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The Jazz Life — The Mike Westbrook Concert Band
Celebration
In musical terms 1967 was a year now perhaps best remembered for The Beatles Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, an album which undoubtedly changed popular music forever. Around the same time another group of young men were recording another masterpiece in West London that changed British Modern jazz.
Mike Westbrook’s Concert Band was an outfit that had been formed in 1966, and one that had already made a name for itself on the UK jazz scene as a band with power, inventiveness, and a handful of soloists, especially John Surman, Mike Osborne, and Malcolm Griffiths, who were changing the very concept of the jazz solo with performances that left the listener as breathless as the musician. It was heady stuff that even now, some 40 years after the release of Celebration — which the Westbrook band recorded on two sweltering summer days in 1967 — sounds as fresh and even more exciting than the first time I heard it.
Let me quote you from Victor Schonfield’s original liner notes:
“ Not many jazz groups have a sufficiently distinctive sound and feeling to appeal to a wide public, and few of the groups which…
