Boisdale On The Boss: Richard Pite Interviewed By Jonathan Wingate - Part 1

Richard Pite has been working as Boisdale’s Director of Music since we first opened our doors 25 years ago. He talks to Jonathan Wingate about his favourite jazz artists, why he is more than happy to be known as ‘the bastard love child of Ringo Starr and Gene Krupa,’ and why he finally decided to release his debut album at the age of 57.

Richard Pite on drums

Was jazz your thing from the start, or did you originally set out to play other musical genres as well?

I originally got interested in jazz because I had a good friend who played tuba in vintage jazz bands and he seemed to have an enormous amount of fun playing. When I was a teenager I developed a parallel admiration for early jazz as well as contemporary pop and rock. My dad bought me my first pop albums, Dance With The Shadows and A Hard Day’s Night 50 years ago, and I still love them.

Hard Days Night Poster

You specialize in jazz music from the 20s, 30s and 40s. Do your tastes extend beyond that period?

I do love the jazz of the 20s, 30s and 40s more than anything else. Philip Larkin – the best British poet of the 20^th Century – and I agreed on the difference between music of this period and all the later stuff. The former has joie de vivre and peps you up, and although some of the later stuff does that too, you have to search for it a little harder.

You have studied the techniques of the early jazz drummers in almost forensic detail. How important is it to play in an authentic way?

It’s very important to me, but it depends on what you want to do with the earlier styles. If you are re-interpreting it with a contemporary twist, that’s fine, but if you’re saying this is how the music sounded if you went to a club on the South side of Chicago in 1932, it behoves you to get it right. You have to put that ride cymbal back in the bag, get rid of the hi-hat and kill the Vinnie Colaiuta licks.

Which drummers would you say have influenced you the most in terms of playing style, and what makes each of them unique?

Pete Long once called me ‘the bastard love child of Ringo Starr and Gene Krupa,’ and I can’t think of a nicer compliment.  On stage Ringo looked like he had the best job in the world, whilst Charlie Watts looked like he’d rather be at home making a battleship out of matchsticks.  I can do a pretty good Gene Krupa, but I can’t get near my other idol, Buddy Rich, who was superhuman. Nobody comes close to him – he was the fastest, most exciting, most musical…the most most. There are drummers today who do tributes to him, but I wouldn’t dare. I can pull the same faces he did but none of his licks and tricks.

Gene Krupa-Big Noise From Winnetka

Who would you like to have played with, if you could go back in time?

I would have liked the drum chair in the CountBasie Band from 1950 – when he put his big band together again – up until when he died in 1984. Basie’s music puts a smile on your face and should ideally be listened to in a Cadillac with the roof down, and if possible, with a blonde in the passenger seat.  Harold Land (currently playing with Tony Bennett) was fantastic, but Sonny Payne was undoubtedly my favourite Basie drummer, mainly because he was a showman. I love showmen – they’re increasingly rare in the po-faced world of modern jazz.

Amazing Drum solo - Sonny Payne 1962

If pressed and you had to pick five jazz albums everyone should listen to, what would they be?

Erroll Garner – Concert By The Sea

Jim Mullen Quartet – String Theory

Miles Davis – Kind Of Blue

Miles Davis and Gil Evans – Miles Ahead

Richard Pite – Now We Are 57

Talking of which, we have to ask – why did it take you this long to get around to recording your debut album?

I just fancied doing an album under my own name and I thought John Colianni, Philip Achille and Jim Mullen were a fine bunch of chaps to tag along with. I had a few quid in the bank and was in no rush to make my money back, so if it took 10 years to get rid of the first pressing that was fine. So, voila, my vanity project was born.

Tell us your favourite jazz joke.

It’s not a joke, but a great story about my grandma. When I was playing in a youth orchestra at the Royal Festival Hall in the mid-70s, my parents took my gran (who was in her 80s) to the concert, where I was battling through Holst’s The Planets. After the show we stopped off at a fish and chip shop before dropping her home. The following day I asked her whether she had enjoyed the concert, to which she replied: ‘Oh yes, it was a lovely piece of fish.’

Gaga For The Crooners: A Frank 100 Years.

Being a terrible singer I've always admired a chap who can start to sing and reduce the ladies to jelly.  The exact opposite happened to me - giving up singing was one of the preconditions outlined in my marriage agreement.  I won the girl by keeping my mouth shut.

Crooning to Kidman - A Little Bit Of Robbie

Now rather than concentrate on the fine crooners who have graced the movies in rather conventional romantic scenes we thought we'd give you a selection of somewhat off the wall crooning moments on film such as crooning to a horse,  a beer and even crooning to accompany a psychopath’s delusional fantasy?  Here's our blog of movie clips showing famous faces using the classic croon in ways you'd least expect:

Homer Simpson serenades Duff Beer:

The original Jeepers Creepers sung by Louis Armstong to a horse:

Goldie Hawn and Dean Martin formulate political philosophy in song:

Never was a love song more alarming than in the hands of The Shining's Jack Nicholson:

And Woody Allen breaks the heart in Everyone Says I Love You:

"Triumphant!" A sparkling review of our Newport Jazz Festival concert at Cadogan Hall!

