Manu Katché, who once drummed for Sting and Dire Straits, has turned his hand to jazz - and the compositions on his new album sound like future classics, writes Stuart Nicholson
For the past 18 months, French television have been running their own version of Pop Idol called Nouvelle Star on channel M6. On it, they've got a judge nicknamed "the Professor". "People say that I am cruel but fair," he told me a few weeks ago. "I am very honest talking but I think I know what I am talking about."
The Professor is actually Manu Katché not a name you'll recognise, probably. But curiously, there's a good chance you'll have heard him without knowing it.Katché is a drummer who has played on any number of pop and rock albums in the past two decades, such as Sultans of Swing by Dire Straits, Fields of Gold by Sting, The Seeds of Love by Tears for Fears, Secret World Live by Peter Gabriel, The Lion by Youssou n'Dour and Boys for Pele by Tori Amos (yes, that album where the cover art depicts her breastfeeding a pig).
Katché's playing is very infectious, and contains subtle embellishments that cause you to do a double-take, like a rhythm within a rhythm. One person who picked up this was Manfred Eicher, the boss of ECM Records in Munich. He was captivated by Katché's unique style when he heard it on the radio, and the result, although it has been a long time in the making, is Katché's latest album, Neighbourhood. Remarkably, it's a jazz album, and it's that good it's already top of my critic's end-of-year-picks list, and will stay there unless something truly amazing comes out between now and December.
But how did the association between one of the top rock drummers in the business and Manfred Eicher, head of a record label famous for what can only be called chamber jazz, come about?
"That's a funny story," Katché tells me. "I had been recording with Robbie Robertson [ a former guitar player for Bob Dylan and The Band], his first solo album. On that first album there is a track called Somewhere Down the Crazy River, which is actually based on a drum pattern I came up with. I was in the studio playing around with my drum kit and they said just keep that pattern and they wrote a song around it. And Manfred Eicher was in Munich one day in his car, the radio was playing that track and he pulled over to listen and wait for the commentator to say who it was. When he heard it was Robbie Robertson's new album he bought it, listened to the tracks, saw who was playing the drums and sent it to Jan Garbarek saying, 'I think you should check this out, the drummer is interesting for your style!' And that's true, that's how I came to play on ECM."
That was in the early 1990s, and since then Katché appeared on five Garbarek albums - I Took Up the Runes, Ragas and Sagas, Twelve Moons, Visible World and the 2004 release In Praise of Dreams - as well as touring as a member of Garbarek's band.
It was an association that eventually led to Katché's ECM debut as a leader in his own right. Neighbourhood brings together a dream line-up of Tomasz Stanko on trumpet and Garbarek on saxes, together with two Stanko proteges, Marcin Wasilewski on piano and Slawomir Kurkiewicz on bass, who have quickly established a formidable reputation in jazz.
"The album is an idea between Manfred Eicher and myself after I had been working with Jan Garbarek," explains Katché. "Manfred proposed me a few years ago an album for myself. I said I would love to do it and then we had to go through a 'casting' process. When you record for ECM, Manfred always wants ECM cast, which is ECM musicians. So I went to Munich and listened to a lot of different musicians from ECM and we had Tomasz Stanko and his band and of course Jan."
What is remarkable about Neighbourhood, given Katché's extensive drum work on pop and rock albums and worldwide tours with the likes of Sting and Peter Gabriel, is that he keeps any flashy stuff under wraps. For the recording session he wrote a series of compositions that sound like jazz classics of the future, full of understated melodic subtleties that allow the soloists to get purchase on the moods of quiet intensity. They prompt Stanko, Garbarek and Wasilewski to respond with some astonishingly profound musical statements.
"My first instrument is the piano, so I wrote all the music," continues Katché. "All the tunes are modal, which means not many chords, which makes it very easy to expand the pulse and the playing. And the writing and the structure - I think it is a little bit different. Everything is very written: even though there is improvisation, the whole thing is very much written."
Neighbourhood is not an album that could be confused with American jazz. It could only have been made in Europe, as Katché is keen to point out: "Marcin on the piano and Slawomir on the bass - I can't say their second names, they are very complicated Polish names - but the influence of classical music is very, very rich and these guys musically know a lot. I too had to play classical music - Beethoven, Bach, and then Prokofiev and then the very modern, like Boulez, all those influences, very complex sometimes.
"I think you are more full of references [ than American jazz musicians], that's the thing. I guess with Slawomir it's there without talking about it, but we have been studying the same music for many years, even if we are different generations. We know those 'codes' are there. At the end of the day we share the same approach to music. I'm not saying Americans don't listen to classical music, but their jazz players are really into jazz and they just stick to it, a bit more than us. We've been through different steps, which is through classical to reach jazz. Instead, the Americans are very specialised, they stick to one thing."
Katché, whose reputation as a drummer's drummer prompted an invitation to play on a rip-roaring big band tribute to the late drum legend Buddy Rich when he sat in on No Jive on the album Burning For Buddy in 1994, sees no incongruity in slipping between jazz - which he says is his first love - and rock.
"I would say the main difference between them is that I am a bit more free when I play jazz gigs because, of course, jazz is improvisation. If you play the theme one day, the next day you can play it a different way. When you play rock, it is very formatted, once you decide this is going to be the arrangement, you play it all the time the same way, night after night. At the beginning it's great but if you do a two-year tour like I have done with Sting - the last tour in 1999 to 2000 - and after playing something like 286 shows the same way, it's a bit too much format for me!"
Accessible yet urbane, calm yet intense, Neighbourhood is an album that finds a space in your life because it can function as hypnotic foreground music or suave background music. Today we are in an age where musical taste is intimately tied to personal identity, and increasingly we say something about who we are through our deployment of music. So the next time you're have a dinner party and want to appear sophisticated and chic - the ultimate urban attitude - just spin a few tracks from Manu Katché's Neighbourhood and watch the result. You'll be pleasantly surprised.
Manu Katché's Neighbourhood is out now on ECM and reviewed in The Ticket today
