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?