Tom Hill and his band The Straitjackets are at the Jam House this evening, courtesy of Birmingham Jazz. And it’s free!
The US-born, Worcestershire resident double bassist composes for the band and they also have a soft spot for the kind of feisty fusion with jazz credentials the Yellowjackets push out.
So it should be a fine affair indeed. The music starts at 9.30pm so it won’t get in the way of your dinner…
More about the Jam House here
More about Tom Hill here
The Midlands Youth Jazz Orchestra (MYJO) has a big gig this evening as part of the Solihull Festival. The bright young things of jazz in this part of the country will be joined by singer Eleanor Keenan, who formerly sang with the Syd Lawrence Orchestra and the BBC Big Band, for a set mixing old and new. It starts at 7.30pm at Solihull Arts Complex and tickets are £13. The box office is at 0121 7046962 or go here
1000 Rainbows
(Posi-Tone PR8062)
Have you been trying to get into some contemporary jazz and finding it kind of difficult to get your head around, and certainly difficult to feel affection for? You are not alone.
While some of us feel it is our duty to try to understand and even like this clever new stuff, so we can do justice to the artists who created it while trying to convey what it sounds like to a potential audience, that is a pressure you need care nothing about and feel even less.
So while the third release from Montana trumpeter Jim Rotondi might come to me as a blessed release from frowns and anguish, to you it might just sound like business as usual. But a pretty fine and dandy kind of business, I hope you will agree.
Jim has done time in the big bands of Ray Charles, Lionel Hampton, Toshiko Akiyoshi and Bob Mintzer, and in the smaller groups of Lou Donaldson, Curtis Fuller and Joe Chambers. He also does a fair amount of teaching, including the summer camps of renowned play-along king Jamey Aebersold.
He is as fluent a trumpeter as you will find and is the kind of soloist who tells stories rather than plays fancy patterns. The result is that he may not be pushing the envelope or “changing the face of jazz as we know it” but he is making some lovely, buoyant, full-bodied music.
If you have never heard him, or even of him, you might be convinced by the inclusion in his quintet of vibraphonist Joe Locke and drummer Bill Stewart, both players better known on this side of the Atlantic, courtesy of Locke having played with Tommy Smith and Tim Garland, and Stewart part of the legendary John Scofield Quartet that toured here in the early 1990s.
Completing the band is Danny Grissett on piano and Barak Mori on bass.
The tunes come mainly from Rotondi with Joe Locke’s Crescent Street in there, as well as a few lesser known jazz standards. The title track, from the pen of vibes player Buddy Montgomery, Wes’s younger brother, is a fine example of the album’s feel. It has that slightly sloppy New Orleans groove that Stewart does so well, a tasty piano/bass riff and a storming solo from Locke. Rotondi is no slouch on it either. The Lennon/McCartney song We Can Work It Out is interesting, too, for the way the arrangement pulls its timing and phrasing about.
Overall, I just like a jazz album that makes me smile, which I suppose is practically a given when Locke’s name appears on the personnel list, but the major credit must go to Rotondi for putting this band and this album together.
Atomic drummer Paal Nilssen-Love gets everything in the right place before the gig at the CBSO Centre on Saturday evening. It’s Russ Escritt’s pic of the week.
Russ has hundreds more pictures like this – in fact when it comes to jazz musicians, if they’ve played in Birmingham he has probably taken their picture. And they are all on Russ’s website which is here. Russ also has available three books of his photographs: two of general pictures and one dedicated to the legendary great grandaddy of Birmingham jazz, Andy Hamilton. Go to the ABOUT section of the site for more details.
CBSO Centre, Birmingham, England
18-09-10
After a relatively jazz-free summer it was with excitement that I – and, I suspect, many others – headed for the CBSO Centre last night and some fresh, no-holds-barred live music at last. And we were not disappointed.
Birmingham Jazz had set up a strong double bill, a band from either side of the Atlantic who happened to have quite a lot in common. So much so that it became interesting over the two sets to identify the differences rather than the similarities.
Atomic (Picture: Russ Escritt)
Switching the running order from their performance at the Vortex in London, Atomic took the first half. They hit hard but perhaps prematurely with Magnus Broo’s first lip-blistering solo a bit of a shock to an audience that probably needed warming up a little more gently. The sound took a while to settle down. Despite being the only instrument going through the PA, the piano was completely overwhelmed by Paal Nilssen-Love’s (and, heavens, the last thing I would want is to temper this wonderful drummer’s power) but this was perhaps just a problem for those sitting at the front.
When the rest of the band had quietened down and we did get a chance to hear pianist Harvard Wiik, it was on Unity Together with an extraordinary solo: two separate improvisational lines, one in each hand, sometimes contrasting, sometimes complementing, always working in a kind of perfect but skewed logic. It was one of my highlights of the set.
The others were mostly provided by saxophonist Freddy Ljungkvist, who has marvellously developed style which incorporates the blues, free jazz and gutsy lyricism together with a dose of good old showmanship as he almost danced with the enthusiasm of his playing.
Atomic have a great group dynamic, sometimes playing a kind of cool West Coast jazz but then subverting it with complex timing and pauses, and then breaking free with explosive force. Nilssen-Love and double bassist Ingebrigt Haker Fleten are a couple of firebrands so there was no let up in beats or rhythm. Broo used his solo space sparingly but, golly gosh, when he goes for it, he certainly goes for it.
Ljungkvist’s composition Panama had some Latin energy in there with the rest of the band’s heady mix of styles, while the extended set closer, Green Mill Tilter, was a summation of all that had gone before, but lifted to a higher level. Nillsen-Love was steaming by this time and the sax/trumpet lines tight with excitement.
Vandermark 5 (Picture: Russ Escritt)
The Vandermark band, playing all new compositions last night, has a lot in common with Atomic in the way that the free playing grows out of some pretty tightly composed material. Vandermark has stronger “contemporary” compositional leanings, favouring passages of busy percussive abstraction from Fred Lonberg-Holm’s cello and Tim Daisy’s drums on Location, which he will then contrast with a strong riff played by his tenor and Kent Kessler’s bass in unison, before he gives some substantial blowing space to saxophonist Dave Rempis.
The two reedsmen are striking in their different approaches, Rempis favouring a more conventional torrential virtuosity while Vandermark for the most part improvises in a more compositional way, leaving space and varying texture and technique, especially on clarinet.
The make up of the group, with even the cello playing mostly notes rather than chords, gives the band a link to the West African sound of lots of interlacing single lines, and gives the harmonies and chords to the band as a whole.
A fairly gentle ballad with floating harmonies from Vandermark’s clarinet and Rempis’s alto behind long and lyrical lines from Lonberg-Holm had the bandleader joking that ECM might be interested – “Dear Mathias…” – and set us up for the astounding set closer, Leap Revisited. By the time Vandermark and Rempis brought the whole thing to a tumultuous end with some raging double saxophone improv, the ears of all present were well and truly pinned back. The encore was every bit as generous.
While my head valued the bands equally, my heart leaned more to Atomic, mainly due to Ljungvist’s emotional generosity which connected more strongly, and with more warmth.
Both bands play a concentrated, fairly strenuous and uncompromising contemporary jazz, which is never likely to draw a large audience, so it was a bold choice for a season’s opener, but it looks like Birmingham Jazz will be trying to broaden the appeal of its offerings in the months to come. Keep listening and reading…
