EFG London Jazz Festival 2018
JAZZ CUBANO
Friday 23rd November - Barbican Hall
Featuring Omar Sosa and Yilian Cañizares; Alfredo Rodriguez; Arturo O’Farrill Sextet
The evening was meant as a kind of homage to the influence of jazz from Cuba. Periodically jazz has turned to Cuba and the Caribbean. Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker and Stan Kenton found inspiration there. Machito’s band in New York created dance and musical fashions. The rhythms and styles have never really dated and they have given fresh life and inspiration to jazz at time when both seem to be flagging.
With hindsight the organisers of this three-group-evening got the running order completely wrong. The majority of the audience did not know what to expect when Omar Sosa and Yilian Cañizares came on to the stage but they were soon convinced that they were in the presence of something special. The top of the bill Arturo O’Farrill and his group didn't stand a chance while the memory of Cañizares and Sosa lingered.
Starting the concert, and playing some music from their album ‘Aguas’, the two Cubans went for the jugular not with violence but with imagination. Sosa was playing piano supported by electronics of all types and used it judiciously to create sounds that are percussive, mysterious and all enveloping. Yilian Cañizares plays violin and sings. Classically trained and inspired, so she says, by Grappelli, Cañizares links beautifully with Sosa and their compatibility is clear to see as she sings, dances and plays. There is a touch of wildness, just a touch, about Cañizares. Their mixture of Jazz, Latin and African sounds is beguiling and seductive. Underpinning all this was the percussionist Gustavo Ovalles. At the end of the set the Barbican audience rose enthusiastically to acclaim them.
Pianist Alfredo Rodriguez follows in a line of great Cuban pianists. Obviously a gifted player, he is a pianist in search of a style. He was not helped by a bassist and drummer who were intent on defining their own style! A long, and almost maudlin, version of ‘Besame Mucho’ was the highlight of the set.
Nepotism obviously has a place in the Cuban world. Arturo O’Farrill included his sons Zack and Adam on drums and trumpet. The sextet also had bass, conga and tenor saxophone. After the joy and invention of the Sosa and Cañizares set the utter conventionality of the O’Farrill group was emphasised. At times they came across like a version of Blakey’s Jazz Messengers, more New York than Havana. They looked depressed and disconsolate as if they had listened to the earlier music and realised how far they were being left behind.
Walking away from the Barbican hall it was the new inventive Cuban sounds of Sosa and Cañizares that resonated in the mind.
Reviewed by Jack Kenny
Friday 23rd November - Barbican Hall
Featuring Omar Sosa and Yilian Cañizares; Alfredo Rodriguez; Arturo O’Farrill Sextet
The evening was meant as a kind of homage to the influence of jazz from Cuba. Periodically jazz has turned to Cuba and the Caribbean. Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker and Stan Kenton found inspiration there. Machito’s band in New York created dance and musical fashions. The rhythms and styles have never really dated and they have given fresh life and inspiration to jazz at time when both seem to be flagging.
With hindsight the organisers of this three-group-evening got the running order completely wrong. The majority of the audience did not know what to expect when Omar Sosa and Yilian Cañizares came on to the stage but they were soon convinced that they were in the presence of something special. The top of the bill Arturo O’Farrill and his group didn't stand a chance while the memory of Cañizares and Sosa lingered.
Starting the concert, and playing some music from their album ‘Aguas’, the two Cubans went for the jugular not with violence but with imagination. Sosa was playing piano supported by electronics of all types and used it judiciously to create sounds that are percussive, mysterious and all enveloping. Yilian Cañizares plays violin and sings. Classically trained and inspired, so she says, by Grappelli, Cañizares links beautifully with Sosa and their compatibility is clear to see as she sings, dances and plays. There is a touch of wildness, just a touch, about Cañizares. Their mixture of Jazz, Latin and African sounds is beguiling and seductive. Underpinning all this was the percussionist Gustavo Ovalles. At the end of the set the Barbican audience rose enthusiastically to acclaim them.
Pianist Alfredo Rodriguez follows in a line of great Cuban pianists. Obviously a gifted player, he is a pianist in search of a style. He was not helped by a bassist and drummer who were intent on defining their own style! A long, and almost maudlin, version of ‘Besame Mucho’ was the highlight of the set.
Nepotism obviously has a place in the Cuban world. Arturo O’Farrill included his sons Zack and Adam on drums and trumpet. The sextet also had bass, conga and tenor saxophone. After the joy and invention of the Sosa and Cañizares set the utter conventionality of the O’Farrill group was emphasised. At times they came across like a version of Blakey’s Jazz Messengers, more New York than Havana. They looked depressed and disconsolate as if they had listened to the earlier music and realised how far they were being left behind.
Walking away from the Barbican hall it was the new inventive Cuban sounds of Sosa and Cañizares that resonated in the mind.
