From heavy lament to puckish sensibility: three performers create some undeniably impressive music.
The travails of the African-American experience have always been at the root of jazz, but in recent years some musicians have given it a new political heat. Trumpeter Terence Blanchard, whose superb set electrified the audience at the London Jazz Festival last Sunday, is one of them. Another is Christian Scott, the young New Orleans trumpeter, who appeared the following day at the Festival Hall with his quintet. There’s a quality of heavy lament mingled with protest in Scott’s tone, which he seems to pull from somewhere deep inside himself. It’s undeniably impressive, but overall the effect of this set was dour, as if the gravity of the situation being expressed (such as the casual anti-black brutality of the New Orleans police) had crushed the inventiveness out of everyone.
It was refreshing to move from Scott’s narrow focus to the set from Courtney
Pine, who appeared with a septet of his favourite musicians. They unveiled
Pine’s new multi-movement suite Europa, a magical mystery tour
around the musical traditions of the entire European continent. Sometimes
these were tangy and Mediteranean, sometimes they were shrouded in a kind of
mythic vastness, as in the modal, flat-plains melancholy of They Came
From the North.
The following night, 82-year-old French pianist Martial Solal gave us
something else: music as pure play, with no message or ulterior motive. He
ambled amiably on stage, and launched with casual ease into a bewilderingly
brilliant riff on several well-known standards, making them skitter through
a dozen keys in as many seconds, draping their outlines in glittering
dissonance.
The speed of thought and execution would be astounding in a 30-year-old, but
in Solal the brilliance is seasoned by a kind of cultural virtuosity. He
passes between a rich 1950s bop style — seasoned with stride piano — into a
polytonal suggestiveness tinged with late Debussy and even Messiaen.
What fuses all these things together is Solal’s puckish sensibility. If he
reminded me of anything, it was the surrealist strain in French culture
rather than anything in jazz. In Solal’s hands, a standard like Pennies
from Heaven becomes startling and even funny, like an object in an early
Bunuel film.
But the most seductive thing in Solal’s playing is its sheer unstoppable
inventiveness. “Between you and me,” he told us slyly, “I love to play the
piano.” And how.
From http://www.telegraph.co.uk
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