Riffing from the soul : Roller Trio at Cambridge International Jazz Festival 2019 (rough gig-notes)

Fairly unadulerated gig-notes for a review of Roller Trio at Cambridge International Jazz Festival

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2019 (17 to 24 October)
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21 November

For those who want to try #UCFF gig-notes, fairly pure and unadulterated by further editing than decipherment, let alone turning them into would-be fluent prose, here are what should become this review :

This is a review of Roller Trio at Cambridge International Jazz Festival 2019 on Thursday 21 November 2019 at 9.30 p.m. (with support from Noya Rao)

Personnel :

* James Mainwaring ~ sax(es) / electronics
* Luke Reddin-Williams ~ drums
* Chris Sharkey ~ electric bass-guitar / electronics


Transcribed raw notes (more or less, as is) :

(1) Giant noise to open
Left-handed guitar
Wa)iling, full of energy and passionate life
Repetitions / iterations and effects
Modular
Riffing from the soul
Bass-and-drum iterations under
Free-flying sax
Slight decrescendo and fragments of melody
Slowed to the rate of a heart-beat, with floral and statementful sax
Always moving
Shimmering and exuding light, as if a live aqueous stream
An unanswered phone-call ?
Bass and drums in a jamming duo – pulsing, energetic
Metallic, howly sounds from effects-pedals
Sampling the horn + growls and mumble
DJing the audio
Really spacey, aquatic, submarine – expansive sax
-> flares and distortions as of a whale, dying
-> opening up, texturing
-> spectacularly large sound with attractive, gaelic-themed chord-sequences and mood
Falling, doubled-note bass-line + clear and evanescent sax-sound
Gtr solo – sounding clavichord or prepared piano
Interrupted statement – more and more like weaponry, strikes it down (small-arms fire)
Dulcimer (or mandolin ?)
-> genre-defying drum-solo (sounds like an ambush or incursion
Now it’s palpations and patting
-> Effect warbles and waves
Ground-bass of satellites or machine-language –
Into danceable rhythms and sax-overlay
- understated sax coments
- slight flare / blare
Sanitizig, good feel
-> segue into a danceable, Latin-style theme that mutates to North-African timbres and runs and repeats
- highly danceable, driven by whines and howls
Up, to intense
Applaud tune
- boppy??, then missed / re-arranged beat-patterns
2nd drum-solo + whoops


* * * * *


Wholly improvised [Reddin-Williams introduced Roller Trio, and told us that they were doing something unusual for them]


(2) Tenderness and insistent and / or staggered rhythms
- threads or filaments of material on which the sequence continues, as its seed or base
– or not


* * * * *


(3) Bluesy sax riff – laid-down ostinato with effects on sax to extend or broaden / coarsen the element of horn / tempo switch (dim.) and, with it, a change of guitar-line -> a more-usual free-sax style with rock gtr / drums -> multi-divided note-lengths, accelerating and with staccato sax-puffs or pouts – down into lower register – danceable again and compelling


* * * * *


(4) [encore] Bonkers cow-bells & electronic bubbles & tapping of cymbals – aerial bass + JB vocalize = keening / pleading – slow decrescendo and a heart-beat slowing



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Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)

Report from Cheltenham Jazz Festival - Gabby Young and Other Animals

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1 June

So, here is my attempt to sum up the experience of The Big Top at Cheltenham Jazz Festival, with Gabby Young and Other Animals...

Compared with other days in that venue, when the acts were not compelling (although, literally, Lianne La Havas did let the position go to her head a little, with everyone on their feet and supposed to do something because she required it), this was warm – and one felt for whether Gabby must have been too hot in her flouncy, cotton-wool skirt. As she said, she had always dreamed of playing at the festival, and she had clearly been inspired with her appearance by the feeling of carnival (and striped awnings and lollipops even feature in one of their videos).

The early numbers were much jazzier than as the set progressed, but at least Ms Young did establish some jazz credentials by swinging along to a few tunes (and even scatting a little), before turning a bit lighter and more folky, unlike others whom I heard in that tent.

That said, some songs were of a distinctly ‘psychological’ flavour, as even the title ‘In Your Head’ suggests, let alone lyrics such as ‘Don’t worry – they won’t get you !’ and ‘The paranoia had taken over’. For a good impression of what that was like, although it is a more free and less straight version, take a look at main man Steve Ellis and her in this Tweet*, which is a link to recordings made for Henry Weston’s Cider :

Some day I might write something about Gabby Young at #cheltjazzfest... In the meantime, here's a backstage session : youtube.com/watch?v=WCKN2i…
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) May 31, 2013

‘We’re All in This Together’ is a less cheery tale (depending on how it is performed, despite the lyrics ‘And I won’t get alive – and they’ll call you up and tell you I won’t survive’), and there is an uneasy quality to music and words of ‘Ones That Got Away’, whose YouTube studio version is quite lively. However, do not get me wrong that there is not plenty of sassy playing with eight or more Other Animals on stage – it may be simply that Ms Young held back a bit on jazz singing as such during the gig, and her classically trained voice came more to the fore.

