A week after winning the Live Jazz section of the Scottish Jazz Awards, Martin Taylor outlined his concert credentials with a superbly relaxed display of solo guitar virtuosity.
Taylor is known across the world for making audiences wonder how he manages to magic such brilliant melody, rhythm and bass parts simultaneously.
This homecoming gig wasn't about wizardry, however, so much as making every song sing the blues. Whether gleaned from the pen of Hoagy Carmichael, a recording by the Carpenters, his own memories of the Caribbean or the suite he and his pal from schooldays, trumpeter Guy Barker will perform with the Britten Sinfonia at the London Proms next month, Taylor framed each melody with soulful clarity and freshness. And when he did turn on the one-man-trio style, it swung with a sense both of fun and of technique put entirely at the service of the music.
Like Taylor, Kyle Eastwood successfully adds flavours picked up on his travels, in this case a Moroccan scale, to the jazz tradition. Playing double bass and fretted and fretless bass guitars, the personable Eastwood led his band of excellent young London musicians with amiable authority through a set that showcased his ability to marshal jazz history from Bob Haggart and the classic Jazz Messengers approach into a sound for today. The result is easily accessible music that grooves and swings with plenty of light, shade and individual creativity and ranged here from the full quintet down to a lovely duo by Eastwood and pianist Andrew McCormack on the bassist's theme from his father, Clint's movie Letters From Iwo Jima.
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