If you are going to see Madeleine Peyroux at Symphony Hall tomorrow evening – and an awful lot of you are; the only seats left are so far up you might need oxygen masks and want to call yourself Edmund Hillary – then might I recommend you get there on time, and so catch Birmingham-based singer Sara Colman, who is opening for Ms Peyroux?
Sara has played in nearly every venue there is around Birmingham, from Broad Street bars to the Jam House and the Glee Club, and she has entertained the Rush Hour crowd in the Symphony Hall foyer on more than one occasion.
Now she gets to go inside one of the finest concert halls on the planet and sing to a pretty nearly full house. And well does she deserve the break… Go, Sara, go!
The Edge, Much Wenlock, Shropshire, UK
26-04-09 A hundred people had squeezed into the room, clustered round small candle-lit tables, and the atmosphere was just right for this Norwegian band near the beginning of what could be an ever-rising road to jazz popularity.
The sound that trumpeter Eick makes has been familiar to fans of the German ECM label for a while from his many stints as a sideman. With his own band we get all that – the intimate trumpet voice, the almost vocal phrasing, the ability to rise from quiet conversational tone to poetic and joyous declamation – but we get, too, his strong melodies and a subtle twist in the way he arranges a conventional instrumental line-up.
To the eye this is a straight jazz quartet – Eick on trumpet, Andreas Ulvo on piano, Audun Erlien on electric bass and Rune Arnesen on drums – but to the ear it is refreshingly different. Erlien’s bass is used as a second melody instrument, sometimes playing themes in harmony with the trumpet, or running a counterpoint. And the band don’t really solo in the conventional way, either – although Eick took the lead most of the evening, his improvisations are so strongly linked to the tunes that they feel more like extended melodies, and Ulvo’s decoration around them enhances that impression. Arnesen used to great effect thick reed brushes that looked like they might be more conventionally used for sweeping floors.
Most of the material was from Eick’s recent ECM disc The Door, but he is constantly writing. One new piece, Edinburgh, had been composed in that city just two days earlier.
Eick shares with the late Esbjorn Svensson the ability to write pop-accessible tunes and then to arrange them with jazz depth, and he also favours the song-long dynamic arch that can take the group from a whisper to a scream and back again. There seems no reason why this band shouldn’t match EST’s success.
The Convergence Quartet, which is playing The Rainbow in Digbeth, Birmingham, this evening, brings together young players from both sides of the Atlantic. New Yorker Taylor Ho Burnam is on cornet, Alexander Hawkins is on piano, Dominic Lash on bass and Harris Eisenstadt on drums. They favour a fairly free playing field where Burnam can growl and smear and the trio can leave lots of space and work up some complex rhythmic interplay. Go here for more.
The Convergence Quartet take the stand at 9pm and tickets are just £3 on the door.
CBSO Centre, Birmingham, UK
25-04-09 This was the culmination of five months of work with pupils at Hodge Hill, Hamstead Hall and Holyhead schools in the city. Leading what is called the Birmingham Jazz Creative Futures project was Sid Peacock, helped by teachers at the schools and jazz musician tutors.
Some 35 pupils had been at a workshop for most of the day before a late afternoon concert took shape and the audience of mostly parents was ushered in. The project had worked with a wide range of abilities with many of the participants never having played in groups before, and never in public until this concert.
Violins and rhythm section started the gig off with a Django Reinhardt-tinged version of Rockin’ Robin, and from there is it was on to the blues, Herbie Hancock’s Watermelon Man and an original tune or two. Many of the players had a crack at improvisation, and remembered to bow in acknowledgement of the applause. This is not just about music, but about working in groups, mutual support, presentation skills… the list of benefits goes on.
For the grand finale, Peacock assembled pupils and tutors together for a jazz orchestra of 40 players. He brings an innovative educational process into play here, which had involved the young players making up their own riffs and melodies. These were then identified with numbers that Peacock signalled during the piece. He had also taught them his own hand signal code that denotes a variety of textures, movements, building climaxes and other things.
