Young trumpeter leads this week’s pick of the Midland gigs

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Laura Jurd

Laura Jurd

Birmingham Jazz has backed a winner this week and tempted young trumpeter Laura Jurd and her band up from London. I think this could be her first gig in the West Midlands since her debut album, Landing Ground, made considerable waves in the jazz critics’ sea.

Landing Ground revealed a composer and player who not only has considerable ambitions – it includes a string quartet as well as a jazz group, and some complex extended fully-scored writing – but a characterful and original sound on her instrument, which incorporates everything from a full open tone to smears and high, choked notes in the Kenny Wheeler tradition.

In Landing Ground she goes from Latin-tinged group arrangements to piano and trumpet duo improvisations, to mad circus band antics, and on to writing that is as influenced by contemporary classical composition as it is by jazz, all in the course of an hour of recorded music.

As I wrote, when reviewing the album last December, it would be an impressive achievement as a fourth or fifth release from someone on their mid-30s; that it was the debut of a 22-year-old who was still studying at Trinity College was astounding.

Laura has various bands in which she can explore her  ideas from duo to orchestra to collective.

For the Birmingham Jazz date she brings her long-standing quartet – they have supported Chris Potter at Ronnie Scott’s in London – comprising Elliot Galvin on piano, Conor Chaplin on bass and Corrie Dick on drums.

The Laura Jurd Quartet plays The Red Lion in Warstone Lane, Jewellery Quarter, from 7.45pm tomorrow (Friday) evening. Tickets are £10 (£8 for members) on the door, and you can find out more at www.birminghamjazz.co.uk

Georgia Mancio

Georgia Mancio

Another driving force in jazz around London is singer Georgia Mancio, and Midlanders get a rare chance to hear her in collaboration with guitarist Nigel Price at Huntingdon Hall on Saturday evening, courtesy of Worcester Jazz.

Georgia also performs in a wide variety of bands but the inspiration for this duo came from that of Ella Fitzgerald and Joe Pass. The blend of voice and electric guitar is a highly efficient, no strings attached way of making good vocal jazz music.

The pre-publicity suggests Mancio’s Italian/Uruguayan fire and Price’s bluesy feel will be a heady mix, and who is to deny that.

Georgia Mancio and Nigel Price are at Huntingdon Hall at 8pm on Saturday. Tickets are £12.50 and you can book at www.worcesterlive.co.uk

Tomorrow’s Jazzlines Free Jazz session in the Symphony Hall Cafe Bar joins forces with Celebrating Sanctuary and Refugee Week to present the African jazz of Afro Mio, a quartet of musicians from the Congo and Angola. Expect rich harmonies in five languages, sunny looping guitar melodies, a strong percussive groove – and loud shirts!

Afro Mio play from 5pm and entry is free. More at www.thsh.co.uk

And for a quick jump from central Africa to Sardinia, head for The Ort Cafe where double bassist Sebastiano Dessanay and guitarist Gianluca Corona explore their heritage with a little help from drummer Tymoteusz Jozwiak (no, he’s not Sardinian!).

Sardinian Songbook is at 9pm tomorrow. Entry is £5 (£3) and there is more at www.blambirmingham.co.uk

CD review: Cécile McLorin Salvant

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womanchildWomanchild
(Mack Avenue MAC1072)

Still in her early 20s this Miami-born, half-French, half-Haitian singer has already been a finalist in the Thelonious Monk International Jazz Competition and is clearly a major new vocal force on the jazz scene.

McLorin Salvant goes right back to the beginnings of jazz for some of her inspiration and opens this disc with St Louis Gal which had been sung by Bessie Smith nearly a century earlier. She has does a great reading of Bert Williams and Alex Rogers’ Nobody, doing justice to its humour and its seriousness.

If I have a slight problem with her it is that she wears her influences a little too openly – sounding remarkably like Betty Carter (especially early Betty) in her vocal tone and phrasing, and writing remarkably like Abbey Lincoln with her own title song.

She sounds more original on another of her own tunes, Le Front Cache Sur Tes Genoux, perhaps because she sings it in French.

