Andy Baker's Illusive Tree Sextet
Glasgow Art Club
Rob Adams
FOUR STARS
Bridge Music's Jazz Thursdays programme continues its focus on Scottish players this month, highlighting the diversity of styles available within the local scene generally and sometimes within the one band, as here. Billed as tenor saxophonist Andy Baker's group, Illusive Tree turned out to be more of a collective enterprise with the nominal leader one of four composers contributing to the repertoire and drummer Doug Hough taking on the emcee role.
This sharing of responsibilities produced a superb variety of moods, energy levels, grooves and arrangement ideas that along with interpretations of an interesting array of other composers' work - New York-based guitarist Brad Shepik, Devonian saxophonist John Surman and the late, ill-starred LA singer-songwriter Judee Sill - nixed any accusations of predictability.
Guitarist Ben MacDonald's lovely pitch bending harmonics on Sill's The Kiss introduced close to a pedal steel guitar effect, which would be in keeping with the songwriter's associations with California's country rock scene, in an arrangement that made an exemplary case for the song's suitability as a jazz ballad. Other pieces, such as alto saxophonist Adam Jack's Folk Tune and Damn, Just a Dream, explored tumbling folk dance metres and swirling dramatic soundscapes, the latter producing a big kick on the coda, and organist Pete Johnstone's Transcendence created a warm, bright and attractive basis for the soloists' explorations.
All six musicians improvise with a sure sense of structure, building solos to climaxes that chime with the music's natural ebb and flow and the frontline, with trumpeter Phil Cardwell joining Baker and Jack, interlocks with both imagination and urgency, nowhere more so than on Baker's terrifically emphatic closing number, Pogo Go.
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