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EFG London Jazz Festival 2015, Monday, 16/11/2015.

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by Ian Mann

November 27, 2015

Ian Mann on performances by Sam Coombes Trio, Elliot Galvin Trio, Dice Factory, and Amok Amor featuring Peter Evans.

EFG London Jazz Festival 2015, Monday 16/11/2015.

SAM COOMBES TRIO, PIZZA EXPRESS JAZZ CLUB

I recently reviewed and recommended “Pace of Change”, the latest album from alto saxophonist and composer Sam Coombes. I was therefore very much looking forward to this performance, one of a series of free lunchtime events being held at the Pizza Express Jazz Club during the Festival week.

Coombes in an interesting character who divides his time between Edinburgh and Caen in Normandy where he has a house. He is an avid Francophile who supplements his musical career with a post teaching French at Edinburgh University.

Coombes has musical associations in both the UK and France and “Pace of Change” features his playing in a saxophone trio configuration with the leader being joined by the highly in demand Paris based rhythm section of Yoni Zelnik (double bass) and Julien Charlet (drums).

Following the terrorist atrocities the previous Friday there was some doubt as to whether Zelnik and Charlet would be able to make this gig but fortunately they did, arriving via a combination of Eurostar and taxi. This was probably just as well as the complexities of Coombes’ writing for “Pace of Change” would have presented a considerable challenge for any “deps”.

With Zelnik and Charlet having to return to Paris later in the day it was agreed that the trio would present their music as a single continuous performance rather than taking the usual twenty minute break between sets. It proved to be an hour and a half of absorbing and surprisingly accessible music making as the trio presented virtually all of the music from the “Pace of Change” album, albeit in a slightly different running order to the CD.

The music on “Pace of Change” is complex, and doubtless sometimes difficult to play, but it remains curiously accessible to the listener, largely due to the strength of Coombes’ highly melodic themes. The gristle is in the rhythmic content as Coombes explains  
“Each composition comprises of a minimum of three non standard time signatures (12/4, 9/4, 11/4, 5/2 etc), hence time is literally of the essence and helps to give ‘Pace of Change’ its title.”

The concept may all sound a little dry and academic but the music sounds anything but and in Zelnik and Charlet Coombes has the perfect partners to interpret his ideas. The pair have the ‘chops’ to handle the complexities of Coombes’ compositions with apparent ease, they are always listening, always receptive, and always in the moment while simultaneously possessing enormous technical skills. This was music that kept both the musicians and their listeners on their toes throughout and was very well received by an attentive and pleasingly sizeable Monday lunchtime crowd. If I was impressed by Zelnik and Charlet on record I was even more so seeing them perform this music in the flesh.

For all its complexities the music on “Pace of Change” is also all about “the groove” with the trio often adopting funk inspired rhythms, as exemplified on album and set opener “perpetual e-motion”.

“Contagion”, the second track from the album exhibited a similar urgency and included solo features for both bass and drums as Zelnik and Charlet offered further evidence of their considerable abilities.

The time signature changes were even more clearly pronounced on the sprawling “In the Interstice”  but the complexities were leavened by Coombes’ own playing, his dry yet pure and always melodic sound granting the music an accessibility that the audience could relate too but without any sense of compromise with regard to his artistic vision.

So far the music had been fairly hard driving with Zelnik’s muscular bass lines helping to propel the music forward. Comparisons with the music of both Ornette Coleman and Sonny Rollins in trio mode would have been valid. Coombes now presented something more impressionistic and obviously European in origin with the drifting atmospherics of “Mondeville, Juillet 2013”, a reflective depiction of the small industrial coastal town just outside Caen where Coombes lives. One could imagine the mist swirling around the harbour in the early morning as Coombes wispy, long toned melody lines were accompanied by Charlet’s mallet rumbles and delicate cymbal splashes as the drummer adopted the role of colourist.

“Interfacing You”, by contrast was eminently more lively and the piece most obviously rooted in bebop. Here the consistently impressive Charlet generated an impressive amount of power with brushes alone.

Although unannounced I seem to recall that “Fault Lines” was next up, a tune that was reminiscent of the music of both Ornette Coleman and French bassist and composer Henri Texier. This was a piece that moved through several distinct phrases with Charlet moving from mallets to sticks as the music unfolded.

