Review: Acappella Poetry feat. Julie Tippetts/Blazing Flame/Steve Day/ James Stallard, Greenbank

Think of combining poetry and jazz and you think, probably, of Greenwich Village coffee bars, black-shrouded beatniks and finger-snapping approval. And, indeed, there is a definite echo of those days in Steve Day’s declamatory performances with the Blazing Flame Quintet that book-ended this well-attended Amnesty International benefit in the Greenbank’s upstairs room. In between those sets, however, the other two spoken word performances each had their own quite different vibe.

Blazing Flame Quintet’s David Mowatt, Mark Langford, Steve Day, Julian Dale and Peter Evans

The Blazing Flames kicked things off with propulsive energy and a kind of subverted jazz-rock sound, harsh brass tones from David Mowatt’s trumpet and Mark Langford’s tenor sax playing off Peter Evans’ stabbing violin. It created a flow that Steve Day rode with his Back Into The High Tide poem, incendiary verbal phrases thrown into (and across) the beat, repeated for emphasis and howled throughout to provide as much a musical contribution as angry lyric. For Russian Doll the band’s moderated approach used internal trios such as violin, drum and bass to provide a more spacious setting for the rueful poem.

The mischievous James Stallard

It was a bracing fanfare for the evening, after which things settled into slightly more familiar spoken word territory. James Stallard’s books of poetry are a very visual experience, the words laid out against coloured backings and striking bold illustrations but, even when read aloud without these props, they bring vivid – if sometimes confusing – images. His unhurried delivery was crisp and clear and the epic (and possibly unfinished) Going Gone/Going One unfolded bewilderingly in a relentless collage of handheld movie clip images, abstract ideas, well-honed connotative phrases (‘the sound of a flyleaf’) and even the occasional joke (‘Duchamp’s Urinal – and a sense of relief’). It was a roller coaster ride but shorter pieces had a haiku-like clarity as in Forging Identity with its elliptical exploration of that phrase’s ambiguity. Throughout his measured performance there was always a sense of things almost expressed, leaving the listener with a pleasing ownership of the details and the performer with the slightly arched eyebrow of mischief.

Julie Tippetts

As a singer and vocal musician Julie Tippetts has performed her words in a wide range of contexts, including settings within the compositions of husband Keith Tippett, but apparently this was her debut as spoken word performer per se. For the event she had chosen mainly lyrical pieces, many with a pastoral focus reflecting her years living in the Gloucestershire countryside. As she began reading pieces like Dismantling Waterfall and Waterwings  it was clear that she savoured the sound of her words, carefully shaping the syllables and feeling the rhythms within the lines, and the room fell pin-drop silent in response.

Each poem conveyed a clear moment or story, as in the lowering Before The Rain where a blackening cloud becomes the more optimistic harbinger of a rainbow to come, or the unsettling Shiver Cross The Soul, the pacing of which was particularly musical and hinted at the singing energy underlying her voice. By Rain Song a gospel vocal was breaking through and she prefaced Run Another Road with a diffident ‘I kinda have to sing this one’. What followed was a combination of measured poetry and musical integrity that showed how the two could coexist on equal terms, a rare thing and one which hopefully future performances could build on.

That said, the bitter-sweet childhood memory of Brighton Beach needed nothing more than a straight reading, as did the angry anti-war commemoration 15th February/Human Interest??, both direct in their different emotional contexts. Finally,  the atmospheric Granite to Wind closed the set with the hushed sound of wind in a wintry chimney conveying a deep sense of someone consciously integrated with the natural elements around them. That composure had been there throughout Julie’s performance, and her evident enjoyment of the experience suggested this would (should) probably not be a one-off venture into the spoken word world.

For their final set Blazing Flame performed trumpeter David Mowatt’s I Don’t Think She Will, an enigmatic piece set in an unspecified Middle Eastern town. The music took on a brooding atmosphere, heightened by Mark Langford’s high-register bass clarinet, and a tangible sense of foreboding grew as possibilities slipped away. What followed was a brash contrast, however, as a dementedly improvised kind of hard-bop groove closed the evening in a wild frenzy of spontaneous words and fiercely bowed violin and double bass.