As a result, this large variously-skilled group of young musicians could come together with no music-reading necessary and perform a fairly sophisticated, multi-movement piece of music interspersed with their own improvisations, and largely of their own creation. It was inspiring stuff, both enthusiastically presented and enthusiastically received.
I’m thinking about the Cheltenham Jazz Festival (as it used to be called) or Cheltenham Festials’ Jazz09 as it is called in these catchy times. And to take just one strand through it, I thought I might concentrate on the trumpeters at the festival.
One of the undoubted stars of the festival is South African Hugh Masekela, a vital player in the township style of jazz that emerged as a symbol of hope for the oppressed back in the 1960s. Forced to flee his homeland early on, both to seek personal and musical freedom, Hugh had US hit success with his tune Grazing In The Grass and he also made some of the most creative jazz-rock fusion of the time.
A characterful singer as well as trumpeter, Masekela also summed up the bittersweet symbolism of the train ride for migrant mine workers in South Africa in his evocative song Stimela.
Hugh Masekela is playing in Cheltenham Town Hall on Friday at 7.30pm.
Also on Friday evening, in The Daffodil, the lovely restaurant converted from an art deco cinema, is a trumpeter with a familiar face. Colin Salmon is perhaps better known as an actor, both in Bond movies and in Dr Who. He was able to combine both talents a couple of Sundays ago when he played trumpeter Note Mkote in the BBC1 series, The No 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency.
His Cheltenham gig includes dinner and starts at 7.15pm.
There will be loads of trumpets in the Town Hall the previous night, of course, when the BBC Concert Orchestra and the Guy Barker Big Band celebrate the music of Duke Ellington. Don’t be fooled by the title – Friday Night Is Music Night is on Thursday, because it’s being recorded in advance for BBC Radio 2, and it starts at 7.30pm.
Sunday is also a good day for trumpeters, with cutting edge players from both the US and Europe.
Dave Douglas is one of the outstanding players of the instrument, and also a great bandleader, and he operates in what is still the most testing city for jazz, New York. He brings his Quintet, with Donny McCaslin on saxophone, Orren Evans on Fender Rhodes keyboard, Scott Colley on bass and Clarence Penn on drums, to the Everyman Theatre at 7.30pm on Sunday evening.
As a trumpet appetizer for the that gig, the truly extraordinary Norwegian musician Arve Henriksen is in the Town Hall Pillar Room at 6pm. He is likely to be playing solo, I think, but uses loops and samples to create a rich texture for his trumpet which he sometimes plays without a mouthpiece and often makes sound as gentle as a flute. Like Masekela, he is also a great singer.
The British trumpeter Tom Arthurs is not only playing with his band Subtopia at noon on Sunday, also in the Town Hall Pillar Room, but is getting right down to basics on Monday morning with a trumpet masterclass. He’ll be giving advice to some young trumpet hopefuls and these sessions are fascinating, whether you are a musician or just an enthusiastic fan. It’s at 10.30am in the Town Hall Drawing Room.
For more information and to book for Cheltenham Festivals’ Jazz09, go here.
If you are going to see Madeleine Peyroux at Symphony Hall tomorrow evening – and an awful lot of you are; the only seats left are so far up you might need oxygen masks and want to call yourself Edmund Hillary – then might I recommend you get there on time, and so catch Birmingham-based singer Sara Colman, who is opening for Ms Peyroux?
A hundred people had squeezed into the room, clustered round small candle-lit tables, and the atmosphere was just right for this Norwegian band near the beginning of what could be an ever-rising road to jazz popularity.
This was the culmination of five months of work with pupils at Hodge Hill, Hamstead Hall and Holyhead schools in the city. Leading what is called the Birmingham Jazz Creative Futures project was Sid Peacock, helped by teachers at the schools and jazz musician tutors.
