Laura Macdonald Quartet, Glasgow Royal Concert Hall
Rob Adams FOUR STARS
It would be tempting to add to Laura Macdonald's comment about getting a night off from her children by noting that she was still playing mother as she debuted a new quartet, at least one of whom has been tutored by the alto saxophonist on the various courses that she oversees.
Macdonald's status as one of Scotland's now more experienced bandleaders, certainly in an age of so much youthful involvement in playing jazz, goes hand in hand with her ability to command both the stage and the auditorium, in this case Glasgow Royal Concert Hall's acoustically suitable studio space, and to present mostly original music of consistently high quality.
Several of the pieces here were drawn from the Commonwealth Games suite that Macdonald composed last year and heard independently and alongside such masterly standards as Benny Golson's Whisper Not and Hoagy Carmichael's Skylark, played as a scintillating duet with pianist Peter Johnstone, they sounded like medal-winners.
Unity, with its dancing rhythm and folk-ish melody hovering somewhere between Africa and Scotland, and the waltzing, beautifully melodic Siothchaint (Gaelic for peace) particularly captured the Games' multicultural nature and showed that even this early in the new group's life, it's a swinging, creative and mutually supportive organism.
Macdonald improvises with both marvellous tonal variation, often progressing from superlight to tough and terse and back again, and an ear for meaningful phrasing, and in the resourceful, momentum-building Johnstone, the solid yet mobile Brodie Jarvie on bass and the superbly alert, lightly assertive, tonally aware Doug Hough on drums she has young players who can bring her compositions to variously bewitching and muscular fruition.
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