06-1996 / Scotland on Sunday / Bill Wells

Bill Wells is our friend and sometime collaborator. When I met him in 1995 I was listening mostly to 60's Impulse jazz and was completely amazed to find a local musician playing with that kind of spirit. I wanted to help him and wrote this piece for Scotland on Sunday. Music to the hipster's ears As the 10th Glasgow International Jazz Festival clunks its way into our lives, don't be surprised if excitement is tempered with a feeling closer to melancholy. A cursory look at the programme will reveal why: Louis Armstrong, Ella Fitzgerald, Django Reinhardt, Mingus, Coltrane - we're to celebrate their music, though necessarily in absentia. It's almost as if one of the most vibrant art-forms of the 20th century has become a museum. If that isn't strictly true, it's fair to say that jazz has been marginalised in recent years; no longer seen as either the cutting edge of the avant-garde, or all that popular. The jazz fan hipster despairs: how are we to cock a snook at the squares if we're living in the wrong place at the wrong time?
For Bill Wells, who is very happy to be participating this year, it is an exciting time for music. He cites John Zorn and Bill Frisell as two players who are moving jazz into new areas while at least registering in wider public consciousness. Closer to home, Tommy Smith's Beasts of Scotland is an intriguing collaboration with poet Edwin Morgan, and one of the centrepieces of the festival. If Smith is Scotland's best known jazz player, Wells is eager to point out that there is plenty going on on our own doorstep. To prove this he happily supplies me with a toppling pile of tapes including Phil and Tom Bancroft and Lindsay Cooper; the latter being valued contributors to his own octet. Ah yes, The Bill Wells Octet; inspired, inspiring, wild, dangerous and tender. Just about everything you look for in music. I'm convinced. Then the punchline: 'Of course I'm not actually sure if what I do counts as jazz. I think some people on the Scottish jazz scene might feel insulted if I'm included.' Wells's whole relationship with Scottish jazz is noteworthy, indeed it seems he commands a certain notoriety - although it hasn't really helped his career. Commissions have not been forthcoming and he feels that some reviews have been untypically rough, though Scotland on Sunday's Brian Morton is a supporter: 'It's a long sad story though certainly not unique to Bill. He's a fine writer and a classic example of a 'creative musician'. But what he does doesn't fit easily into any market niche, and so he's seen as being an outsider.' It seems to me that if Wells is an outsider struggling to gain acceptance for his music, then there is a certain irony. Is this not closer to where the great jazz came from, than the somewhat smoother pathway of contemporary musicians who have been able to study jazz full-time at Berklee? Wells is entirely self-taught (from his Falkirk home). It was a painstaking process: 'When I started reading about music I'd to spend some time in the area before Page 1. As a result I can never take it for granted that I can play.' Determined to master an instrument, he began to play in clubs from the late Seventies, which he describes as 'frustrating but a learning process ... Eventually I was writing some arrangements that I thought were quite good. Naively I thought maybe Bobby Wishart would be glad to use them. He wasn't, and it struck me that I would have to put my own band together.' The Octet is essentially jazz because that is the background of its members, and Wells has been able to attract some of the best players on the Scottish scene. He relies upon their technique to realise his ideas of structure, space and improvisation. To an extent the music reflects his own taste for the melodic inventiveness of Gil Evans, Charlie Mingus, Brian Wilson, Burt Bacharach and Gary McFarland. However these are mere pointers as the Octet is in a world of its own, at times approaching what Sun Ra termed 'the sound of joy'. Ever enterprising, Wells has from the start recorded performances treating them as documents of the Octet's musical journey. He began to sell them at concerts and last year released a CD. This has had mixed results: his band were rather surprised as they hadn't been informed of his plan, which his critics have seen as vanity publishing. However, the rough and ready approach has brought his music across to some of the hippest names in independent music, and now Stereolab, the Telstar Ponies and Domino Records are fans. Wells is indomitable, looking forward to his first studio foray and making grand plans: 'The setbacks just make me more determined.'
SP. Scotland on Sunday. 23rd June 1996