Even he can’t put a number on his appearances here but he always guarantees two things: a capacity crowd, or as near as makes no difference, and a spectacle. This one began with Pine’s bass clarinet being heard before he took a stroll through the audience, shaking hands and playing peek-a-boo with his fans upstairs, and grew into the kind of intense, exhaustive blowing display that has become Pine’s trademark.
His theme, as with his latest album, was the inspiration of clarinettist and soprano saxophone pioneer Sidney Bechet and while not actually playing Bechet’s music, Pine visited scenes familiar to Bechet, including
New Orleans, in a souped-up
Crescent City funeral march, and Parisian boulevards before igniting his pyrotechnics. His band are
capable of matching him in this department, with pianist Robert Mitchell unleashing a thunderous and genuinely exciting rhythmical attack and violinist Omar Puente offering Paganini-like variations without apparently breaking sweat.
Not breaking sweat wasn’t an option in the bath-house atmosphere of the Lot, where The Thing confirmed that not all Nordic jazz is cool. Saxophonist Mats Gustafsson, double bassist Ingebrigt H Flaten and drummer Paal Nissen-Love form a combustible partnership whose negotiations between free improvisation and profound, rugged themes can be exhilaratingly cathartic. Their energy levels are positively Olympian, with Nissen-Love achieving a highly musical form of percussive perpetual motion, and yet their music isn’t without tenderness, as confirmed
by the psalm that resulted when
Gustafsson switched from baritone to tenor and the eerie stillness and near string quartet temperament of their encore, The Alien.
Edinburgh Jazz Festival
Queen’s Hall/The Thing,
The Lot
***
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