Mark McKnight Organ Quartet featuring Will Vinson November 8, 2009
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Recital Room, City Halls, Thursday 5th November
Whether it was the rival attraction of the Portico Quartet elsewhere in town, Guy Fawkes Night, a Celtic European game being shown live on TV in some pubs, or winter having well and truly started this week, I don’t know, but the attendance at this concert was woefully poor. But if you like jazz and weren’t there, you missed out.
The line-up was:
- Mark McKnight guitar. He’d a lovely clean sound: from the lightly-amplified Joe Pass / Jim Hall school, but making subtle use of effect pedals from time to time.
- Will Vinson alto. One of the most expressive-sounding young players I’ve heard for a long time.
I thought there was the odd hint of Johnny Hodges in some of his playing, although overall he didn’t sound like Hodges at all - James Maddren drums.
- Ross Stanley Hammond organ.
They were all very good individually, particularly McKnight and Vinson, but what they excelled at was playing as a group: this wasn’t just four guys on stage at the same time, it was a band. Three passages exemplified this: Maddren’s drum solo which built from nothing over repeated figures from the band during the coda to one piece in the first half; the long drum and alto duet in one piece in the second half; and McKnight and Vinson playing guitar and alto solos in tandem towards the end of the set.
If I’m vague about the titles of the pieces, it’s because McKnight didn’t use a mic when speaking to the audience, and I couldn’t always make out what he was saying. They played three standards: an excellent “Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered”; “Solar”; and one of those Charlie Parker tunes whose name always eludes me. The rest of the set was McKnight originals.
I didn’t make a conscious decision to go to this rather than the Portico Quartet. I’d simply bought my ticket for this before discovering the other gig was on. But based on Rob Adams’ review of the Portico Quartet’s Edinburgh concert, I seem to have made the right decision. He was at this one too, but I haven’t seen his review yet. Euphbass certainly enjoyed it.
Marilyn Crispell and the Burt/MacDonald Quintet October 14, 2009
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Recital Room, Glasgow City Halls, 13th October 2009
An odd concert, in that it managed to be simultaneously excellent and disappointing. What disappointed was that there wasn’t enough of Marilyn Crispell, one of the masters of avant-garde jazz piano. This was very much a performance by a Burt-MacDonald Sextet rather than by a Marilyn Crispell group.
This was particularly true of the first half. It opened with a solo piece by Crispell (if it wasn’t based on a Coltrane ballad, it certainly sounded as if it was), and then the rest of the band joined her on stage. She was slightly more prominent in the second set, which opened with a piano and sax duet between her and Raymond MacDonald, followed by a trio piece played by Crispell, George Lyle on bass, and Tom Bancroft on drums. Lyle and Bancroft aren’t quite Gary Peacock and Paul Motian, who were the rhythm section last time Crispell played Glasgow, but they acquitted themselves well.
The Burt-MacDonald Quintet get better every time I hear them. They’ve always gone in for a unique combination of catchy, almost middle-of-the-road, melodies and free improvisation. This had made them one of the most distinctive outfits on the Scottish scene. What they’re now better at is blending the two seamlessly: there was no sense of “that was a tune, now here’s a noisy bit”, for the two elements of their style came together seamlessly. Nicola MacDonald mainly played melodica, only singing on a couple of pieces. George Burt, playing a Les Paul style electric guitar, somehow always looks as if he’s about to launch into a power chord and start duck-walking across the stage, but never does.
Overall, a very enjoyable evening, although I was disappointed that Marilyn Crispell wasn’t featured more. It’s nine or ten years since she last played Glasgow. Let’s it hope it’s not as long before she returns.
A couple of final observations: there seemed to be a much higher proportion of women in the audience than is normal for Glasgow jazz gigs. Is there an untapped female audience for free improvisation, or do female musicians attract female listeners? And in his introduction to the set, Todd Gordon announced that it was being recorded. An album to look forward to.
Update, 15th October
Claire Martin October 5, 2009
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I had planned to go to Claire Martin’s concert with Gareth Williams on Saturday night, but circumstances prevented me. The press reviews I’ve seen suggest it was slightly disappointing.
Would anyone who was at the concert like to confirm or disagree with these assessments?
