Memory lane provides new inspiration for Costello
Music
Elvis Costello Glasgow Royal Concert Hall
Keith Bruce
WITH the upcoming publication of his autobiography this autumn as the next milestone in his diverse artistic practice, the Elvis Costello approach to performance is a constantly evolving fascination.
Radically different from his last solo appearance in Scotland, at the Usher Hall in October of last year, this show was also vastly different from those that have preceded it on the current tour.
Although the structure was lightly worn, this “Detour” show was nothing less than a personal overview of the past century of popular music, during the last third of which Costello can claim a significant place.
An archive of his own old videos preceded the two-and-aquarter hour set, allowing the opening quip: “You can all go home now, you’ve heard all the hits.”
He then did what he has done nowhere else this time out and, perversely, played all his early hits, opening with Red Shoes, finishing with Peace, Love And Understanding, and including Good Year For The Roses and Oliver’s Army in a duet section with his brother Ronan MacManus, who had also provided the support set.
Family provided the spine of the show. Footage of his father, Ross MacManus, singing If I Had A Hammer with the Joe Loss Band, was followed by Costello appearing where the screen had been, playing Alison and Pump It Up on his familiar Fender Jazzmaster.
Memories of his grandparents were the link to repertoire like Nat King Cole’s Walking My Baby Back Home, dedicated to his own twin eight-year-old sons, and featuring the “lost art” of whistling.
It is not the only lost art of which Costello is a careful curator, and the continuing expansion of his own skill-set included some beautiful piano playing for songs that included Joni Mitchell’s A Case Of You and a glorious slow gospel version of Sam & Dave’s I Can’t Stand Up For Falling Down.
Music
SCO Ensemble
Cottier’s Theatre, Glasgow
Michael Tumelty
ON Thursday night a superb ensemble from the Scottish Chamber Orchestra gave an exemplary performance in the Cottier Chamber Project. Despite the quality and reputation of the players, it didn’t attract much of a crowd. Why? It’s busy just now, of course; but can I suggest one reason is that the concert dared to venture into little-known territory?
The fact is that, though composers Darius Milhaud and Bohuslav Martinu between them wrote over 800 pieces, nobody really wants to know them. But folk cannot appreciate the potential appeal of their music if they won’t go and hear it when the rare opportunity occurs. I fear that people prefer the known and the familiar. The acid truth is that in much of musical society there is little curiosity in music beyond near horizons, or in music that hasn’t been overdone with endless repetition.
Yet Milhaud’s sparkling, buoyant, airy and witty Trio for Violin, Clarinet and Piano, winningly played by Ruth Rogers, Maximiliano Martin and Peter Evans, would have brought a smile to the face of an Easter Island statue. Alas, the statues stayed at home too.
And if you love your Bach for its motoric momentum, you’d have delighted in Martinu’s Madrigal Sonata, featuring flautist Alison Mitchell in a terrific piece that spiced up its Bachian drive with splashes of syncopation, creating an irresistible momentum.
The coup de grace from the group, however, joined by cellist Martin Storey, was a mindblowing performance of Schoenberg’s Chamber Symphony, a late-Romantic masterpiece with a modern glint, straddling two musical eras, embracing a seismic upheaval in musical language, and stunningly played in Webern’s translucent quintet arrangement.
Music
Gemma Hays
Oran Mor, Glasgow
Lisa-Marie Ferla
IT had been a while, according to Gemma Hayes, since she had played in Glasgow; so she was pleased that the city still remembered her.
Which was funny, since I had hardly thought about the Irish singer-songwriter since the release of her gorgeous, Mercurynominated debut Night on My Side in 2002. Yet Hayes has hardly stopped working since: latest album Bones + Longing is her fifth release, and its polished, summery folk-pop songs made up the bulk of her West End Festival setlist.
The aptly titled Joy is your hazy, lovestruck summer road trip soundtrack; while Making My Way began as reverent as the audience – although kicked up a gear when the drums came in on the first chorus. Like much of Hayes’ work these songs are simple but affecting, ending with a three-part harmony courtesy of her touring band.