Of course these Carterisms and Lincolnisms are not necessarily a problem for the listener – McLorin Salvant does them gloriously, and there are worse singers to imitate! And it isn’t all she does – she uses remarkable variety in her tone and the range of her delivery.

The timing on her I Didn’t Know What Time It Was is lovely, the arrangement of There’s A Lull In My Life is slow and sensuous, and You Bring Out The Savage In Me shows even more of that range of vocal character as well as a daring choice of material and a dramatic wit.

Her band, a trio led by pianist Aaron Diehl, with a little added guitar and banjo here and there, is excellent.

It’ll be exciting to hear what Cécile McLorin Salvant does next, and especially as she develops further her very own style and sound.

Here is a live taste of I Didn’t Know…:

 

CD review: Jon Davis

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davisOne Up Front
 (Positone PR8110)

Best known for playing with Jaco Pastorius on the West Coast in the mid-1980s, this pianist studied with Lennie Tristano, Jaki Byard and Ran Blake, and has been gigging for nearly 30 years.

Back in his home town of New York a while now, he has been in house bands, taught, and been an in-demand side and session man.

This is a warm and friendly trio disc with Joris Teepe on bass and Shinnosuke Takahashi on drums, with Davis working his way through some of his own tunes interspersed with one by Teepe, How Deep Is The Ocean, You’re The Top, Goodbye Pork Pie Hat and Horace Silver’s Strollin’.

The album has that lived-in feel you get when a man is sure of his jazz home and still working to find those musical highs that make it all worthwhile. Here he moves comfortably from a simmer to a boil and back again.

CD review: Nikolaj Hess

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trioTrio
(HESS-1)

The Danish pianist divides his time between Copenhagen and New York and this disc finds him in the company of two familiar players from the latter’s Downtown scene, double bassist Tony Scherr and drummer Kenny Wollesen.

From the start, a slow, pensive reading of Bob Dylan’s Make You Feel My Love, this single day in a Brooklyn recording studio feels like time well spent.

Nikolaj Hess

Nikolaj Hess

With the exception of another Dylan (Masters Of War) and Duke Ellington’s Cottontail, the compositions are all Hess’s.

Film (he does quite a lot of work for cinema) has a simple but compelling tune, and Scherr and Wollesen (he favours mallets) give it a deeply spacious groove, and Black & White continues that mood into slightly more sombre areas as befitting its monochromatic nature.

Masters has a circling left-hand line, which lets Scherr add the colour while Wollesen explores his cymbals.

Sept 2010 has a light formality after the freedom of Improv, while Cottontail features a funky left-hand riff which forms the basis for a fine bass solo and makes the well-worn song new again, and Social Call has a sunny African feel to it.

Overall, a lovely album, assured in its clean plainness and space, full of light and clarity of purpose.

New insights on that old conundrum – is it jazz?

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Dan Nicholls (Picture Scott Macmillan)

Dan Nicholls (Picture Scott Macmillan)

Pianist and composer Dan Nicholls has a new album out on the Loop label, called Ruins. In the course of a rewarding email back and forth, I asked Dan if he considered his music to be comfortably labelled “jazz”.

Here is his response:

“I find the word ‘jazz’ more inhibiting than it is useful personally, as I have no real feeling of ownership of the actual word, but rather some of the music that it refers to. I think that using a word like ‘jazz’, which ideally symbolises a democratic and peerless movement with many diverse influences, but more often than not is used as a banner for a ‘style’ that people believe they ’own’ and know the rules of, triggers a lot of negative associations in the minds of listeners. The music that we are referring to can all to often be presented in a very confusing and ill-conceived way – the musical content and manner of the performers being aloof and ‘high-art’ but the setting and presentation being more underground and down to earth.” 

Read the full interview here.

CD review: Metamorphic

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metaCoalescence
 (F-IRE Records F-IRECD 59)

Laura Cole is the pianist, composer, arranger and leader of this band which met at Middlesex Uni. It includes Led Bib alto saxophonist Chris Williams and Juice singer Kerry Andrew.

