Colin Steele: Joni, Mary and All That Jazz!

One of the most magical moments at last year’s Edinburgh Fringe came from the bowels of Chambers Street where a room-ful of punters could be heard softly singing Feed the Birds, the beautiful ballad from the Disney film Mary Poppins – to the accompaniment of two of Scotland’s leading jazz musicians as they performed their Poppins-themed show at the Jazz Bar.

This hour-long concert – which united tiny tots, senior citizens, hippies, hipsters, seasoned Fringe-goers, diehard Disney fans and jaded jazzers in song – became one of those shows which grew busier as its run went on. Word of mouth boosted its ticket sales and the memory of how special it was prompted its stars – the duo of trumpeter Colin Steele and pianist Brian Kellock – to be persuaded to revive it for this year’s Fringe, for just two performances.

But Mary Poppins, the jazz version, is just one of a raft of diverse gigs that Steele is preparing for. While other dads might be looking forward to easing off work during the school holidays, Steele is limbering up for the busiest couple of months in his calendar.

The acclaimed 51-year-old jazz musician – and father of three – is bracing himself for a festival season which this year sees him headlining two concerts at the Edinburgh Jazz Festival (and serving as sideman on a further seven) and four shows (each with multiple performances) at the Fringe, plus so many as a sideman that he has already lost count. “Some days I have three gigs,” he says, “so I’m practising like crazy, building up the chops.”

Steele – who has just spent the weekend zooming between the Glasgow Jazz Festival, where he played in up-and-coming singer Georgia Cecile’s band; Loch Lomond, where he is renovating a holiday house, and his hometown where he had gigs at both the Barony Bar and Soderberg – seems to be ahead of the game in terms of building up his stamina for mid July. But it’s not something he takes for granted, having suffered a catastrophic crisis with his playing ten years ago.

Left unable to play, he had to re-learn his craft and he is now much more aware that he shouldn’t push himself too hard. “Nowadays, I know that if it’s not working, then I need to put the trumpet away for a bit. I used to get anxious and push myself too far and it would all collapse,” he explains.

As his busy, cross-country weekend and heavy Fringe schedule illustrate, Steele is an extremely versatile musician who is at home in any number of jazz settings and has absorbed inspiration from a vast range of horn players. He cites Chet Baker – whose, cool, swinging, pared-back “West Coast” sound he channels with ease – as his biggest influence, and names Louis Armstrong, “whose creativity, originality and emotional playing is second to none”, as his favourite trumpeter. It was playing Baker-style jazz that made Steele’s name back in the 1990s, but recently he has played more traditional jazz thanks to his membership of various bands led by the singer Alison Affleck, a tireless champion of early styles of jazz.

[Affleck, Steele and their cohorts may have helped to fuel the revival of interest in traditional jazz in Scotland but it has,unfortunately been pounced upon, rather cynically, by some musicians who seem to view it as a way of landing gigs, rather than because it’s an area of jazz that they are passionate about and well-versed in. Even more disheartening is the fact that jazz festivals are lowering their standards by booking these groups which have jumped on the trad bandwagon.]

Under his own name, Steele has performed and recorded Celtic/folk-influenced jazz with his own band. At last year’s Edinburgh Jazz Festival, he acknowledged his past forays into pop by performing a jazz concert of music by the Glasgow band The Pearlfishers, on ten of whose records he had played. The success of the Pearlfishers project – the concerts and a very well-received album – inspired another pop-themed jazz project for this year’s festival: the Colin Steele Quartet Play Joni Mitchell.

“I’ve had a deep love for Joni Mitchell for a long time; I’d always known her music – and I felt her songs deserved to be better appreciated. She’s known primarily as a poet, but her melodies are fab and stand on their own two feet. Plus, there’s already a jazz connection because she worked quite often with jazz musicians – Charles Mingus, Michael Brecker and Jaco Pastorius are just some of the jazz guys she worked with.”

There were other contenders for this next jazz-meets-pop project, however. “Ricky Lee Jones was high up on the list too,” says Steele before returning to the subject of how he convinced himself that the Joni Mitchell idea could work. “Actually,” he explains, “I probably wouldn’t have gone for this Joni Mitchell idea had Brian Kellock and I not done the music of Mary Poppins at the Fringe last year. It’s so far away from jazz – it just shows what you can do. Someone said to me after the Mary Poppins show that if you can make something as fab as that out of Mary Poppins, then you can do anything. It’s all about melody, and if you have a really strong melody, then it will work. Also, Brian can make anything possible!”

