A couple of concerts and a couple of reviews November 21, 2009
Posted by byased in Concerts, Local Musicians, Media, Music but not jazz.add a comment
There are a couple of concerts on in Glasgow over the next few days which I haven’t mentioned yet.
John Williams and John Etheridge
On Sunday night, John Williams and John Etheridge are playing at the Old Fruitmarket. Just in case you’re in any doubt, this isn’t John Williams the film composer, but John Williams the guitarist. Williams is mainly a classical musician, although he’s musically fairly adventurous and has made forays into different musical territories through his work with Cleo Laine and as a member of late 70s MOR prog-classical abomination Sky. Etheridge has worked with a wide range of musicians in the jazz and jazz-rock world, including Stephane Grapelli and the Soft Machine. They will each be playing a solo set as well as performing as a duo. Details on the Glasgow Concert Halls site.
It looks like a must for all fans of serious guitar playing, although I do have my doubts about whether it’s the best venue for an event which will at least partly consist of solo acoustic guitar. The Grand Hall upstairs might have been a better bet.
Alyn Cosker
On Monday night, Alyn Cosker is playing at the RSAMD with the students of the RSAMD Jazz Ensemble. The concert starts at 6.30pm.That might not give you enough time to hear them and then get down to the City Halls to hear Brass Jaw, who will be performing in the Recital Room at 8pm.
Reviews
Kenny Mathieson reviewed Empirical’s Perth concert for the Scotsman. He was less impressed by them than I was.
Rob Adams enjoyed Mercy Mercy Mercy’s performance in Dundee.
Empirical, a Big Guitar Weekend, and the Dundee Jazz Festival November 11, 2009
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Empirical
Empirical are playing the Recital Room at the City Halls on Saturday night. The band came to prominence a couple of years ago with a very good debut album (here’s a review). Since then, the line-up has changed significantly, with only two members of that quintet – alto player Nathanial Facey and drummer Shaney Forbes – in the current version of the band. The rest of the group is now made up of bass player Tom Farmer, pianist George Fogel and vibes player Lewis Wright. Their Glasgow date is part of a tour promoting their second album, Out’n'In. It too has been getting good reviews (eg in the Guardian and All About Jazz). Their current music is a tribute to the Eric Dolphy – the album includes versions of “Hat and Beard” and “Gazzeloni” from Out to Lunch as well as originals inspired by Dolphy. Here are reviews of recent live shows from Birmingham and Gateshead; and here’s a clip of them, with guest Julian Siegel, on the video section of their web site. They go on to play Aberdeen, Perth and Stirling, but don’t seem to have an Edinburgh gig lined up.
This seems as good a place as any to link to this wonderful YouTube clip of Eric Dolphy playing “Meditations on Integration” in Charles Mingus’s band. Magnificent stuff.
Big Guitar Weekend
The RSAMD is hosting a “Big Guitar Weekend” festival of (as the name might suggest) guitar music this weekend. It looks as if it covers a wide range of styles of acoustic guitar music (just don’t expect any howling feedback-drenched shredathons), with the performances most relevant to a jazz audience being the Scottish Guitar Quartet on Friday 13th at 9.30pm, and Martin Taylor playing as part of the Guitar Label showcase at 7.30 on Sunday. Videos of them, and some of the other participants, are available on the video page of the Big Guitar Weekend web site.
Dundee Jazz Festival
Martin Taylor is also appearing at the Dundee Jazz Festival, which starts on Friday the 13th and ends on Sunday 22nd. He’s at the Apex Hotel on the opening night alongside singer Alison Burns. Other acts on the opening weekend are Ken Mathieson’s Classic Jazz Orchestra (Saturday evening) and local trad band The East Coast Jazzmen at lunchtime on Sunday. Wednesday 18th sees a gig by Mercy Mercy Mercy, a new band put together by Colin Steele and Martin Kershaw to perform music by the Adderley brothers. This should be interesting, particularly if, like Kershaw’s earlier Charlie Parker Project, they do new arrangements of the pieces rather than simply playing them the way they were done on record. Full details of these gigs, and the rest of the programme, on the Dundee Jazz Festival web site.
International Guitar Night; Strathclyde Youth Jazz Orchestra September 24, 2009
Posted by byased in Local Musicians, Music but not jazz, Musicians from elsewhere, U.S. Musicians.add a comment
International Guitar Night
Those of you who aren’t going to one of this weekend’s British Jazz Showcases might be interested in the International Guitar Nights which are on at the City Hall this Saturday and Sunday. There are three guitarists playing, American Brian Gore (who came up with the guitar night idea), Lulo Reinhardt (Django’s grandson), and Itamar Erez from Israel. Not strictly jazz, but close enough to possibly be of some interest to jazzers. The concerts start at 8pm, and tickets are £14. International Guitar Night web site.
Strathclyde Youth Jazz Orchestra
There’s an article about the Strathclyde Youth Jazz Orchestra in today’s Herald:
The band’s alumni include Ryan Quigley, Laura MacDonald and Alyn Cosker. And it’s good to see a couple of stalwarts of the older generation of Scottish jazzers, Bobby Wishart and Stewart Forbes, get mentions. Maybe not major figures, but the type of good solid professionals who’ve helped keep the music alive and have done solid work in jazz education.
