Perth Festival
Courtney Pine & Zoe Tahman, Perth Concert Hall
Keith Bruce
four stars
Chamber music, already a staple year round at Perth Concert Hall, need not always be classical in form and this superb Perth Festival gig by festival favourite Courtney Pine proved the point. The duo on his new Song (The Ballad Book) album pairs his bass clarinet with the piano of Zoe Rahman, who will be appearing in her own right at Glasgow Jazz Festival at the end of next month. It is a wonderfully balanced partnership, both musically and in terms of onstage dynamic, with his natural ebullience somehow held in check by her inherent grace.
What Pine gets up to with his instrument is still extravagant. He introduces Rahman as playing "the 88s", but his own multi-octave range cannot be far behind, reaching pitches un-notated in any Tine-A-Day fingering chart. For much of the evening he operates in alto sax range and above, with only the occasional punctuation from the register for which the instrument was orchestrally designed. If there is a precursor to his style it is more Roland Kirk than Eric Dolphy, but this is still a much more intense Pine than the one who last visited Perth Theatre.
Rahman has her share of solo space, notably in Windmills of Your Mind, in what was conceived as a set of romantic standards and became more political as the project progressed. Donny Hathaway's Someday We'll All Be Free is a moving climax, but there is still a playfulness to everything Pine plays, with snatches of Bach and Christmas carol in the mix. An obligato solo from his magpie mind quotes successively from Gilbert and Sullivan, dance band hits and Acker's Stranger on the Shore, in a performance that defines "virtuosic".
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