Review roundup – Cheltenham and more

Haven’t had time to write here last few weeks, so here’s a link roundup to reviews of some of the excellent gigs we’ve heard.

Tony Benjamin’s take on Saturday at Cheltenham

Peter Bacon writing about Mike Gibbs and Gary Burton the day after.

Mary James’ reflections on Cheltenham

And Mike Collins was there too.

Mike also caught the terrific gig from The Bad Plus at Colston Hall last Saturday.

So did Tony Benjamin, who was equally enthusiastic.

And slightly further back, Charley Dunlap filed a nice piece about the John Law/Alex Hutton double trio gig at Chapel Arts in Bath

So we’ve had an outpouring of good writing as well as good music. Ready for a breather now, but the Basquiat Strings/Oriole date at St George’s next Thursday looks enticing. Basquiat’s new CD collected a rave review from John Fordham a couple of weeks ago, and Oriole seem to make friends wherever they go so hard to resist that one!

Overwhelmed with riches – Cheltenham, Saturday

We seem to be in one of those spells when geography and the calendar come together to make a space where every gig is golden. After hearing Quercus (sublime) and Marius Neset (of whom more below) a week apart at St George’s, we had plenty to reflect on. But Cheltenham beckoned with one of the strongest programme for years. And the three perfomances we caught yesterday were all quite wonderful. Some days it feels almost greedy to hear so much great music…  Almost.

First up, trumpet maestro Dave Douglas in the jazz arena, with the wind flapping the canvas like a clipper ship, and the odd siren – which happily seemed to be in the right key. Neither bothered his superbly accomplished band, with Donny McCaslin on sax making a welcome return to Cheltenham to reproduce the front line from the Douglas quintet’s memorable show in 2009 – rather than John Irabagon who joins Douglas on his two latest recordings.

This time, though, we had the phenomenal Linda Oh on bass and a singer – Heather Masse – presenting some of the hymns and folk songs on Douglas’s “Be Still” set, although the best of all was perhaps a song whose title I didn’t catch which was a new offering. It was solidly in the folk story-telling tradition, and combined a traditional ballad feel with some great soloing – imagine Fairport Convention with the personnel transformed into jazz virtuosi and you’d be close. An altogether fine show.

The time for an annual catch-up with Cheltenham friends (hi Nick, even though you think blogs are rubbish) before Sons of Kemet in the Parabola. Shabaka Hutchings’ little band has two fine drummers – Seb Rochford and Tom Skinner – telepathically linked, and evoking a deep African dance/trance feel. The astonishing Oren Marshall dances on his feet while punching out tuba lines which interweave with Hutchings’ sax and clarinet figures – the clarinet particularly affecting. The general effect is mesmerising, the drums providing a rolling rhythmic river, as they do in Joe Lovano’s two drummer quintet but with the paired percussion more in lockstep here than playing for contrast as they do in Lovano’s concept. In some bands the others would float over rhythm like this, but Marshall and Hutchings are both deep in the swim, with the inherently blurry sound of the tuba, even when played with his athletic precision, smoothing out the choppiness of a two drummer sound rather pleasingly. The single horn at the top exposes the sax and clarinet vividly, and the leader rose to this well, keeping us absorbed for a generous hour’s set. A band to revisit in a year or so to see how they have developed, but already a very satisfying musical offering. I fancy them in a double bill with Dhakla, whose riffier approach would complement Sons of Kemet’s more stretched out concept beautifully.

Finally, saving the best ’til last, back to the Parabola for the Edition Quartet. The unostentatious name, from the record label, denotes the combination of two remarkable duos already seen live – Dave Stapleton and Neil Yates on piano/trumpet and Marius Neset and Daniel Herskedal on sax/tuba. A relief, incidentally, to hear Neil Yates back in action after his accident at St Georges earlier this year, when he finished the gig after making hard contact with the gallery timbers, but had a seriously compromised embouchure afterwards.

