Paul Booth Quintet with Ingrid Jensen December 8, 2009
Posted by byased in British Musicians, Live reviews, Musicians from elsewhere.1 comment so far
Recital Room, City Halls. Sunday 6th December 2009
Sunday’s concert by the Paul Booth Quintet with Ingrid Jensen was the first of a UK tour. Unfortunately it showed at times.
I don’t know when Jensen arrived in the UK, but I got the strong impression that she was still jet-lagged. She looked tired, and generally gave an impression of being ill at ease, spending a lot of time fiddling with the valves of her trumpet when she wasn’t playing. In her one announcement to the audience (Paul Booth did the rest of them) she admitted that she wasn’t sure which time zone she was in. Fortunately it didn’t hamper her playing too much – or if it did, she must be superb on a good night – but something of her lack of ease came across in the performance as a whole. Musically she was fine, though, having a lovely warm rich tone, particularly when playing flügelhorn. Much of her playing was gentle and lyrical, but she handled the uptempo extrovert stuff just as convincingly when the music demanded it.
The band as a whole were very good, even if lacking the sense of spontaneous interaction which made the recent appearances here by Empirical and Mark McKnight’s group so enjoyable. It all seemed a wee bit stiff and tentative, particularly early on, with quite a few obvious hand signals to cue people in.
Pianist Phil Peskett really impressed me: he didn’t do much in the way of soloing until late in the first set, but once he did stretch out he communicated with a voice of his own. Phil Robson on guitar was good but possibly under-used. I thought the highlight of his performance was the passage towards the end of the evening where he played clipped, almost kalimba-like, rhythm guitar behind one of the horn soloists. Paul Booth himself mainly played tenor, with the occasional outing on soprano. He also wrote all the material, with the exception of Cole Porter’s “I Love You”, and an excellent ballad, “Yew”, by Ingrid Jensen’s saxophonist sister Christine. Michael Janisch and Dave Smith did a fine job on bass and drums.
I hope this doesn’t come across as too negative a review. Despite my impression that they weren’t quite firing on all cylinders, the band played a lot of fine music, and I discovered a pianist and drummer I was unfamiliar with but whose work I will look out for in future. Overall I enjoyed the concert, but couldn’t shake off the frustrating suspicion that this group will be better later in their tour than they were in Glasgow.
Footnotes
- They seem to have got over their teething troubles by the time they got to Coventry, judging by the review at The Jazz Breakfast.
- John Fordham reviewed their album Pathways in the Guardian.
Catching up December 2, 2009
Posted by byased in Live reviews, Local Musicians, U.S. Musicians.2 comments
For a variety of reasons – including sheer laziness – I haven’t posted much recently. So this is just a brief catch-up.
Brass Jaw
Brass Jaw’s concert last week was excellent. I think having a trumpet in the line-up, rather than being a straightforward sax quartet, allows them to have a variety of tone colours in their repertoire which differentiate them from any of the all-sax bands (although there doesn’t seem to be as many of them around as there were in the 80s). They played a wide range of music, with lots of originals but also versions of pieces by Gershwin, Horace Silver, Sonny Rollins and Duke Ellington. Allon Beauvoisin on baritone basically stuck to providing the bass line, with Konrad Wiszniewski, Ryan Quigley, and above all Paul Towndrow all contributing some excellent solos. They had to revamp their running order when Towndrow was having problems with the F-sharp key on his alto, but it didn’t seem to phase them too much, possibly because, as Towndrow joked, “F-sharp’s an over-rated note anyway”. There was a healthy number of people in the audience, which was good to see as the last couple of jazz shows at the Recital Room were rather poorly attended.
Fuller review from Euphbass, who also has a video clip from one of their other tour dates.
Judy Carmichael
I was out of town visiting relatives when stride pianist Judy Carmichael made her appearance at the City Halls. I regret having to miss it, but sometimes these things can’t be helped. Euphbass was there, as was Alison Kerr for the Herald, and they both seemed to enjoy it.
100 not out
This is apparently my 100th post on the blog. Just thought I’d let you know.
Empirical at Glasgow City Halls November 17, 2009
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Recital Room, Glasgow City Halls, Saturday 14th November 2009
I don’t do star ratings on this blog. If I did, most gigs I review would probably get three or four stars out of a possible five. Empirical’s concert on Saturday night was unequivocally a five-star performance.
The pre-gig publicity for this gave the impression that the line-up would be a quintet, but on the night it turned out to be an alto sax, vibes, bass and drums quartet. Alto player Nathaniel Facey and drummer Shaney Forbes are founder members of Empirical and played on their debut album, while bassist Tom Farmer and vibes player Lewis Wright joined more recently. Their set was made up of music inspired by Eric Dolphy plus three pieces by Dolphy himself (two in the main set, one as encore).
The band weren’t imitators, though. The music came from the mid-60s Blue Note vibes-plus-horns freebop school which included Jackie McLean and Grachan Moncur as well as Dolphy: it wasn’t a case of them being “Still Out to Lunch”. I thought it was a clever touch that the two pieces they played from Out to Lunch itself (“Hat and Beard” and “Gazzeloni”) were ones on which Dolphy played bass clarinet or flute rather than alto. The encore, “245″, originally used piano rather than vibes, so again there was no risk of the band playing pale cover versions of the original.
Lewis Wright’s playing had some of the chiming sound and plentiful pauses of 1960s Bobby Hutcherson, but he wasn’t simply a copyist. That style of playing works really well as a background for a horn player to solo over. If I’d to single one soloist out, it would be Nathaniel Facey, whose alto playing always gripped the attention, but as with Mark McKnight’s group a week or so ago, the most impressive thing about Empirical was the way they played together as a unit. It wasn’t a case of Intro – Solo One – Solo Two – Outro. All the parts of each number flowed together organically. You were aware that, say, the sax had been taking the lead but had now stopped playing, while the vibes player who had been playing mainly chords was now playing more melodic lines. There wasn’t the sort of jerky stop-start feeling you sometimes get in less integrated performances. As a result, there wasn’t much applause for individual solos: but this was a tribute to the way the musicians worked as a group, not a criticism of the soloing.
The sound was very good, with none of the problems with the Recital Room’s echoey church-like acoustics which affect some performances.
Unfortunately, there was a worryingly small audience. I spotted an unusually large proportion of local musicians among the listeners: I hope this was an indication that those in the know realised that Empirical were a band not to be missed and not an indication of a lack of work for them elsewhere in the area.
To sum up: quite superb. One of the gigs of the year. You should have been there. But, alas, you almost certainly weren’t.
Mark McKnight Organ Quartet featuring Will Vinson November 8, 2009
Posted by byased in British Musicians, Live reviews.1 comment so far
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.
