Sep 20
“There’s too little clarinet in contemporary jazz”. I wish I could attribute the quote to some insightful luminary, but in truth it is just what I think. Although one or two current players double on clarinet, not too many play it as their main instrument. Ken Peplowski’s appearance, as the primary soloist in the last set of the Scarborough Jazz Festival is therefore a delight. Peplowski’s style is deeply rooted in the swing era, and in the style of a previous employer, Benny Goodman. It is great to hear him in a small group context, and supported by a great trio and a partnership with Alan Barnes.
About the only thing that blew the musicians off some swinging performance was the sudden burst of the mist machine that ensures the lighting effects work properly. This was Barnes final musical appearance of the festival, and his introductions have been the sardonic thread that ran through the whole event. Here he met his musical and verbal equal. Peplowski not only a serene soloist, but has a sharp line in putdowns and witty asides. The mist machine became the centre of their comic performance.
Just as quickly we were back to some romantic, late-night music played with elegance and sensitivity by the whole band. The audience were in hushed appreciation, except for the moments when they expressed their admiration with warm applause. This was a more than fitting end to a stimulating and thoroughly enjoyable weekend of jazz. We’ll be back for more next year.
Tim Wall
Sep 20
Tony liking Tim's review of the his performance
Sep 20
All festivals need an all-star band, and I think I’ll make this one the Scarborough Festival All Stars. This Sunday afternoon set was an exploration of Charles Minus’ exuberant music by a band that did it full justice. Led (appropriately) by bass player Arnie Somogyi, with rhythm support from Clark Tracey on drums and Tim Lapthorne on piano, and a terrific frontline of Tony Kofi’s alto and wonderful baritone, Alan Barnes exuberant on alto and tenor and Jeremy Price playing fluent and often melancholy trombone.
Many bands would be setting themselves up for a fall by choosing to play pieces by a giant of jazz like Mingus to an audience full of knowledgeable listeners. But rather than falling this was a set of soaring, beautifully realised interpretations which made a respectful nod to Mingus-era performances, while giving each musician enough space to create the individual solos which are essential to the all-star line-up. Somogyi avoided pastiching Mingus, and played as himself, but when the band picked up a number in which Mingus fingers were required he didn’t disappoint. Equally the ensemble playing gave anyone who had heard Mingus’ records would get a warm glow of recognition. I was particularly taken with Price’s solos which were perfectly placed within the Mingus tribute. Kofi and Barnes were their boisterous selves. All members were taken with the gospel spirit which pervades Mingus’ compositions, and the audience clearly responded with enthusiasm.
I have to say I especially liked the more abstract interpretations offered, up and there were times when I felt they chose to be a little more conservative than was necessary. Perhaps another characteristic of the all-star band. Having said that this was genuine collective music-making, no one was there just to support the soloists and those up on stage clearly enjoyed themselves as much as we did in the hall.
Tim Wall
Sep 19
Michael Garrick’s lyrical compositions rank among my favourites, and his precise, careful playing fits beautifully with Trudy Kerr’s meticulous intonation and elegant swing. This was reason enough to look forward to tonight’s set. I am also a firm believer in the dictum that you need a strong jazz singer on stage about half way through the festival. Most popular music has featured the voice heavily, and while I’m a fanatic about jazz playing, getting back to a singer is a refreshing restorative 15 hours into a festival.
The trio were ideal accomplices for Kerr, turning reserve into a virtue, gently swinging behind her, and then filling the instrumental solo spaces with distinctive ‘voices’ of their own. Garrick and Clark Tracey echoed each other’s percussive lines, but the pianist’s pastoral feel is never far behind, while Geoff Gascoyne was responsive to every situation.
The Ellington pieces (from Kerr’s current CD with Garrick) were a joy. She made the well-known compositions her own. This is a woman who commands a stage anyway, but she loves to sing and I was drawn in to very number. But Garrick was always an equal in the musical stakes, even if he is more self-effacing up on the stage.
This was genuinely a jazz trio with a jazz singer, and everyone in the room seemed to feel that they earned their place in a very strong festival line-up. I like a singer who respects as well as uses the jazz tradition.