“Pace of Change” itself exemplified the trio’s approach and included improvised solo features from all three group members.

The new tune “Present Continuous” saw Coombes switching to soprano saxophone, an instrument on which he is also highly accomplished. His exchanges with with Zelnik’s bass and Charlet’s brushed drums were consistently gripping and the level of interaction between bass and drums exceptional.

Coombes remained on soprano for “Go re-configure”, an altogether more energetic affair that featured the leader’s incisive soloing above the restless and dynamic polyrhytmic flow of Charlet’s drumming.

Coombes moved back to alto for the afternoon’s only standard, a ballad reading of “Everything Happens To Me” introduced by a saxophone/bass duet and also featuring a melodic solo from Zelnik shadowed by Charlet’s brushes.

Like the album the performance finished with an alternate version of “perpetual e-motion”, an even more overtly funky version of the tune played in a different set of time signatures to the first take.

I’d been looking forward to this performance since reviewing the album and Coombes and his colleagues certainly didn’t disappoint. It was good to hear what could have been perceived as relatively challenging music going over so well with the other audience members too.

Immediately after the show Zelnik and Charlet had to pack up their gear and retrace their steps back to Paris. During the performance Coombes had spoken of the shock that all three musicians had felt with regard to Friday’s events.

On a more personal note the saxophonist was very relieved that he hadn’t been forced to cancel what had been a very successful gig for him. Sam and I have had a degree of email contact over the years and post gig it was good to meet up at last and talk at some length about music and other matters. Sam Coombes is a highly intelligent and genuinely nice guy, let’s hope his musical career can continue to prosper in difficult economic times.

ELLIOT GALVIN TRIO, RAY’S JAZZ AT FOYLE’S

The Café at Ray’s Jazz within the Foyle’s book shop has customarily staged free early evening jazz events during the Festival and at other times of the year.

Following the relocation of Foyle’s to a site just a few doors down Charing Cross Road from the old store a new sound proofed performance space has been created on the top floor, adjacent to, but separate from, the Café. Overall it’s a better place to listen to music with the hubbub of the Café and the roar of traffic in the street outside no longer a distraction.

This time round the Festival events at Foyle’s have been ticketed but with the prices kept very modest (typically around £6.00) and audiences still turned out in impressive numbers beginning with this evening’s performance from the young pianist and composer Elliot Galvin and his trio featuring bassist Tom McCredie and drummer Simon Roth. 

I reviewed a gig by the trio at Dempsey’s in Cardiff in September 2015 and loved every minute of it and once again I found myself enjoying their performance immensely even though the element of surprise or novelty was inevitably less second time around.

I’m going to reproduce a couple of paragraphs from the Cardiff review which give an indication of what Galvin is all about;

Galvin, originally from Rochester in Kent, is a graduate of the Jazz Course at London’s Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance and is a frequent award winner, a former Yamaha Jazz Scholar and the 2014 European Young Jazz Musician of The Year. Together with trumpeter Laura Jurd he is the co-founder of the increasingly influential Chaos Collective of young musicians. Indeed “Dreamland”, with its brilliant and amusing artwork by Stuart Brough, appears on the Chaos Collective’s own label.

Galvin is a pianist with technique to burn but he’s also a self confessed nerd and gadget fanatic and his performance saw him augmenting the orthodox sound of the piano with a dizzying array of devices and extended techniques. He approaches his music with an impish irreverence that has caused other commentators to liken him to a young Django Bates, and it’s a fair comparison, Galvin really is that good. Like Bates he has ideas to burn and his music is similarly busy, full of sudden shifts and turns and dramatic dynamic contrasts. The restless and often whimsical nature of his music might not suit all listeners but I loved it for its youthful brashness and energy, the sheer joy the trio took in one another’s playing and Galvin’s obvious reluctance to be pigeon holed. This was a three piece that went way beyond the usual conventions of the piano trio, whether pre or post E.S.T., to deliver music that was gloriously original, occasionally challenging, but above all fun.

