What Bedmakers do is to take fragments of folk tunes, and melodies that might once have been folk tunes. They interweave strange sounds and free improvisation into the melodies, and they turn them inside out in a unique way.

The French-born clarinet and saxophone player Robin Fincker was well known on the London scene in the 2000s as a co-founder of the Loop Collective, and in some fine bands such as Outhouse and Blink. Mathieu Werchowski is French violinist operating in the field of contemporary music and as a composer/sound designer. Dave Kane is a Leeds based improvising bass player and producer. Fabien Duscombs is a Toulouse based drummer associated with several Freddy Morezon groups.

The music isn’t really folk music at all, although it does contain the ghosts of folk melodies. On the other hand its possible to spend as much time debating “what is folk” as it is on the definition of jazz – and its equally pointless!

The album is very definitely a bit of both, and probably needs labels like contemporary and experimental as well. For example “Wheel Reels” starts out as a straightforward Celtic reel over a thunderous drum rhythm. The saxophone melody is intertwined with a violin countermelody that might be considered the harmony were it not so delightfully discordant.

The track “Folks” is the most intriguing. It starts with assorted breaths and squeaks and pizzicato sounds above which Fincker gradually evokes ephemeral fragments of tunes including echos of the well known song “Scarborough Fair”. The melody is never played, just hinted at by saxophone and then by the violin and with both interacting.

Other tracks include the French traditional ballad “Le Jardin des Amours” the gentle Cajun tune “Bonsoir Moreau”, and “Charivari” which only occasionally lives fully up to its title (noun: a discordant mock serenade to newlyweds, made with pans, kettles, etc.)

When I reviewed their previous album in 2021 (link below) I said that the music was pretty well guaranteed to horrify most fans of folk music and that’s still true. But these melodies, however distorted or fragmentary, lend a novel background to the improvisation of these fine musicians in a way that more conventional jazz melodies might not. The result is a fascinating and intriguing album.

Peter Slavid broadcasts a programme of European Jazz on mixcloud.com/ukjazz and various internet stations.

Passe Montagne is released today 31 January 2025

The post Bedmakers – ‘Passe Montagne’ first appeared on UK Jazz News.

The penultimate day of this, now well established festival saw a fine triple bill in the wonderful Literary and Philosophical Society venue. Earlier in the day some of us had been treated to some ferocious percussive solo piano from Cuban-American Aruan Ortiz.

The evening opened in a rather more conventional fashion with the young J.A.M. String Collective: Annalise Lam (Violin) / Julia Dos Reis (Viola) / Miranda Lewis-Brown (Cello).

They improvised over charming melodies finishing with a fine arrangement of Ornette Coleman’s classic Lonely Woman.

Next was a solo guitar performance by Tara Cunningham. This was a mesmeric performance as she conjured a range of sounds and effects, sometimes atmospheric, at others harsh and sharp.

The final, headline act was The Flame: Robert Mitchell (Piano) / Olie Brice (Double Bass) / Mark Sanders (Drums). This is an outstanding improvising trio of musicians all at the peak of their powers – listening, interacting and prompting. Sanders can play delicately, but is at his best thundering alongside the others, prompting and dropping bombs in all the right places. Brice is a whirlwind, rumbling in the background or driving things along in the foreground. Mitchell uses his formidable technique to good effect whether on dramatic chords or glittering runs.

Unfortunately this was my only visit this year to a festival that now runs over two weekends with dozens of acts. Its tight focus on this style of improvised music give it a unique place in the jazz calendar.

The post Newcastle Festival of Jazz and Improvised Music 2024 first appeared on UK Jazz News.

The 8^th iteration of the NFOJAIM has just published its programme and it looks like the most imaginative yet.

Its full of big names and experimental musicians that many will never have heard of, mixed with luminaries from the jazz scene in the North East.