Tim Wall
Sep 19
Bring together some top-flight, European-based, musicians, select some good numbers for exploratory playing, and then give each player plenty of solo space; that’s pretty much a recipe for a thoroughly enjoyable club set for dedicated jazz listeners. And that’s what you got here. What’s great about the Scarborough Jazz Festival is that the audience is relatively large, but the atmosphere is still intimate. In these circumstances a band like this plays in such a supportive atmosphere that they almost have to succeed.
Steve Grossman and Damon Brown make a great pairing. There’s a good contrast of emotional energy, but a great degree of equality in the intelligence of the playing. Each can take extended solos and keep a musicality about the journey. Most enjoyable, though, is the frequent interplay. They listen to each other just as much as they challenge. The numbers were particularly well chosen, and even the recent compositions by Brown and others fitted well into a programme of post-bop.
Leon Greening plays beautifully supportive piano, prominent enough to bolster the soloist without getting in the way. His own solos extend this role, rather than dramatically switch to a new mode. They are impressively technical, the sound forcing me to focus with intent concentration on his playing, but not in any way flashy. The strong applause at the end of most of his solos, and when he was named-checked in the band member introductions, suggest to me that most people in the room agreed.
Tim Wall
Sep 19
I took on the role of reviewing each of the bands during the three days of the festival. This is not a job to be taken lightly, though. Musicians are notoriously suspicious of critics, especially when (like me) they don’t play themselves and haven’t a clue what it’s like to create music. Even once you’ve taken the decision to publish and be damned, there are decisions to be made about what to write about and how to write it. I am not a professional critic, nor am I a particularly skilled writer. Working as a university academic means that most of my writing is for obscure journals where scholarly rigor is more important than wit and flair. As a member of the team that developed justlikejazz.org I tried to take our overall objective – to put the experience of the festival online – and focus it on capturing something of the music that we all heard in the hall.
I haven’t tried to promote the festival, or individual bands. I have written what I thought, and what struck me as I listened. I wrote the review while the concert was in full-swing (excuse the pun). I hope the individual reviews are not uncritical. I actually loved everything I listened to, and my tastes in jazz are broad and somewhat eclectic. In my academic work I have often studied jazz musicians and the music business in which they work, and the imperative there is to be as empirical as possible; to record what is actually true, not what I think.
These, of course are only my own opinions. I tried to express how the performances struck me, to add relevant details about who made the music, how it progressed and how the audience responded. I also wanted to try and put the single set into a wider context. Sometimes that means saying something of the musicians’ careers, other times locating the performances we enjoyed into the history of jazz as a whole.
If you are new to jazz I hope you found the approach informative; if you are more familiar with jazz as a whole I hope I was able to communicate something of the event as it happened; and if you were actually there I hope your experience overlapped to some extent with my own. Because I wrote these reviews on the fly, I was able to show some of them to the musicians whose performance I reviewed, or tell them what I had written. I was pleased with their reactions, because they were often gracious in receiving the complements, and encouraging about my comments.
Tim Wall
Sep 19
This was a enjoyably rumbustious set, in which some terrific music was introduced by Alan Barnes in his unique sardonic style. There’s a real warm relationship between Alan and the Scarborough audience, and his jokes and gently biting asides produce much mirth.
The basic set-up was that Alan introduced a number written by Andy Panayi to represent individual Greek gods. So we got a witty pen portrait of the god, a comically rude comment about the band members who had the role of personifying the god in music (if gods can be personified) and some sterling arrangements of real flair performance by a great band of soloists.
For me this is perfect festival music: great entertainment value, a band of well-respected musicians, and high quality accessible music. It would be hard for anyone not to be converted to jazz, and equally difficult for a jazz fan not to be bold over by the full exuberance of it all.
Tim Wall
Sep 19
At least part of Killer Shrimp’s name seems appropriate for the Scarborough Jazz Festival; the music was wholly right for opening Saturday’s musical feast. Freewheeling they maybe, but the band’s musical roots are in hardbop, updated with some rhythmic feel from more contemporary musics of black origin.