Jazz at the Proms August 12, 2008
Posted by byased in British Musicians, Media, Music but not jazz.2 comments
Stravinsky, Bernstein and Simcock
The BBC prom on Saturday 2nd August was devoted to jazz, or rather to jazz-classical crossover music. Sad to say, it didn’t really work. Some of the pieces were okay – Bernstein’s “Prelude, Fugue and Riffs” and Stravinsky’s “Ebony Concerto” are fun – but it was all a bit lightweight. There were a couple of premieres: Jason Yarde’s arrangement of part of “Porgy and Bess” contained more real jazz than the rest of the concert put together; and there was a piece for piano and orchestra by Gwilym Simcock which, although colourful and skillfully put together was terribly conservative in its musical language and didn’t come across as having any real depth.
Gwilym Simcock is an odd case. BBC Radio 3 loves him, to the extent of having made him one of their “New Generation Artists“, but I sometimes get the feeling that he’s got the gig because he’s got the most convincing classical credentials of his jazz peers, rather than because of his jazz credentials. That’s not to say that he’s a bad musician, it’s just that I think there are several other folk of his generation who are equally deserving of publicity.
It’s not Gwilym Simcock himself who’s the problem, it’s the way the BBC New Generation Artists scheme is being applied to jazz that’s the problem. It’s less of a concern when you’ve got a dozen New Generation Artists (like the classical part of the scheme), but when you’ve only got one token jazzer a couple of issues arise:
1. Unless there’s one musician who is head and shoulders above his or her contemporaries in talent, the scheme effectively builds one person’s career at the expense of other equally talented musicians. I certainly think there’s more than one potentially excellent up-and-coming jazz musician around: Konrad Wiszniewski, Paul Towndrow, Zoe Rahman, the folk in Empirical, and no doubt someone I haven’t heard yet because he or she is gigging away in pubs in Leeds or Leicester, unnoticed by London medialand.
2. The musician you pick might not make it, for one reason or another. Think about some of the young stars of the 80s jazz scene: Steve Williamson rarely plays jazz these days; Gail Thompson’s had health problems which forced her to more or less give up playing; and Phil Bancroft (although still an interesting player) has been rather eclipsed by his John Rae Collective bandmates Brian Kellock and Colin Steele.
Maybe the BBC needs to rethink how the scheme is applied to jazz, for instance by offering several musicians rehearsal time and a tour of small-scale venues, rather than concentrating on the one player all the time.
As far as classical-jazz crossover in general goes, I was listening to Simon Nabatov’s “A Few Incidences” recently and wondering what it would sound like done by a good classical new music group (the Ensemble Modern or similar). Maybe if there is to be a successful interaction between jazz and classical music it will be at the more avant-garde end of things? Heiner Goebbels and Mark-Anthony Turnage have both done some interesting jazz-related stuff, although I don’t think either of them have managed to get an orchestra to swing properly yet. And there’s always Anthony Braxton’s operas….
Sun Ra Arkestra and Others May 1, 2006
Posted by byased in Live reviews, Music but not jazz, U.S. Musicians.add a comment
Tramway, Glasgow, 29th April 2006
A five-hour extravaganza of instrumental music featuring four bands:
Colditz
The opening band were a quartet called Colditz: keyboards, trombone, cello and viola (or maybe violin – I was a long way from the stage). Each number consisted of the keyboard player playing arpeggios, the cellist playing the melody, and the other two adding colour. A wee bit more variety in the arrangements would have gone down well. As it was, they were basically pleasant but not particularly engrossing.
Battles
Battles are a guitar-dominated instrumental quartet from the USA: three guitarists, two of whom double on keyboards, plus drums. The easiest way to describe them would be as a more jagged-sounding version of Mogwai. What sets them (and Mogwai) apart from earlier guitar-based improvising bands like Man or Television is the lack of long solos: it’s more about building textures through the interplay of the musicians. I initially enjoyed them, but found they got a bit samey as the set went on: they need to get a wider range of tempos into their sets, and in particular they need to learn that very quiet to very loud is a bigger and more dramatic dynamic range than loud to very very loud.
Steve Reid and Kieran Hebdan (FourTet)
I’d never heard of drummer Steve Reid before, but a bit of googling revealed that I’d unknowingly heard quite a few records that he played on. He was a house drummer with Motown in the sixties before moving on to play jazz with the likes of Ornette Coleman and Sun Ra.From what I could hear, he seemed a very good, subtle drummer, but unfortunately most of what he played was drowned out by Hebden’s electronic bleeps and squeaks. I enjoyed Hebden’s playing – which seemed to be made up of a mixture of purely electronic sounds and samples of instruments such as acoustic guitars – more than I thought I would, but he was far too loud, both in absolute terms and in relation to Reid’s drumming.
Sun Ra Arkestra
I saw the Arkestra at the Mitchell Theatre in the early 80s, when Sun Ra and John Gilmore were still alive. My reaction then was that they put on a great show, but the music itself didn’t make a great impression – it was a mixture of free-form noise and fairly cursory runs through old swing material.
Musically this gig, with the band led by veteran alto player Mashall Allen, was better, with a bluesy Mingus-like quality to much of the playing. It all seemed very loose and spontaneous, but was no doubt well-rehearsed and thought out in advance. The showmanship had been cut back a bit, but was still there: the glittery capes, the hats, the wandering through the audience while playing, the chants, the dancing and somersaults. There was no keyboard player – who could replace Sun Ra? – but Marshall Allen often played an electronic wind synthesiser instead of saxophone.
Maybe the earlier Ra show was more of an experience, but of the two times I’ve seen them, this is definitely the concert I’d like the CD of. Space IS the place.
