Edinburgh Jazz Festival

Binker & Moses

George Square Piccolo

Rob Adams

four stars

IN SOME ways London-based saxophone-drums duo Binker Golding and Moses Boyd would slot easily into Edinburgh Jazz Festival 2017’s comprehensive tributes to characters and events in jazz history as it marks the music’s centenary. There is, after all, a tradition stretching back fifty years and more of musicians working in this format, some of the examples being fairly uncompromising.

There are uncompromising elements here, with Golding rocking back and forth as he fires raw exhortations into Boyd’s percussive storm, but they’ve found their own niche and character. Even the use of their first names seems to set them apart, giving them a benign, matey collective personality.

Unconventional as a sax and drums team might once have been, theirs can be quite a conventional approach to music making, with Boyd’s very musical drumming often providing the scope of a full, finely tempered rhythm section as accompaniment to his partner’s more melodic improvisations. When they expressed their mystification at press references to their grime and dance music influences by playing All of Me, they followed jazz convention in trading choruses, and rather beautiful ones at that.

Sure, they can get intense. They can also get incredibly quiet as Boyd forsakes sticks and brushes for fingertips, and presumably through a well-developed set of cues, they can stop on a sixpence. Their play on John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme mantra was a respectful delight and while it might not have been an intentional homage, one of their pieces sounded like the sort of chant with which Sun Ra’s Arkestra used to set off in dancing procession. The audience might well have been up for that by then.