Damon Brown’s flugel horn playing will be familiar to the wider audience who heard the ‘Blue Note put to beats’ group Us3. Much of the music in this set, though, has a very different sort urban grit, more about cafes in North London and disputes with landlords than romanticised New York street life. This is realised particularly well in the contributions of saxophonist Ed Jones, especially when counterpointed by the more romantic sound of Brown’s horn.
Playing live, most of the investigations of electronic music found on the album were absent, but they lost none of the sense of adventure. There’s traditional head and solo turn-taking, but far more interplay between instrumentalists than characterised the hardbop heyday. The groove is far less important here than the measured individual playing. There are stimulating, intelligent horn solos that never sound mannered, and drum solos from Luke Flowers that never lose their musicality.
There’s been a strong line up of bass players at this festival, and Mark Hodgson is far more understated than the bass-leaders who were on stage yesterday. However, I found myself increasingly mesmerised by his walking, fluent playing. This guy is a strong team player, giving the band a lovely strong pulse, and the traded sixteens and eights with Flowers were beautifully measured and assured. Hodgson seemed far keener to give Flowers a springboard for some gentle and sophisticated percussion, than to push his virtuosity. Deft and sensitive are the best adjectives here.
In concert here, and on their current CDs, there are lots of originals, but there are also compositions from slightly lesser known bop and hard bop composer-players like Tadd Dameron, Blue Mitchell and Harold Land. As the set went along the music grew in stature, and the band members clearly became more confident and audacious. The later numbers in particular had an appreciative audience engrossed.
The band have a lot in common with the spicy Thai fusion food suggested by their name: gently sweet and sour, varied textures, and at its best imaginative enough to be different.
Tim Wall
Sep 18
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
Sep 18
The quintet’s final piece was dedicated to fellow bass-player, and clear influence, Charles Mingus. It was a brilliant choice for the closing number, featuring much of the theatrical musicality that characterised Mingus’ own performances and many of his compositions. The five members of the group often took on the scale and stature of the Mingus big band, and Janisch strong rhythmic playing and Booth’s tart sax work were then mellowed by the gentler timbres of Palmer’s trumpet and Hart’s vibes. This was another number that simmered, then rose slowly but inevitably to the boil. Penn is in there stirring, pushing the other ingredients around as the emotional intensity rises through the round robin of solos. Sitting here in the hall you can gaze at the whole band on the stage as the music washes over you, then you can turn to one of the large screens to see a close-up of individual players, and then your focus of attention moves to the individual player. This is music strong in its whole and in its parts. The thunderous climax that had the audience cheering and clapping. A splendid end to a great set.
This show coincided with the launch of their new CD. I haven’t heard it yet, but if it reflects anything of tonight’s performance it will be a joy to hear.
Tim Wall
About 'Just Like Jazz'
'Just Like Jazz' is a collaborative project between Interactive Cultures, a research unit at Birmingham City University, and the Scarborough Jazz Festival. We're media academics who happen to be jazz fans and we're working with the Scarborough Jazz Festival to explore the ways in which jazz festivals can be portrayed online.
Rather than creating a brochure website around the festival, or simply filming the festival and putting that online, our goal is to capture the spirit of the festival using a range of techniques such as photography, text and handheld, personal digital video. We have given small, cheap, portable video cameras to select audience members, musicians, backstage staff and the festival organisers and asked them to capture whatever they think is interesting: the buzz of the audience, the surrounding environment, snippets of the music performed, and any discussions that take place around jazz.
Left to right: Prof Tim Wall, Andrew Dubber, Dr Simon Barber, Jez Collins.
We're gathering together all of this video, photography and text from our contributors and publishing it live on this website as the festival happens. We're also tagging the content in order to experiment with the ways in which the characters and stories that are captured can be navigated by you, the visitor. This process gives audiences the opportunity to experience the festival in their own way and makes the event accessible to those who may wish to attend the festival in future years, or who may never have considered visiting a jazz festival at all.
Although we've worked on projects like this before, with Aftershock in Italy and with the Copenhagen Jazz Festival, we don't have a fixed idea of what we're going to end up with. We're working with a loose structure and quite a lot of improvisation - in a way, it's just like jazz.
Do come and say hello if you see us around. We hope you enjoy exploring the festival online with us,
Tim, Andrew, Simon and Jez.
http://interactivecultures.org