This is an inspired foursome who delivered a spellbinding 90 minutes. Stapleton presided unobtrusively, and furnished several pieces from his Flight suite, Herskedal and Yates were matching marvels on their high and low horns, and Neset was simply heart-rending. He was recognisably the same player who presented a set at St George’s with the kind of scalding intensity that has people talking of what it must have been like to hear Charlie Parker  - and, said the buzz, in Cheltenham the night before. But the music he plays with Herskedal and Stapledon brings out his lyrical side, wringing the emotion from every phrase of a ballad, evoking folk dance, pastoral landscapes and the beauty of emotion recollected in tranquillity more than fired in the heat of the moment. And yet, the intensity is still there, and while he is playing you simply cannot take your eyes off the man with the saxophone. Different music: the same total commitment. For all the several beauties of this gig, I felt wrung out afterwards, in the best possible way. A good day.

Did I say greedy? Well, maybe a little. We’re off back up the road today to hear the great Michael Gibbs and then Gary Burton, who I have been listening to since approximately forever. There are still tickets left for both for any late deciders…

World Service Project – tonight

Having signed off the last post with hopes for audiences for all the gigs on offer, looks like the last one I mentioned needs a bit of a boost. Ian Storror just tweeted that the World Service Project date at the Hen and Chicken in Southville is now “pay what you want”.

They’re a great band – well worth catching – so this is a pretty enticing offer to round of your weekend.

More details here.

And latest announcement:

MASSIVE OFFER:Pay what you want? WORLD SERVICE PROJECT Bristol tonight! Need an audience for Hi-Energy-Punk/Jazz lads
Was going to cancel gig through lack of advanced bookings but the guys are really up for it. They may be busking for a crowd in Bristol Docks this afternoon. Above and beyond the call.
Extra-ordinary assault on your senses with this powerhouse JAZZ/Punk/Funk outfit, well worth a listen, come down to the Hen & Chicken tonight from 8pm.

Coming up, John Law, Alex Hutton: two piano trios in Bath – and more!

Basic policy here is to point to John Law for gig of the week whenever he’s playing somewhere in reach of Bristol. Here’s why.

This time, the gig is extra-special as there are two trios for the price of one. As Law says,

It’s a double bill entitled The Contemporary British Jazz Piano Trio and will feature my trio and that of young, exciting pianist Alex Hutton. Both of us happen to use the same rhythm section of Yuri Goloubev (astonishing Russian bass virtuoso) and Asaf Sirkis (my sensational Israeli drummer I’ve played with now for nine years), so it’s a chance to contrast and compare two different, yet similar trios.

Sounds enticing. The gig is at Chapel Arts Centre in Bath on Weds 24th, and advance tickets, astonishingly, are only 8 quid. Box office here.

Having said which…  After what has seemed like a bit of a lull, music is breaking out all over in the next few days/weeks – it must be Spring or something. If you can’t make it to Bath, Alex Hutton‘s trio have another date on their tour at the BeBop Club (which hasn’t had big crowds lately, apparently) on Friday, the Pushy Doctors are at The Fringe, Clifton on Thursday, although I’ll be going to St George’s to marvel again at June Tabor, this time with Huw Warrern and Iain Ballamy in Quercus – really looking forward to that one! – there’s a remarkable line-up of improvisers at Colston Hall on Saturday for Mopomoso, and the World Service Project are playing for Ian (Jazz at the Albert) Storror at the Hen and Chicken on Sunday. (Pause for breath – see the venue links list on the right for details of all these). Then St George’s have another more or less compulsory gig on Thursday May 2, with Marius Neset, and the Cheltenham Festival gets under way at the same time (Dave Douglas, Gary Burton, Mike Gibbs, Ravi Coltrane, and many more…). It will be hard to keep up, and we won’t manage it, but hope all these great gigs find their audience!

The Bristol jazz scene – reposted

This ramble about what makes for a good jazz scene in Bristol has been up on the LondonJazzNews site for a while – it was written in the run up to the jazz festival. There are some comments there, too, but I’m putting it up again here ‘cos makes it easier for me to find it again, just in case I want to remind myself what I said quickly one day…

And by the way, the point is to list a few features of the milieu, not name all the names – a healthy scene has more than you can mention if you are writing a blog post rather than an encyclopedia entry

