The Own Band

This is the latest chapter in my on-line autobiography, To read the whole story just click above on the left where it says autobiography,

The “Own Band”
When you’re gigging around as a sideman you often get asked if you also have your “own band”.
The own band can take on various levels of importance , from the central income earner to a peripheral project.
For me, having an “own band” was an imperative from the very start – not only because it’s nice to have your name at the top of the page, but also as a composer it’s the best way to get your music “out there.” Also, one tends to feel that the best situations for expressing yourself as a soloist usually come via situations you have crafted for yourself- but not always- the risk is there that you might just give yourself an easy ride.
So here, I’ll try to tell the story of this, the central path of my own band’s development. There have of course been other projects, sometimes temporarily taking over in importance , while the own band takes a back seat, or even goes on holiday. But I have never personally been able to have two “own bands” in my mind simultaneously; the own band is the first stop for any creative thought, and often shapes that thought while it is still coming into being
I arrived in London fresh from University, in the late ‘seventies. In those days, if you were not offering punk rock, the staple pub music was a sort of jazz rock that might take in influences from afro, latin, jazz fusion or even English home grown jazz rock descended from the Canterbury scene.
The typical line up would be: sax, guitar, keyboards electric bass and drums, sometimes with a sixth member a vocalist, usually female, and my first attempts at putting an own band together followed the quintet formula.
Then came two changes: first my bass player turned up one day for a rehearsal with a double bass, saying he had lost his electric bass,(or that it had been stolen,) and that he could do anything I asked for on his acoustic bass. I had my doubts about this, but I was now entering the stage where people were becoming more important than their instruments, and Olly, my bassist was fine by me on double bass, if that was what he wanted.
Also, I had been working with a keyboard player who was reliable, available and a good friend, but not quite technically up to the level I needed, so he gradually faded out, and I was now offering a quartet of sax/flute (we used to say “reeds” even though the flute has no reed), guitar, double bass and drums.
My first Own Band , The Geoff Warren Quartet, recordings for BBC Radio were in this format with Mark Wood on guitar, Olly Blanchflower on double bass and Malcom Ball on drums.
Artist Carolyn Clough came to one of our gigs at Battersea Arts Centre and did some sketches. This must have been around 1983. Don’t we look cute and boyish!

Here is the first track from our first BBC Radio3 broadcast. They called it “discontinuous live performance” so it was in studio but there was no going back to do second takes unless the piece really fell apart. The tune is called “Waiting for Highgate”,

After a few years Mark dropped out. At that time he was getting work with some name bands like Nucleus, and had also started complaining about Olly’s bass playing. (not to Olly, only to me.) On this subject I asked for an opinion from Graham Collier who had seen the band a couple of times. He told me that in his opinion there was nothing wrong with Olly’s bass playing. Probably Mark was looking for a more subservient bass player , whereas Olly tended to interact.
So, for about a year Tim Stone took Mark’s place, but I had some difficulties getting on with him, and he was soon replaced by Ed Speight, Graham Collier’s guitarist, bringing me to the last UK Quartet line-up which existed from about 1984 to 1988, seen here taking a beer break during rehearsals for our Yugoslavia tour of 1985. L-R: Malcolm, Olly, Geoff, Ed.


Moving base to Italy of course changed everything. Arriving in a new country I made some attempts to reproduce the quartet, but two factors seemed to be against this. Firstly, there was less of a culture for bands to present all their own material, particularly in the jazz world and perhaps even more particularly in the Emilia Romagna region at that time. Having a few originals on the set list was OK, but a certain amount of standard repertoire was expected. Also, the venues I had immediate access to, had budgets that made working in quartet not very rewarding. So, I started working in trio: just me, bass and drums.
I wasn’t new to this format , the band Isogon, with which I had made my first ever BBC broadcast in 1979, had been such a trio. But this line -up was fairly innovative for Emilia Romagna in the late ‘80s, and as I have written above, we started getting quite a lot of gigs.
My first companions in this trio format were Stefano Cappa (Bass) and Lucio Caliendo (drums).

