exists between Duke and Monk and, therefore, between Duke and Monk and Stan Tracey. And I suspect that any further likeness between Monk and Tracey is due to a similarity in the way they think. In both of them I hear a brooding. quirky, puzzled mind at work, wrestling with much the same problems.

The most interesting thing in recent years has been Stan Tracey's development as a composer. Right from Li'l ol' Pottsville, one of the most attractive jazz themes ever written this side of the Atlantic, his writing has always had at least as much individuality as his playing. It may have been the literary association that did it, but this was brought home to a much wider public with the issue in 1965 of Stan's quartet masterpiece Jazz Suite--Under Milk Wood. (It's painfully significant of something, though, that in spite of all the acclaim that brought him, remarkably little writing work has been offered him since.)

Milk Wood was followed by the suite Alice in Jazzland, and if this was less successfull and less satisfying it is almost certainly because, being for a big band, it had to do without the weirdly sympathetic sound of Bobby Wellins' tenor saxophone. which glided or leaped or keened so effectively through the earlier work. On the present record, a series of pieces springing from Tracey's compassionate, cynical examination of the tragi-comedy of human love, the unique voice is back.

Bobby Wellins belongs to that rare breed of jazz musicians who are recognisable within two or three notes. His tone is thinnish but steely; he employs not a vibrato so much as a slow, undulating effect a little like wow on a gramophone. And his conception of melody is a sensitive extension of Stan Tracey's own.

The titles here all have that wry Tracey touch. Amoroso - only more so is a fine ballad with a few bars of celeste at the beginning to set the mood. The blues Lovers' Freeway, Stan explains is 'an updated lovers' lane; there's no stopping on a freeway'. Two part intention is 'self-explanatory', So is Love now, Weep later, except that Stan used the word 'weep' in preference to the more expected 'pay' because 'weeping's a little harder even than paying'.

Three time loser, Three times blueser has Stan on vibes, and the improvisation here is all on the pentatonic scale. In fact it's 'treated as a semi-African thing. rather like Free, done on the album "Little Klunk" years ago'; extra percussion and a whistle were dubbed in later. Everywhere derriere is a blues inspired by sights to be seen in a mini-skirted London in the summer of 1967. Undercover Lover he explains as the expression of a universal male ambition. Musically, however.there's more to it than that. It's actually based on a progression created on the 'black notes' of the vibes in Stan's front room by young Clark Tracey, Stan's six-year-old son. Clark takes his vibes playing very seriously, and one afternoon I watched him demonstrate the principle involved in this particular number. Stan had worked out a series of downward·moving chords which would fit whatever 'black' notes Clark decided to strike, and they were away.

The whole LP forms a kind of bitter suite which I believe is at least as evocative as Milk Wood was. Freed from the literary hook it could even. on closer acquaintance, prove a more satisfying work still.

Stan Tracey and Bobby Wellins are backed throughout by Dave Green (bass) and Jackie Dougan (drums), except on one track, when Lennie Bush and Ronnie Stephenson take over.

Notes: © Peter Clayton