'You're so exposed with a ballad, it's a tightrope all the time,' says Phil Ware. He tells Ray Comiskeyabout the trio's striking new CD
Jim Doherty likes to joke about a certain town in Ireland being unique - after the Latin unus equus, or one horse. As Phil Ware describes it, the little village of Wilsford in green and leafy Lincolnshire is unique, too; there is, he says, "One bus a day in each direction". Growing up there, as he did, everything is relative. Nottingham, for instance, is a Big City.
Maybe Phil Ware felt the same about Dublin when he arrived here, seven years ago, with "a duffle bag and a suitcase". Or maybe not. What he did feel, when he arrived, was tired. Not of Nottingham. He loves the place. Still goes back there a lot. But, as a jazz musician working from that city, he had grown weary of doing 27,000 motorway miles a year to gigs. He needed to break that, hence the move to Ireland.
It has worked out extraordinarily well. Now course co-ordinator for the BA in jazz performance in Newpark Music Centre, he has produced and recorded with singers Cormac Kenevey and Maria Tecce, backed others such as Honor Heffernan and Susannah de Wrixon, and worked as producer on several other albums. He has even played in the band for actor Simon Delaney's ill-fated wedding in Bachelors Walk.
Despite all this, he didn't get into jazz until his early 20s, when he had what he calls "an epiphany", while he was playing piano in a blues band in a local pub. The band, a family affair, used to invite him back to the house to listen to blues records.
"One night they dug out The Coltrane Legacy, that documentary with all the clips of the German TV stuff, and it was that and Tyner," he says.
"Obviously, I didn't have a clue what was going on musically. It was the passion thing of Coltrane himself, and when Tyner was soloing it wasn't a huge jump from the blues stuff I was in.
"I think my taste was getting more sophisticated by that time. And hearing what Tyner was doing, before he really got into what Miles Davis called 'bashing the hell out of baby grand pianos', there were still elements of the blues there." Over that summer, his listening went from zero jazz to virtually full-time.
"I think the piano player that really knocked me out the most initially was Bobby Timmons with Blakey. Now there's the direct link between jazz and sophisticated blues. Wynton Kelly - most swinging piano player ever - came shortly after I heard Red Garland.
"I got into the whole block chord thing, so there's a very close correlation between Bobby Timmons and Red Garland. Hampton Hawes was a huge influence as well. If I'm playing on certain tunes and I hear them back, mentally I hold my hand up and say 'I know where that came from'."
And Bill Evans? Apparently, not a great impression to begin with. He heard him on the seminal Miles Davis album, Kind of Blue, at a time when he was expecting to hear the swinging Davis Quintet of the earlier Prestige sessions.
"So, unfortunately, my opinion of Bill Evans was coloured for a couple of years until I came to my senses," he adds, with a wry smile. "He's not a direct influence, but there's a direct link down through the lineage in the way he changed the course of piano ballad playing, dealing with the melody in a very simple way.
"The big influence on me, in terms of structure, would be Ahmad Jamal. And, in just a whole difference approach to the piano, Brad Mehldau. He's managed to distil so much tradition and still form his own lines." Nevertheless, he still had to be "conned" into playing jazz. "Through my teens I never approached jazz because it always seemed completely unattainable. The amount of things you seemed to have to know to play it always put me off."
SO WHEN THE traditional jazz band at the same local pub claimed they were stuck for a pianist, they had to twist his arm a bit. "The real piano player did turn up, saw me and sped off. I don't think he spoke to any of the guys ever again."
He got the call from Nottingham, quickly became known and wound up a regular on the scene there. And although he was born in London, the capital didn't tempt him. He had spent a miserable year there in film school.
"Being in London and skint was horrible." He did go back in 1997 and 1998, when he was twice finalist for the British Young Jazz Musician of the Year. By then, too, he was working in a soul band, and when he came over here on holiday he was very taken with the vibrant scene here.
"The vibe there was fantastic. It just seemed much more open than in England, where you're very quickly pigeonholed as this kind of player, and therefore you can be hired for this kind of gig. There was no sense of being able to move to a challenge."
Bassist Mick Coady suggested he move here and after he arrived he had a stab at setting up a working trio with bassist Dave Fleming and drummer Kieran Phillips, but that collapsed when Dave Fleming got sick. Then he played with drummer Kevin Brady.
"This sounds so cheesy, but it's true," he explains. "The first time I played with him there was the swing, straight away. When you comp [ accompany] on piano, you're either thinking consciously, or unconsciously, about where you're going to place the chords, and from the very first playing session it was obvious that Kevin and I put the emphasis in exactly the same places."
The remaining piece in the trio's jigsaw came when bassist Dave Redmond joined them for a TV themes gig the pianist was assembling for JJ Smyth's. "You know it's right when head arrangements evolve instantaneously on the bandstand, with no discussion, and they stay there the next week you play," says Ware. "And that's what happened."
It took about a year to move that initial rapport into what he calls "the rhythmic comfort zone". By 2003 they were part of a piano trio series organised by The Improvised Music Company in the John Field Room. Since the start of last year they have a Monday night residency in JJ Smyth's.
And now, finally, a CD, In Our Own Time. It's been worth the wait. The ballads, in particular, are striking for the spacious, spare piano playing, the rhythmic freedom of the bass line and the sensitivity of the drumming.
'WE REALLY WORKED on that to get it right," he says. "Because you're so exposed with a ballad it's a tightrope all the time, but if you can just get the right notes offsetting each other, say a chord in my left hand, something Kev's doing with the cymbals, where Dave is filling, everything reflects off the other thing. It's more than the sum of its parts when it's like that." They also do the tricky Llareggub, from Stan Tracey's Under Milk Wood suite, where his solo has more than a hint of one of Tracey's great piano influences, Thelonious Monk. Ware acknowledges that wasn't an accident.
"I'm always keen to try and make my solo reflect the tune. I don't want it to be just a generic Phil Ware solo. There are compositional aspects you can take into account from the tune into the solo, but there's also the character of the piece.
"And even though the changes were a bugger to play, we were keen to stick with them. It led to a couple of dangling over the parapet moments, but it's such an angular melody it's a shame not to try to bring some of that out in the playing."
One of the finest performances on the CD is also the longest; Kevin Brady's Goodbye Mr Münch, so named because the Norwegian painter's iconic The Scream went missing for a brief spell around the time Brady wrote it.
"That," says Ware, "was a one-take wonder and we'd never played it before.
Because we had to record more tunes" - some material was aborted because of an unanticipated situation - "we were scrabbling around for material, so Dave said 'here's another ballad'. I think he gave it to me two nights before and I just sussed out the melody. I think we played through the head once and then went to the tape and that was it. Straight up." Not bad for a piano player from a unique place.
