Dave O'Higgins 7 + Jazzcotech Dancers
Friday night ended on a high and entertaining note with a strong British jazz band and a group of dancers reinventing the jazz dance tradition.
I’ve long admired Dave O'Higgins through his many changes of musical style. In particular he has a nuanced sense of time on a ballad as well as any twisting headlong fast-tempo song the band throws at him. His solo tonight on ‘You don’t know what love is’ is a great example of the former. Part of the standard repertory, here he brings out its slinky essence. At its close he dedicated it to his baritone-playing wife who helped shaped the front-line of this set.
O'Higgins has a long and continuing interest in jazz fusion, but the septet he presented here is a more mainstream post-bop band displaying interesting and shifting arrangements and great ensemble playing. There’s strong support from a great rhythm section and the two sax, trumpet and trombone horn section made a joyous noise, especially when playing for the jazz dancers in the latter part of the set.
Jazz dance has its origins in the same folk culture that gave birth to jazz as a music, but reached its zenith in the lindy dancers of the swing-era. Jazzcotech take this tradition and, as their name suggests, give it a contemporary twist. The band play fast and furious, providing the dancers with a brilliant pulse on which to improvise, and lots of colour to shape their moves. Dancing to jazz takes enormous energy and skill (I can tell you from personal experience), and the twists and turns of the latin-infused numbers they danced to demanded even more.
Scarborough Grand Hall has a large stage which comfortably accommodates even a big band and provided enough room for the dancers, but I am not sure it gives them the best surface to dance on, nor the best space to perform on. It is great, though, to see dance programmed at a jazz festival, and O’Higgins clearly gets a lot from the collaboration. The band certainly do not give the dancers an easy ride; if anything their playing during this section was more complex. Both band and dancers, though, are gifted improvisers, and just as the musicians take standard themes and make innovative performances out of it, the dancers take a whole series of classic moves and twist them into personal long-lines of strikingly modern dance.
I think I’m right in saying that O’Higgins is a Brummy, and as the team that brings you this online report from Scarborough Jazz festival is from Birmingham City University we think of him as our own, even though he is a professor at Leeds College of Music. Our very own Jeremy Price, from Birmingham Conservatoire was also there on trombone. We’ll overlook that members of the band and the dancers are from elsewhere, and celebrate a great end to a great evening of music and, of course, dance.
Tim Wall
