Music / Jazz
Review: George Cooper’s Jazz Defenders
There’s an element of mystery about the Jazz Defenders, pianist George Cooper’s quintet celebration of the classic Blue Note sound. This was to be only their third gig, the second having been at this year’s Bristol Jazz Festival, and yet they’ve had an album in the pipeline since last August, apparently, and most of their tunes were specially composed by George in collaboration with the others. It all added up to the paradox of a brand new band with a history behind it. And the band itself was hardly bringing brand new faces to The Fringe, being five of the busiest and best on the Bristol jazz scene. But the Blue Note era is probably one of the most enduringly popular of modern jazz idioms and the ‘jazziest’ in sound and the full house at the Fringe was definitely up for a nostalgic night’s music.
They weren’t disappointed, either: the playing was pretty faultless throughout the Jazz Defenders’ set and if some of the new tunes need a bit more playing in to settle them the well-chosen smattering of covers more than compensated. Thus the Miles Davis number Tune Up elicited a suitably abrasive trumpet solo from Nick Malcolm, balanced by some bopping lyricism on tenor sax from Nicholas Dover as well as an excellent bass solo, full of invention and beautifully phrased, from Will Harris. Horace Silver’s Jody Grind proved an effective warmer-up for the second half, too, with George channelling forceful bebop piano in the Bud Powell mould.
Of the original material the memorable tunes included a fine Latin workout in Malcolm and Cooper’s Costa Del Lol, interestingly structured and given a rich Cuban flavour thanks to Matt Brown’s restlessly complicated drumming, hands and feet all following their own separate paths. The drummer also contributed to the composition Brown Down, possibly the most distinctive of the band’s original tunes, with a suitably polyrhythmic drum part woven to a terse bass line and smooth unison horns providing the chorus. There was a definite sense of collective purpose about this one as it closed the set to warm applause.
There’s always a tension in a project that aims to make new music from the position of looking back – something George Cooper acknowledged in one of his rather rambling introductions – and the risk of writing mere pastiche is always high. This classy fivesome of intelligent musicians seem well able to deal with that, though, and the promise of their new material suggests that this is a band to keep an eye (or ear) on.
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