Enrico Pieranunzi Trio August 11, 2009
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The Hub, Edinburgh. 1st August 2009
Italian pianist Enrico Pieranunzi has recorded several dozen albums since the late 70s, but remains little known in this country. On this showing it’s hard to know why.
His set consisted of a mixture of originals and standards. Everything he played combined a great lyrical and romantic quality with great virtuosity. Even when he was playing fast swinging jazz there was always a sensitive poetic quality to the music, yet it never became merely pretty. Bassist Darryl Hall (not the “and John Oates” one) and drummer Enzo Zirilli gave him fine support. I could have done with slightly fewer bass solos though, not because they were bad but because they sometimes broke the mood of the piece. Other than that, my one complaint would be that I thought the set was slightly short: 75 minutes rather than the advertised 90.
Gunter Sommer and Raymond Macdonald July 5, 2009
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Tron Theatre, 27th June 2009 (afternoon)
This was the first concert in a series of German jazz concerts organised with the assistance of the Goethe Institut.
I don’t listen to much free improvisation, so I don’t really know how to judge this in approved improv terms. Is it a form of jazz, or has it developed into a form of its own – non-idiomatic improvisation, I think the term is?
First up was a Gunter Sommer – Raymond Macdonald Duo. They played five or six pieces, each of which developed the opening idea in a fairly coherent manner, with obvious interaction between the two musicians. It wasn’t cold abstract music: there was an obvious element of humour and play to it. Jazz kept threatening to break out, but never quite did. I got the impression that Sommer would be an excellent straightahead jazz drummer if he chose to be, but that wasn’t his plan. (Later on, in the discussion, he said something along the lines of “I was playing Black American music, but I wasn’t a Black American. I felt like a thief”). On the jazz – free improv axis, the set was less jazzy than Fred Anderson and Hamid Drake’s “Together Again”, but more jazzy than Joe McPhee and Paal Nilsson-Love’s “Tomorrow Comes Today”, if that’s any help.
After the end of the set, Gunter Sommer gave a talk on his own musical past, and on the free jazz scene in the old DDR. He was interesting, amusing and spoke pretty good English. The BBC should get him to do an edition of Jazz Library, or at least interview him for the Jazz House.
What I did on my holidays (2) July 3, 2008
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It looks daft having a “what I did on my holidays (1) post without at least one further part, so here it is, even if it’s slightly out of sequence:
I saw the Z Syndicate (Joe Zawinul’s last band, with a replacement keyboard player) at the Treibhaus in Innsbruck. I’d initially thought it was just going to be a tribute band, but it turned out to be (almost) the real thing. I’m not sure how much I’d like their Bitches Brew meets Nana Vasconcelos mix of electric jazz and world music on record, but they were superb live. It was a good venue – a general purpose Arts Centre – and they’d negotiated a deal with the local bus and tram company which meant that if you’d bought a ticket in advance, it was also valid as a day ticket for local public transport.
Oddarrang July 3, 2008
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Tron Theatre, Saturday 28th June 2008
Part of Glasgow International Jazz Festival
I suppose some purists would say that this wasn’t really jazz, since it contained very few elements from the African-American blues tradition. But one can be too purist for one’s own good. I’d describe them as “very ECM”, except that that somehow sounds like a bad thing.
Oddarrang are a Finnish quintet led by drummer Olavi Louhivuori. They’ve an unusual line-up, trombone, cello, guitar, acoustic bass guitar and drums, plus the occasional wordless vocal from cellist Osmo Ikonen and trombonist Ilmari Pohjola. This gives them a distinctive rich dark sound. It would be interesting to know just how much of the music was improvised: while there were definite individual solos, they always had an interesting arrangement behind them. This was definitely group music; it wasn’t just a case of one member soloing while the others vamped behind him. At times there was a hint of film music about about their compositions: not big-budget Hollywood blockbuster film music, but something you might hear on a good European film at the GFT.
I went along to this without knowing what to expect, but it was very good indeed. Living in Britain you tend just to hear jazz from the UK and jazz from the USA, but this was a reminder that there’s a lot of good jazz being made all over the place.
More about them at Osmo Louhivuori’s web site.
“Women Play Jazz, Music World in Shock!” February 10, 2008
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Laura Macdonald – Martina Almgren Quartet
Recital Rooms, Glasgow City Hall, 7th February 2008
The headline, from an article in the Scotsman about the band, was simply too good not to steal.
I’d gone along to their concert last year, not knowing what to expect, and was pleasantly surprised. This time, because my expectations were higher, I was quite prepared for it not to be as good as I remembered last year’s gig being. I needn’t have worried.
They played all the material from their new album Open Book, plus “Bingo”, the title track from Martina Almgren’s previous recording. The strength of the set was that, while they were playing contemporary post-Coltrane jazz, both the material itself and the way it was played were very melodic. Almgren’s pieces were particularly impressive, but the performance it hung together as an integrated whole. If it hadn’t been for the between song announcements, I couldn’t have told that there were two writers.
The main difference between this year’s gig and last year’s were that Laura Macdonald stuck to alto for the whole show, whereas IIRC she also played some soprano last year, and Almgren used drumsticks a lot more this time round, whereas previously she’d stuck to brushes. The quartet, with Paul Harrison on piano and Mario Caribé on bass, also seemed a more integrated unit, presumably because they’d worked together a bit more.
One wee thing I noticed about the marketing: the Scottish gigs were by the Laura Macdonald – Martina Almgren Quartet, whereas the album, on a Swedish label, is by Martina Almgren and Laura Macdonald. The homegirl gets top billing each time.
Rob Adams’ Herald review of their Edinburgh gig.