European Jazz Network: British Jazz Showcase 1 September 29, 2009
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Strathclyde Suite, Glasgow Royal Concert Hall, 23rd September 2009
This was the first of three concerts, each of which gave several bands a chance to show what they could do in front of an audience made up largely, although not entirely, of jazz promoters from around Europe. Each act played for about 25 minutes.
Stu Brown’s Raymond Scott Project
Stu Brown’s transcriptions of compositions by American bandleader and composer Raymond Scott. A lot of the compositions will be familiar to anyone who has watched classic Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies cartoons such as Bugs Bunny, although they were originally written for radio broadcasts. The music isn’t really jazz, but a lot of the phrasing, and the use of growl trumpet, means that it’s hard to imagine it played by anyone other than jazz musicians. Great fun.
Tom Cawley’s Curios
Curios? Curious. Of the night’s four bands, they were the one I thought suffered from having to play an abbreviated set. Their music utilised an assortment of disparate styles: EST-like vamps, romantic melody, freeish improvisation. The one thing which was missing was any real sense of swing. The three musicians – Tom Cawley on piano, Sam Burgess on bass, and Josh Blackmore on drums – were all excellent, but they never really managed to combine the different elements of their music into a unified whole. I’d like to hear a full-length performance by them to see if they can bring everything together. As it was, this was fascinating and frustrating in equal measure.
Ryan Quigley Sextet
This was an altered version of band which recorded last year’s excellent Laphraoig-ian Slip. The rhythm section of Alyn Cosker and Mario Caribe remained the same, but Konrad Wiszniewski and Paul Towndrow replaced Paul Booth and Laura MacDonald on tenor and alto, and Brian Kellock made a guest appearance on piano. They opened and closed with fiery hard bop pieces from the album, with Towndrow taking a particularly fine solo on “Buzzy Bee”, and in between we were treated to a fine trumpet and piano duo version of “Embraceable You”. The most straightforwardly enjoyable jazz of the night, but also the most conservative.
Get the Blessing
Inventive jazz-rock from a Bristol quartet. The trumpeter and sax player both made use of a wide-range of electronic effects. The overall effect was a bit like early-70s electronic Miles, but with catchy tunes and short pieces, or like 80s one-hit wonders Pigbag with serious jazz soloing. There was a lot of Ornette Coleman in the mix too. I’ve generally not been too impressed by the new-wave of UK electric jazz, but I enjoyed Get the Blessing and would happily go to see a full concert by them.
Euphbass has a review of this concert, and the second in the series, on her blog. I’m sure I saw an overview of the series by Rob Adams in the print version of the Herald, but it doesn’t seem to have made it to the online version.
Michael Janisch Purpose Built Quintet September 21, 2009
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Recital Room, Glasgow City Halls, 13th September 2009
I’m fairly recently back from holiday, and struggling to catch up with a load of post-break stuff, so this review is a bit late and a bit less substantial than I’d like it to be. Sorry.
Janisch’s quintet was a mixture of British players (Jim Hart on vibes and Paul Booth on saxes) and Americans (drummer Clarence Penn and trumpet and flugelhorn player Jason Palmer). Penn was the big name in the band, but it was Palmer who most impressed me. He’d a lovely tone, used mutes and half-valving in a way which was simultaneously ultra-traditional and ultra-contemporary, and, most importantly, didn’t seem to be copying any of the obvious models.
The music, predominantly Janisch compositions, was a bit more adventurous and out than a lot of contemporary post-bop, but it never turned into fully-fledged free jazz. There was nice variety to it. Different sections used different permutations of band members. Janisch switched between acoustic double bass and bass guitar; Palmer played a fair amount of flugelhorn; Paul Booth played alto on one piece rather than his usual tenor; and Penn used a variety of different sticks and brushes to add colour to the music. If I’d one criticism, it would be that some of Janisch’s compositions were less memorable than others, but overall this gig was more about the playing and improvisation than the tunes. And his best pieces, for instance “Adelante” and “Lost Creek”, are very good indeed. An excellent start to this year’s Jazz International season, although I thought the turnout was slightly disappointing.
Euphbass was also at the concert, and has a review here. She’s also tracked down coverage of a couple of other dates on the tour: the Newcastle (from “Bebop Spoken Here”) gig and the one in Fishguard (from Ian “Jazzmann” Mann). There are also some photos from their Epsom show on the London Jazz Blog.