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Bristol’s first international Jazz and Blues Festival (March 1-3) is going to span an impressive range of music over two-and-a-bit days. Also impressive, I think, is the number of sets on offer from musicians based in and around the city. In various combinations, they make up more than a dozen different bands who will be fitting in sets in the Colston Hall’s splendid new landmark foyer as well as in the main concert spaces.What makes for a thriving jazz scene like this? I’ve wondered since I fetched up in Bristol from London a bit over five years ago. OK, I knew that there was jazz outside the capital, in theory. But I was worried there wouldn’t be enough good stuff. Surely, just as US jazz players gravitate toward New York, the good ones in the UK make the trek to London?I quickly learnt it ain’t so. Bristol keeps on coming up with things I really want to hear. I should have expected that in a city of nearly half a million. But perhaps there’s more to it than that. I’ve a strong impression there’s as much going on here as in much bigger conurbations like Birmingham or Manchester. Is it something in the water? No, growing a nicely working jazz scene seems to need something like this:

- A pool of good musicians. But not too many. When everyone knows everyone else, new combinations arise naturally. That’s always happened in jazz, and you can see it happening here all the time. So Dan Moore plays with Andy Sheppard’strio for local pub gigs, The Pushy Doctors, with young alto sax star James Mortonin Pork Chop, as well as joining singer Yolanda Quartey in country/soul fusion outfit Phantom Limb. The Festival’s artistic director Denny Illet also plays funk with Morton, pops up again in jazz/cabaret outfit Moscow Drug Club, and has his own trio. Trumpeter Pete Judge is half the horn section in avant rock/jazz favourites Get the Blessing, but can also be heard playing wistfully beautiful acoustic tunes (and lots of other instruments) in Three Cane Whale in the free-spirited duo with drummer Pete Wigens, Eyebrow,and weaving dancing lines into the horn tapestry of Dakhla.

- Reliable rhythm sections. Bassists, pianists, drummers get to play with more people on the whole, so a few key players make a huge contribution to keeping a scene ticking over. Many bands rely on the drum skills of Mark Whitlam, and the keys of the country’s best undiscovered piano player, Jim Blomfield. Bass player about town Will Harris is probably the busiest of all, playing in two or three bands alongside Emily Wright, appearing regularly with trumpeter Andy Hague’s quintet, and popping up with any number of bands at the weekly sessions at the bebop club down in Hotwells. Which brings us to…

- Organisers. Andy Hague, as well as leading a long-running, all-star boppish quintet has run the bebop club for many years, and frequently convenes ad hoc ensembles to play new arrangements he has worked up from the many jazz composers whose work he loves and knows inside out. Jim Barr, bassist with Get the Blessing and the (slightly more famous) Portishead has his own studio, which helps get recordings organised, too.

- Venues, and plenty of them. A few have gone on long enough to be heard of out of town, like the aforementioned bebop club at the Bear in Hotwells or the Old Duke in the city centre. But there is hardly a pub, bar or café that hasn’t tried the odd jazz night. I’ve seen good music in at least eight venues I can walk to from my house. There’s certainly no lack of places to try out your new band on a live audience.

- Regular new blood. Infusion in Bristol comes on occasion from Dartington in Devon, and from an excellent jazz course at the Royal Welsh College of Music across the Severn in Cardiff. Some Bristolians like up and coming vocalist Emily Wright (Moonlight Saving Time) finish their musical education there. Other players, like recent Cardiff graduate Dan Messore shift to Bristol because it means they can still keep links forged in Wales, play around the South West, but also make a date in London when they come up. Because…

- It’s not London, but not so far away. Plenty of Bristolians stay in close touch with the local scene while studying in London (young sax exponents James Gardiner-Bateman and Josh Arcoleo come to mind). Others, like the superbly gifted trumpeter Nick Malcolm take the London plunge but keep coming back here to play (in Moonlight Saving Time again).

- Mentors. As well as the newcomers, a healthy scene needs its inspiring elders. Bristol, of course, has one bona-fide international jazz star in Andy Sheppard, who plays regularly in the city when not on tour. He has taken a close interest in James Morton’s career. Josh Arcoleo got his early tips from Frome resident and sax legendPee Wee Ellis. It’s another fine jazz tradition. You learn from more experienced players: you pass it on. Iain Ballamy, Jason Rebello, and the great Keith Tippettall live in the South West as well.

