Recordings like this inspired meeting with pianist Jason Moran and saxophonist Chris Potter are the only way to hear Paul Motian these days without travelling to New York, since the septuagenarian drummer stopped touring. Caught live at the Village Vanguard, setting for many a fabled jazz album, this one finds the trio playing mostly ballads, although the prevailing mood of contemplation gives way to more animated playing before the haunting final track, Cathedral Song. Motian is one of jazz’s great colourists, adding subtle brush strokes behind Potter’s variously light, firm and yearning tenor lines and Moran’s quietly assertive style, and he’s also a very melodic, soulful composer. Only the short, tone poem-like version of Irving Berlin’s Be Careful It’s My Heart is a “cover”. All the other pieces are Motian’s, with the fanfare-style Abacus and the simple, attractive Birdsong, familiar from his Le Voyage and Tati albums respectively, sitting alongside new tunes that, as befits someone who has played with Thelonious Monk and Bill Evans, say much with few notes.
A mission to introduce music that’s cuddly but dangerous was Aberdeen-born drummer Sebastian Rochford’s initial reasoning behind naming his band Polar Bear and while the dangerous element might be more accurately described as “unsettling” here, polar opposites still co-exist in one of the most consistently interesting bands to have emerged on the UK jazz scene over the past decade.
This fourth album finds the quintet at its most raw emotionally, creating moods that are by turns delicate, melancholic, plaintive, joyous and positively euphoric, with Apple Mac maestro Leafcutter John now adding guitar rhythms and riffs as well as electronically treated sounds such as the haunting Middle Eastern wail that illuminates Finding Our Feet.
Rochford’s writing is often sparse and has been inspired more recently, it seems, by soul music, giving Pete Wareham and Mark Lockheart’s twin tenor saxophones simple catchy hooks reminiscent of Allen Toussaint’s Working in a Coal Mine on the title track and exploring the soul ballad tradition on the lovely, understated All Here.
Ryan Quigley Big Band, Brunton Theatre, Musselburgh
These people are having far too much fun. How are we supposed to make a case for jazz musicians getting more support from the Scottish Arts Council if, when they get a tour on the SAC’s Tune Up programme, they make it look like they’re enjoying themselves?
I jest, of course, because there was loads of mental, physical and creative effort going into this music, much of which was plotted on the spot. Saxophonists were told they’d be “doing something” just before the count-in. Trumpeters were alerted to their big moments with similar notice. The only person who had a script – apart from the one in Ryan Quigley’s head – was Justin Currie, who seems slightly bemused to be fronting a band without a guitar but does a fine job as the rock heart-throb discovering his inner Nat King Cole.
Quigley’s arrangements, showing typical punch and colourful use of sections and individuals alike, led Currie stealthily from his familiar Del Amitri beat deep into the jazz jungle. By Out of This World, Currie was intoning Johnny Mercer’s lyrics over a John Coltrane orchestra in full Afro Blue mode and in Tomorrow Never Knows, complete with alto saxophonist Paul Towndrow’s “tape running backwards” solo, Quigley captured The Beatles’ psychedelic leanings with scary accuracy, unleashing previously unrealised jazz potential.
As a snapshot of the quality on offer, though, Nature Boy would be hard to better. A splendid vocal from Currie, just-so ensemble work, unutterably classy piano playing from Steve Hamilton and a mischievously miraculous Alyn Cosker drum feature brought smiles all round that may take some time to wear off.
Trumpeter Rory Simmons’ Fringe Magnetic is a many headed beast - in more ways than one. The latest project to emerge from the Loop collective, an organisation of London-based musicians who offer mutual support in nurturing and promoting music that might not otherwise find a place in the market, it’s a ten-piece band that combines elements of chamber music, both left-field and fairly conventional jazz, European art song and folk music influences.