Reviewed by Jack Kenny
MONTY ALEXANDER
Sunday 25th November - Cadogan Hall
Monty Alexander (piano) ; JJ Shakur (bass) ; Jason Brown (drums)
Sometimes Monty Alexander sounds as if he is from a different time. His stories of Sinatra, Jilly’s bar and gangsters in Florida are from another age. True he has had a long and varied career but his real worth is not in showbiz celebrity talk. No, it is in the way that he has used his Caribbean musical roots to bring fresh life to piano improvisations.
‘Hello’ opened the concert and it was soon apparent that his studied melodic swagger, his assurance and insouciance, his ease and confidence would lull the audience into accepting his offerings. The pieces played ranged from the ‘Banana Boat Song’ to the ‘Concierto de Aranjuez’ and ‘In The Wee Small Hours of the Morning’. There is everything in a Monty Alexander performance: grace, enjoyment, technique, rhythm, pace and the beguiling rhythms from his childhood.
The composition ‘The River’ was reminiscent of Ellington in a rhapsodic, romantic mood. The repeated figures on the bass were overlaid by cascading high notes which morphed gradually into a beautiful tune. Like Oscar Peterson, Alexander can generate rumbling crescendos which then subside gracefully. His other composition was ‘Renewal’. After a meditative opening, it moved at double speed in to a splendid spirited improvisation. To show his jazz credentials he created a satisfying blues, musing why the blues are associated with sadness. Sections of his Jamaica Suite were played too. The concert proper finished with ‘No Woman, No Cry’. Monty Alexander brought out the majesty of that tune. The whole set was a satisfying melange of cascading calypso, ska, reggae.
Someone compared Alexander to Erroll Garner. Like Erroll he is not afraid to please. And the penalty for that in the jazz world is not to be fully valued and appreciated.
The support at the concert was ‘Tomorrow’s Warriors Female Frontline’. They are a band of female jazz players that are a collective focusing on developing girls and young women into strong, confident players and preparing them for careers as professional jazz musicians. They swayed self-consciously to their music and punched out material by Herbie Hancock, and Freddie Hubbard. They were particularly strong on rhythm and Alana Curtis on percussion drove the band. The bass guitar player was confident and assertive. It is still unusual to see a band like this and all power to their female warrior spirit.
Reviewed by Jack Kenny
Sunday 25th November - Cadogan Hall
Monty Alexander (piano) ; JJ Shakur (bass) ; Jason Brown (drums)
Sometimes Monty Alexander sounds as if he is from a different time. His stories of Sinatra, Jilly’s bar and gangsters in Florida are from another age. True he has had a long and varied career but his real worth is not in showbiz celebrity talk. No, it is in the way that he has used his Caribbean musical roots to bring fresh life to piano improvisations.
‘Hello’ opened the concert and it was soon apparent that his studied melodic swagger, his assurance and insouciance, his ease and confidence would lull the audience into accepting his offerings. The pieces played ranged from the ‘Banana Boat Song’ to the ‘Concierto de Aranjuez’ and ‘In The Wee Small Hours of the Morning’. There is everything in a Monty Alexander performance: grace, enjoyment, technique, rhythm, pace and the beguiling rhythms from his childhood.
The composition ‘The River’ was reminiscent of Ellington in a rhapsodic, romantic mood. The repeated figures on the bass were overlaid by cascading high notes which morphed gradually into a beautiful tune. Like Oscar Peterson, Alexander can generate rumbling crescendos which then subside gracefully. His other composition was ‘Renewal’. After a meditative opening, it moved at double speed in to a splendid spirited improvisation. To show his jazz credentials he created a satisfying blues, musing why the blues are associated with sadness. Sections of his Jamaica Suite were played too. The concert proper finished with ‘No Woman, No Cry’. Monty Alexander brought out the majesty of that tune. The whole set was a satisfying melange of cascading calypso, ska, reggae.
Someone compared Alexander to Erroll Garner. Like Erroll he is not afraid to please. And the penalty for that in the jazz world is not to be fully valued and appreciated.
The support at the concert was ‘Tomorrow’s Warriors Female Frontline’. They are a band of female jazz players that are a collective focusing on developing girls and young women into strong, confident players and preparing them for careers as professional jazz musicians. They swayed self-consciously to their music and punched out material by Herbie Hancock, and Freddie Hubbard. They were particularly strong on rhythm and Alana Curtis on percussion drove the band. The bass guitar player was confident and assertive. It is still unusual to see a band like this and all power to their female warrior spirit.
Reviewed by Jack Kenny
ABDULLAH IBRAHIM & EKAYA
25th November - Barbican Hall
The foyer is still resounding to the tumultuous multi-horned attack of the Don-qui Five, part of the Nordic Jazz Comets take-over, but in the main hall an atmosphere of calm prevails. Ibrahim’s tall, frail figure is greeted with rapturous applause as he walks onstage and sits at the piano. After a moments pause, he starts to play; a quiet, meditative solo, with hints of gospel voicings and simple, township melodies, moving imperceptibly into darker sonorities and out again. It’s like sitting in the next room, listening to the man strumming at the piano, lost in his own intimate musical reverie, and it comes almost as a surprise as the band filter quietly onstage and join in. Hesitantly at first, then with growing presence, they unite in a unison riff, building like clouds until Keyon Harrold bursts forth with a solo that’s like a dazzling ray of sunshine.