- Add all that up, and stir in a little Kevin Figes (saxes), guitarists Jerry Crozier-Cole and Adrian Utley, and keyboard player Mike Willox (a London refugee, plays with everyone),and you account for a very healthy proportion of the festival. That’s a pretty healthy scene.

- Oh, and it needs one more thing: someone to tell everyone what all these people are up to that’s good, and where to find them playing. That would be Tony Benjamin, Festival trustee, jazz reviewer for the former Venue magazine, and now for theVenue website and the Bristol Post. Tony had a fine 60th birthday party a couple of months back. Who turned out to play? Just Moonlight Saving Time. AndSmith and Willox. And Sheelanagig. And Get the Blessing. And an 11-piece Afro-Jazz big band to finish. It was the best possible showcase for a city bursting with jazz talent. All it lacked was an after hours jam session. But the Festival is putting that right, with three of them running after the main evening gigs. I’ll be there, hoping to spot the our best local players discovering the germ of a new idea, or a new band, somewhere Round about midnight…

Local heroes: Jim Blomfield Trio, BeBop Club, March 22

Bristol has a splendid jazz scene, as I’ve gone on about at length elsewhere - a scene in the sense that there is a pool of excellent players who combine and recombine in lots of different ensembles.

A jazz obsessive enthusiast gets used to some faces. You know that if Jim Blomfield is at the keyboard- in Andy Hague’s quintet, Kevin Figes’ Quartet, at one of the rare sightings of the Resonation Big Band, or a bunch of other bands – it’s in safe hands.

Too easy, maybe, to take that for granted. So it was a treat to hear him leading his own trio, and have a full evening’s reminder what a very good player he is.

Two sets at the BeBop club, with a well-rehearsed Mark Whitlam on drums and Roshan “Tosh” Wijetunge on bass, covered an impressive range. There was a Wayne Shorter tune, a Mingus piece, a Schumann arrangement, and a big helping of his own compositions. Like Brad Mehldau, he has a well-developed classical technique, but he also returns often to latin grooves, draws heavily on bop, and (on Pier Pressure) rock.

The Schumann intermezzo turned into a ballad, and there were some nice contemplative moments on another Blomfield composition, Now and Zen, “looking for a quiet place amid the chaos”, as he put it. The more typical Blomfield solo, though, has a nice, bustling urgency, a mood echoed by the drummer, with occasional pauses to savour a simpler figure or a couple of chords soon giving way to a renewed flow of notes. There’s  an appealing swagger about quite a few of his tunes (Return of the Easton Walk) and a touch of dry humour (it’s the walk you adopt in Easton to reduce the chance of getting mugged, apparently). It’s a good combination. And the closer, a bluesy swinger “dedicated to Saturday night” whose title I didn’t catch, put new heart into a decent BeBop club crowd who had come down on the most dismal Friday night of the year so far. First day of Spring – ha!

Music like this, happily, confers immunity to weather. Couldn’t take it home because the trio CD which features many of these tunes wasn’t quite ready – seem to have heard that before on these premises this year. It’ll be well worth getting hold of when it is available though.If  in Bristol, you’re in luck, because it will be easy to hear Jim playing again and pick up a copy. If not, I think it will bring this particular local treasure some national attention. It really should. (Samples here, for now. Do have a listen.)

Bristol Jazz and Blues Festival – Thank you!

Like I said, I got involved a bit in promoting our splendid new jazz festival, so I’m not going to review it. Probably doesn’t matter on an obscure blog, which is mainly here for my own benefit, but my old journalistic mindset makes me want to keep some kind of boundary between the two.

However…  a few things to say here. First is simply a big thank you to the people who got it going. There was a lot of real work going on while I was messing around on twitter chasing followers for @BristolJazzFest, and it seems to have paid off! The weekend went amazingly well, and I got a sense of the local jazz scene taking stock of itself and rather liking what it saw. Saying it put the city on the map for jazz is a cliche, but true. This is a fine thing, and a tribute to the vision of the organisers.

There’s been lots of positive comment on twitter, on facebook, and in various reviews – from Mike Collins (was was playing piano in the jam session around 1.00 am on Sunday morning so you can tell he took his reviewing duties seriously) at LondonJazzNews (three pieces: Ginger Baker here, Get the Blessing here and a roundup here), from Jazz Journal, (here and here) and one in the Telegraph.