The Full Programme is at the link below, but I would like to pick out just a few highlights:

• The festival always features a selection of artists from the Newcastle area including Andy Champion, Faye MacCalman and others
• The first weekend sees the Danish pianist Jeppe Zeeberg with his modestly named band The Absolute Pinnacle of Human Achievement. Zeeberg was at last year’s festival with a duo and was a big hit. Also on the first weekend there is a rare return to the UK by Ingrid Laubrock with Tom Rainey, playing with local improvisers Johnny Hunter and John Pope
• The second weekend features (amongst others) the Japanese pianist Izumi Kimura playing with drummer Gerry Hemmingway; an Art, Entertainment and Politics Workshop, and The Flame, the trio of Robert Mitchell (Piano) / Olie Brice (Double Bass) / Mark Sanders (Drums). It all finishes on Sunday 6^th with local saxophonist Emma Johnson‘s Gravy Boat.

It’s hugely encouraging that the Newcastle area retains an enthusiasm for this type of music which can be challenging at times. This year the festival has expanded into new venues and some interesting experiments with sound. These include the Friday Night Chill Out at Jesmond Swimming Pool and soundtracking to a selection of historic surrealist films.

This is the only jazz festival around that focuses exclusively on this type of jazz and improvised music, and its now established as an important part of the UK jazz landcape.

The post Newcastle Festival of Jazz and Improvised Music 2024 (NFoJaIM) first appeared on UK Jazz News.

The band has been going for almost 30 years and is made up from three brothers, Áron, Benjamin and Salamon Eredics, plus cousin Dávid Eredics and Ábel Dénes, the only non-family member, on bass.

All the family members are multi-instrumentalists. All of them play various different sizes of the Tambura – a mandolin-like instrument, probably of Turkish origin, used by the South Slav (Serbian and Croatian) communities in Hungary. But in addition Áron Eredics plays outstanding Darbuka (a goblet drum), Benjamin Eredics plays trumpet, Dávid Eredics plays clarinet, saxophone, and kaval (an end-blown flute) and is also lead tabura player. Salamon Eredics plays hulusi (a chinese flute), bass drum and accordion.

The music can be fast and furious with incredible precision from the tamburas, it can mix rock with balkan bluegrass, with nods to classical composers like Bartok, who used folk music themselves. They can also play a cheesy ballad as in their version of Laura where Potter and others soar over the sparkling Tamburas.

The press release is helpful, and describes the opening track Liras thus:

“The musical material of the composition consists of three layers: motivic music based on Balkan asymmetrically rhythmic dances, a Greek 7/16 Serra dance originally played with a lyre, and improvisation. Interestingly, some motifs from one of Rachmaninov’s liturgical choral works appear in the music.” Most of the other tracks have a similar mixture of improvisation and folk music.

I did like the cheekily named, trumpet led, Sketches of Spoon, and the two arrangements of Bartok pieces. The final track encapsulates the whole style. It starts slowly and lyrically with short improvisations from saxophone trumpet and flute over rhythmic percussion. Then about three minutes into the nine minute track it suddenly triples in speed and becomes a dance rhythm with ferocious solos from saxophone, accordion and others over a constant driving rhythm from the percussion.

The whole album is great fun, and clearly sits firmly in its local roots, but is nevertheless full of exciting improvisation – definitely a jazz album – and great fun at that!

Peter Slavid broadcasts a programme of European Jazz on mixcloud.com/ukjazz and various internet stations

LINKS: Gyezz at GroundUP
Buy Gyezz from Presto Music

The post Söndörgö with special guest Chris Potter – ‘Gyezz’ first appeared on UK Jazz News.

The day started with Julien Durand’s Dreamscapes. Durand is a French-Chinese guitarist based in London, but a graduate from Birmingham. This is a five-piece band with Cenk Esen (keys), Jack Robson (drums) and George Garford (sax), with vocals from Lucy-Anne Daniels. The name gives a partial clue to the nature of the music, but this wasn’t just a dreamy soundscape – there were solid rhythms and powerful improvisation here too, as well as an intelligent use of electronics.

