Instead of the complacent vanity of a band insisting they can’t be pigeonholed, I’d like to imagine Robert Wyatt, on being asked where to place the type of music he has helped produce for ‘Ghosts’, simply shrugging and saying ‘Oh, anywhere you’d like really.’ His work is so often stylish and technically polished yet suffused with an aura of absent minded beauty. At once mainstream, jazz and outsider art, he continues to plough a happy furrow through the music scene and has added to one of the loveliest and most underrated back catalogues in music with his latest release. ‘For the Ghosts Within’ is a collaboration between Wyatt, saxophonist Gilad Atzman and violinst Ros Stephen which puts original compositions alongside standards such as ‘Round Midnight’ and ‘In a Sentimental Mood’.
So much hangs on his voice – personally I think it’s a lovely thing, that soft south England accent wandering through string quartets and aching sax, hanging notes and a vague sense that Wyatt is wandering around his house in nightgown and slippers singing to himself and unaware that he has an audience entranced by his performance. And it is an uneven album, in the best sense – the title track is a sumptuous, twisting ballad with guest vocalist Tali Atzman’s haunting voice floating amidst eastern scales, an embroidery of sound that carries lightly the darker thematic resonances and is followed by ‘Where Are They Now?’ which sounds like a trad jazz take on Mozart’s Divertimenti , plunging in and out of sampled beats and Arabic rap.
This is what self-indulgence should sound like. And a thought strikes me – that maybe, to act with total self-indulgence is to behave with complete integrity.
But I digress – ‘For the Ghosts Within’ is your favourite batty uncle, your letter to Santa delivered, a guiltless-guilty pleasure and a tender and understated treat.
