There were 12 entrants in each category, although one of the drummers pulled out of attending, tipping the balance slightly. The opening night saw all performers presenting one song or composition, everyone backed by the Riga Jazz Quartet: Kristaps Vanadziņš (piano), Rihards Goba (guitar), Jānis Rubiks (bass) and Miķelis Vīte (drums). Besides their musical prowess, these four should be congratulated on their sheer stamina, for rehearsals, soundchecks and actual performances.

The first evening in particular was a marathon. Even with just one number apiece, it still took three sets, with two intermissions, to work through all of the contestants. The second evening’s final had whittled the singers and drummers down to six finalists in each category, but each of these was now allowed a pair of songs or compositions, which retained the longueurs of the opening night.

It must be noted that all of the singers were female and all of the drummers male, although presumably this rigid divide was established due to the available entrants. Nationalities were quite diverse, circling around Europe and across to the USA. The transitions from entrant-to-entrant went very smoothly, with no technical malfunctions, and the sound balance was fine throughout. For much of the time, there seemed to be a general consensus over which artists shone, although there were three from the first round that really should have made it to the finals: singers Aleksandra Smerechanska (Poland) and Alina Zalozna (Ukraine), plus the Italian drummer Christian Anzolin. Smerechanska chose ‘Lullaby Of Birdland’, with an old school mobility, confident and slick, but still varying her phrasing trajectory. Zalozna’s original song wasn’t so jazzed, but she had an individualist presence, and a projecting, authoritative performance stance. Anzolin was a refreshingly hard hitter, but still pacing out his blows, definitely the highest volume sticksman of the first night. He offered variety, coaxing out a muted wooden box tone on the skins. A good thing!

There was a problem with many of the singers, whose core styles and approaches appeared to arrive from mainstream pop rather than actual jazz music, especially with their intonation and phrasing. Curiously, some of those artists that were sieved through to the final selected material that was way more jazz-rooted and uncompromising on the second night. Given that all of the jury had arrived from the jazz sphere, it would seem like a sound concept to select a jazz repertoire, even on the first night.

I particularly enjoyed the playing of Yannick Ballmann (Belgium), his tune-choices being particularly good: ‘Nardis’ on the first evening, then ‘Beatrice’ (Sam Rivers) and ‘Matrix’ (Chick Corea), on the second, with the quartet’s guitarist sitting out. Ballmann demonstrated a deft cymbal-lightness, with creative skips and flashes across the skins, adding constant accents, but not overdoing the constant soloing. Even though being quite hyperactive, this fitted well with the tunes.

The drums winner was New Yorker Domo Branch (from Portland, Oregon), who also received the journalists award. With his larger-than-life Stateside style, this was no surprise, as he had the confidence to ration his heavy hits, employing great subtlety for much of the time. This had a strangely commanding effect, displaying great control of dynamics. In the final he had the courage to play two long-ish pieces that found swathes of space, with dramatic pauses before hits, plus multiple mallet shimmers and bass rumbles.

I particularly enjoyed the singing of Paula Saija (Latvia) in the final, although she wasn’t actually that remarkable on the first night. For the second show she used speedy, light phrasing, with a tongue-twisting, theatrical presentation, expressive during ‘The Peacocks’, and surprising everyone with a trumpet-impersonating scat. She is on the bill for Rigas Ritmi 2022.

The Turkish singer Eylul Ergul chose a song that was very redolent of her homeland, completely switching the atmosphere. Along with Ergul, the eventual vocal winner Louise Balkwill (UK) was probably much further along the career advancement line than most contestants. She emanated a confidence already born in jazz clubs, and was clearly experienced at working an audience. 

Balkwill was more impressive later that same night, at the regular post-show jam session with the AG Trio. She took to the stage and quickly instructed the band with her needs, then finger-clicked off at a rapid, slickly enunciating pace. Earlier in the jam, Branch too had displayed an ‘effortless’ command of speedster swing, lightly bouncing the snare and deftly snicking the cymbal on the small drumkit, powering with massive energy yet physical restraint. The Latvian drummer finalist Pauls Pokratnieks (second place) also impressed at the session, getting into some hardcore swing propulsion. Otherwise, the AG Trio, led by introverted bassman Andris Grunte, weren’t exactly encouraging to the contestants, given that their late-night sessions were supposedly a platform for spontaneous guesting.

On the Friday session (the best one), the trio was augmented by a saxophonist and guitarist, as well as three competition drummers. Nevertheless, on other nights, AG Trio did create a suitably smooth, ‘sophisticated’ jazz backdrop in the Radisson Hotel bar-area, which actually boasted very good acoustics due to its abundance of soft furnishing.

The post Riga Jazz Stage 2022 (Latvia) first appeared on UK Jazz News.

Right at the beginning of March, the Kansas City alto saxophonist Logan Richardson played a very rare gig. Very rare during the last year, anyway. His usual existence has involved being out on the road full-time. Richardson appeared at Szczecin Jazz, a six-day Polish festival in that north-east city, which has been running since 2016. He fronted the Jazz Forum Talents, a collective that formed as a result of a 2019 showcase by Poland’s leading jazz publication. Jazz Forum continues to support these younger Polish players and composers. The gig took place in Opera At The Castle, a modernised insertion within an old Szczecin edifice. Richardson didn’t overly dominate, becoming at one with the ensemble spread, providing a few tunes, and soloing prodigiously and articulately on the works penned by the Talents. He and I chatted before and after the performance, anticipating the release of the new album Afrofuturism, which also marks a fresh signing to Whirlwind Recordings, in an arrangement with Richardson’s own imprint, Wax Industry.

