marklatimer.com

INTERVIEW FROM COUNTY LIFE

From Balakirev to Brubeck; Chopin to Coltrane - classical/jazz pianist Mark Latimer has done it all.
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Mark Latimer, internationally acclaimed classical pianist - British Music's enfant terrible' and I are sitting in the kitchen of his home in the country bizarrely discussing 1980s pop group The Smiths.

It is not your typical classical concerto conference; there is no talk of scores, symbols and signatures, but then again, Latimer isn't your typical classical pianist.He became a professor at the London College of Music at the age of 18 and just four years later performed Alkan's concerto for Solo Piano from memory - once regarded as near impossible'. Referring to the Smiths' verbal imagery, he exhales a cloud of smoke nostalgically, "I've forgotten how remarkable their words can be. People used to say I looked a little bit like Morrissey when I had longer hair, heaven knows I'm going grey now," he retorts.

When the Smiths released their eponymous debut album in the early 1980s, Latimer was already educating musicians scarcely younger than himself in London.
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Far from projecting a plethora of conceited arrogance - the sort you'd stereotypically associate with a member of the classical establishment' (Latimer is less roundabout, "It's as overflowing with ass holes as any other walk of life, especially a walk of life with artsy overtones") he is the total opposite.Tall and charming, Latimer is beautifully polite.He is relaxing over a traditional French breakfast when I walk in: ground coffee and a cigarette.It is only in the last six months he and his wife  have returned back to the rural countryside after composing music for the Royal Ballet and living in epi-central London.

The decor and the surroundings of his country retreat enrich a rural French vibe: the stone-floored tiles in the kitchen, the creaky wooden table, the overflowing bookcase on the back wall.

There sit books on Goya and Picasso - two controversial artists famed for breaking down rigid barriers in their chosen art, and a vast array of walking books."I can tell you that it is exactly 5.1 miles into town," he enthuses.Having spent a number of years in France, it is clear that Latimer has adopted a number of French life-style habits, not least the one jarred between his two fingers.

Aside from being one of the UK's most accomplished classical pianists - he has performed all the major cycles, over 75 concertos, and the complete works of Balakirev, Chopin and Ravel - he is also firmly established in the jazz scene, playing with musicians as varied as Stan Getz, Jerry Underwood and Buddy Tate.

But despite working with some of the most prestigious musicians in the world and performing in just about every beautiful city in the world, His greatest musical achievement, he says, is Take 2 Unhinged, a jazz record he produced in 2002, loosely translated into 74 minutes of avant-garde jazz.

And in essence, this record could tell you everything you need to know about Latimer."It didn't sell awfully well," he admits, "But it's the one I remember most fondly; I recall I had pleurisy at the time and we were in a pub and I was desperately trying to figure out a new spin on Coltrane's Giant Steps when someone's mobile went off with the Mission Impossible ring tone and that's how it ended up in 5/4. I was shocked to hear it on a New York jazz radio station in a comparative slot pitting different version including Coltrane's own, and the listeners preferred my bizarre take!"With such a vibrantly opened mind to music, Latimer's recorded work often follows no clear trajectory; in fact, the only certainty in Latimer's work is that there is none.He has recorded dense and demanding piano music by Alkan and Reger but only three years ago delved into the world of animation and improvisation after being awarded a prestigious creative award by the Arts Council.

Throughout the varying multitudes of his successes, it is perhaps Latimer's working class roots that have equipped him best when handling his burgeoning success.Growing up in "ammersmith", London, as he calls it, Latimer's father was a telephone engineer for the General Post Office."I used to listen to his 78s; mostly big band stuff peppered with a little rock n' roll - Buddy Holly, Elvis that type of thing."

He met his wife Annie in the early 1990s at Steinway and Sons, London.She was the sales and marketing manager and Latimer was a Steinway artist."He would prefer to make tea for the porters than make conversation with some of his fellow Steinway Artists, but that's Mark", she declares.

Despite agreeing to a number of interviews in the past, the idea of himself interesting other people is a concept, you feel, Latimer doesn't fully appreciate; opting to stand in front of a firing squad than have questions put to him about himself and his work.