If one could wrap up ‘a message’ of the show, it was that things maybe are not as bad as they feel (that paranoia may be manageable, and, even if one has fallen down a tunnel, there may be good things at the bottom), and perhaps best done with another song, ‘Male Version of me’, which ends, a little disbelievingly, with the words ‘Perfect for me’.

In every good sense, Gabby Young is and has the true and unselfish energy of a real entertainer, and her talented Animals and she will surely go on to please others wherever they are heard.


And here is a review of the band at Bristol Harbour Festival...



End-notes

* The one on the official web site, www.gabbyyoungandotheranimals.com has that stripy, Yellow Submarine sort of atmosphere.


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Report from Cheltenham Jazz Festival - Double bill with Roller Trio and Polar Bear

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23 May

I have tried to write this up before my recollections fade further... they have faded far enough...


Roller Trio comprises tenor sax, electric bass and drums, and they play with an assurance that cannot just come from knowing their material, but also from the unshowy musicality that seems to be the group’s ethos. Not that one will not be impressed by James Mainwaring’s riffs or the funky depths that Luke Wynter conjures up, but it is all of a piece from three guys (the third being drummer Luke Reddin-Williams), whose main aim clearly is to make music, rather than deliver solos.

In a way, we were spoilt to have a fifty-minute set from the trio and then one from quintet Polar Bear, but it did mean that certain things had to be left unexplored, and that neither band, knowing that they had to wind down early, could get into a seventy-five-minute groove.

Not that that came over in the trio's playing, but it probably limited their ambitions for what they could share - which is where I come back to saying that one had to regard this as a good chance to hear both bands. And I know that Roller Trio took the opportunity to do just that with Polar Bear, and then, because they were staying in the same hotel, had a chance to talk later.

It was nice, @rollertrio, to be where the likes of @polarbear_uk and you were spending the night !
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) May 7, 2013

It was the right way around to have Roller Trio first, as their sassy and less-extended numbers made an interesting contrast with the electro-acoustic sound-world that followed, of drawn-out and flexible sections, and with the thrill of two tenor saxes (Mark Lockheart, Pete Wareham) playing off each other.

Roller Trio seemed @bbcjazzon3, but Polar Bear more like @bbcradio3's Late Junction - perhaps @imaxreinhardt ?
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) May 6, 2013

Seb Rochford, drummer and the band’s almost self-deletingly frontman, introduced the three pieces that they had time for with a highly tentative wish that the audience ‘might feel something’. In my case, I had the sense of free navigation around structures that allowed saxes, electronics (Leafcutter John), bass (Tom Herbert) and drums to fit into their place and move around in them.


I am left hoping to see the bands again, maybe hear them on the radio before then, and to look into some of their recordings...

Favourite five events (unranked) from #cheltjazzfest : @cmartinjazz, Troyk-estra, Barbacana, Roller Trio / Polar Bear, Ravi Coltrane Quintet
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) May 6, 2013

Both have web-sites, which are linked to Roller Trio (@RollerTrio) and Polar Bear (@polarbear_uk) for you


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Report from Cheltenham Jazz Festival - Was that really two duos ?

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12 May

All team-players or divided in two ? Edition Quartet #cheltjazzfest
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) May 4, 2013

Don't get me wrong...

If the set had been broadcast, and so you couldn't see Neil Yates on stage and unable to make / find an opening in what Marius Neset was doing, maybe you'd not have noticed his absence from the texture - or assumed that he smoked and had wandered off for a roll-up, etc., etc.

Enjoyed hearing him in Troyk-estra, and, when he had the chance, Edition Quartet, @dave_stapleton #cheltjazzfest
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) May 7, 2013

Don't get me wrong also...

What Neset (with or without Dave Stapleton) and fellow Norwegian Daniel Herskedal were doing / playing was just fine, but, for stretches that felt awkward for me, it did make Yates' being there redundant.

(Herskedal's solo number on tuba with pedal-invoked multi-tracking was great, but, as I suggest, all too symptomatic of the Brito-Norwegian divide between audience left and right.)

Playing detective at Edition Quartet : a missing chart, glances exchanged, wandering off stage, playing volumes, postures, #cheltjazzfest
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) May 4, 2013

Don't get me wrong finally...

Of course, a quartet doesn't have to be playing on all four cylinders at once, but if a member (or two) of the personnel might as well be down the pub... Maybe Neset thought that the photo from the Cheltenham Jazz Festival web-site gave him licence 'to take charge', as if it were a replication of his own quartet :





Overall, whatever the curatorship of @fionatalkington hoped for and strong sax apart, more like the Cheltenham Double than the Edition Quartet ?


