All About Manchester

Spontaneous compulsion

The late Tony Wilson once told this magazine that jazz was dead and smelled funny. Wilson was a great man and we had enormous respect for him, but he obviously didn't know jack about jazz. World-class jazz guitarist Mike Walker sets the record straight.

In his very distinguished 25-year career as jazz guitarist, Salford-born Mike Walker has played with Vince Mendoza, Anthony Braxton, Bill Frisell, Tim Berne, Mark-Anthony Turnage and George Russell among many other jazz luminaries. He is currently touring with Jacqui Dankworth and preparing to headline this year's Manchester Jazz Festival, but was happy to take some time out of his busy schedule to talk to All About Manchester about life and all that jazz.

The 46-year-old father of two did not start playing the guitar until he was in his late teens, but music featured prominently in his upbringing. He credits his father's piano playing and his mother's singing for his genetic predisposition "towards a love of corduroy" and says his early exposure to different types of music, from Led Zeppelin to Bach, helped to shape his eclectic style. "Most of the things I play are jazz-based but that entails quite a lot of different genres of jazz. I guess you could say I do contemporary classical stuff with jazz elements."

'Fusion' comes to mind, but Walker is not crazy about this word. "Fusion has become another word for smooth, funk-based, occasionally corny tunes," he protests. "I fuse styles and try to use them in a fresh way, so I guess it's fusion in the best sense of the word."

Whichever way you try to define Walker's brand of music, it is still undeniably jazz at heart. He describes himself as a jazz guitarist and that could not have been a popular career choice in Salford 25 years ago when he started out.

"It wasn't," he confirms. "But I never got into music in order to be anything other than a musician. I didn't do it to be famous. I did it purely for the love of music."

Even now, although jazz gets a little bit more coverage in mainstream media, it remains a minority music. Hence the absence of reality shows entitled 'Jazz Idol' or 'Strictly come Improvising' on national TV.

And there's another problem. "The media often feel they need to dress jazz up to make it more 'interesting', which sometimes works fantastically well because it is borne out of the music but sometimes it feels like Big Brother television, where the show needs to keep being reformatted in order to keep people watching. And sometimes the music suffers for that."

The media and their sometimes dubious gimmicks have not done jazz a great service. However, it would take more than a few enthusiastic journalists to sell jazz to a wider audience. And here comes the question that a nice guy like Walker should probably not have to answer: Is it possible to do new and exciting things with jazz or is the general preconception of jazz as the kind of music that only appeals to old people in cardigans right?

Walker laughs heartily before making a couple of false starts at putting in words how he feels about his life-long passion. "For me improvisation is the essence of jazz. I love to improvise and I don't know many other situations in life where I can express myself with other people at the same time and create something whole. I don't know anything else that really does that.

"I went into the studio once with John Taylor, a great piano player, and we improvised from start to finish what John felt was an album's worth of material. When you listen back to it, it is difficult to know what was improvised and what was composed, and actually it was all improvised. For me that's something that will always be fresh and beautifully free. It's something that really excites me, so in that respect jazz is very much alive."

Most people wouldn't put Manchester and jazz together in one sentence, yet we boast "one of the most powerful jazz guitarists in Europe" according to the Guardian's assessment of Mike Walker. We also have a very well established jazz club in the shape of Matt and Phred's, and the Manchester Jazz Festival is a very big event on our cultural calendar. Which points to the rather bizarre conclusion that there must be a lot of closet jazz lovers out there.

"There probably are," concurs Walker. "I wish they'd get out of the closet and support it more vocally and then jazz musicians could shop in Marks & Spencer instead of ALDI." He bursts into laughter again and the absence of bitterness in his voice speaks volumes. "Yeah, that would be great."

Manchester's annual jazz festival is doing its bit in drumming up enthusiasm for the music. Now in its 13th year, it offers both jazz aficionados and the uninitiated the chance to discover some of the best jazz talent around. Most of the performances are free and easily accessible, encouraging people to explore jazz in all its genres and judge for themselves.

"I've been doing the Manchester Jazz Festival since its inception and I've been privileged to play on a lot of different gigs with a lot of great musicians," says Walker. "It's one of the best jazz festivals that I've been involved with and that's because these guys are working 24/7 to make it possible. They work hard throughout the year and they give a lot of love to it.

"Maybe the festival could change things. When people get to these gigs, if they've not been to them before, they experience something new and it's something that you don't get from watching television or listening to the radio. It's a live experience. Seeing people in a dangerous situation, where they don't know what they are going to do next, can be very thrilling."

Walker has produced a special commission for this year's festival called Ropes. Described as a Hendrix-meets-Turnage suite, is fuses contemporary classical music, jazz and rock'n'roll. It features a quintet including Walker's long-time musical partner Iain Dixon on the clarinet and heavyweight US drummer Adam Nussbaum. It also includes a 30-piece string orchestra that Walker promises will not just be there to pad out the quintet. "I wanted the strings to be involved musically with what the quintet was doing so that this is one organic music voice, one expression."

Meanwhile, he has been keeping "privately prolific" as he puts it. "I write songs, I write pieces for different kinds of setups, I improvise in lots of different genres and lots of different ways. I always feel that I'm being led – that music leads me into its space and in some ways I'm being played by it and not the other way around."

This laid-back attitude perhaps explains why the first album under Walker's name, the critically acclaimed Madhouse and the Whole Thing There, took 11 years to produce. "It's been a mammoth venture," he admits. "The music itself is about my upbringing and family life. It's got my mother on the front of it and a pair of incredible curtains that many people might remember from the 70s. And it's kind of a journey in a way. It starts with my mother's voice and ends up with my daughter's voice.

"There are a lot of different colours used in it. There are strings on the album, there is French horn, there are funky things, Brazilian-type things, there are a lot of different angles. But it's got one angle that goes right the way through it, which is to do with not judging a book by its cover."

Not judging jazz by its label is another good idea.

Madhouse and the Whole Thing There is available from www.jazzcds.co.uk. Mike Walker performs at RNCM Haden Freeman Concert Hall as part of the Manchester Jazz Festival on July 23. Tickets cost £13.50/£9.50 (concs.) and you can book by calling 0161 228 0663. For more information on the Manchester Jazz Festival visit www.manchesterjazz.com.

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Spontaneous compulsion

The late Tony Wilson once told this magazine that jazz was dead and smelled funny. Wilson was a great man and we had enormous respect for him, but he obviously didn't know jack about jazz. World-class jazz guitarist Mike Walker sets the record straight.