Music / Jazz
The week in Jazz March 26 – April 1
The economics of life and music generally means that jazz players have a few different bands on the go. This helps pay the bills but can lead to a loss of style or identity, a kind of one-size-fits-all blandness. The outstanding exception to this is saxophonist Jake McMurchie, whose electro-soundscaping band Michelson Morley comes to the Bebop Club this week (Friday 30). Well known as part of Get The Blessing, Jake (the one in focus in the picture above) also contributes to Sefrial, Jade and the Greg Cordez Quintet as well as his own mainstream standards quartet. While Jake’s presence is always distinctive each band somehow brings out a different voice and vocabulary from the rawness of GTB to the fulsome Sonny Rollins influence of the standards quartet. Michelson Morley joins his electro-processed sax with the light-touch fluency of guitarist Dan Messore who also has a gig in his own right at Canteen (Wednesday 28).
Aye aye! It’s Iain Ballamy
The Fringe welcomes another excellently versatile sax player leading the Iain Ballamy Quartet (Wednesday 28). Last seen here in the glorious Electric Lady Big Band at the recent jazzfest Iain’s multifaceted career started with Loose Tubes in the 80s and has bounced off most of the UK’s livelier contemporary jazz combos as well as notable collaborations with Scandinavian musicians.
The Kodian Trio wait for Pointless
Other European influences feature in the week’s healthy servings of free and improvised music, notable the Anglo-Belgian Kodian Trio whose fearsome sax and guitar duels headline a triple bill at Salt Cafe (Saturday 31). Similar reed’n’string jousting can be expected at Cafe Kino (Friday 30) when free jazz duo BRACE recruit Dan Catsis’ guitar and Dominic Lash (bass) with support from electronic explorer Don Mandarin. Two regular ‘nights of the unexpected’ return this week: Crofter’s Rights Sound Cupboard on Wednesday 28) and the Old England’s Liquid Library (Sunday 1) both important hotbeds of musical abandonment. The Old England also hosts the completely unbounded Come Alt Jam on Tuesday (27).
is needed now More than ever
Greg Sallet
Even more thoroughly European jazz comes to Future Inn (Thursday 29) courtesy of French saxophonist Greg Sallet and his contemporary jazz quartet Sur Ecoute. The band play original music, quite tightly composed yet fluent in tone – something that could also be said of the cinematic chamber jazz written by pianist Andrew Christie whose Quartet play in the Colston Hall foyer the next day (Friday 30). That night also sees the launch of the Bristol Swingdance Festival – a lipstick-laden weekend featuring a programme of classes and live music dances.
Rattle – off-beat and on-time
You can count on the Exchange to throw the odd curve ball into the musical melee and this week there’s two, with Friday (30) seeing Polar Bear’s electronic disruptor Leafcutter John performing solo while Easter Sunday (1) welcomes the highly (in)appropriate Revolutionary Army of the Infant Jesus. The latter is a mysterious experimental acoustic music collective from the 80s who disappeared in the 90s and resurrected last year to release their first album for 25 years. Just as off-beat (though always very much in time) Rattle (St Michael’s Parish Hall, Friday 30) is the pairing of two kit drummers who set up facing each other and provide the vocals over their percussion soundtrack.
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