The second gig saw the stage filled with some of the UK’s best improvising musicians to perform Sam Eastmond‘s arrangements of John Zorn’s bagatelles. London composer Eastmond has worked closely with John Zorn and is the only UK musician entrusted with Bagatelles. As far as I know he’s also the only person who has made a big band arrangement of Zorn’s music. This was the first festival performance of this exhilarating music. Zorn’s melodies seem to inspire creativity, and the quality of the improvisation on show was outstanding. It was entertaining too to watch Eastmond’s animated conducting.

The final Parabola performance of the weekend was a special event. After standing down last year as the sole programmer at the Parabola, Tony Dudley-Evans was offered sponsorship from Longrow Capital to create a special commission. The brief was to help ensure that the reputation of the parabola as the home of creativity and innovation was maintained under the new regime.

Un-procedure are normally synth player Piera Onacko and drummer/electronic artist Nathan Jones, both from Birmingham, normally joined by saxophonist Cassie Kinoshi. The event was slightly marred by the fact that Kinoshi was unfortunately stranded in Berlin, although she did send a recorded contribution.

The commission also enhanced the band with the addition of strings and woodwinds, There was a large screen behind the band showing graphics throughout the hour long performance. The music of un-procedure is dominated by electronics and keyboards with powerful drumming. The depth and power of the music was sometimes overwhelming.

Given the stated objective of this commission it certainly made its contribution. In fact there was no sign over the weekend of any slackening of the commitment to innovative jazz. No other festival, no other venue, maintains such a dedicated programme from the cutting edge of the many different genres of what we loosely call jazz.

Long may it continue.

The post Cheltenham Jazz Festival report (6) – Sunday at the Parabola first appeared on UK Jazz News.

Several of the participants in this project over the years have gone on to great things. The overseas contribution has been slimmed down a bit from previous years, but I’m sure we saw some stars in the making.

The students were formed into three quintets, and rather than band names, were given numbers by the order in which they appeared. All of the students got an opportunity to solo, and all did so creditably.

Group 1 was my favourite of the three, featuring delightful interplay between the trombone and alto sax. It’s a slightly unusual combination, but it worked really well. The compositions weren’t credited, but I thought they were particularly interesting in this group.

Parabola Quintet 1

Trombone: Will Pethick (Hamburg)
Sax: Nathan Evans
Double Bass: Francesco Bordignon (Siena)
Drums: Yiu Lam
Piano: Julianne Deil

Group 2 gave us a rather more conventional bebop performance, although there were some interesting effects from the guitarist, whose solo was one of the highlights. There was also an unusual love song from the bass player who vocalised along with the bass.

Parabola Quintet 2

Trumpet: Christian Kiely-Charalambous
Trombone: Henry Hansen
Bass/vocal: Lennart Meyer (Hamburg)
Guitar: Edoardo Ferri (Siena)
Drums: Wilfred Mckenzie 

Group 3 concentrated on tunes from, amongst others, Joe Henderson and Lee Morgan. This was a polished and professional band full of fine musicians. 

Parabola Quintet 3 

Vocal: Giuditta Franco (Siena)
Sax: Reuben-James Gilbert
Bass: Macy Wright
Drums: Dominic Johnson 
Guitar: Oliver Canham 

The overall impression from these three bands was one of high quality musicianship. If I have a criticism it is only that the music was all a bit conventional, with very little risk taking, although I do understand the complexity of putting together these projects across national boundaries. However, I suspect that many of these musicians go out and play in Afrobeat or improv bands, and it would be great to see just a bit of that in future years.

Birmingham Conservatoire and Cheltenham Jazz deserve big congratulations for their continued support of this excellent project, and the large enthusiastic audience would roundly endorse that.

The post Birmingham Conservatoire International Student Project at Parabola Arts Centre first appeared on UK Jazz News.