Over the last five years, the Steele-Kellock double act has become a fixture on the Fringe; the two longstanding friends and colleagues seeing it as an opportunity to explore themes or songbooks that they hadn’t delved into before, and to harness the anything-goes spirit of the Fringe to up the level of spontaneity and fun. And, of course, to make a feature of audience participation.

Steele recalls: “The first Fringe show we did together was My Fair Lady in 2014, then the following year, Brian suggested that we do a Glenn Miller show and it sort of took off from there; it became an annual jamboree. It just worked so well; the audience loved it. We had air raid sirens, singalongs (Pennsylvania 65000 etc) and everybody knew a lot of the tunes. The strength of the melody and the arrangements are so great, and playing that music in a small group gives you so much space. When I’ve played it in a big band, I’ve not been satisfied because you can’t really be creative – and I do like to improvise.”

In 2018, Steele and Kellock retired the Glenn Miller show so they could concentrate on their Mary Poppins one. Its slow sales at the outset suggested that there was some ambivalence that it would work but ultimately it assumed the status of being one of those shows that people kick themselves for having missed because those who were there talk about it as a life-enhancing event.

Steele says: “On the fifth and final day, there was a big group of musicians who came in and they said it was the best, most fun, gig they’d ever seen and I felt that way too. It really was one of the most beautiful experiences of my life – everyone singing Feed the Birds. It was so special. I felt it would be a shame not to do it again.”

In addition to reviving Glenn Miller for the Edinburgh Jazz Festival and Mary Poppins for this year’s Fringe, Steele and Kellock are celebrating two of the original giants of jazz – Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington – in another Fringe show that will have five outings.

What is it about working in a duo that so appeals to Steele?  “There’s a real intimacy and a responsibility that you both have – you can’t take a back seat. It’s lovely to work with someone with such musicality and of course you have to remember that there’s also the beauty of no drummer! There’s so much space because there’s no drummer. Anything can happen in duos. With three or four people it’s more complicated. The duo offers more possibilities, more freedom but also harder work – there’s a lot of sweat going on.

“I’ve no doubt that Brian is the greatest of all Scottish jazz musicians and we’re so lucky to have him and I’m so honoured to play with him. We all feel that. It’s always a challenge: he’s not an accompanist – he’s there for the creativity, he’s always pushing. I’m more reticent, he pushes you into different areas. It’s always scary, always a joy.”

*Colin Steele plays the Edinburgh Jazz Festival on July 15 (Glenn Miller, with Brian Kellock) and 17 (Joni Mitchell with his own group); www.edinburghjazzfestival.com for details. For details of his various Fringe shows, visit www.edfringe.com ; Mary Poppins is on August 18 and 20.

Edinburgh Fringe 2014: Little Jazz Bird

Little Jazz Bird, The Jazz Bar (until August 24th) **

Nerves and whisky may have got the better of Victoria Bennett at her opening performance on this year’s Fringe, but luckily, the local singer has an endearing personality, a swinging band and a voice which is often quite lovely. The problem is that in most songs, it sounds as if there is more than one voice in there trying to get out: one with a transatlantic accent, one with a thick Scottish one (especially on the last word in many of the lines of songs), one whose deep, throaty sound evokes Marlene Dietrich and another which is more girlish. Confused? You will be.

* First published in The Scotsman, Monday August 11th

Man of Steele

Trumpeter Colin Steele has no fewer than three Edinburgh Jazz Festival gigs in the next week, followed by a residency at the Jazz Bar during the Fringe. Hardly headline news you might think, given how well established he is on the Scottish music scene. But it is actually pretty remarkable: six months ago Steele was unable to get even a single note out of his horn, and four months ago the most he could muster was Three Blind Mice.

The 43-year-old Edinburgher, who made his name on the jazz scene in his twenties, and went on to become known for his crossover work fusing other forms of music with jazz in his playing and writing, has been through hell in the last year – and at one point had to face the”terrifying” possibility that he might never play again.

Rewind to last summer, and Steele was prominently featured in an Edinburgh Jazz Festival Orchestra concert. What nobody knew at the time was that he was struggling to re-learn how to play the trumpet, which he had never been properly taught – and this involved un-picking years of bad habits.

Steele explains: “When I learned trumpet at school, it was just a matter of getting a sound and getting on with it – but I never did anything correctly. Later on, I always practised more than anybody else practises but I never really improved, and nobody liked to tell me I was doing stuff wrong – fundamental stuff like taking a really deep breath before playing.”

Of course it didn’t help that Steele’s primary influence was Chet Baker. “He had this very light, soft sound – and that was what I was aiming for. I found I could emulate it by taking very shallow breaths but there was no finesse, and no underlying power. If I had to play a high note, I didn’t know how to.”