On the BBC's Russell Harty chat show in the late 80s, Latimer was in a line-up with actor Sir Anthony Hopkins, also an accomplished pianist, in which, Latimer recalls the actor insistently wanting to talk to him about his piano playing, "I kept changing the subject," says Latimer.On the BBC 1 live Russell Harty chat show in the early 80s, Latimer was in a line-up with actor Anthony Hopkins, also an accomplished pianist, in which, Latimer recalls the actor insistently wanting to talk to him about his piano playing, "I kept changing the subject," says Latimer.
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Since the age of 12 Latimer has been impossibly busy with music and it has required the strictest dedication.Did he ever miss out on playing football with his friends?"I was never much into sport," he muses.But its toll is evident, acutely summed up when Latimer exhales a large cloud of smoke away from his mouth and up into his vaulted ceiling, "If I could go back I would never in a millions years have gone into this industry."

While the Smiths and Mark Latimer might have been on polar opposite ends of the scale musically, both have been driving forces behind breaking down respective barriers in their genres.During the 80s, The Smiths counteracted the crass and synthesised pop music, replacing it with a no-frills, back-to-basics rock sound.Likewise, Latimer's fresh approach to classical and jazz music, laced with its rush of innovation and excitement has pushed the boundaries of what is deemed either classical or jazz."I've done truly different things within my music, says Latimer, "And I am pleased that I've at least tried them."

Mark Latimer will be performing at the gala opening ceremony of the HSBC Brecon Jazz Festival, which takes place from August 10 - 12.

INTERVIEW TAKEN FROM JAZZ VIEWS MAGAZINE

Mark has played with top American players such as Benny Carter, George Coleman, Stan Getz, Slim Gaillard and Warren Vache, as well as with the cream of the current UK scene; and maintains a busy classical schedule and an interest in theatre, poetry and pop music.

JAZZ VIEWS: There are many musicians that have an interest in both jazz and classical music, but very few that have such a command of both musical idioms as performers. How do you cope switching between two contrasting musical worlds?

MARK LATIMER: Vis the subject of this classical/jazz thing I have to admit that it has always been incomprehensible to me that there is any kind of mystique appended to this kind of 'versatility' as music, whilst undeniably an abstract even abstruse art form/science, is still, in the final analysis a single language. Whilst the various musical disciplines may in themselves seem irreconcilably even diametrically opposed, they are really tantamount to little more than dialects within the overall genre. No-one seems in the least shocked by a linguist with an infallible command of several languages - this latter incidentally a phenomenon which leaves me limp with admiration. It is perhaps more an indictment of our society and its rabid and dogmatic desire for compartmentalisation that has led to surprise and even mistrust of a musician refusing to be imprisoned by such extraneous and manufactured sub-divisions. Much as I?m notoriously not big on purveying, either literally or metaphorically the wares of the authors of the ?American songbook?, I do subscribe to Cole Porter?s apposite summation, ?Don?t fence me in? - pigeon holes are principally the domain of pigeons. Maybe this is just a totally intrinsic situation - maybe it just is, but equally maybe rigorously institutionalised teaching with its tunnel vision and straight-jacketed stultification of the new and innovative is responsible for contributing to this cultural apartheid: it is incalculably less prevalent, even anathema elsewhere in the so-called civilised and cultured Western world. I can only say that personally I find no conflict whatsoever between the requirements of either musical avenue to the extent that a number of times it has been necessary for me to play both within a short space of time and frequently even within the parameters of the same concert, neither situation allowing time for any kind of an adjustment.

JV: What about musical influences, I understand that as a youngster discovered jazz first?