The second event came from Charlotte Keeffe’s Right Here, Right Now Quartet, featuring Ashley John Long on double bass, Ben Handysides on drums, and Moss Freed on guitar, with Keeffe on trumpet and flugelhorn. On stage, Keeffe is an enthusiastic communicator about her music. Free improvisation may seem complex, but she explains her love of squeaking and growling sounds, engages the audience in chanting the name of her band, and shows her enjoyment in a way that’s totally infectious.

After that came a project that was a bit of a departure for the Parabola. David Ola’s Lucumi Project is an Afro-Caribbean carnival band built around Ola’s powerful drumming, with three steel pan players plus sax and trumpet. The project was designed to tell stories about the movement of the African diaspora, although shortened versions of these were featured on Saturday. The music, however, stands in its own right: infectious Afrobeat and Cuban rhythms, with some fierce improvising, would have had the audience on their feet dancing had there been space. The Lucumi Project have a gig booked in June at the home of carnival, the Tabernacle in Notting Hill, where they will perform their full show. 

In complete contrast, the next event featured Kit Downes on piano with vocalist Norma Winstone. This was a duo performance featuring intimate music that will appear on an ECM album later this year.  Winstone may be 82, but she neither looks nor sounds it. She may use less vocal pyrotechnics than in her youth, but instead her voice has a warmth that you can touch. Downes has been a regular at Cheltenham for many years, and has graduated from bright newcomer to legend in no time. He has always been a fine solo pianist, and we heard some of that, but in this duo he has adapted that skill into being the perfect accompanist.

The post Cheltenham Jazz Festival report (3) – Saturday at the Parabola first appeared on UK Jazz News.

Friday evening, in what was a rather rain-sodden Cheltenham, saw a full house happy to be indoors to enjoy the rather sunny Caribbean-infused music from Sultan Stevenson. With fine tight support from double bassist Jacob Gryn and drummer Joel Waters, Stevenson played music from his excellent recent debut album “Faithful One”. He uses a wide dynamic range, moving seamlessly from soft and lyrical through to those strong punchy McCoy Tyner influenced block chords. He also has an entertaining line of patter in selling his albums, and his range of homemade hats. A good start to the weekend.

The second event in the PAC was very different. A packed stage saw an 18-piece ensemble from the National Youth Jazz Orchestra, conducted enthusiastically by their musical director Mark Armstrong, and featuring some really fine soloists. The music was created by pianist Nikki Yeoh and was accompanied by visuals on a large screen behind the band.The first extended piece was Speechmik X-ploration which comprised short poems in different languages delivered by talking heads (literally just heads shown reciting on the screen). These were then repeated accompanied by piano notes following the cadence of the words, and then the band picked up those cadences in the full composition. Meanwhile the graphics manipulated those pictures of the heads and mixed them into a range of abstract images.

The graphics on show were really interesting, so much so that at times I found them distracting me from the music, but at others they really enhanced it – I’m sure this varies from person to person.

The second piece was tribute to Ian Carr’s Nucleus. Carr had been a teacher and mentor to Nikki Yeoh, and her enthusiasm for his work shone through in the music. This was an exciting arrangement, with several excellent young soloists, with graphics built around the album covers released by Nucleus.

An excellent end to the first day in the PAC.

Peter Slavid broadcasts a programme of European Jazz on mixcloud.com/ukjazz and various internet stations

The post Cheltenham Jazz Festival report (1) – Friday at the Parabola first appeared on UK Jazz News.

In the period starting sometime around 2006, Scandinavian jazz saw an explosion of outstanding power trios. Over the next 10 years we saw the emergence of Bushman’s Revenge, Elephant 9, The Thing, Krokofant and many more. One of the best of the bunch was definitely the Swedish trio Fire!

Fire! started in 2009 as baritone sax player Mats Gustafsson with Johan Berthling on bass and Andreas Werliin on drums, a simple line-up but with enormous power.

Like many of the trios, Fire! experimented with their line up, often collaborating with a fourth member, and are probably best known for the monstrous 28 piece Fire! Orchestra (desribed fairly accurately on their website as a free jazz/ experimental/ psychedelic/ noise/ free improv ensemble).

