“I do feel proud of it…It feels like a good representation of me,” says Jim Watson of his new solo piano album, the first disc in his own name since 2001…
The millennium had not long arrived when Jim Watson, one of the most reliably and unobtrusively inventive piano accompanists in UK jazz and mainstream-pop circles from the 1990s on, last made an album under his own name.
But if that seems a while away from pursuing his own muse for an artist of Watson’s skills and imagination, the distractions have been understandably tempting – playing keys for Sting, Chrissie Hynde and Kurt Elling, for instance, not to mention the great percussionist Manu Katche, Paloma Faith, Lalo Schifrin, and a raft of illustrious others. But with this month’s release of his unaccompanied acoustic-piano recording ‘Calling You Home’, the pianist in the shadows finally takes centre stage again.
Six tracks mixing his own straight-grooving, country-gospellish or dreamily romantic compositions join equally personal versions of classic tunes including ‘Round Midnight’, ‘Body and Soul’ and ‘Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered’, as well as a tenderly lilting cover of Paul Simon’s ‘Old Friends’. A big highlight is a springy, bassline-punching country-rock tribute to The Band’s 1968 classic ‘The Weight’, which Watson became obsessed with as a teenager, when his father showed him a VHS of Martin Scorsese’s film of the group’s final concert, ‘The Last Waltz’.
And, throughout “Calling You Home”, Jim Watson sounds as if this most exposed and demanding of jazz situations, where the success of everything that happens is down to the soloist alone, is the most natural place in the world to be.
‘Well, that was where I first started, as many people do,’ Watson says when we talk on the phone for UKJN. ‘When I was young, I was picking out little melodies and stuff on the piano, and my parents were into jazz so they gave me records to listen to. So making this album just felt like going back into a room with the piano and playing on my own, something I’ve always really loved doing. It feels easy, that mix of sparseness and richness the piano offers you. So making “Calling You Home” happened pretty fast. I wrote the tunes quite quickly, then made one or two takes of each in the studio, and it was done.’
Maybe from years of occupying supporting roles, but perhaps also by temperament, Jim Watson is the most self-effacing kind of accomplished artist. But I suggest to him that Calling You Home must feel like an achievement to be proud of – even if waiting 24 years to make a follow-up to his 2001 trio album The Loop might be considered a bit of a long hiatus.
‘Well, it’s overdue,’ he somewhat wryly agrees. ‘But if you develop a nice career as a sideman, and get used to being busy doing other people’s gigs, you can get a little bit lazy. It was always on my mind to do my own project at some point, but it just kept getting pushed back and pushed back. What I was always sure of though, was that I wanted to do something simple, I didn’t want to have to organise a big band, or lead too many people. And I suppose I had a subconscious goal to do some pieces that might flow and feel relaxed together. It’s such a personal, intense thing, solo piano. But yes, I do feel proud of it. It feels like a good representation of me.’
Watson’s personal language at the keyboard reflects a diverse jazz education – initially on the pioneering Leeds College of Music jazz degree course, and on postgraduate studies at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama that included some lessons with the late great John Taylor. What followed was a unique musical life adapting to the sounds of many different artists with their own styles and origins, all of which leaves their own special traces. I apologise to him for playing the critics game of Spot The Influences, but within the rolling groove beneath ‘Midge’ (a dedication to the Watson family’s dog) and the lightly dancing waltz of ‘Tezetto’, the timelessly seductive country-gospel grooves of Keith Jarrett and the vivacious grace of Bill Evans seem to be unmistakeable.
‘You can’t get away from Jarrett’s influence as a solo pianist,’ Watson fervently concurs. ‘I’ve listened to a lot of him of course, so if there are things of his that creep out, I guess that’s inevitable. Also with ‘Midge’ I was trying to keep the melody present, but have other things going on underneath it to create two or three or four parts simultaneously, you know. I like to get out of the traditional jazz pianist’s way of having left hand and right hand parts that don’t interweave much. I wanted to get some constant movement going, so it became almost like a fugal sort of thing. Also I didn’t want to be limited by the bar lengths – I didn’t determine bar lengths for that one, it was just a melody where I’d play a phrase, then it would roll on a bit, and then I’d play the phase again. I didn’t have the gaps between those melodies figured out.
‘With “Terzetto”, well, it’s hard to play a jazz waltz entirely originally if you’ve ever heard Bill Evans playing one!’ Watson continues. ‘But though it’s an honour to be considered alongside names like Jarrett’s and Bill’s, you’re always wanting to get your own voice across. I would also say that Abdullah Ibrahim has been a significant inspiration for me. Especially in the title track, “Calling You Home” perhaps. He was in my mind when I was writing that tune, wih that sort of gospelly South African feel.’
While standard jazz themes that have become classics present their own kinds of challenges, Watson and I consider. Especially such an indelible, and much-copied classic as Thelonious Monk’s ‘Round Midnight’.
‘Obviously “Round Midnight” has been played a thousand times by all kinds of different musicians,’ Watson reflects. ‘But I knew I didn’t want to do any kind of stylistic copy what Monk might do, and I didn’t have any kind of preconceived idea – I just tried to go in and play it as freshly as I could, and let that great melody sing through, as I also did with “Body and Soul” I hope. I also didn’t want to do big long versions full of improvising, I just wanted to put some improvisation around the melody a couple of times, and then finish.
‘But that’s what I’ve wanted to do with the whole album,’ Watson concludes. ‘To approach the music as simply as I can, not try to force anything. You have all your years of practising, where it feels natural to just sit down and start playing something that comes into your head, and then somehow creep into something else you haven’t anticipated, and then merge that into bits of everything that’s come out of your years of experience…maybe it cultivates a feeling about not forcing things in music.’
Though in retrospect it seems a slightly tactless anecdote as Jim Watson contemplates a period of live solo performances of this music, I recount to him a story the great British saxophonist John Surman once told me when he began to embark on a sequence of unaccompanied saxophone performances, with significant spaces for improvisation in them. Surman would take his watch off and put it on the piano, he told me, and then play an extended sax piece that he felt had taken up a fair bit of the set time. The first time he did it, he checked the watch, and it said five minutes had elapsed.
‘Yeah, that’s something I’m slightly worried about,’ Watson laughs. ‘You’re on your own, you’ve got more to play, you’ve got to fill it all yourself. It’ll have to be right gigs, it’ll have to be the right venue. But I’m looking forward to it. Playing solo, you’ve got the freedom you want without having to worry about anyone else trying to follow you. But now I’ve started this, I’m very much looking forward to where my own music might go in the future – including playing in trios, like I was doing on “The Loop” back in 2001. I’m sure things will develop. Between jazz musicians, that’s always liable to happen.’
Jim Watson’s ‘Calling You Home’ is out 11 July. He plays the 606 Club, London, on Tuesday, 8 July.