Lots of great pics, too - here, here, and here.

Final comment on videos, sort of. I looked at quite a few videos of Arturo Sandoval during the build-up, and tweeted a view. Some were quite impressive. But nothing came near the impact of hearing him play on the live stage. I’m not hugely drawn to his style – supercharged be-bop with a Latin tinge – but he’s certainly an extraordinary player, on trumpet and piano. There’s a mountain of fine jazz on YouTube these days, which is excellent when BBC TV jazz output is so pitiful. But, as ever, there’s no substitute for being there.

Best thing about the Festival was lots of people having that experience who probably hadn’t sampled jazz before – and finding, as Andy Sheppard put it in a Q&A, “jazz is people making music with people, for people”. Here’s to next year!

Add 6/3. Great review of the whole festival for BBC Music Magazine here

Add 8/3 and a particularly nicely turned review from Tony Benjamin (of course) here 

plus more photos from Alan Ainsworth here and Arthur Hagues here

(never have so many jazz musicians been photographed playing in Bristol, so well…)

Add 11/3 Missed some more reviews, from Listomania in Bath, like this one…

The sound of three trumpets…

Had a notion to turn out for gigs a bit less often this year – going for quality, not quantity (more in the listening than the playing – real attention calls for a bit of effort). However, we still found our way to three of them in the last week. As it happens, all were in a jazz area, and all featured superb trumpet playing. And the infinite variety of music means things which might look superficially similar sounded quite different. All good, but different.

First up was Kevin Figes quartet taking care of the early Sunday evening (6-8.30) gig at the Brass Pig on the triangle in Clifton. It’s a cavernous place, especially downstairs, but the upstairs room works OK for music – it could do with some lighting for the band – and more people were there to listen than I might have guessed. The quartet mostly played standards, as they were augmented by guest Steve Waterman on trumpet. He has tone and technique to spare, and reeled off a succession of superb, boppish solos. Tony Orrell on drums was a bonus, and the whole thing was a nice way to round off the weekend.

Followed swiftly by the Edition Records showcase at St George’s the following night. This was probably the best of the three, with an opening solo set from Ivo Neame on piano followed by the piano/trumpet duet of Dave Stapleton and Neil Yates. Tony Benjamin’s review of the evening is a particularly nice piece.

As he says, the trumpet playing here was quite different. Trumpet may be the only instrument aside from the drum which gives us a verb, but trumpeting was exactly what Yates wasn’t doing on this outing. It was more like tuneful breathing by someone who happened to have a trumpet against his lips at the time. Pushing air through brass with that kind of plaintive whisper requires impressive control of the instrument. It also sounds wonderful. The music was meditative, melancholic, wisftul, resigned, and deeply joyous by turns. If I am ever ill and looking for a restorative, don’t send me to soak at a spa, find me more of this to immerse myself in, please.

Finally, we went down to the BeBop club on Friday to hear what Nick Malcolm is up to with his quartet. Not of lot of bebop, but lots of interesting new music, is the answer – there’s a new CD set for recording in May which will be a cracker. As on previous outings, the general approach is freebop, with solo inspiration depending crucially on melodic ideas. The themes are getting quite elaborate. Malcolm has not exactly taken a vow to eschew more familiar intervals but he certainly emphasises the other kind, They sound pretty tricky to play. The neatly arranged endings  of several debut pieces here evoked the smiles of relief of musicians who have just successfully negotiated the rapids for the first time. Strong material, from the leader and Olie Brice on bass, and excellent playing from everyone, especially the mercurial Corey Mwamba on vibes, making a welcome return visit. This quartet go beyond the familiar routine of head and solos – which is still rewarding in the right hands but can easily seem merely routine nowadays – to explore music which puts a premium on real, high risk improvisation. Most of the time, they bring it off splendidly. They’ll be energising the free stage at the Bristol Jazz and Blues Fest in a few weeks, so if you missed them, and the turnout was a little thinner than some recent BeBop evenings, come on down to Colston Hall then.

Coming up – Compassionate Dictatorship

Sorry to see that Mitsuko Uchida’s recital at St George’s tomorrow has been cancelled, but – yay! – that means we can go down to the BeBop Club to hear Compassionate Dictatorship, a favourite quartet.