That’s a lot of diverse ingredients but Simmons marshals his resources with a light touch, creating music that’s by turns pastoral, melancholy, slightly frivolous, challenging and eminently hummable. Norwegian singer Elisabeth Nygaard adds her moody presence on four tracks, guest vocalist Andrew Plummer a disturbing menace on another, and if occasionally the ensemble becomes a bit strident, the overall result of thoughtfully arranged trumpet, clarinet, bass clarinet, flute, violin, cello and responsive rhythm section is music that - as best illustrated by Little Boban’s hypnotic phases – is genuinely imaginative and worthy of attention.
Brass Jaw’s second album registers Scotland’s a cappella horns quartet as not only possibly unique, with their three saxophones and one trumpet formation, but also as international class illusionists able to imply the sound of a jazz orchestra at their most lush and romantic and deliver the smart funky strut of the Brecker Brothers’ band without hiring a rhythm section. Across a range of jazz styles from the Gershwins and the Jazz Messengers through to their own grooves, pastorales and impressionism, the arrangements are superb, the playing vital, heartfelt and thrillingly creative.
Classical guitar and trumpet may not be an obviously compatible musical pairing but this meeting of American guitarist and founder of chamber jazz group Oregon, Ralph Towner and Sardinian trumpeter Paolo Fresu is both inspired and clearly mutually inspiring. Towner, who also features on 12-string and baritone guitars, writes most of the material including the gorgeous, hymn-like Sacred Place and the pacier Doubled Up, drawing beautifully poised playing from Fresu and creating typically spiky improvisations and one-man-rhythm-section accompaniments himself. A lovely album that’s up there with Towner’s best work.
Jan Garbarek’s concerts were becoming rather bloodless celebrations of a still great saxophone sound until, not long before this knock-out live recording, Brazilian bass guitarist Yuri Daniel and French drum wonder Manu Katche arrived to re-energise the Norwegian’s music. Over two discs, from the opening exuberant blast through L Shankar’s Paper Nut and on into a dynamic range covering folk song plaintiveness to mighty rhythm-driven fervour, the quartet come on like natural successors to Jaco-era Weather Report, a point supported by a joyful version of Milton Nascimento’s Milagre Dos Peixes, as first championed by Wayne Shorter.
Tom Bancroft Orchestro Interrupto, The Ballad of Linda & Crawford (Interrupto)
Five years have passed since drummer Tom Bancroft recorded this album and for the music it contains to have languished unreleased would have been a great shame. Bancroft composes from the heart as well as an imagination that’s buzzing with ideas. Hence Ornate Bessie succeeds in marrying Count Basie and Ornette Coleman’s very different styles yet also suggests Sun Ra, and a traditional-flavoured jig can move from childlike wonder to expressing raw loss. By turns lyrical, chaotic and beautifully plotted, this is serious music but with an endearingly impudent streak.
In trying to get behind Arkansas photographer Michael Disfarmer’s lens, guitarist Bill Frisell may have created the soundtrack to a film that’s just waiting to be made. Disfarmer was a loner in a small town whose stark Depression-era portraits won him posthumous acclaim and through his own compositions and selected borrowings from Arthur Crudup and Hank Williams, Frisell captures a mood that’s genuinely haunting. With violin, steel guitar, mandolin and bass joining Frisell’s lightly metallic signature sound, the effect is a kind of back porch chamber music through which you can almost see the tumbleweed.
From The Herald, August 8, 2009.
Julian Arguelles Trio with John Abercrombie, Royal Concert Hall, Glasgow
Reversing the “American soloist with local rhythm section” format is still a relative rarity but as Julian Siegel showed in a cracking Glasgow gig with his transatlantic trio earlier in the year and his fellow saxophonist and fellow Julian, the adopted Scot Arguelles confirmed here, the Brits have no need to feel humble in the presence of such greatness.
Arguelles first teamed up with New York bass and drums partnership Michael Formanek and Tom Rainey back in 2004 and the addition of guitarist John Abercrombie, after an uncertain start not helped by the Strathclyde Suite’s rather unforgiving acoustic, developed into a shrewd meeting of like minds.
