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Deirdre Cartwright Group - Tune Up, Turn On, Stretch Out

Blow the Fuse Records BTF 0707CD

Deirdre Cartwright, guitar; Alison Rayner, bass; Buster Birch, drums; Sarah P, vocals

What I hear is a mix of influences and on my first audition, music in the background to other activities, I detected the sounds of Jimi Hendrix, Jefferson Airplane and a touch of Grateful Dead. Hendrix used the technique of guitar feedback and was influenced by the blues of Elmore James, Albert King and Muddy Waters, pulling styles from modern jazz and rhythm-and-blues and soul guitarists like Cornell Dupree and Curtis Mayfield. The Jefferson Airplane sound that I heard was reminiscent of their 1967 Surrealistic Pillow album, a fusion of folk-rock and psychedelia that included jazz drummer Spencer Dryden in the line-up. There are echoes of White Rabbit in the album, but none of Grace Slick in the vocals.

The Dead sound is somewhat less precise and I am tempted to locate it perhaps with Jerry Garcia’s guitar or maybe Phil Lesh’s bass, but Deirdre Cartwright’s delight at the variety of guitar sounds that she can use drew me in the direction of an obscure offshoot of the Dead catalogue. Seastones, 1975, from the pen of composer Ned Lagin, featured Dryden, Lesh and Garcia along with David Crosby, David Freiberg, Mickey Hart and Grace Slick, in an expression of the composer’s artistic vision. The piece uses “-expressive musical materials - chord patterns, harmonic clusters, melodic fragments, notes, pitches, rhythms and sung and spoken words”. Perhaps the parallel is that this album has a similar structure: perhaps that’s what I hear, but I still don’t think it’s jazz.

‘Smells Like Jazz’ (track 4) is a Nirvana influenced composition (yes, ‘grunge’ music - their 1991 album Nevermind carried the lead single ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’) and Deirdre still recognises the effect of an early exposure to ‘Glam Rock’, so the range of influences seems endless and leads me into my diversion, for Deirdre has another side to her. She was one of the original members of the all-female jazz ensemble, The Guest Stars and at one time The Electric Landladies with Alison Rayner and together the duo was City Jazz. Over the more than thirty years that Deirdre has been in music, she has demonstrated that a place in music should not be acknowledged on the basis of gender but on musical achievement. She is not alone in this for Ivy Benson's all-female big band played a major role, from the 1940s onwards through the 1980s, in training women musicians and giving them a chance to play professionally. The women’s movement of the 70s gave musicians like Annie Whitehead a further spur to do things their own way and both she and Deirdre were taught at the hands and in the band of Ivy. Just as in the earlier days the New Orleans traditionalists took exception to the bebop generation, so did this latter seek to denigrate free improvisation and male musicians in Britain objected when Ivy Benson won a slot on BBC radio. So she and Annie and Deirdre might be considered to be at the cutting edge of one of the faces of music in the counterculture, just as Surrealistic Pillow was considered to be one of the quintessential albums of the American counterculture of the 1960s, a reaction against the conservative social norms of the 1950s. Tune Up, Turn On, Stretch Out may not be jazz, but it is an album of some significance and very enjoyable. You may too – file it under W.

Reviewed by
ken cheetham
March 2008