JazzNation Talks With: Jon Thorne

22.1.2002

JN: You must be one of the busiest men in town. How do you keep going?
JT: Love primarily. I am walking my path. I've been playing in and around Manchester now for the best part of 11 years since I started. I didn't start playing 'till I was 23. I came to it with a lot of enthusiasm, and I got a lot of work with people who were far more established than me just 'cos I had a positive attitude really. I regard music as the universal language, and the principal tool for unification that people have. I am blessed to be a part of that process.

JN: Who have been your major influences?
JT: Danny Thompson. Otherwise what got me into it was not Jazz, but I was working in a bookshop, and a friend of mine there did me a tape that was just made up completely of ECM artists. So you know, it was Keith Jarrett, Dave Holland, Jan Garbarek and all that. I went back in to work the next day and went, "what's that noise?". I'd never heard double bass played like that and it grabbed me immediately you know? I thought, "I really want to make that noise". I'd tried everything from writing to painting, and I'd had a fledgling attempt at electric bass when I was 16 or 17, when I was into things like The Police and things like that. But when I heard the double bass it connected with something that really struck me very strongly, a definite calling. At the same time I went down to Paramount Books on my lunchtime and in the pound box on the floor I saw this book with a double bass head on it. And it was Mingus' autobiography 'Beneath the Underdog'. I stayed up all night and just read it in one go and thought, "oh my god, what's this?". Pimps and America in the 40's and 50's and everything that entailed, and I just thought, "wow, what a wild world". So then that got me into the Jazz side of it. There used to be a lot more jams going on in those days. Night and Day (cafe) had a particularly good jam on a Monday night, which was Richard Wetherall and Milo Fell, who's now playing with Tim Whitehead in London on drums. I used to go and sit in with them and bassist Saffron - it was her gig. She moved to London and, because it was a Monday night and there was no money, no-one really wanted to do it particularly. But she offered it to me, and I'd just moved to Manchester at that point, about 1991, and I was dying to gig so I took it on. That was a great thing for me because consequently I got to play with brilliant musicians every week. I was playing with people well above my level which was brilliant because I used to get roasted every Monday and just go home weeping and thinking, "I can't do this." But of course, you practice harder and move yourself on, and that's kind of the origins of it all.

JN: You've played with some of the UK's finest, including Iain Ballamy and Dave O'Higgins. What has that been like?
JT: Well again I've been fortunate. Those gigs have come around without me having to move to London, and do the whole London thing, which I don't want to do. I adore Manchester, I love it do death. I love the people up here, I love the sense of community up here. It's much less competitive and it's much more oriented around making good music together. Manchester's furbished London with some great musicians, particularly a band up here called the John Ellis Big Bang. Some of the musicians that've come out of that and moved away to London. You've got Mike Outram who's playing with Herbie Mann, you've got Andy Ross who's playing with Herbaliser. And you've got Neil Yates as well, tremendous trumpet player who's playing with everybody from the Lighthouse Family to US3. The list goes on and on. I've been fortunate. I've played with some phenomenal Jazz musicians inluding Dave Liebman. Iain Ballamy really sticks out from all the people I've played with 'cos he had the most fresh and open approach to improvising and to playing. He was incredible. Another great gig I did recently was with Pete King, alto (sax) player from London who's coming very much out of that 60's Bebop thing in London. He's one of the few people that didn't kill himself through drink or drugs, but you could feel the history in his playing. The depth that's come out of how much he's played. He's incredible.

JN: How healthy is the Northwest Jazz Scene?
JT: It's very healthy. I think the college scene is very well established up here. When I started out you didn't have that. So the people that got into the music were doing it completely of their own accord, with very little support. Whereas now you've got a much more firmly established college scene. Everything from the Royal Northern (College of Music) - a lot of people came out of that, people like Matt Miles, a great double bass player who's in London now, and Eryl Roberts.

JN: Being self-taught, do you think that's hindered you in any way?
JT: For me, I'm very, very glad about that. It's all come from really close attention and listening to people and to records, and it helped me develop my own voice a lot more quickly. The flipside of the college thing is a lot people come out packed with technical information and a lot of facility, a lot of technique, but they've not really managed to connect that with their heart as much. So they struggle to have anything to say with it. Whereas, for me, there was various reasons that I got into playing music at all but, primarily, it's expression of the self. That's at the core of it. And being self taught helped me get in touch with that a lot more quickly. Not that I'm dissing the other way of doing it, because all roads lead to Rome at the end of the day.

JN: Who are you listening to at the moment?
JT: Well, not all that much Jazz to be honest with you. I've started DJ'ing a little bit as well. My DJ moniker is DJ Random, 'cos I like putting any kind of music together. I mean I love anything you can think of, Classical, Opera, right through to Folk music, Jazz, Pop, Rock, Indie. You name it, I love it all. I particularly dislike snobbery in Jazz music, and snobbery in Jazz musicians. It winds me up. Some of the most interesting things that have happened in Jazz come out of openess to embrace different kinds of music. That was really inspiring to me, that yeah, you can be into Jazz, but you can be into other stuff as well. You don't just have to like John Coltrane and Miles Davis and that's it. Look at Miles Davis for god's sake. How many people did he piss off by just like, "no, right, I've done that now. I'm gonna go and do this". "I don't want to play in a smokey Jazz club all my life, I actually want to reach more people than that". I feel like, as much as I like playing smokey Jazz clubs, I like doing Pop festivals with Lamb. We headlined a festival to 40,000 people in Portugal about a year and a half ago. You can't get that just playing straight ahead Jazz, as much as that might have it's place. So, for me, my focus changed in so much as what I began to realise that what Jazz could do for me was to furbish me with the musical skills to take my instrument anywhere and play with anyone, and that's what I continue to want to do, to take double bass into every corner I can possibly take it.