Abercrombie’s waltz-time Spring Song, with its dreamily beguiling theme, might actually have been written with Arguelles in mind and the quartet’s shared enthusiasm for Ornette Coleman’s music resulted in a Round Trip that fitted them to a T, with Arguelles and Abercrombie’s coiling tenor and guitar caressing its angular shape and bassist Formanek contributing a beefy solo that built logically on the melody.
Arguelles’ Birmingham secondary school and his relocation to East Lothian were celebrated in tune titles such as Wilderness Lane and Fife on the Firth of Forth but it was the saxophonist’s love of Dewey Redman and his half-Spanish background that perhaps registered most strongly. The simply named Redman found Arguelles in bullish, tautly bustling form, supported superbly by Rainey, whose very particular, almost balletic presence – and occasionally his judicious absence – played a major part in shaping the performance as a whole.
Indeed, Rainey’s crisp but subtle punch allied to Arguelles’ hypnotic tenor figure and a classic, inquiring solo from Abercrombie on the concert’s dancing, propulsive Spanish coda strengthened the conviction that this association could have many more miles yet to travel.
Norwegian double bass master Arild Andersen’s long relationship with ECM Records has produced many gems and this is another one. Featuring his trio with Scottish saxophonist Tommy Smith and Italian-born, Norwegian-based drummer Paolo Vinaccia, and with four of the seven tracks given over to Andersen’s superb Independency suite, this is majestic, wistful, roaring, elegant, and wittily conceived music, played by musicians at a peak of spontaneous, conversational creativity. Andersen’s huge-toned command never ceases to delight, whether shadowing Smith’s plaintive reading of Ellington’s Prelude to a Kiss or fuelling Outhouse, where all three players are absolutely flying.
Trumpeter Roy Hargrove says he made this CD with the intention of bringing sonic pleasure to the listener by recording his working quintet playing simple melodies moving around luscious chords. Well, mission accomplished, Mr H. This is a beautiful album by a superbly tempered ensemble largely in the Jazz Messengers tradition but very much of our times, playing with passion, pungency and a great groove and soloing with conviction and style. The title’s spot-on, too, with loads of flavour in the soul cooking as they head towards a very New Orleans-sounding Bring It on Home to Me.
Swoon. At the end of the year that celebrates bossa nova’s fiftieth birthday comes this delicious soufflé of an album. Long based in New York, singer-pianist Eliane Elias returns to her Sao Paolo youth to deliver cool, classy bossa favourites and subtly Brazilianised jazz and pop songs. It’s a perfect recipe: seductively enunciated and beautifully pitched singing with occasional, light brush stroke strings, a quietly simpatico rhythm section and Elias’s superbly sculpted, concise piano solos enhanced by Toots Thielemans’ unutterably heartbreaking harmonica invention on two songs and Ivan Lins’ avuncular voice guesting on his own I’m Not Alone.
Martin Kershaw: Hero as a Riddle, Queen’s Hall, Edinburgh
Many visitors to Edinburgh will be familiar with the work of Eduardo Paolozzi, whether they realise it or not. The Leith-born artist’s pieces are among the most publicly shown art in the capital. Indeed, a large black foot, hand and part of a limb are on permanent display at the top of Leith Walk, where they’re regularly sat on and clambered over.
Martin Kershaw’s immediate response to Paolozzi’s art was just as physical, if more sympathetic, and nine years after moving to Edinburgh, the York-born alto saxophonist with creative jazz hooligans Trianglehead and Scottish National Jazz Orchestra regular has expressed his reactions in music.
The product of Scottish Arts Council new work funding, Kershaw’s Hero as a Riddle is a lovingly crafted work in ten parts. Featuring a frontline of alto and baritone saxophones, trumpet and trombone and rhythm section plus the superbly accomplished Mr McFall’s Chamber trio, playing their skeletal electric instruments, it combines jazz voicings and improvisation with electronica, drum ‘n’ bass and ambient music to create impact, vivid colourings and variety entirely in keeping with its inspirational subject.