I wrote some material for this line-up, but it never really, fully felt like an “own band”. It was however busy enough, and central enough to my life to merit inclusion here. But, as time passed, I found myself becoming more and more a sideman for various other groups, and this pleased me. Apart from being fairly stable in Graham Collier’s line ups I had rarely worked as sideman on the London Jazz Scene.
So, the ‘90s became a decade of playing in lots of different projects, having a shelf full of folders with the various repertoires, and relying quite heavily on my ability to read and to adapt. The bands I played in also started to move away slightly from jazz, into ethno- fusion, New Age, and other types of music that were still looking for a label, but where I could apply my talents and be myself.
During this period, I made a conscious effort to drop the saxophones, or rather I started to feel that the saxophones, particularly the alto, were for when I was doing a job, whereas the flutes were for when I was being myself, albeit often in someone else’s context.
My move to Abruzzo, which happened gradually over the first years of the century, reawakened the desire to have a quartet again. Once again, I was looking around for the right members. The main difference now was that there were to be no more saxophones- not even a little bit of ethnic sounding soprano. This was going to be a jazz quartet fronted by a flute. In deciding this I was already setting up roadblocks for myself, but an own band means you do what you want and need to do, and if some promoters can’t conceive of a jazz quartet without a sax or a trumpet then that’s their loss.
The first stable Italian quartet line up featured Raffaele Pallozzi on piano, double bassist Marcello Sebastiani (with whom I had already worked in many situations, including the trio with Badal Roy,) and Walter Caratelli on drums . With my composition style wanting to get back to my Kentish/Canterbury roots and calling out for an electric bass, eventually Marcello was replaced by Marco Di Marzio. Around this time, I became a Yamaha Artist, and it was now definitely time to record an album in quartet after all these years.
The resulting CD , released on Trevor Taylor’s FMR label in 2014 bears the simple title The Quartet Album.
Here is that line-up in Switzerland in 2016. L-R: Raffaele, Geoff, Marco, Walter.

Walter the drummer gradually phased himself out with some unpredictable behavior and was replaced by Bruno Marcozzi who has remained the drummer since then. This then was the band who recorded The Lonely Cool CD whose title track was the opener I used with that original quartet in the ‘eighties.
Here we are in a break during recording that album in 2022. L-R: Marco, Raffaele, Geoff, Bruno.


I love playing with these guys, and it’s maybe the most comfortable vehicle I’ve had for my ideas. They put up with my time changes and odd length phrases, and have helped me to bring to reality a lot of the things that have been buzzing around in my head over the years.

All of the recordings made by my Italian Quartet are available on digital platforms. Why not follow me on Spotify?

1986 – That Night in Belgrade

This is the latest chapter in my musical autobography. You can read the whole story following the link above on the left.

That night in Belgrade.
Back in 1986 I got the chance to take my quartet on tour in what was then called Yugoslavia, with support from the British Council, who in those days were still willing to promote British Jazz around the World.
A year before I had written the preliminary letters to the State organizations and sent tapes from our BBC Radio sessions, and they had responded saying that they were willing to put us on at some of their festivals if we could get some funding from the British Government.
It turned out that in the same week in October of that year, there were the major jazz festivals in Croatia, Slovenia, Macedonia and Serbia.
I had taken the quartet to Hungary in 1985 and I kept the same line-up for this tour, with Ed Speight on guitar, Olly Blanchflower on double bass, and Malcolm Ball on drums. Stylistically I was moving away from the more open moments, as seen in Other Storeys, and was writing shorter tunes with more jazz rock- Canterbury influence, and making ever more use of the soprano saxophone.
We rehearsed in Greenwich. This was when the riverside area was still pretty down-market; in fact, in places, it was positively squalid, but the rehearsal room, which overlooked the Thames, was well equipped and convenient. These pictures were taken outside.