REVIEW: Newport Jazz Festival Celebration at Cadogan Hall (2014 EFG LJF)

Pete Long, on stage at Cadogan Hall

Newport Jazz Festival Celebration
(Cadogan Hall. Tuesday, 18 November 2014. EFG London Jazz Festival. Review by Peter Vacher) 

Richard Pite, The Newport Jazz Festival concert producer

Drummer/impresario/historian Richard Pite’s ingenuity and enthusiasm know no bounds, it seems. Fresh from presenting a well-received LJF programme celebrating Glenn Miller and Benny Goodman’s New York heyday just days before at the same venue, here he was back in this uplifting space to recall the 1950s Newport Jazz Festivals, again to a full house of highly appreciative listeners.

The premise here was simple enough: recreate Duke Ellington’s 1956 Newport Suite, factor in Cole Porter’s music from the movieHigh Society, move on to photographers Bert Stern’s evocative documentary Jazz on a Summer’s Day, leap forward to the Dizzy Gillespie big band and their 1957 NJF offerings and conclude matters with Duke’s immortal Diminuendo and Crescendo in Blue.

The Newport Jazz Festival, Cadogan Hall, for the EFG London Jazz Festival

Well, simple to say perhaps, but mightily challenging to accomplish. It needed a cast of, not thousands, but certainly twenty, all hand-picked to suit and a level of commitment that allowed the proceedings to move well beyond pastiche and on to creative replication. This was epitomised when tenorist Mike Hall, given the unforgiving task of recreating the seminal Paul Gonsalves solo on D&C, chose not to chase a note-for-note duplication but to give its unrelenting surge a twist of his own, with Pete Long’s superb orchestra in full cry behind him. Earlier, young altoist Simon Marsh had evoked the memory of Johnny Hodges on Jeep’s Blues with due care and attention before the band essayed the multi-part Newport Suite.

With Long’s opening clarinet cadenza duly done, trumpeter Ryan Quigley made the first of a number of impressive incisions, soaring high over a crunching trumpet section, the band bounding in with gusto. ‘High Society’ gave trumpeter Rico Tomasso his head, especially so on ‘Now you Has Jazz’, Louis-like for sure, but couched in his own heart-felt manner, trombonist Ian Bateman on song alongside, with Long similarly fluent. Whether the show needed the soft-centred Little One and the rest of the film’s balladry may be questionable for all that Spats Langham coped well as an ersatz Bing Crosby.

High Society Medley, Georgina Jackson, Iain MacKenzie 

Tomasso-Bateman- Long, the last of these three on tenor, then gave Blues Walk a cheery going-over before pianist James Pearson essayed Blue Monk, momentarily allowing us to picture its composer from Stern’s film before Georgina Jackson reminded us of Anita O’Day’s impact with Sweet Georgia Brown/Tea For Two. Then followed more Louis from Rico, then Dizzy’s formidable Cool Breeze and Manteca as dealt by this terrific ensemble, Quigley and fellow-trumpeter George Hogg making high notes seem easy. Then came Hall’s finisher. He looked triumphant and so he should but then that goes for the whole presentation. Put aside one or two bits of cheesy stage biz, and look for this package to live again. It was that good.

The Jazz Repertory Company has  more surprises in store for 2015.

Review by Peter Vacher

http://www.londonjazznews.com/2014/11/review-newport-jazz-festival.html?m=1

A Feature By The Jazz Journal; The Newport Jazz Festival, 18th November 2014

Sixty years of Newport jazz

A concert from Richard Pite’s Jazz Repertory Company as part of the EFG London Jazz Festival in November marks 60 years of the Newport Jazz Festival

In the year the renowned Newport Jazz Festival is 60, "Newport Jazz Festival: The 1950s" comes to Cadogan Hall as part of the EFG London Jazz Festival.

Presented by the Jazz Repertory Company, the 18 November concert will feature music fromJazz On A Summer’s Day (1959) (which saw Anita O’Day’s captivating performance of Tea For Two/Sweet Georgia Brown) and High Society (1956), as well as Duke Ellington’s Ellington at Newport album (1956) which included Paul Gonsalves’s famous 27-chorus solo on Diminuendo And Crescendo In Blue. The Jazz Repertory Company, led by drummer Richard Pite (pictured), specialises in putting together "authentic live recreations of the greatest music in jazz history."

Original Newport Jazz Festival organiser George Wein (who is now 89 and still actively involved with the event) described Ellington’s 1956 appearance as "the best performance of Ellington’s career … it stood for everything that jazz had been and could be."

The music will be performed by the Echoes of Ellington Orchestra directed by Pete Long, who has also played his part in Ronnie Scott’s Jazz Orchestra and Jools Holland’s Rhythm and Blues Orchestra. The concert will also feature Georgina Jackson as Anita O’Day, Enrico Tomasso as Louis Armstrong, Iain Mackenzie as Frank Sinatra and Tom Langham as Bing Crosby.

Tickets are between £18 and £32 and the concert starts at 7.30pm. You can book tickets online atefglondonjazzfestival.org.uk and find out more about Richard Pite’s Jazz Repertory Company at jazzrep.co.uk.

Sally Evans-Darby