Kershaw had, in the Ellington tradition, written the music specifically for the musicians involved and was rewarded with crisp, dynamic ensemble work and splendid individual touches including Ryan Quigley’s exuberant wah-wah trumpeting on the swirlingly addictive ‘Hero’ itself and fellow Trianglehead-case Paul Harrison’s impishly berserk keyboard probing against Wittgenstein at Casino’s quietly insistent drum beat and plangent brass and string chords. What Kershaw achieved above all, though, and not every new work does this, was the quality that calls the listener back.
Bassist John Patitucci spent eight years, during down time from a busy diary that includes work with Wayne Shorter and the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, formulating ideas for the trio he leads here. And it shows. Patitucci’s acoustic and electric basses, Joe Lovano’s saxophone and clarinet and Brian Blade’s drums coalesce in a way that makes the original possibility of including piano seem like over-orchestration. Relaxed grooves, conversational interaction, imaginative colours and strong themes – Sonnyside pays homage to Sonny Rollins and Sunnyside of the Street – makes for a recording that satisfies quickly but reveals more with every listen.
Saxophonist Paul Towndrow’s latest album is another example of the high quality of jazz releases coming out of Scotland these days, as well as being evidence of Towndrow’s further maturing as a soloist, bandleader and composer with an impressive variety of ideas. The opening Heroes in Transit offers listeners an attractive way in via a current update on the Jazz Messengers’ and soul jazz traditions and the more dramatic title track, with its grooving rim-shot rhythm, enigmatic melody and forthright blowing, marries ambition with great playing from a band that can hold its own on the international stage.
They may have been introduced as a chamber jazz trio but Norma Winstone’s accompanists hardly played up to the description, launching into an opening number – a perhaps unlikely union of James Joyce’s words with Nearer My God to Thee’s melody – with a gusto that threatened to overpower even a singer of Winstone’s fortitude.
First impressions can lie, though, and what followed illustrated why Winstone is held in great reverence by those who know her work and showed that in Italian pianist Glauco Venier and German soprano saxophonist and bass clarinettist Klaus Gesing, the English singer has found, possibly, the band of her life.
She may quip about getting too old to be tackling too many rigorous numbers but even in her bus pass years, Winstone is an example to any musician. Always ready for new challenges and different directions, she’s working here with a repertoire that needs an encyclopaedia to accommodate it. Where else are you going to hear John Coltrane’s Giant Steps on tiptoes, Randy Newman given Thelonious Monk’s overcoat, Brigadoon, Harry Nilsson, calypso and Italian folksong all sounding so persuasively compatible?
Venier and Gesing, it turns out, are immense, forming a percussion section with Winstone’s mouth music, offering a dancey bass clarinet descant here, gentle soprano probings and brilliantly rhapsodic piano there. One of several inspired segues, wherein Winstone slipped from wordless ballad to a superbly rendered glide through Tom Waits’ San Diego Serenade into an Italian equivalent of Flora Purim’s intensely rhythmical Brazilian chanting, would have capped a terrific performance, until Winstone led a deathless Every Time We Say Goodbye and broke every heart in the room.
Two numbers into this hugely enjoyable concert, as the applause for the opening piece was still fading, Ari Hoenig put beaters to tom tom and tapped out the stealthiest of tattoos. Initial suspicions were quickly confirmed. It was indeed Bobby Timmons’ ‘Moanin’’ with Hoenig’s drums as the main voice, eventually going through several key changes as this Jazz Messengers classic headed for its coda.
New York-based Hoenig has visited Scotland before, with sometime Steely Dan guitarist Wayne Krantz. Here he was joined by another guitar hero in the making, Israeli-born Gilad Hekselman, and Scottish bassist Euan Burton, in a trio that was less dense, less tense than Krantz’s group, although as with Krantz, Hoenig and Hekselman have clearly formed a close understanding.
Playing a repertoire comprising standards refreshed by Hekselman and Hoenig originals that showed a very precise compositional touch as well as an agreeably bonkers line in pet-derived inspiration, they created music that was by turns elegant, expansive, edgy, good natured and downright groovy.