In this new album they have gone back to basics, both with the line-up and with the music. The album was recorded live in the studio on analog tape at Steve Albini’s studio in Chicago, the home of a long string of huge rock recordings.

The album starts with “Work Songs For A Scattered Past.” A very simple bass riff runs through the piece. The drums join in with a steady rhythm as the sax plays a single note. Then everything starts to ramp up. The sax develops that note into its own version of the riff, and the drums start to add powerful improvisations. That riff then passes back to the bass as the sax improvises over the top. After a period of intense power everything calms down back to a basic rhythm and the simple riff as the volume gradually fades to an end. It’s powerful and dramatic, but beautiful at the same time.

Other tracks take a similar structure, although one starts with the drums, and the final ten minute track starts with a raucous sax before fading down to another short few bass notes.

Describing it this way makes it all sounds very simple and repetitive, and in some ways it is. What lifts it above that, is the way they change intensity and tempo through the tracks, and the power and imagination of the three musicians at the peak of their powers, and in perfect sync with each other

Peter Slavid broadcasts a programme of European Jazz on mixcloud.com/ukjazz and various internet stations

The post Fire! – ‘Testament’ first appeared on UK Jazz News.

Since then there have been occasional attempts to mix the two genres, with mixed success. More recently a lot of jazz musicians have cropped up in folk/rock bands and occasionally in acoustic groups.

Which brings us to tonight’s concert in the magnificant surroundings of the Grand Junction church, put together by saxophonist Sean Khan.

This turned out to be an excellent concert although it may well have disappointed any folk music fans, given that it was fundamentally a jazz concert – and a very fine one.

The concert started with what he described as a “warm-up act” from the Sean Khan quartet. Khan is a fine saxophonist on tenor and soprano in the John Coltrane mould, and this group was worthy of a gig in their own right. There were excellent contributions from Al Mcsween on keyboards and from the rhythm section of Filippo Galli on drums and Mirko Scarcia on bass. Their set finished with a powerful version of Coltrane’s “Naima”.

The second half was also a jazz concert but this time using some of the best folk tunes as the basis for improvisation. There were fine instrumental versions of the traditional Irish tune “She moved through the fair” and the Sandy Denny tune “Who knows where the time goes” featuring powerful solos from Khan and McSween. This was very much a continuation of the style shown in the first half.

There were also several folk songs given a jazz treatment. Young Yorkshire singer/songwriter Laura Kindelan has a fine voice, but on this occasion her words weren’t easily heard, and there was no announcement of the two songs which were “Parasite” by Nick Drake and the traditional song “Let no man steal your thyme” which Pentangle recorded in 1968.

Rosie Frater-Taylor then sang two classics from the 1960s, John Martyn’s “Solid Air”, and Nick Drake’s Things Behind The Sun, and she contributed some excellent guitar work to the quartet as well.

And so to the star of the show. Jacqui McShee will be 80 next month, but you would never have known that, as her stage presence and voice outshone everyone else. She was never just a folk singer, and her band Pentangle was, for a few years a popular mix of folk and jazz that was unique in the way it combined the two.

She sang two songs from that era. First came the Pentangle song “I’ve got a Feeling” which used the Miles Davis tune “All Blues”, from Kind of Blue, with Pentangle’s own lyrics. The programme then finished with Pentangle’s best known song “Light Flight” one of the iconic folk songs from that era which briefly entered the hit parade after being used as the theme tune to a TV programme.

The integration of folk and jazz has never been entirely comfortable since Pentangle’s success, and the way folks songs tell stories doesn’t always sit comfortably in a jazz idiom. On the other hand using folk tunes as the basis for jazz improvisation, as we saw here, is definitely worth the effort.

The band’s version of I’ve Got A Feeling is available now on bandcamp.

Peter Slavid broadcasts a programme of European Jazz on mixcloud.com/ukjazz and various internet stations

The post Modern Jazz and Folk Ensemble with Jacqui McShee at Grand Junction first appeared on UK Jazz News.