I was reminded while listening to the opening track, Puma, of a friend of mine who prefers to avoid vocal jazz. Here we have not only vocal jazz but spoken word jazz! Heaven knows how fast he would run from the room.

Which is a pity because I’m sure he’d love the instrumental bits, full of loopy, overlapping motifs.The tunes have some insinuating riffs, some appealing tricky time signatures and while the soloists are never likely to overwhelm the compositions or arrangements, they are solid.

In the course of the album Cole incorporates her own style into music by Ornette Coleman, Jimi Hendrix, Kenny Wheeler and Radiohead without it being submerged, but I find it’s some of her own wholly original pieces which end up the more interesting on the album. Flotsam And Jetsam is a favourite, and there are some lovely horn harmonies (John Martin is on tenor and soprano) in Gneiss. Troyka guitarist Chris Montague does a nice guest turn on The Juicemaster.

Ultimately, though, this music stands or falls on the compositions and overall musical conception, which might be a little too introspective (it has its source in Cole’s own battles with RSI) for some tastes. And, in sympathy with my friend, I have to confess that the vocal elements become tiresome on repeated listening.

  • Metamorphic is currently touring and remaining dates are Darlington Jazz Club tonight, Millennium Hall in Sheffield tomorrow, Voicebox in Derby on Wednesday, and Seven Arts in Leeds on Thursday. The album launch is at The Vortex in London on 24 June and there is a final tour date at Lost Voices in Liverpool on 27 June.

Concert review: Django Bates’ Beloved

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CBSO Centre, Birmingham UK
14-06-2013

This trio – Django Bates on piano, Petter Eldh on double bass and Peter Bruun – was formed so that Bates could explore his love for the music of Charlie Parker. So its first album, Bird (2010), was, with two exceptions, filled with music Parker either wrote or like to play.

By the time the band was ready to record a second, Confirmation (2012) Parker was still a prime inspiration but the compositional mix had changed, with two of Bates’ tunes for every one or Parker’s.

This concert, the band’s second visit to the CBSO Centre, moved that trend still further, with the Parker pieces – Scrapple From The Apple, My Little Suede Shoes, Confirmation, Donna Lee, Ah-Leu-Cha and Now’s The Time among them, getting some serious Django cut, paste, stretch and squeeze.

Of course, it’s a highly logical move – as are all Bates’s artistic decisions in my book – because why play a whole Parker bebop classic head in full when a mere scrap of notes from time to time is enough to make the reference, to ascertain what playground we’re in  here?

In the notes to the first album, Django refers to a critic at one of Beloved’s early gigs claiming that Bird would be turning in his grave. Well, there’s a classic case of the misguided elevation of Parker’s music into some kind of hallowed canon right there; on the contrary, I can’t believe Parker would have been anything but chuckling with delight at last night’s concert.

And not only at what Bates, Eldh and Bruun were doing to his music – Parker would surely have been fascinated by the way Bates and the players have such fun and games with time, just as he did, with creativity, just as he did, and with moving the music forward into places it has never been before, just as he did.

We were treated to two generous sets completely devoid of longeuers and saturated with highs. In amongst the Parkers were Bates’ Sadness All The Way Down, Peonies As Promised and others I didn’t catch the names of. Peonies was a highpoint in the first set, and a particular equivalent in the second set was a lengthy through-composed piece that Bates sight-read.

All were jammed with those things I love about his music – the fidgety time signatures, the pauses and surges, the chords and phrases tight and muscular one minute, blowsy and blooming the next – just like those peonies.

And in Bruun and Eldh, Bates has found musicians able to guess where he’s going almost before he has decided himself.

Eldh is mightily strong, accurate and driving, which gives Bruun the space to do what he loves best – to phrase with Bates, to colour and comment, drawing so much eloquence from vellum, cymbal and stick I wouldn’t have been surprised if they had begun to talk.

An evening of music which astounded, delighted, amused and enriched. I don’t know if there is an emoticon that combines eyebrows arched in amazement coupled with an ear-to-ear smiley face, but that would have summed up my mood last night.

Oh, and only Django Bates would choose to fit into a solo the briefest snatch of La Cucaracha. Genius.