ML: Certainly 'jazz' was my first musical access but as far as influences - that is in the common musical parlance and vernacular usage of the word as something or someone who exerts an indelible impression or path to be slavishly followed and adhered to both in a stylistic and musical sense - I can in all honesty admit to absolutely none whatsoever. As an illustration of this, I read a review some time ago of a recording I'd made which made the unequivocal claim that I had been 'influenced' by Ahmad Jamal. Now I have nothing at all against the great man Jamal, but as I have not ever listened to him this would seem to me to militate against his being an 'influence' on me! In fact I have to admit that I find this whole business of ?influences? ridiculous. The idea that it is an imperative that a sax player for example has to sound like an aural photocopy of Parker, Hawkins, Young, Coltrane, Brecker, Redman in order to be taken seriously or to find a market or an audience says more about the market and the audience and strikes me as ludicrously incongruous and the very antithesis of the raison d?etre of this kind of music. More often than not however these days, the main reason piano player X sounds indistinguishable from Bill Evans or Oscar Peterson et. al., (or to cite more trendy examples, Brad Mehldau and Keith Jarrett although to my ears the former sounds as though he has been ?influenced? by the latter and is himself also an alumni of one of the establishments I am about to speak of) is precisely because they have been inculcated so to do by one of these jazz schools/colleges/academies summer schools/lycees/ecoles/summer courses that are proliferate on virtually every street corner. My views on the subject of so-called jazz education are apparently so well known as to have been vilified in some quarters but I continue to maintain that, in the exactly same way you can?t TEACH someone to breathe and you can?t TEACH someone to like broccoli or hate Ginger Rogers, so you can?t TEACH someone how to play this music. Sure, you CAN teach imitation and mimicry and how to end up as, at best, a low alcohol substitute for the imitated original but you also CAN?T teach the necessary imagination to find a genuinely individual voice. Much has been made recently of these marvellous seats of learning beautifully condensing ten years into three; this rationale completely misses the point that those are the most important and formative ten years. It seems that this particular tired old justification, or excuse for the existence of these courses is wildly erroneous as most of them are only in existence to keep ?practising professional? jazz musicians in paid work and off the dole queues. I read somewhere recently another paroxysmally hilarious justification inasmuch as these emporia ?spoon-feed? the student; in fact, in common with all the rest of the recent corporate vogue for dumbing-down, they force-feed bite-sized, liquidised, easily digested bits and pieces of that-which-is-to-be idolised upon the student: altogether the all to easy and soft tutorial option. Another reason for specifically this country?s pathological and obsessional preoccupation with influences? is that it has become almost unavoidable in a field so virulently overrun with inevitable standard after standard after standard after standard played exactly the same way as the last time and exactly the same way as the next time and exactly the same way as their ?influences? played fifty years ago. In this respect, there is often a more improvised element in a current performance of a Bartok string quartet.

JV: Let?s talk about some of your recordings. ?Zeitgeist?, for example is totally improvised with no preconceived rhythmic or harmonic framework, an approach that is almost alien to the classical genre. How did you approach the recording of that album, and the preparation of the piano itself?

ML: As I mention in the annotation I wrote to accompany 'Zeitgeist', the entire undertaking was preceded by little more than a few scant hours notice and as a direct consequence of this extreme haste, there was genuinely no premeditation to any aspect of this particular CD up to and including any of the 'preparation' of the instrument. I simply turned up at the hall with no preconceptions whatsoever and discovered by complete chance and serendipity those miscellaneous items that subsequently found themselves on the disc. To pick up momentarily on the idea that improvisation is alien to the classical world, there is a not inconsiderable number of 'classical' practitioners, especially organists who are extraordinarily consummate improvisers and who, for whatever reason, would emphatically not classify themselves as 'jazzers'. It is, however probably expedient not to dwell too long on this paradox though as it opens up all sorts of philosophical, existential and semantic questions, a number of them very hoary indeed, as to what constitutes jazz and the whole meaning of jazz.

JV: The two releases on Spotlite Jazz are more firmly in the jazz tradition, although completely different in approach. ?Take #1?, from 1998, is a quiet yet intense examination of some jazz standards; whilst the recent album ?Unhinged Take #2? has more original compositions along with some classical references and comes across a much more upfront. Was this a conscious decision on your behalf?

