What do you get if you mix yellow with red?
In jazz terms, A Kind of Blue wouldn't be a bad guess, although it was a tune from a different source but the same modal jazz era, John Coltrane's Impressions, that the seven musicians choose for the genial jam that ended this leg of the launch tour for the Scottish Jazz Federation's J-Word initiative, with the two drummers forming a percussive tag team.
Whether they reached out to the new audience that the J-Word is hoping to attract may be a moot point; they certainly involved this one, with both bands playing in a style that engendered a jazz club-like intimacy and drummer Tom Bancroft's Scottish-English-Norwegian Trio Red opening with a further refinement of the witty, compact and searching but easily followed music-making that made their debut album, First Hello to Last Goodbye, such a welcome addition to the piano trio canon last year.
The Yellowjackets have a much longer history but their current incarnation has fresh blood in the shape of the excellent saxophonist Bob Franceschini and the deeply impressive Felix Pastorius, wearing his father's legacy lightly on six-string bass guitar.
Founder members Russell Ferrante on piano and electric keyboard and the commanding, effervescent Will Kennedy on drums lend direction on music that can be complex, as witness the trickily metred An Informed Decision, but perhaps more so than in the past looked to the essential jazz ingredients of a sense of swing and soloing with the feeling of the blues to create a truly satisfying set that climaxed with the mighty, grooving and exhilaratingly urgent Why Is It?
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