Today’s show was in the same mould as the Cardiff performance but included exclusively new material which is slated to appear on the trio’s second album, is due to be recorded in early 2016. Opener “Hurdy Gurdy” and second piece “Lions” were both new compositions and featured McCredie deploying both arco and pizzicato techniques on the bass. “Lions” saw Galvin unrolling a length of gaffer tape and integrating the sound of the process into the musical performance. He then used the strip of tape to dampen the string of the piano thereby producing a kind of pizzicato string sound as Roth detonated a series of drum explosions. All very theatrical but delivered with an astonishing degree of musical skill. There are hints of surrealism, Dadaism and performance art in an Elliot Galvin show.

The restless use of devices continued throughout the evening with Galvin variously deploying toy piano, stylophone, kalimba and his home built microtonal melodica, essentially two melodicas in different keys melded together.

He doesn’t use it in this group but Galvin is also an accomplished and original accordionist who deploys this instrument alongside the piano with bassist Huw V Williams’ band Hon.

For all the madcap antics Galvin is also capable of more impressionistic moments such as the new tune “1666” which nevertheless still included use of the piano’s innards plus Roth’s various percussive devices. Meanwhile an innovative arrangement of the standard “Mack The Knife” reclaimed the song from the supper club crooners and welcomed it back to the dark side via Galvin’s doomy piano chording, McCredie’s grainy low register arco bass and Roth’s vaguely sinister tapping out of the melody on a child’s glockenspiel.

“Tippu’s Tiger” was no less unsettling, a musical depiction of an anti-colonialist exhibit housed at the Victoria & Albert Museum. The item in question is an Indian made musical box and Galvin and his colleagues captured something of that quirky music box sound with the leader playing kalimba simultaneously with the piano accompanied by bowed bass and that glockenspiel again.

“Polare” was more hard grooving, a kind of E.S.T. meets Django Bates approach. “Punch And Judy” began with Galvin manipulating fairground sounds on an old fashioned cassette recorder and incorporated a stop/start finale with more false endings than the track “Nearch” on Egg’s 1974 album “The Civil Surface”. I sometimes wonder if Galvin’s generation have listened to all that Canterbury Scene stuff or just arrived at a similar destination totally independently. On a more contemporary note I also wondered if keyboardist Dave Morecroft’s WorldService Project was also an influence given the association of Galvin and some of his Chaos Collective colleagues with the Match & Fuse movement.

“Cosy” concluded the show with a typical piece of Bates inspired whimsy with Galvin even getting the audience to whistle along with an uncharacteristically simple melody line.

The trio’s music was very well received by a supportive crowd, possibly an audience more familiar with the group’s music than the Cardiff audience had been. Galvin’s scatter-gun approach may not appeal to all listeners but I think he’s a terrific talent (as are McCredie and Roth) and I’m looking forward to the new album with keen anticipation. Meanwhile the début album “Dreamland” remains recommended listening for all fans of contemporary jazz.


DICE FACTORY / AMOK AMOR, THE VORTEX

My first of several Festival visits to the Vortex, still my favourite London jazz club, was to hear this double bill featuring the British quartet Dice Factory and the international four piece Amok Amor led by Danish bassist Petter Eldh.

DICE FACTORY

I very much enjoyed Dice Factory’s eponymous début album for the Babel label released in 2012 and reviewed and recommended it for this site. Founder members Tom Challenger (tenor sax), Tom Farmer (double bass) and Jon Scott (drums) remain but the group has since acquired a new pianist with fellow Loop Collective member Dan Nicholls taking over from George Fogel.

Three years on from the début it was inevitable that tonight’s performance would include a high percentage of new material and the group began with two as yet untitled compositions by drummer Jon Scott which elicited powerful solos from Nicholls and Challenger.

As Oliver Weindling of the Vortex noted in his review for London Jazz News this was a set of quietly simmering intensity and included “Co-incidental Design”, a new composition from Farmer that began with gentle rippling piano arpeggios and included an atmospheric solo drum passage from a mallet wielding Scott before growing incrementally in terms of intensity as it segued into a new Nicholls piece titled “Let The Horse Go”.

