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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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