Issue 97 / March 2019

REVIEWS
Leonardo da Vinci:
A Life In Drawing
Walker Art Gallery – until 06/05
To commemorate 500 years since the death of LEONARDO
DA VINCI, the Royal Collection Trust have released 144 of the
Renaissance master’s pieces to be shown across 12 UK venues,
before being brought together for the largest exhibition of his
work in 65 years, to be held at Buckingham Palace from summer
2019.
It is a rare moment for these works to be allowed to leave
the Royal houses by the RCT. The trust’s overall wish that their
Da Vinci 500 (Gareth Evans)
collection of over a million objects collected over 500 years can
be viewed and enjoyed by the people is hampered somewhat by
the fact that they are confined usually to the Royal palaces and
estates in the south of England. So, to have the Leonardo pieces
travel north, or indeed anywhere, is an event worthy of some
celebration.
Leonardo 500 is a study in study. What we see in these,
the private notations of the master never intended for public
view, is the meeting point of artist, scientist, mathematician and
philosopher that formed the genius of Leonardo. A place where,
in his quest to visualise and enrich his own knowledge, detailed
notation and instruction works alongside the drawings with equal
importance, highlighting his profound world vision of limitless
interpretation and endless possibility.
These are not paintings, but moments of intense inquisition
delicately expressed through chalk, ink and quill. He used
drawing to think, it helped him converse with the world
around him, to see more and to be more by seeking a better
understanding of the elements and how natural processes affect
us. His fascination with botany, architecture, the human form,
engineering and cartography are shown here in this collection of
delicate fragments of genius. There is a deep and rich purity to
these images held, for instance, in his vital need to understand
the mechanism of muscle and bone in a piece such as The
Muscles Of The Upper Spine (from 1510-11). Working at the
medical school at the University of Pavia for an entire winter,
dissecting and drawing human bodies, each muscle, every sinew
and bone became an individual study, forming a quest for deeper
understanding. This was a process Leonardo enjoyed hugely,
until his mentor, anatomy professor Marcantonio della Torre, died
from plague, at which point the artist was forced to move on to
other projects.
The preparatory materials for an ambitious work depicting
the Battle Of Anghiari in 1503, a work which would later be
destroyed as were so many of his pieces, is another search for
detail. His attempts to capture the hellish fury and rage of war
in the flared nostrils and bared teeth of a horse’s head, repeated
on this one piece, with a lion’s head pictured for comparison,
are further example of the urgency of his study, the repeated
attempts to perfectly define the form, scrupulous and absorbing.
There is added context given to the Walker’s Leonardo
500 exhibition by a display of the links between the artist and
gallery. William Roscoe was a renowned collector and donator
of work from the Italian Renaissance – as well as writing the
first biography of Lorenzo de’ Medici – and donated many prints,
drawings and paintings from before and during this period.
Because of this, the work of Leonardo’s many peers and mentors
are represented on permanent display in the Walker.
This is a unique opportunity for art lovers in Liverpool and
beyond (there are a further 12 of the Leonardo 500 pieces,
focusing predominantly on his anatomical work, currently at
Manchester Art Gallery). With the Walker welcoming a collection
of over 250 pieces of work from Charles Rennie Mackintosh and
his contemporaries in The Glasgow Movement in March, and
Tate Liverpool given over to a Keith Haring retrospective in the
summer, Leonardo 500 should be celebrated as much for its
beauty as for the fact that it has been allowed to leave the Royal
Collection if only for as little as three months. While the sheets
that make up Leonardo 500 are on paper, so easily damaged
by exposure, there must surely be a need for more of the Royal
Collection’s million plus items being on permanent display
somewhere outside of the English or Scottish capital cities.
For the people, and for all time.
Paul Fitzgerald / @NothingvilleM
Jah Wobble And The Invaders Of
The Heart
Philharmonic Music Room – 01/02
A packed-out Music Room awaits the arrival of the enigmatic,
genre-mashing JAH WOBBLE, whose 40 years in the music
business have produced one of the most distinctive oeuvres in
the post-punk pantheon. There’s a “we love this guy… but what
the hell are we in for tonight?” kind of vibe in the room tonight.