ML: I suppose the only completely and candidly accurate answer to this is yes and no. Music, especially the recording element is emphatically still a business and with the best will in the world, it is almost an impossibility to completely ignore market forces and other such commercial exigencies and often one will disregard them at one's own peril. It is foolhardy for anyone to expect any record company to completely indulge every whim of those who they record. Therefore this disparity between the two records you mention was conscious and intentional since the earlier 1998 CD was my first for Spotlite and I could not at that juncture have expected to be able to get away with some of the more 'out' material that found its way onto the more recent disc. By nature I am no more enamoured with compromise than I am with compartmentalisation and so consequently anything that may be perceived as classical music is not there for any more gimmicky purpose than my more recent explorations of the indie pop and world music genres. In spite of the aforementioned comments on standards, I have nothing against them per se just how one is expected to approach them. The sheer weight of history on the shoulders of this repertoire leads yet further to the polarisation of jazz and the audience for it. Most of these tunes are now so authentically antiquated that they are nearer to ?classical? music and are so knee deep in ?definitive? performances that the architypal ?jazz? audience expects their ?comfort zone? of familiarity. Recently and ironically apocryphally, I have been throwing into an otherwise completely ?free-improvised? environment things such as deconstructed versions of Jerome Kern?s ?All the things you are? - but with one major difference here - Kern?s structure is totally incidental and the main concern in this design is the total metamorphosis of Charlie Parker?s overused intro - overused almost to the point of it becoming a pastiche of itself. We recently recorded it and in my humble opinion it is fifteen glorious minutes of pure imaginative music and group interplay in which Kern comes and goes as the piece develops. Now to return to this familiarity issue and its perilous proximity to contempt, this degeneration can surely not represent good news for an art form which, although it should move forward on paper at least, cannot possibly move into the future whilst simultaneously mired in and intimidated by the past. Nobody has more respect or reverence for the achievements of the great men who preceded me but I?m damned if I would ever concern and thus paralyse myself with the fear that what I?m doing might not conform to the rules and strictures that they conformed to. I think it was Confucious who said ?seek not to follow in your master?s footsteps - seek what he sought?.

JV: What about the future? What plans do you have to develop your jazz concept further, and do you have any plans to put together a permanent working band?

ML: I am somewhat fortunate in that most of the venues I play afford me the luxury of being able to present pretty much what I like and perhaps even more remarkable than that is the fact that most of the audiences also seem to be becoming, mutatis mutandis more adventurous. Maybe this has something to do with the inexorable 'legitimisation' of jazz, its acceptance in the concert hall and conservatoire. Immediately prior to this interview I returned from Scandinavia where I had a couple of Festival engagements. I was not only flabbergasted by the astounding level of musicianship there but also by the uniquely astonishingly wide age range of the audiences. I briefly listened to a young girl singer there - alas I was at the time in a great rush - who was about seventeen and was without a shadow of a doubt the best ?jazz? singer I have ever heard. Amazingly she was singing ?But not for me? or something of that ilk but she was genuinely and unaffectedly fantastic, but equally amazingly she told me she was anxious to attend the ?jazz course? at the local University - go figure! There must be infinitely more genuine enthusiasm and inspirational pedagogics and less Fascism in the Norwegian musical education system if someone this ridiculously accomplished actually aspires to attend. The guys I was personally working with there were not only jaw-droppingly good but also unbelievably easy to work with and this is unquestionably a band which developed an instantaneous concept which I look forward immeasurably to developing. Over here in the UK I already have as near to a permanent working band as it's possible to get in this insanely impermanent business - the extraordinary Mario Castronari and Asaf Sirkis, both capable of holding their own with anyone.

JV: Finally, when can we expect another recording from Mark Latimer, the jazz pianist?

ML: As well as a fair number of ?classical? discs due out imminently, there is at least one other Spotlite CD currently already to go that will hopefully be out before too long and seems destined to be imaginatively entitled 'take 3' ! I?ve also recently contributed to a number of typically very interesting recording projects by John Williams and Don Rendell among others. There are also other 'live' CD projects, a good number of them 'in the can' and we hope also to have them out soon. You never know, there might even be an itsy-bitsy little standard on one of them!!

For more info visit Mark?s Website and Spotlite Jazz.

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Live public BBC Radio 3 Jazz Interview

Presenter: “I’ve never seen that before, but in your second piece ‘Owed’ that you wrote, you opened that entirely with your left hand alone - a jazz pianist wouldn’t normally do something like that.”

