Edinburgh Jazz Festival
Jan Garbarek Group
Festival Theatre
Rob Adams
four stars
IT MUST have been something to be Jan Garbarek these past forty years and more: getting up in the morning, knowing that when you blow into your instrument you’re creating one of the most beguiling, instantly recognisable sounds in jazz. The Norwegian saxophonist hasn’t always appeared to revel in such fortune. He can seem quite severe, which he’s not, and there’s an austere beauty in some of his music.
As with his previous visit to Scotland in 2010 only more so, however, there was lightness and buoyancy and fun at work here. Bass guitarist Yaron Herman and percussionist Trilok Gurtu laid a springy undercurrent, as well as much musical colour beneath Garbarek’s marvellously burnished tone on tenor and soprano and even the often inscrutable Rainer Bruninghaus got involved in keyboard frolics in his solo feature and duet with Herman.
If I had a reservation about a concert that produced entrancing, dancing folk themes, magnificent tenor ballad playing and a further engrossing example of Gurtu’s inimitable water music – he even made the bucket containing the water a musical instrument – it was that the lengthy solo features sometimes interrupted the flow of a fabulous, and fabulous sounding, ensemble.
That said, the playfulness that Garbarek showed, especially in his duet on selje flute with Gurtu’s frankly amazing tabla fingering combined with an, as always, beautifully tuned, singing drum kit, and his digging in on Herman and Gurtu’s funk groove were worth turning up for in themselves. So too the encore, complete with handclaps and audience participation, of Steve Winwood’s Had to Cry Today from the Blind Faith album. Nobody, surely, saw that gem coming.
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