Challenger’s composition “Gooch” represented the only selection from the group’s début. The cricket loving saxophonist’s tune references Graham Gooch’s record breaking innings of 333 and is centred around triplets, clever stuff, but like Coombes and Galvin eminently listenable. The solo highlight here was Farmer’s inventive and imaginative double bass feature.

An abstract ballad, I think the title was “AWOL”, featured lyrical piano and lightly brushed drums and represented something of a pause for breath before the set closer, Farmer’s composition “The Eternal Sleep” with it’s soaring tenor sax and highly percussive piano solo rounded off by a powerful drum feature from Scott.

A second Dice Factory album must surely be imminent, and on this evidence should be well worth hearing.

AMOK AMOR

The 2014 EFG LJF included an acclaimed performance at the Vortex by Starlight, a trio led by the Berlin based drummer Christian Lillinger and featuring bassist Petter Eldh and German alto saxophonist Wanja Slavin.

This year the group returned with a new name and a new member, the phenomenal American trumpeter Peter Evans. Now called Amok Amor the new group functions under the nominal leadership of Eldh but is very much an improvising collective – I suspect that the Starlight trio is still operative but with Lillinger at the helm, the relationship is a bit like the one between Polar Bear and Acoustic Ladyland with shared personnel but different leaders.

As Amok Amor the quartet released their eponymous début album earlier in 2015 on the Austrian Boomslang label featuring compositions by Eldh, Lillinger and Slavin. Tonight’s performance appeared to be predominately improvised with the first sequence lasting half an hour and introduced by the metronomic beat of Lillinger’s drums which provided the platform for some astonishing soloing from Slavin and particularly Evans.

I first encountered Evans’ playing when he was a member of bassist Moppa Elliott’s irreverent quartet Mostly Other People Do The Killing and was lucky enough to see the group play live at the Vortex in July 2011. Evans was little short of astonishing, a trumpet player possessed of an extraordinary power and technique and he was no less impressive this evening, almost to the point that he threatened to overwhelm his colleagues despite Lillinger’s robust drumming and Eldh’s highly physical bass playing. Amok Amor was a group that played with a scorching intensity almost throughout, citing a lack of light and shade would be a valid criticism, but one gets the sense that like MOPDTK that isn’t what this group is all about.

Instead it was best just to enjoy the spectacle of this turbo-charged quartet in full flow, the scintillating horn interplay, the driving rhythms, the excoriating solos, particularly from the brilliant Evans, a man capable of generating multiphonic effects without the resource to pedals as Oliver Weindling pointed out. Slavin did his best to keep pace and delivered some impressive solo statements of his own but was frequently overpowered by Evans. A glance at Slavin’s website suggests that he’s a busy musician with a number of other projects on the go and it would be interesting to hear him in a less intense and claustrophobic context. In between the lengthy solos there were staccato unison passages interspersed with free jazz squalls. It was a blisteringly intense but ultimately exhilarating half an hour for musicians and audience alike.

Eldh, wearing a baseball cap, made his announcements in a curious Mid Atlantic accent. He introduced the next piece as a “cover arranged by Peter Evans” but frankly I have no idea what it was. This time Evans, Slavin and Lillinger were all reading music but the group’s methodology seemed much the same, blazing, free-wheeling jazz that was sometimes reminiscent of Evans’ old group MOPDTK. He may have left Elliott’s mob to explore more improvisatory waters but Amok Amor didn’t seem to be too far removed from his old alma mater. Along the way we heard some dazzling set pieces including some brutal drumming by Lillinger, sporting a Morrissey like quiff, the physicality and theatrical nature of his solo feature not dissimilar to MOPDTK’s Kevin Shea. Then there was the stunning horn duet featuring the harsh metallic buzz of Slavin’s alto juxtaposed with the bright, brassy, audacious virtuosity of Evans. Slavin came into his own with a lengthy passage of solo alto before Evans entered into a dialogue with Lillinger that included elements of humour that again evoked memories of that night at the Vortex with MOPDTK four years ago with the incredible Evans also demonstrating an extraordinary circular breathing technique.

Overall the quartet played for around an hour but with such a blistering intensity that neither band nor audience could have taken any more. The group’s album is slightly more formal and features shorter pieces but is still suitably powerful and intense. It stands up well in the home listening environment and is strongly recommended.
 

 

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