The five horns take turns in a tag-team exchange of solos, finishing in an almighty bass statement from Noah Jackson; Ibrahim barely touches the keys until the conclusion, then starts again in the intervening silence with a solemn church ballad that draws a stirring performance from trombonist Andrae Murchsion. Then come dark, cinematic chords from the horns, voiced like a miniature Gil Evans band, out of which drums and bass burst with a super-fast blazing bop tempo. Section leader Cleave Guyton steps forward with, of all things, a piccolo, and lays down a wild solo, setting the scene for Harrold to take flight over the headlong rush of the rhythm section. Ibrahim has dropped out again - as each player takes to the mic, he announces them with a single chord dropped into the racing pulse, his energy turned totally towards the band, overseeing and digging the proceedings.
Jackson ducks behind the piano then reappears, seated, his impressive form encircling a cello, and he and Guyton on flute join the leader for a chamber recital of the kind of major-key South African folk melody that Ibrahim is known for. There’s another solo piano interlude, as a limpid pool of calm, before the band swagger into a boppish mid-tempo line like something from Monk At Town Hall - as Monk was wont to do, the Ibrahim drops out altogether under much of the soloing. There’s a supremely musical drum solo from Will Terrill, and a slow Township march with Keyon Harrold tearing down the walls with his powerfully down-home solo.
Throughout not a word is spoken to the audience - Ibrahim almost seems like a spectator at his own show, watching with an approving nod of the head, quietly guiding proceedings, adding a soft piano commentary in the breaks. The quality of the musicianship is really outstanding, with superb soloing from everybody ( special mentions for Lance Bryant on tenor and Marshall McDonald on bari) and the horn section breathing as one on the unison sections; but there’s still no doubt who’s boss onstage, and the closing trio recital, with Jackson back on cello shows why he was described by Mandela as ‘South Africa’s Mozart’. The crowd give a standing ovation, and then as quietly as he came, he’s gone back into the waiting darkness of the wings.
Reviewed by Eddie Myer
25th November - Barbican Hall
The foyer is still resounding to the tumultuous multi-horned attack of the Don-qui Five, part of the Nordic Jazz Comets take-over, but in the main hall an atmosphere of calm prevails. Ibrahim’s tall, frail figure is greeted with rapturous applause as he walks onstage and sits at the piano. After a moments pause, he starts to play; a quiet, meditative solo, with hints of gospel voicings and simple, township melodies, moving imperceptibly into darker sonorities and out again. It’s like sitting in the next room, listening to the man strumming at the piano, lost in his own intimate musical reverie, and it comes almost as a surprise as the band filter quietly onstage and join in. Hesitantly at first, then with growing presence, they unite in a unison riff, building like clouds until Keyon Harrold bursts forth with a solo that’s like a dazzling ray of sunshine.
The five horns take turns in a tag-team exchange of solos, finishing in an almighty bass statement from Noah Jackson; Ibrahim barely touches the keys until the conclusion, then starts again in the intervening silence with a solemn church ballad that draws a stirring performance from trombonist Andrae Murchsion. Then come dark, cinematic chords from the horns, voiced like a miniature Gil Evans band, out of which drums and bass burst with a super-fast blazing bop tempo. Section leader Cleave Guyton steps forward with, of all things, a piccolo, and lays down a wild solo, setting the scene for Harrold to take flight over the headlong rush of the rhythm section. Ibrahim has dropped out again - as each player takes to the mic, he announces them with a single chord dropped into the racing pulse, his energy turned totally towards the band, overseeing and digging the proceedings.
Jackson ducks behind the piano then reappears, seated, his impressive form encircling a cello, and he and Guyton on flute join the leader for a chamber recital of the kind of major-key South African folk melody that Ibrahim is known for. There’s another solo piano interlude, as a limpid pool of calm, before the band swagger into a boppish mid-tempo line like something from Monk At Town Hall - as Monk was wont to do, the Ibrahim drops out altogether under much of the soloing. There’s a supremely musical drum solo from Will Terrill, and a slow Township march with Keyon Harrold tearing down the walls with his powerfully down-home solo.
Throughout not a word is spoken to the audience - Ibrahim almost seems like a spectator at his own show, watching with an approving nod of the head, quietly guiding proceedings, adding a soft piano commentary in the breaks. The quality of the musicianship is really outstanding, with superb soloing from everybody ( special mentions for Lance Bryant on tenor and Marshall McDonald on bari) and the horn section breathing as one on the unison sections; but there’s still no doubt who’s boss onstage, and the closing trio recital, with Jackson back on cello shows why he was described by Mandela as ‘South Africa’s Mozart’. The crowd give a standing ovation, and then as quietly as he came, he’s gone back into the waiting darkness of the wings.
Reviewed by Eddie Myer