Latimer: “That was for the benefit of the listeners!”

Presenter: “Would you like to hear your compositions played by other people?”

Latimer: “Only when I’ve registered with the Performing Rights Society!”

Classical Music Magazine - cover feature

On the Wild Side - Roger Watkins struggles to get a word in edgeways when he meets outspoken pianist Mark Latimer.

Music rebel's without a pause does occasionally stop for breath, if only to light up another cigarette. Mark Latimer, who candidly admits he is a 'mouthy non-conformist', has strong views and does not mind who hears them. But this amalgam of classical music and jazz who studied at the Royal College of Music at 16, and was teaching at the London College of Music less than 2 years later, has off the wall, even contentious ideas about professional music in Britain which are never less than entertaining. Even his genuine ad libs ('I was introduced to music by my father's 78s: I found that, like a musician's promises, they're easily broken') are as polished as a piano lid. Latimer has a CV which talkes in accompanying Sarah Brightman and Wayne Sleep but now spends most of his time playing modern jazz and composing. He has the good grace to wince when I recall the review that described him as an explosion in a munitions factory, but he must be secretly proud of Stan Getz' verdict on him as 'simply brilliant'. And you suspect he rather revels in the image that he likes to walk on the wild side. But is he really a rebel? Latimer admits: 'I was a terrible hothead in my younger years, shooting my mouth off and saying things that were, best, inappropriate. But, to be honest, I wouldn't care if I never played the piano again. It does not interest me that much: it is not a matter of life or death: and proably one of the reasons no-one has heard of me is that, to paraphrase Groucho Marx, I wound not wish to belong to any club that would accept someone like me as a member. I don't like playing by their rules, and I don't actually like musicians: they're a vapid self-indulgent lot, and music is nothing more than a festering swamp of simmering rivalries'. Latimer's eclecticism means that he has a repertoire of more than 75 concertos, has appeared with jazz greats on both sides of the Atlantic and has collaborated with Andrew Lloyd Webber in the West End. But next month this protege of John Ogdon takes on one of the greatest challenges ever: the monumental and frightening Alkan Concerto for Solo Piano. From memory! Already into rehearsals he is humble and respectful about what he describes as one of the greatest works of the 19th Century. 'It's abominably difficult: even things which on the surface sound innocuous are appalling hard to execute, and the sheer duration (about an hour) is monstrous. The last time I performed it was at the South Bank in 1985, and I must have lost a stone. Ronald Smith, the Alkan expert was there and even Ogdon was surprised at my kamikaze playing from memory.' Typically, Latimer is combining the Alkan with jazz of his own composition for appearnaces in Bristol and Manchester this year and the capital in the New Year. Included is his new suite, Exhibitionist @ the Pictures, which contains a piece called the Great Gate of Chicken Kiev. He hopes to get a better reaction than he did some years ago at the Cheltenham International Jazz Festival, when during a chat with the audience he made an allusion to embalming fluid ('well I'd have got more reaction in a morgue!'). At the Brecon Festival, he said he would address the 600 plus audience in their native Welsh. All he said was 'Baaaa!'. He spent a couple of years teaching as Professor of Keyboard at the University of Wales Music Faculty, but he knew the job was never going to last. Latimer explains:'I didn't feel students should be stultifying their talents with endless scales and constant exams. I'd rather turn out shelf-fillers with a genuine love of music then competent automatons whose enthusiasm has been eroded. Exams are the refuge of the uninspired and the uninspiring: and all the scales in the world won't equip you to play the Alkan. There is too much constriction by tradition, having to play a certain proportion of right notes or you're a laughing stock. I don't think this is true. There must be standards of course, but without risk, some gladiatorial element of danger, the music itself is dead. It degenerates into a sort of typing test. Music is not on the page, it's in here (points to head), and ultimately here (his heart). And anyway, in the words of Ronnie Hilton, it's all been done before.'

Jazz UK Magazine Interview

MAVERICK MARK - why Mark Latimer breaks the mould (front cover feature)

The Outsider

A Mark Latimer concert isn’t your average jazz night out. He might play an hour-long exercise in classical pianistics, then follow it with  wild free-improvisation.  John Fordham checked out the definitive one-off.