Moving to Rome in 2017, Richardson had spent five years in Paris. This Euro-phase came after a decade or so in NYC, which was itself preceded by Berklee-studying in Boston. The last time that I caught Richardson onstage was also in Poland, during the Jazz Jantar festival in Gdańsk, as part of trumpeter Christian Scott aTunde Adjuah’s marathon two-hour 2019 set, nimbly speeding throughout most of its duration. In earlier years, there were also impressive NYC shows with organist Lonnie Smith’s Big Band, at the Jazz Standard club (2010), Richardson’s phrasing sensitivity found over intense soloing durations, and in that same year, a stirring set at the Iridium, in a double bill with pianist John Escreet. All of these gigs displayed Richardson’s impressive facility as a mainline sideman, but his recent solo works have evolved beyond, into a highly personalised expression of ambient soundtracking, attuned to narrative constructions where the impact of entirety is more significant than any separated details. Several of the tracks on Afrofuturism feature Richardson almost literally solo, as he works on layering with piano, keyboards, synth-sounds and often radically effected saxophone parts.

“The interesting thing is that with the Blues People album [2018] I started this process of taking segments and pieces of produced tracks that I was doing in Logic,” Richardson explains. “That’s where a lot of the bites and different ideas came from, aside from what I wrote directly in the studio. For this project it was more full-in, not only using Logic and Ableton [software] tracks for ideas, and then having the band take them and do something with them, but actually having it be part of the direct core ensemble. Afrofuturism was that first dive into where everything spread out from the production of the songs. Even in the studio, I would play the track, and everybody would play with the actual produced track. It’s way free-er, because you don’t have to be in this tight recording mode. I can take the music, and sit with it for months, putting a saxophone part down much later.”

Even in the early years, Richardson would still have made a rougher ‘demo’, then written it out via Sibelius software. Now, he’s using actual recording as a notebook, like a painter would build up layers on a canvas, from wiry lattices up to blooms of colour and depth. Richardson has also made a pronounced shift from acoustic to electric palettes. “I’m becoming more romantic with the various timbres of the orchestra, so to speak. With the instrumentation, it’s very important to have as much of an ambidextrous format as possible.” He’s talking about the left and right hands of acoustic and electric.

Richardson has long been accustomed to composing at the keyboard, then moving to saxophone at a later stage in the process. “I’m really addicted to the piano and keyboards in general,” he says. “So I write 99% on the keys and synths. Then everybody came in and they breathed the life into it. It’s developed in terms of recording, and actually using the template in open form.”

Richardson actively wanted to form a band around the Kansas City scene, with Blues People mostly comprised of artists hitherto not so well-known outside Missouri: Igor Osypov (guitar), Peter Schlamb (vibraphone/keyboards), Dominique Sanders (bass/production), Ryan J. Lee (bass/drums) and Corey Fonville (drums), the latter hailing from Richmond, Virginia. Also involved on several Afrofuturism cuts are the Italian singer Laura Taglialatela and the Turkish cellist Ezgi Karakus.

Richardson’s sound on Afrofuturism evokes a cinematic, narrative nature, short snippets acting like cues in a movie, longer pieces letting the music extend into a swirling wash of multiplexity, reminiscent of Ornette Coleman’s Prime Time sonics, which frequently combined criss-crossing free-form complexity with an ambient miasma of sheer abstract expression.

Richardson has long been interested in the art of soundtracking. “I feel like I can naturally do it, I love film a lot.” He also thinks that it’s quite difficult to enter that particular musical world, as though it’s some kind of magical circle. He mentions details in the mixing and mastering of Afrofuturism, where his engineer tracked down the original Vangelis synth-settings on the Blade Runner soundtrack, to use in the shaping of reverb on a saxophone solo, sculpting it in a virtual zone. Richardson is a science fiction acolyte, so perhaps that particular genre would be eminently suited to his output. There has certainly been a run of such films in recent times, featuring striking and atmosphere-seeping soundtracks, including Mandy, Archenemy, Possessor, and the Watchmen series.

“Also, I like the album to be like a book, listening to the whole album for it to make sense.” Richardson is aiming for a feel of continuity…both within an album, and beyond, into a sequence of related releases.

He’s very pleased to have signed up with Whirlwind Recordings, and has known mainman Michael Janisch for around a decade. Richardson is in the midst of a highly productive phase, although not necessarily driven by any lack of live action. He actually has a vision of a sharply delineated album cycle, using these current collage methods. “It’s imperative that the urgency is clear,” he says, running through the recent toll-list of Chick Corea, Ralph Peterson Jr., Stanley Cowell, Wallace Roney, McCoy Tyner and Junior Mance, the latter of whom was one of Richardson’s teachers at The New School in NYC. “The urgency, which is always there, is overwhelming, at this point. We don’t have any choice but to be furious in our art.”

The post Logan Richardson – new album ‘Afrofuturism’ first appeared on UK Jazz News.