Tickets sales up 40% before the first concert and attractive poster art disappearing from accessible hoardings as fast as the promoter can put them up – this is a vintage year for the Glasgow Jazz Festival.
Before the Lord Provost's reception to launch the event in the City Halls' Candleriggs Bar, I was chatting to a weel-kent Edinburgh jazz fan who was good-naturedly bemused by the programme, which he saw as quite different from the mainstream music he knows and expects to hear at Edinburgh's event.
Glasgow's jazz audience is often noticeably youthful, funky and keen on experimental eccentricity, which is a good advert for the city as well as the festival. On the opening night, a packed Old Fruitmarket heard venerable mystic Pharoah Sanders, and King Tut's was transformed into a Ronnie's-of-the-North for urban altoist Soweto Kinch.
Kinch is not only a deliciously fluid saxophonist, he is also a very lyrical wordsmith, who regularly puts down his horn to rhyme on the ills of the world. I last saw him at The Sage in Gateshead a couple of years back and his rapier barbs about the Government and the evils of the money markets have lost none of their currency. His party piece is to "freestyle" on suggestions from the audience in improvised live acrostic verse. I don't recall what the source word was at The Sage, but I do remember that the shouted offerings were appropriately political and included "Osborne" for the letter "O".
At Tut's he asked for suggestions beginning with the letters of the word "Glasgow" and received an education in the local vernacular. Obvious suggestions such as "green" and "alcohol" were by-passed in favour of a gallus lassie who turned out to be a Weegie after being described as both arty and schemie. The speed with which he learned and correctly deployed this unfamiliar vocabulary was a joy, and the laugh for his inspired inclusion of wild card "octopus" well deserved.
It was jazz, but not as we normally know it, and summed up exactly what it is hard to put into words about the distinctiveness of the Glasgow Jazz Festival.
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