The kind of language that’s definitely closer than two blocks from the edge tends to be used when Mark Latimer is in the vicinity. One crazy mother’, Kirk Lightsey called him.‘Dangerous, man, dangerous’ said Gordon Beck.Classical Music magazine popped a button sufficiently to call him a ‘rebel without a pause’. But for all this, Latimer is the young British pianist who seems to be trying his best not to get noticed in either the classical or the jazz worlds he’s capable of inhabiting with such fierce aplomb.He performs rarely (the upcoming gig at St George’s. Bristol on November 2 is in the hen’s teeth category), and lives reclusively in France, well away from the metropolitan centres most UK jazz musicians reasonably consider essential to anything answering the description of a career. Latimer’s musical projects follow no orthodoxy either. Last year’s was a characteristically quirky mélange of laid-back fusion, Latin music and free-improvising he called ‘Exhibitionist At The Pictures’ –  but it came on the same bill as his breathless and breathtaking hour-long unaccompanied piano recital of a concerto by the little-known 19th century composer Alkan, a contemporary of Chopin and Victor Hugo. Like Latimer, Alkan was a square peg who avoided the Paris recital circuit and wilfully followed his own muse.A measure of the intriguing wiring of Mark Latimer’s unique musical mind is that he’s one of the few to ever deliver all 130+ pages of Alkan’s concerto without the score in front of him, and it’s easy to see why he’s fascinated by its thundering chords, sweeping references back to baroque music and forward to modernist dissonances that were still decades ahead of Alkan’s time. The contrast with his trio’s jazz-playing (Mario Castronari is on bass, Harold Fisher on drums) often make it hard to believe that Latimer’s double, a musician of a completely different persuasion, hasn’t taken to the stage in his place. Latimer is a natural debunker of high-minded speculation, and likes to insist that the only reason he makes music is that it keeps him in cigarettes – a reason he also gives for his attachment to France, with its enduring tolerance of the habit. But if you dig deeper, a restless and complex fascination with the art of creating shapes and stories in sound is at work in him, a fascination that is perhaps both entrancing and haunting to him. ‘My mother went to a clairvoyant prior to my birth’, Latimer relates. ‘The clairvoyant said “you’re going to have a son who will be very talented”. My mother said “that’s marvellous”. The clairvoyant said “is it?” I think it was Jean-Paul Sartre who said “beware what you most wish for in your youth. You may be unlucky enough to get it.” I was fascinated by music from childhood, but being a musician isn’t easy, and I still have days when I wonder why I do it. I started as a clarinettist into Benny Goodman and Artie Shaw. I found I could play difficult things on the piano, but I was never ruthless enough to go completely down that classical route,so somehow I’ve found myself halfway between the one and the other.’ Latimer counts his closest friends in music as having been jazz players – particularly the late Colin Purbrook and Mick Pyne ‘who seemed to me to typify a kind of camaraderie that’s very rare.’ He listens to few pianists for example or inspiration, but he loves Don Pullen – in whose mix of traditional lyricism and tempestuousness a good deal of the Latimer of today can be detected. With such a wide span of musical interests, does Mark Latimer believe ‘jazz’ still has a meaning? ‘It’s certainly become a very ephemeral term’ the pianist reflects. ‘But no matter how cerebral it is, or how direct, I think it’s an affront to the word if it doesn’t have something you can identify as swing in it. But I also don’t believe, if the term ‘genius’ means anything, that you can ever apply it to a recreative artist. Music must move on. That’s why I’m doubtful about jazz education – I think this music can be learned but it can’t be taught.’ Mark Latimer’s latest project is called, with typical opacity, Ensemble=Musique Contemporaine2 – but he isn’t sure what it will be like yet. ‘I don’t have a career plan, and I don’t practise, and I leave things to the last moment. But often, something happens. I’m always fascinated to find out how.’

Mark Latimer plays St George’s, Bristol, on November 2. ‘Take 1’ will also be available shortly on the Spotlite label (SPJ 569-CD)

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