Wobble walks onstage alone and begins to describe how
the evening will pan out: “I’ll do a song and tell you about it, the
band will come on, they’re pretty good, we’ll do some music, I’ll
make some self-deprecating comments, which is really me being
smug and… OK, I’ll get on with it.” Upon which he sits down
and proceeds to get into a solo bass groove which immediately
has heads nodding. After a while he is joined by drummer Marc
Layton-Bennett who picks up the rhythm, then by guitarist
Martin Chung, and, eventually, keyboard player George King
who begin to lay down some jazzy, proggy flourishes over the
trademark throbbing bass.
“That was the jazz workout to show you how good we are,”
quips Wobble, before they launch into a dub version of Harry
J Allstars’ ska classic The Liquidator, which, under Wobble’s
mimed mixing desk direction, they deconstruct and build back up
again. As the evening develops it becomes obvious that there’s
no planned setlist. Wobble seems to go wherever his heart tells
him, and he has a bountiful orchard from which to pluck. There
are about 10 Invaders Of The Heart albums to start with, not to
mention PiL, the English Roots Band and a list of collaborations
as long as your arm.
The band members are constantly looking at him and at each
other for clues and cues as to where the music could go next. It
takes musicianship of the highest quality to pull this off, but that’s
what we get. The band is absolutely top notch, whether playing
a pared back skank or in full improvisational jazz flow. Chung and
King’s ability to sit on the groove or to embellish it with technically
brilliant but empathetic soloing is masterful.
“I feel like Nietzsche staring into the abyss… the abyss stares
back.” He’s off on another stream of consciousness ramble, which
he directs at both audience and band, who play the straight men,
nodding with amused, heard it all before tolerance. It’s part music,
part musical theatre – I half expect Wobble to doff his trademark
fedora and don a fez before going into a comedy magic number.
His wife, guzheng player Zi Lan Liao, and son (percussion)
have joined them now. The harp-like Chinese instrument is
played in a flurry of circular hand motions, but its delicate swirl
is at times lost in the mix when the band are in full flow. Wobble
acknowledges Augustus Pablo as having turned him on to Eastern
music, saluting him with a version of Java before concluding the
first half with a leftfield version of Fleetwood Mac’s The Chain.
The second half of the evening progresses in a mixture of
laughter, musical virtuosity and versions of older material stripped
of any hint of nostalgia by dint of their updated interpretations and
dynamic delivery (not sure how Wobble manages to sound dynamic,
spending much of the time in a seated posture better suited to
holding a TV remote than a top end Yamaha bass, but he does). The
band, now just a four-piece, play spellbinding versions of Visions Of
You and Becoming More Like God. Elsewhere Every Man’s An Island
perfectly suits Wobble’s deadpan spoken word delivery.
PiL’s Public Image, Poptones and Socialist make it to the
table, but not as we know them. The former morphing into
Jah Wobble And The Invaders Of The Heart (Glyn Akroyd / @glynakroyd)
a spacey dub, while Poptones, delicate at first, building to a
hypnotic, extended crescendo.
We get dialogue from 1971 crime thriller Get Carter
preceding a jazz-fusion version of its theme tune. We get a
comedy, contemporary dance routine, we get poetry, we get
discourse on the hierarchy of musical instruments: “The bass is
the King of the Jungle – grrrrrrrr.” What next?
“Oh, we haven’t done any drum and bass.” Wobble turns
to drummer Layton-Bennett – “and don’t you try cheating,
playing half-pace” – before driving the poor guy to the edge of
exhaustion as he pushes the tempo faster and faster. Layton-
Bennett responds superbly, laying into his kit with controlled fury.
The evening passes all too quickly. A musical kaleidoscope
of differing styles, brilliantly delivered, which is somehow held
together under the direction of the MC, the one-off that is Jah
Wobble. An East End geezer making the King of the Jungle dance
to his own tune. The audience are on their feet, the applause is
long and loud.
Glyn Akroyd / @glynakroyd
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