London Jazz Festival roundup, review

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 should be said the impression of inchoate gloom was partly due to the lousy sound-system, which favoured drummer Jamire Williams at everyone else’s expense. Even so, the moment Scott moved onto less fraught emotional territory, as in the tender ballad dedicated to his partner, everything came alive.

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 generosity of the conception was winning, but as always with things that hark back to origins, cultural references got somewhat blurred. The Search for the Holy Grail seemed to start somewhere Basque, but then took on a whirling Irish-flavoured frenzy. Pine is a virtuoso bass clarinettist, though on this occasion it was pianist Zoe Rahmann and bassist Darren Taylor who really stood out.

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