It was easy to hear why Hekselman has been causing excitement in New York since his arrival there in 2004. He combines plectrum and fingerstyle to great effect, variously picking graceful lines, big warm chords and stinging, intense runs as his solos, such his variations on Hoenig’s cleverly orchestrated ‘Birdless’, built momentum.
At one point, Hoenig, accompanied by Hekselman and Burton, did actually hum a refrain very effectively, a nice touch that underlined the feeling of informality between musicians and audience. It was his singing skins on ‘Moanin’’ and in an increasingly involved, bluesy call and response exchange with Hekselman that particularly caught the ear, though. The more so because, like his vast repertoire of brush strokes, stick bounces and alert, exact detailing, it’s all performed with a musical end product in mind.
It's a minor disappointment that trumpeter Colin Steele can borrow a band name from one of Arthur Montford's favourite expressions and yet leaves tunes untitled when another Arthurian legend - "up go the heads" - would surely do a better job than "tune number seven".
That other football commentary ejaculation associated with the bold Arthur, "disaster for Scotland", wouldn't apply since this Stramash is anything but disastrous. Spilling off the stage through sheer force of numbers, the jazz quintet plus string quartet and pipes prepared for the imminent recording of its first CD by reconfirming the fluidity that this apparently diverse collection of musicians has achieved.
We're well used in these parts to musicians of differing disciplines combining profitably. Even so, without the luxury of consistency in personnel, Steele has forged a particularly well-tempered amalgam of jazz, traditional and classical music. Whether it's the cello leading off a sedate air, the jazzers brawling in a swingtime vignette of carousal in Bowmore or the whole team creating celebratory jig-jazz, it all sounds like Steele.
The compositions he has written specifically for Stramash - most of them evoking successfully locations on Islay - already had an all-of-one-piece quality. However, the way tunes from his quintet's albums have expanded, with whistle sharing a muted trumpet melody or strings shimmering behind blustery tenor sax, makes Stramash all the more persuasive.
One or two bugs were being ironed out in what was essentially - and you'll hear no complaints - a public rehearsal, and Steele's own playing has sounded more at ease before. But if they can capture the whole Stramash panorama in the studio, it'll be a CD worthy of an Arthurian "sensation!"
Liane Carroll's CDs haven't always told the full story but this ballads album holds nothing back. The Hastings-based singer-pianist is a force of nature in a world of jazz singers who barely constitute a mild breeze. At times it's as if she's just managing to control a volcanic soulful eruption, and yet she can be playful, sexy and vulnerable, too. Alone with just her grand, or occasionally electric, piano (except on gorgeous If I Loved You sung to Ian Shaw's piano accompaniment), Carroll gets down and gospelly, confides, confesses and celebrates on jazz standards, show tunes and stunning covers of Laura Nyro, Tom Waits and Donovan songs.
Norwegian saxophonist Trygve Seim has been one of European jazz’s most consistently intriguing arrivals over the past decade and his involvement with accordionist Haltli includes large ensembles as well as this intimate and highly compatible duo. Their range of interests is considerable, spanning Armenian folk tunes, freely improvised pieces, an inspired take on Bob Marley’s Redemption Song and Seim’s superbly guttural waltz for Tom Waits, and although some tracks require patient listening, Seim’s deeply personal, keening soprano saxophone playing, especially when set against Haltli’s bandoneon-esque richness, can easily get under the skin.
Joe Zawinul & the Zawinul Syndicate, 75th (BHM/Birdjam)
Just weeks before he succumbed to cancer, keyboards master Joe Zawinul was celebrating his seventy-fifth birthday, sounding emotional as he introduced his pan-global band and reunited with long time friend and colleague, saxophonist Wayne Shorter, to duet on a moving In a Silent Way. A trouper and team captain to the end, Zawinul plays his heart out as his band grooves and parties with precision, personality and superb musicianship, their world music-jazz fusion, including tumultuous updates of Weather Report classics, confirming their leader’s visionary powers and underlining his candidacy as the hippest septuagenarian on the planet.