Back in 1986 Yugoslavia had no motorways, and the best way to get from one city to the next, in time to play on consecutive days, was to travel by plane. There were, it seemed, daily flights between the cities, and these internal flights were always early in the morning. In order to check in the instruments, we needed to be at the airport usually a couple of hours before take-off so this was the tour of the early morning calls: very early morning calls. On arriving we needed to check in at the hotel and usually there was little time, if any, to rest, before going to the venue for the sound check. I don’t know how my colleagues managed but by the end of the tour I was suffering from a serious lack of sleep.
This was life on the road, and of course, as a musician I was used to it. But I was less used to it as band leader. We didn’t have a road manager thinking about every detail. After landing in the new town, we would of course be met by someone from the local organization. The nice thing about being a sideman on tour is that you only have to think about playing, eating and sleeping. Here I had to be conscious, responsible, and even chatty, most of the time.
Here is the tour schedule and you can see that after a fairly easy start it gets a bit intense towards the end.
Monday 20 October Flight London to Zagreb.
Tuesday 21 October Concert in Zagreb
Wednesday 22 October – Free day
Thursday 23 October Bus to Ljubljana – Concert in Ljubljana
Friday 24 October Plane to Skopje- Concert in Skopje
Saturday 25 October Plane to Belgrade. Concert in Belgrade.
Sunday 26 October. Flights- Belgrade-Zagreb. Zagreb – London.
The night after our gig in Zagreb we were out of the theatre by about ten p.m. and looking for a restaurant. Everything was closed apart from some really seedy looking places where they wanted dollars and the meals came complete with hostesses.
We wandered around the Croatian capital looking for something to eat, and eventually got to the main railway station where there was a greasy burger bar. That was our dinner. On the wall behind the man flipping the burgers was a photo of Marshall Tito. Ed remarked, in a voice that I felt was a little too loud “I’ll have a Tito-burger”. I was horrified that the chef might take offence. but it seemed he wasn’t listening.
It was on this occasion that Ed Speight offered me a piece of wisdom that I have kept with me all my life. “First rule of the road – Eat while you can.” An excellent rule, but possibly more applicable to a jobbing back-line musician than to a front man. Also, getting older, one’s stomach starts to need more time to digest. In recent years (writing in 2023) I have occasionally forgone a big meal pre-concert and played on an empty stomach, only to grab a sandwich afterwards.
The Wednesday night, after our only free day, our appointed driver took us to a restaurant out of town, possibly run by relations of his . We had a fantastic meal, consisting mostly of grilled meats, and we paid very, very little.
There was a problem waiting to kick in. My Selmer Mark Six soprano saxophone, at some point during the tour – about halfway, started to have problems. It seemed to have taken a knock and I really don’t know how or where. The funny thing was the problem was gradually getting worse! – As if the instrument was slowly bending! – As if the tension in the rods was too much for the body and was pulling it round. I used it in Zagreb and Ljubljana but for Skopje and Belgrade it was out of the question.
I remember being driven around Belgrade on the Saturday afternoon by one of our local organizers, desperately searching for an instrument repair man. But that afternoon there were no instrument repairers available in the Serbian capital.
Like I said earlier, the repertoire I had been developing had been very dependent on the Soprano sax. So now I found myself short of material. I think maybe one of the pieces could be adapted to the alto sax but the rest couldn’t. There was, of course, the option of filling the set out with some jazz standards, but at that time I wasn’t much of a standards player. I taught standards in my evening classes of course, but rarely performed them on my own gigs, and had never played standards with this band. Also, my personal repertoire didn’t really mix well with standards.
So, I was tired, slightly disorientated by having to adapt the set, and the instrument I had been relying on most was now unavailable.
Belgrade was a weird gig.
I got the impression we had been stuffed into an already full festival program. Someone had thought, “This band is here, and the Brits are paying for them, so let’s put them somewhere.” They used us as an opening act to what was essentially a jam session. And I seem to recall the organizers of the event were, not exactly hostile, but a little cold, in that we seemed to be holding up their fun.
Miles Davis was playing Belgrade that night and before our performance we were kindly driven to the big hall where he was performing. (I think we saw Miles before we played our gig, but it may have been afterwards.) This was the band with Robben Ford on guitar and Bob Berg on sax. I can remember really enjoying a couple of beautiful solos by Berg, who for some reason was wearing a long leather coat on stage. Ford was a little too rock for my tastes. And Miles? I can remember him playing some chords on a keyboard he had for his personal use on stage, and I can remember them having an almost endless delay that got in the way of the music and…I don’t remember much else because I fell asleep. The hall was full, all the seats were taken, so we were sitting on the floor at the front between the seats and the band- right on front of the band, and I just nodded off. So, I can’t really say if I appreciated the great man or not. The lack of sleep accumulated during the week finally took its toll. We were escorted out before Miles finished his set, as it was time for us to go to work. (I think that’s how it went.)
So, the only time in my life I got to see Miles Davis live, and had a place right up front, really close to the band, I fell asleep. I’m not proud of it, but that’s what happened.
Overall, I think we generally played well during the tour, and I remember having a good feeling about our gigs in Zagreb and Skopje, but also feeling relieved when we finished our set in Belgrade.

A Blast from the Past

Recorded live at BBC Radio Maida Vale studios in 1983. Here I am playing a Parrot alto flute in the first recording of my tune “Nobody Phoned”. For the full story go to the last chapter of my autobiography page in this site.