Dick Heckstall Smith Reviews

BBC Magazine
Observer (Record of the Week)
Rock 'N' Reel

Chris Parker; BBC Music Magazine. March 1996

Review Key ***** = Excellent
Performance rated *****
Sound rated *****

Dick Heckstall-Smith is probably still most frequently celebrated as a pioneering commuter between jazz and blues, cutting his teeth as he did in such bands as the Graham Bond Organisation and Colosseum, but this album triumphantly reveals his other side: the skilful, eclectic composer. other recent albums, notably 1990's Woza Nasu, have showcased his talent in frustratingly brief glimpses; this seamless, through-composed piece reveals it in all its considerable glory. The stellar UK band, formed from a sensible mixture of young lions and experienced old hands, takes a lively but plangent Heckstall-Smith theme imbued with a peculiarly Celtic mix of stridency and melancholy. This theme is subjected to, in turn, a folk-based runtrhough culminating in a skid of bagpipes, a rouising big-band swing treatment involving an exhilarating trumpet/flugelhorn cháse and , finally, after a wonderfully querulous tenor solo, a finale packed with squirting funk and bubbling percussion. Joyous and celebratory, yet intelligent and considered, this is a highlight of an already distinguished career.

Observer Record of the Week; by Dave Gelly

Jazz: Record of the Week: 24.3.96
Dick Heckstall-Smith's "Celtic Steppes"

Celtic Steppes (33 Records 33JAZZ027 CD) The Arts Council funded the making of this CD and I am pleased to tell you that your money was well spent. Heckstall-Smith's unique and forceful saxophone playing has been an under-appreciated treasure of British jazz for at least 30 years, and this remarkable work for 20-piece band displays his typical combination of originality and directness. The simple Celtic tunes are clothed in fascinating textures and tone colours, the modd of the music ranges from airy calm to wild tumult, and there is non of that idle pomposity which often descends when the words 'jazz' and 'commissioned work' are uttered in the same breath.

By JP Bean (tel: 01142 663 637); for Rock 'N' Reel.

Jack Bruce called him "my musical father"... In the 50s he played in the first British World Music Band - Sandy Brown's Jazz Band... He was a mainstay of legendary outfits like Alexis Korner's Blues incorporated... The Graham Bond Organisation... John Mayall's Bluesbreakers... a founder member of powerhouse unit, Colosseum.

Who is this musical Titan and what's the news today? None other than Dick Heckstall-Smith and he's just released a brand new CD on 'CC Records'., 'Celtic Steppes', an album that defies comparison with anything else happening right now. It's not the usual format - a colledtion of tunes, loosely linked and stuck together - 'Celtic Steppes' is one long invigorating composition, staggering in its originality, taking in folk themes, big band swing and even bagpipes. Old hands and young turks make up the sixteen piece band, with the man himself, Heckstall-Smith on soprano and tenor saxes.

Dick heckstall-Smith was always in the vanguard. One of the first musicians to successfully cross over from jazz to blues-based rock, he has blown with the best throughout his career. In Blues Inc. he stood alongside the legendary harmonica player and pioneer of British blues, Cyril Davies - "the firs t fully-fledged genius I ever worked with on a regular basis." The link-up with Graham Bond - a chameleon, many persons locked into one" - followed and the next four years were spent trundling up and down pre-motorway Britain with Ginger Baker, Jack Bruce and Bond, a self-destructive genius who burned brightly but briefly and met his end under a London tube train in 1974.

Heckstall-Smith's next job brought about the comment: "There were two things about John Mayall that I quickly came to marvel at. First, his altogether admirable reputation, among both musicians and public, for autocratic monsterhood; and second, what a nice easygoing bloke he was." Dick spent a year in the Bluesbreakers before leaving with drummer Jon Hiseman to form Colosseum, a band critically acclaimed in the States as well as Britain and Europe Colosseum lasted three years before running out of steam, or, more accurately, running out of music - victim of their own high standards and the grind of the road which left no real time to compose new material.

With 'Celtic Steppes', Heckstall-Smith has been able to make his own pace. By necessity of his health the schedule in recent times has been less hectic than in the old days. "This is something that's been in my head for at least three or four years", he says. "It came slowly, very piecemeal. I don't write from my own improvisations, I write from an idea that I hear in my head.

And where did that idea originate? A few years ago he took his saxes into the folk clubs in a trio, 3-Space, with acoustic guitarist John James and keyboards man Dave Moore. This seems to have been the beginning. "Yes, I think the work with John James was probably the first time when my head began to turn in the direction of Celtic music, and then I began to look into the history of Celtic culture."

The time span for "Celtic Steppes' covers three millennia, from the early days of the culture, through the Anglo-Saxon purges of Celts out of Southern Britain, into a silence Dick describes in the CD notes as "blue-black midnight darkness over Offa's Dyke." It endes in the present revival of Celtic culture, "headlong, rushing, momentum increasing into its conclusion, overpowering the saxophone soloist along the way".

It's terrific, heady, no-frontiers stuff, and that's always been the essence of Heckstall-Smith's approach to music. Not surprisingly, given the hignways and byways he's travelled during his forty year career, he does not recognise musical boundaries. "No, not at all. Erecting barriers between one kind of music and another, so that you have to surmount the barrier to get from one to the other, is something that's been invented by people who are not musicians. I could get stroppy and say that as far as I 'm concerned there are ony two types of music - good and bad. I prefer good!"

If I close my eyes I can picture the tall, bald, bespectaled figure of Dick Heckstall-Smith leading his men on 'Celtic Steppes' at one of this summer's festivals. A warm day, out in the open air, somewhere in the countryside... "Now you're talking, but it's going to take a bit of whipping up. It will be quite a job to finance because of the size of the band, and getting the right people in. There are plans, but they're very much under wraps."

Get the wraps off, let's hear the music!!!