For a city that hasn’t had regular visits from musicians on the international jazz circuit in some years, Dundee Jazz Festival provides what amounts to a crash course in current availabilities.
While the more traditional and dance-oriented ends of jazz’s A to Z are catered for in larger venues, the festival’s club headquarters, in the Drouthy Neebors pub’s basement bar, offers an intimate appraisal of less familiar, contemporary names.
Festival organisers Assembly Direct have long-established and strong links with the Scandinavian scene. These ensured that, this year, two of that most fertile of jazz territories’ rising stars were able to make their Scottish debuts to small but appreciative audiences.
Swedish singer Josefine Lindstrand’s style owes more to quirky pop than it does to the jazz canon, although there were moments when she and her trio might have marched offstage to a New Orleans fanfare or taken a detour into free improvisation. Stylistic considerations apart, though, she’s a technically fine singer, showing impressive, quiet and unshowy agility in unison with her pianist, Jonas Ostholm, on one especially memorable voice and
keyboard coda and articulating her sometimes dark, wintry English lyrics with clear diction.
If some of her songs erred on the sugary side, she was generally well served by imaginative arrangements involving choppy percussion, tinkly glockenspiel contrasting with beefy electronic keyboard bass patterns, breathy trumpet, bright, ringing autoharp and her own tightly rhythmical ukulele playing.
Norwegian saxophonist Froy Aagre arrived with the endorsement of her recent signing to Act Records, the label behind the phenomenally successful Esbjorn Svensson Trio, and while her music shares some of EST’s characteristics, not least in its attention to detail, it sounds very much in its early stages of development.
Part of the problem with this gig for me stemmed from Aagre’s concentration on soprano saxophone at the expense of her apparently absent tenor. She favours a limpid tone and a rather polite improvising style and there was little variation of expression in her playing. On this evidence, she’s stronger on composition and arrangement, creating impressionistic pieces inspired by rain, train journeys, flights over Siberia and the factories around Birmingham, where she studied at the local conservatory, and working closely with her pianist, bassist and drummer at making attractive, if still ultimately slight, Nordic jazz.
Flying the flag for Scotland and creating quite a stir in the process were the incorrigible Brass Jaw, who in their initial incarnation were a saxophone quartet striving to carve their own niche in a crowded market. Since tenor saxophonist Konrad Wiszniewski replaced Brian Molley and alto saxophonist Martin Kershaw made way for trumpeter Ryan Quigley, however, they’ve become a unique entity.
The sound of their four horns working together is massive – and yet for all their orchestral power, kicked along at times by Quigley’s astonishingly loud finger snapping, they’re as mobile and pliable as … well, a very mobile, very pliable thing.
Brilliantly interlocking arrangements of songs ranging from the smart pop of The Police’s Walking on the Moon to Neal Hefti’s lush, romantic Falling in Love All Over Again allow for creative break-offs into supportive duets; trumpet, alto or tenor soloing against the lean aggression of Allon Beauvoisin’s baritone; or one horn soaring over a harmonic trio.
The soloing is almost routinely exhilarating, too, with Paul Towndrow on alto and Wiszniewski on tenor producing successions of cogently argued, urgent ideas while highlighting a richness of tone and tradition, and Quigley both spitting metaphorical flames and caressing flugelhorn-like tender phrases.
What’s perhaps most impressive, though, is the high standard of their own compositions. Towndrow and Wiszniewski contributed two of the evening’s classiest works – and this in a repertoire that embraces jazz composition giants Duke Ellington and Horace Silver as well as Hefti – in the gorgeously soulful Charles Franklin Blues and beautifully voiced Feel. Beauvoisin’s more left-field impressionism produced Holding Pattern, complete with feelings of mid-air turbulence and much off-mic leg-pulling during his explanatory introduction.
Mind you, in a band where you’re likely to have your feet gaffer-taped to the stage floor during your most lung-bursting solo, or see your colleagues continue playing while chumming up with the front row, irreverence goes hand in hand with meticulous performance standards.