Steele tried, unsuccessfully, to address the problem in his early twenties. It wasn’t until last summer that he decided to have another go. “After every gig my mouth would be cut to shreds – and it would only be by about late afternoon the next day that it would have healed enough for me to play. Last year I noticed that it was taking longer and longer to heal.

“The other issue was that because I felt that I was hurting myself when practising, practising itself became sort of self-defeating. If I had a gig at night, I felt I couldn’t practise as I’d knacker myself so I was frustated because I wanted to play.”

As a pre-emptive strike, before anything else went wrong, Steele began to look for a teacher. He settled initially on Adam Rapa, an American trumpeter, who gave him some lessons via Skype, prescribing the same sort of radical change Steele had tried in his twenties.

This time, Steele persevered, but being tutored over the internet, with the tutor unable to see at first hand what he was doing, proved, ultimately, disastrous: he ended up with a whole new problem, of his throat closing up when he went above a certain note. During a gig in December, his throat went into excruciating spasms . “By this point I couldn’t play the old way or the new way. It all fell apart and I had to cancel gigs.”

It was two weeks before Christmas, and Steele – a father of three, two of whom are under ten years old – not only had no work, but also no idea whether he’d be able to work again. “I was terrified I’d never get it back,” he admits, “and although I did wonder what I might do if it didn’t work out, I couldn’t really come up with anything. The last thing I did was study accountancy at university until I was 19, but I took a year out when I got offered the chance to join Hue and Cry, and I never returned.”

At this point he reached out to John Kenny, an experienced and highly regarded trombonist and teacher with whom he had worked many times – and he began to deal with the throat problems, while Steele was also working on his breathing and his posture. Meanwhile, he wasn’t earning. Did he work out how long he could afford to give himself to re-learn the trumpet?

“No, because if you start giving yourself deadlines then you put yourself under pressure and then things are going to go wrong the second you panic. I needed to be able to play in a relaxed way – so it was a matter of digging deep into credit cards for a while, remortgaging, keeping the head down and not panicking.”

However, panic – and grim despair – did set in. “It took six weeks for me to blow one note,” explains Steele. “I was so excited that I expanded that very quickly, and got so carried away that I hurt my throat again, and went right back to the beginning: I couldn’t play. I did think ‘maybe this is never going to work’. I’d pushed it too far too fast. It was devastating. I felt like I was facing losing my identity.”

Despite being depressed about this catastrophic setback, Steele, who admits to being a stubborn character, started all over again. And exactly six weeks later, he managed to play a note without any side effects. Needless to say, this time he proceeded with extreme caution.

Realising that Steele needed to see someone more regularly, John Kenny put him in touch with the BBC SSO’s principal trumpeter Mark O’Keeffe who agreed to take him on – and, like Kenny, refused to take any payment. At their first session, O’Keeffe asked Steele to play Three Blind Mice, and immediately identified his problems. “He gave me loads of incredible advice. Everything he said made perfect sense, and it wasn’t radical change he was suggesting – it was a natural approach. I would go in with an issue and within five minutes he’d have explained the whole thing and I’d be doing it correctly – after 20-odd years of doing it wrong.”

Steele’s progress from this point was “shocking – I felt even from the first day that I was getting 10% better every day”. After three weeks, he played I Loves You Porgy and O’Keeffe said: “That was beautiful.” And that, says Steele, “was the best compliment I’ve ever had. I felt that I was finally at the beginning of something.”

“Another great supporter,” he says, “was Bill Kyle [who runs The Jazz Bar]. He was one of the first people I confided in last December, and every month he would phone me to see if I was ready to come and sit in.”

Steele’s “second chance” at the trumpet coincided with the Fringe programme being finalised so when Kyle called him three hours before the programme deadline and said that a five-gig slot had become available, he grabbed the opportunity to realise a project he’d long hoped to do: a duo with pianist Brian Kellock. And, as luck would have it, he was back in action in time for the Edinburgh Jazz Festival programme too.

Having turned the corner, Steele has just got better and better – and is now “over the moon” with his sound. “I think it’s better now than it was before all this. It’s stronger and warmer and much, much closer to the tone I’ve always wanted to have. Chet may have sounded as if he was taking shallow, very light breaths – which is what I used to do – but he didn’t play that way. And now I don’t either …”

* For details of Colin Steele’s Edinburgh Jazz Festival gigs visit www.edinburghjazzfestival.com. His duo is at The Jazz Bar from August 6-11.