JN: Is there more to come from Lamb?
JT: Yeah definitely. This is going to be our biggest year yet. We've just done a 3 month tour last year. They're on their 3rd album now and it was the most successful tour we've ever done. It sold out everywhere. Out of that, we're going to Australia for a week in April, we've got 3 gigs in Portugal in March which are about 5,000 capacity each. Playing the Brixton Academy, on the 5th of April. We have a big slot at Glastonbury this year. We're doing a lot of the major festivals in Europe, and hopefully we'll be touring America at the end of the year as well. So it's set itself up nicely. And they've just recorded one of their old songs with Nicole Kidman singing on it, doing a duet with Lou. She sang it in Moulin Rouge, then she got in touch with the band and said, "can I record it with you?". And Gorillaz have done a mix of a single that's coming out in the Summer. So it's on this crest of a wave and it might fall in, or it might surf quite a long way. So we'll have to see what happens. It's exciting.

JN: You continue to work with the John Ellis Big Bang, a favourite of mine. Are there any plans for a CD?
JT: He's done a live CD, and there's 3 or 4 tracks we did a year ago that's been mixed which I haven't heard yet. That's just an amazing band to play with. John's very open. He loves everything from Duke Ellington to Ray Charles to Frank Zappa, so you've got so many influences in there. It's got a very strong Jazz pedigree, and some phenomenal Jazz musicians in there. It's become one of those schools that you go through. It was my dream to play in that band. When I started playing, I saw them do their first ever gig at Night and Day, and they were all dressed up in drag with these hats, and I remember standing there and thinking, "oh my god, I would do anything to be in this band. It looks like more fun than you should possibly be allowed to have with your clothes on." Consequently, I was very lucky when Matt moved to London, I got the gig. I'd been doing stuff with John. John had very much been helping me personally to come through, and he offered me the chair and it was a real honour, and something that I just cherish doing ever since. It's seriously good fun, and it's challenging as well. I love that band.

JN: What's the best way for a budding musician to get established on the local Jazz Scene?
JT: I think you need a lot of things. You need patience with yourself because there's a lot to learn, it's complicated. Because the nature of it is very personal, so consequently, you're very open, and you can get hurt quite easily. As I've said before, there's a lot of snobbery involved and you come up against that, and you have to ride above that. Primarily, I would say, just enjoy yourself. Far, far too many young players beat themselves into the floor because, "I can't do this, I can't do that". Some of the greatest players throughout the music have a limited vocabulary. Look at someone like Charlie Haden who plays with incredible minimalism, and yet such depth. You don't have to play at a thousand miles an hour to express yourself at all. Give yourself time to find your voice. Just enjoy it. It is not a competition. Keep your eyes open and look around the band and audience. And listen. That's the main orientation of playing is actually listening. Not what you're playing at all, but what everyone else is playing while you're playing it, and finding synchronicity and harmony within the band, so it becomes a unifying statement rather than an egocentric, "this is what I can do." Learn to become a channel.

JN: What's your next big project?
JT: Lamb's going to be quite dominant this year. My main thing which I got together on my own is probably my Mingus band, Oedipus Complex. It's a 7 piece band, playing Mingus' music. And what I'm attempting to do this year is get in touch with Sue Mingus herself, and I want her to give her blessing to a remix project, which would involve everything from my own band through to a lot of diverse bands that aren't necessarily Jazz bands, but that I know are madly into Mingus. Very excited about that. As well as that, I've got 25, 26 pieces which I've written for a quartet, and I've been gigging that at Matt and Phred's, and here and there. I hope to get a good recording of that at some time. I've got a sessions with Trilok Gurtu and Robert Fripp in London coming up, which I'm very excited about. Trilok's just amazing. But that came out of Lamb as well. Also, I've written a book of my belief system as well which I'm.

JN: You've played with some of the UK's finest, including Iain Ballamy and Dave O'Higgins. What has that been like?
JT: Well again I've been fortunate. Those gigs have come around without me having to move to London, and do the whole London thing, which I don't want to do. I adore Manchester, I love it do death. I love the people up here, I love the sense of community up here. It's much less competitive and it's much more oriented around making good music together. Manchester's furbished London with some great musicians, particularly a band up here called the John Ellis Big Bang. Some of the musicians that've come out of that and moved away to London. You've got Mike Outram who's playing with Herbie Mann, you've got Andy Ross who's playing with Herbaliser. And you've got Neil Yates as well, tremendous trumpet player who's playing with everybody from the Lighthouse Family to US3. The list goes on and on. I've been fortunate. I've played with some phenomenal Jazz musicians inluding Dave Liebman. Iain Ballamy really sticks out from all the people I've played with 'cos he had the most fresh and open approach to improvising and to playing. He was incredible. Another great gig I did recently was with Pete King, alto (sax) player from London who's coming very much out of that 60's Bebop thing in London. He's one of the few people that didn't kill himself through drink or drugs, but you could feel the history in his playing. The depth that's come out of how much he's played. He's incredible.

-JN-