Post-script

On her blog, @maryleamington had this reaction to Neset and the quartet :

But on Saturday night we saw another Marius (last glimpsed in Flight by Dave Stapleton at St George’s Brandon Hill last year), unexpectedly fragile, human, reflective. Just as a Michelangelo sculpture moves us as its strength appears out of simple form (I am thinking of his unfinished Slaves here), so Marius has the same effect on me. The Edition Quartet is a perfect ensemble – Dave Stapleton on piano, Neil Yates on trumpet, Daniel Herskedal on tuba and Marius on saxophones.


Leamington, rightly impressed by Neset in himself, calls the Edition Quartet perfect - however, I thought of the track Secret World from Peter Gabriel's album US (which is where I started) :

Divided in two
Like Adam and Eve


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Report from Cheltenham Jazz Festival – Troyk-estra and Talk I

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11 May

Work in progress… - beware of a bumpy landing !

I have just read a review of Troyka’s debut album in 2009, which maybe I can import into this blog – it appears on the BBC web-site, and was written by Martin Longley.


If I can, I hope to draw on it to make some comments about the panel discussion (plus Q&A) that took place under the title ‘Music journalism in the 21st century’. It comprised four male contributors, amongst them the jazz critic of The Times (broadcaster Alyn Shipton (@AlynShipton), who also chaired the session), The Financial Times*, and the deputy editor of Jazzwise.

The fourth (who had written for The Birmingham Post) was the only one prominently introduced as blogging (and, yet, who talked fairly little about his blog, other than the freedom that it gave him to write about what he wanted, when not earning a living) :

All wanted to peddle a message of ‘If it was good enough for me…’ and ‘I had to work my way up’, littered with boasts of their writing and editorial skills and like kudos. In a way, of course, the typical defensive speech of those occupying posts that they don’t intend – wish, maybe ? – to vacate : Don’t bother to climb the greasy pole – if you do, I’m the resident bear at the top, so mind your neck !

Therefore predictable, and predictable that they would ‘take a pop at’ those whose blog postings extend beyond, as the case might be, the 375-, 500- or 1,000-word limits to which they have to work, or whose content (they believe = opinion ?) is not a review, but opinion.


It’s as if they (wildly ?) assume that the bloggers couldn’t do what they do – and write a 500-word review to deadline – to save their lives, just because the bloggers choose to do something else, for whatever reason – and, if people read what bloggers right instead, who is to say that they are wrong (except that it might endanger further the position of those paid to pen tight, tidy, and possibly tired traditional accounts of gigs or releases).

So much for the chaff. The grains were the usual ‘tips of the trade’ of Someone I’d once met said… or They asked me if I’d stand in when X was sick, and I’m still there 300 years later, the positive face of the negative slant previously given :

They approached me because they knew me, they only knew me because I do this sort of thing, and I only survive doing this sort of thing because I’m brilliant, which they wisely recognized.


I laugh, but it’s just like Hollywood stars (whether in their own eyes or not) who tell an audience :

I met Tom Hanks two years before, and then we were out of contact, but he rang me out of the blue when I’d just finished in The Cherry Orchard off Broadway and said he wanted me for the part of Scrooge

[Hanks did not happen to mention that he had not got Mel Gibson or Hugh Grant to take the part, or that Hanks’ agent had suggested approaching The Star because (if it genuinely was Hanks’ ‘shout’), at least, of industry-driven Factors a, b and c - more likely, The Star knew all of this, and this is the agreed concoction for the PR world that is ‘celebrity’ interview…]


Continued… (not in this posting, maybe in order not to offend the critics’ tender sensibilities !)



End-notes

* Or was it The Sunday Times ? (I didn’t take notes, and I forget which.)


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Report from Cheltenham Jazz Festival - quintets contrasted

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7 May

Two quintets comprising trumpet, tenor saxophone, piano, bass and drums, those of Dave Douglas (trumpet) and Ravi Coltrane (sax), but there the similarities ended, and not because of the lead instrument.

Douglas had a special guest in the form of singer Heather Masse. Opinion was divided as people left at the end whether she even had ‘a jazz voice’, despite being his ‘favourite singer’.

The note that Masse introduced came after an edgy opener that had been made so by exploiting the queasiness of the semi-tone, followed by another that drew further gravitas from discord between wind and reed. It did not seem a good – because not jazz – note, exposing both her rather ‘straight’ delivery and the rather limited quality of the arrangements (the defects did not seem likely to be unrelated).

From a sentimental setting of Sibelius' hymn Be still (touching because the favourite of Douglas’ mother, whom one imagined recently deceased) things continued in this rather dull vein with a version of ‘Barbara Allen’ of all things.

