Bristol’s week in jazz, March 25 – 31

Well that was fun, wasn’t it? But now the annual jazzfest is over there’s still plenty more coming at you on the jazz scene. This week sees a number of very fine piano-led instrumental jazz outfits vying with some world music flavours and one artist who’s definitely in a musical world of her own.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PeoS2J0Kx54

There can be few musicians as thoroughly absorbed in their instrument as Vula Viel’s Bex Burch (Cube, Thursday 28) who spent three years living and farming in the Ghanaian hinterlands in order to learn how to make and play the local Gyil xylophone. Now back in the UK she uses the traditional music as the basis of her own compositions for her trio with ace-of-bassists Ruth Goller and drummer Jim Hart (himself a mean vibraphone player elsewhere). The looping and evolving music has a powerfully hypnotic and uplifting effect, while Bex herself is an eye-catching performer. She will also be giving a musically illustrated talk about her experiences among the Dagaaba people and their rich musical culture at St George’s (Friday 29).

Another woman who both makes and plays her own instruments is the remarkable Sarah Kenchington (Bristol Unitarian Meeting Hall, Saturday 30). Her self-built orchestra comes entirely from her own imagination, however, as does her music which wrestles with the often unpredictable behaviour of her amazing instrumentation. It’s radical music that would be welcomed at Crofters Rights Domestic Sound Cupboard session (Wednesday 27) which this month includes improvisatory flautist Tina Hitchens among others. The venue also features further free music explorations on Monday when drum/sax duo Run Logan Run join experimentalists COIMS  and uncategorisable sibling duo Hysterical Injury.

Pianist John Law is a fine improvising player himself who brings a rare quality of clarity to the jazz process of melodic reconstruction. John Law’s Re-Creations (Fringe, Wednesday 27) is a quartet project that takes a fundamental rethink to well-known tunes by the likes of Eric Satie, Miles Davis and Adele. Well-matched by Sam Crockatt’s sax, John’s capacity to both respect and revise the music is predictably brilliant. Re-Creations excellent drummer Billy Weir pops up again at the Bebop Club (Friday 29) in the Tom Berge Quartet which also features (as well as the eponymous pianist, of course) a long-lost Club favourite in the shape of hard bopping tenor sax player Martin Genge.

The Bebop’s Andy Hague, meanwhile, can be caught in drum kit action as part of the Dave Jones Quartet (Future Inn Thursday 28) with Ben Waghorn on sax and Ashley John Long on bass. That’s a powerful combination to do justice to pianist Dave’s filmic compositions, while another film composer – Nico Casal  –  appears alone in the Colston Hall Foyer (Wednesday 27) to showcase Nymanesque minimal solo piano music from his forthcoming debut album. El Rincon hosts another act with cinematic ambient ambitions in the shape of Totnes loop duo Jazzient (Thursday 28).

If the name Ruby Rushton (Fiddlers, Friday 29) doesn’t ring a bell yet don’t worry: there’s no such person, but it is the name of an extremely hiply-happening quartet from London’s   ever-burgeoning scene. The band’s latest line-up includes the hotter-than-hot Yussef Dayes on drums and saxophonist Ed Cawthorn aka Tenderlonious and the sound consciously evokes the grooves of J-Dilla and Lonnie Liston Smith, with hints of Afrobeat in some numbers. The night before that gig another London-based performer Ineza (Canteen, Thursday 28) brings Rwandan roots to a jazz vocal style honed in the Conservatoires of the Netherlands.

More explicitly African is the fusion of electric groove jazz with desert-driven Gnawa of Electric Jalaba (Old Market Assembly, Friday 29). As with Vula Viel the music uses traditional format and structure (and instruments) from Africa to underpin looping hypnotic workouts. A similar spirit of disciplined improvisation is at the heart of Qawwali, the impassioned Sufi singing from Northern India and Bangladesh first introduced to the West by the late great Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan. Like the frenzied Gospel singers of the Southern USA Qawalli expresses spiritual intensity through ever escalating vocal freedom, and, as nephews of the great man himself, Rizwan-Muazzam (St George’s, Thursday 28) continue to promote this riveting virtuoso vocal tradition.