They have superb front line (Jez Franks, guitar, Tori Freestone sax) and a matchless rhythm section (Jasper Hoiby, James Maddren). I fancy Jasper’s bass playing won’t be heard in venues like the Bear in Hotwells that often in future, as his own trio Phronesis move out on to the international concert circuit (They’re off to Australia in February). So all the more enticing to see him in a small space in Bristol one more time…

Previous visits by this band were outstanding, too, as are both their CDs, so expectation high.

Here’s the Be-Bop club blurb:

This excellent band is touring again with Jazz Services support, and produced great gigs on their previous visits. Most of the music is composed by guitarist Jez Franks, who tutors for Birmingham Conservatoire and the Falmouth-Yamaha Summer School. Jez has worked with most of the big names in jazz on the London scene, and Rick Astley. Saxophonist Tori Freestone teaches at Leeds College, and has worked with The Creative Jazz Orchestra and Orquesta Timbala. Bassist Jasper Hoiby is from Copenhagen, and stayed in London after studying at the Royal Academy, working with Gerard Presencer, Pete Wareham, Seb Rochford and many more. Drummer James Maddren is one of the UK’s finest drummers, well known to Bristol audiences through his work with Josh Arcoleo. Fresh sounding melodic contemporary jazz, superbly performed.

And here’s the band website.

The beat goes on – 2012′s standout gigs

It’s been a richly rewarding musical year, as usual. A great mix of regular gigs in and round Bristol plus festivals in Cheltenham, Bath, Brecon and London was augmented by the indulgence of a trip to the Chicago Jazz Festival. One reason for keeping up the blog is to remind me which nights stood out. Re-reading this year’s impressions, and aligning them with what I now remember that the words don’t capture, here are a notable dozen in 2012 (in no particular order).

Andy Sheppard’s Trio Libero – first heard in Cheltenham last year, and also caught in Bath, but the best set so far was at St George’s I think. Michel Bonita’s bass sounded wonderful in there.

So did another bass player, Michael Janisch, underpinning the great quintet of Aruan Ortiz, Greg Osby and co. The sax/tuba duo of Marius Neset and Daniel Herskedal also used the room to great effect, as did Dave Stapleton’s double quartet project playing his superb new compositions from Flight. Fred Hersch was pretty remarkable at St George’s, too – a high hit rate there this year.

Stan Tracey stays in the memory from Bath, duetting with drummer son Clarke, as does Soweto Kinch from Brecon – an intense performance. Intense was also the word for Ken Vandermark and Paul Nillson-Love in Chicago, and it was great to catch the Billy Hart quartet there, too.

We heard Joe McPhee in Chicago as well, but his duo at the Cube with Chris Corsano a month or so earlier was an unexpected delight.

Young saxophonist – and impressive composer – George Crowley came to town for a fine night at the Coronation Tap, and Bill Frisell, whose live sets I’ve found a mixed bag in the past, blew me away with his trio at Cheltenham. So, finally, did Chick Corea’s trio with Brian Blade and Christian McBride at the London Jazz Festival. Is that 13?  Well a baker’s dozen then.

There was a thing on Radio4 this morning asking if jazz is dead. I think this lot suggests the answer is no. The range and quality of music one can hear at first hand, in this early part of the new century, is a constantly renewed privilege.

If anything else stands out from this year for me, it is the contribution which drummers make to the music. The level of skill, responsiveness and invention from the current generation of drummers seems to get more gripping every year. Joyful to see Rudy Royston at work with Frisell, and again with Ortiz, Brian Blade inspiring Corea, Seb Rochford with Sheppard, Corsano’s understanding with  McPhee, Nilsson-Love with Vandermark, not to mention Marcus Gilmore with Steve Coleman in Chicago, Tony Orrell with the Pushy Doctors and Dylan Howe subbing on the drum stool for Get the Blessing. A fair to middling gig can be lifted by a great drummer. If the others are superb, but the drummer is not quite up to it, there is trouble with this music. I find drummers at work even harder  to describe convincingly than the other musicians, but  what they do thrills and intrigues in equal measure.

Here’s to more chances to try and work out why this is in 2013…