It became clear that Douglas was 'dishing up' one after another of these not because he thought that people wanted to hear, but because he likes Masse and he could. It was unclear why, because even his trumpet-playing was utterly thrown into relief by that of Ralph Alessi in Coltrane’s quintet.

The dexterity of Alessi’s runs was, of course, effortless, and versatility and sonority were the hallmarks of his playing, not least when matching his instrument to that of Coltrane. By contrast, Coltrane’s sax did not give one a tingle down the spine, but it was assured, fluent and graceful (with Coltrane a little unusually taking the bell not to his right, but bending to accommodate it between his legs).

Coltrane’s other personnel were steady and even, with Luis Perdomo on piano, dazzling and perhaps a bit too expansive with the odd solo. However, despite Drew Gress’ prowess on bass, I had been far more impressed by the virtuosity of Linda Oh in Douglas’ quintet, who genuinely seemed to respond to what he was doing and to his choice of material.

Perhaps I have to be grateful to those things for inspiring what much of the audience also clearly admired in her playing, but I found that following her line was only what made what I was hearing palatable. In Coltrane’s quartet, in comparison, I was really keen to hear what Alessi and he were playing, and his bassist was not my anchor for keeping a hold on the music.


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Report from Cheltenham Jazz Festival – The Aristocats

A response to seeing The Aristocats (1970) - a few years on...

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4 May

A response to seeing The Aristocats (1970) - a few years on...

It must have been in around 1968* that I was taken by my parents, almost certainly with my sister, to see The Aristocats. I have just watched it again, with no acquaintance in between, in the Cinema Tent at Cheltenham Jazz Festival – and, yes, I had forgotten that jam-session, when the alley-cat musicians, led by Scat Cat, have let themselves into Thomas O’Malley’s pad, and so, despite the jazzy tone to some of the earlier musical numbers, I had begun not to figure why this was being shown at a jazz festival.

As it is, it is a great little film, and, although animation techniques are considerably different now for much of what is produced (so there would not necessarily have been the need to make scenes such as that jam-session at the expense of the budget for such clear and focused images throughout the film), it does not feel dated – and, yes, it was Walt Disney. No doubt it has been restored, but, as this is not a film festival, I am unsure whether I need to look in the festival handout that I picked up for more details.

What was probably lost on me as a boy is that the cats need not be cats and that this is not really a film about cats (or cats and humans) at all…


23 May - Now continued, with some thoughts penned in a station waiting-room earlier

The cats are, of course, cats in the swinging, jazz sense, and there is the fable of the much-loved and attractive Duchess (Eva Gabor's voice) being Lady to Thomas’ Tramp** (Phil Harris' voice), by putting aside her wisdom and prejudice about ‘alley-cats’ after they have played and bantered together, and he has – after his fanciful promises – assumed care for her and her kittens.

Duchess' home-life, the epitome of the idea of self-improvement through music and the other arts, resembles that of a grande dame, wanting her children to acquire taste and poise, and not hiss and scratch, as Berlioz wishes to do with his sister. Of course, it is, on another level, charming fantasy that a kitten can play the piano by bounding back and forth on the keys, but it is there for the contrast between the sedate family sing-song and the raucously lively – and beautifully put-together – jam-session.

Duchess, being the best kind of Duchess, appreciates the musicianship and sees all that is good in Thomas and his friends Scat Cat and the others (and, maybe, we wonder what her past was, and who was father to her kittens for her to suppose so badly of the alley-cats) : this is, after all, not plumbing the depths of Shakespearean characterization, but good fun, but with a bit of a message about not taking Edgar - or any of the others - at face-value.

(In fact, the only ones who can be taken in those terms are Abigail and Amelia, the waddling, unflappable British geese, and, once they have served their purpose of route-marching the party to Paris to rescue their sozzled uncle, they are given no further part.)

The Old Lady is given a portrayal consistent with her remaining in the background, worrying about what has happened, and generally being benign, along with her amiable lawyer-friend (who seems to have the geniality of the goose-uncle to a T). As already mentioned, the care and attention to high-quality imagery is in the jazz scene, whereas she is sketchily drawn, roaming the mansion, so that we are distanced from her grief, and can rest it instead in Roquefort, the mouse, whose quivering voice is so brilliantly done by Sterling Holloway.

The tussle at the end is about Edgar fighting for what he wants, and the animals showing that, by working together, they can overpower and defeat him. A wholesome account of the nature of good and evil, which leaves little room, except at a comic level, to understand Edgar’s desire not to have his life dominated after his mistress’ death by her menagerie – again, this is not Corneille, and, beyond understanding his motivation, we are not invited to enter into such things.

At heart, setting aside the misery and self-destructiveness in the genius of many a twentieth-century jazz musician, the wish to be ‘in’ and play a horn so that people want to listen :


Ev'rybody wants to be a cat,
Because a cat is where it’s at



End-notes

* Actual date 1970.

** Another Disney, from 1955.


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