Hayes claims not to be able to write happy songs – she introduced the deceptively upbeat Happy Sad with a story about a journalist who had a go at her for “always being so miserable” – so her warm, funny stage persona was a bit of a surprise.
She even hinted that she was about to cover My Lovely Horse from Father Ted – “the best thing that Ireland has ever done” – before playing new single Palomino instead.
But the sad songs, when they came, were delicate, beautiful things: on Shock to My System, which Hayes described as “a really nice miserable song”, her voice became a husky, gorgeous instrument of heartbreak while soft mandolin and a jarring minor chord gave the song its atmosphere. And when she played Back of My Hand from her debut, it turned out I still knew all the words.
Music
Susan Tomes/Aurea Quartet
Cottier’s Theatre, Glasgow
Michael Tumelty
THERE are some moments in concert performance where everything, magically, just clicks. It’s the time, it’s the place, it’s the space, it’s the people playing, it’s the music to hand; it’s the crowd, it’s the atmosphere, it’s the occasion and it’s the vibe, as we used to say. It’s the moment, as all these strands feed into, reinforce and enhance one another, resulting in a cumulative effect that transcends definition, when the word synchronicity looms again in my mind.
It comes unbidden, but, to me, it seems the exact word with which to explain the grace and power of the enthralling performances that clearly captivated the large audience which turned out on Friday night for the unexpected but riveting combination of pieces by Mozart and Shostakovich in the Cottier Chamber Project.
I’ve gone on and on here for decades about the fact that it is not necessary in performance to shout in order to be heard. And that was exemplified in the absolutely beautiful performance by Susan Tomes of Mozart’s A major Piano Concerto, K414, in its chamber version, for just piano and string quartet. Tomes’ exquisite scaling of the piece in this form was perfectly matched to the close-up environment, the intimacy of the accompaniment by the Aurea Quartet and the spellbound atmosphere in the venue.
And that actually flowed, almost naturally, with no sense of stylistic dichotomy, into a magnetic performance by the group of Shostakovich’s Eighth String Quartet which was so quietly but fiercely concentrated that the abrupt eruption into the second movement seemed volcanic: a rather special musical experience.
Music
Square One
Glasgow Art Club
Rob Adams
GUITARIST Joe Williamson may have assumed the role of spokesman for this accomplished youthful quartet but as he intimated during this latest Jazz Thursdays presentation, it’s very much a collective effort.
His fellow musicians, especially double bassist David Bowden and drummer Stephen Henderson, match Williamson in contributing to a varied and attractive repertoire that’s certainly not short of ambition and in terms of the group sound, Williamson’s frontline partner, pianist Peter Johnstone, plays a crucial role in delivering both lovely and quite devilish lines in unison with the guitarist.
Johnstone, a former Young Scottish Jazz Musician of the Year, is a major asset here. His soloing has moved on to an extra level of refinement lately, showing a sure sense of pace and construction, and his left hand strength, in tandem with Bowden’s basslines, gives the group a powerful bottomend resonance.
The Debussy-Satie-esque piano figure that introduced Henderson’s Night Sky, a track from the group’s just-released debut EP, was just one example of their ability to use stealth effectively, even if the freer section that followed didn’t always hold the attention, and Williamson’s Morning Star, with its splendidly intriguing bassline, and Too Close to Call, featuring a superbly realised guitar solo, underlined an ensemble awareness in smart execution.
If some of the material tended towards the episodic there was more than enough evidence of Square One being an exciting prospect. Put them on a tour and the benefits of nightly gigging, I suspect, would be considerable and the already coherent and sparky exchanges between Johnstone and Williamson that lit up Henderson’s groovy, closing Puppet Love might well set off smoke alarms.
Music
Laura Macdonald Quartet
Glasgow Royal Concert Hall
Rob Adams
IT would be tempting to add to Laura Macdonald’s comment about getting a night off from her children by noting that she was still playing mother as she debuted a new quartet, at least one of whom has been tutored by the alto saxophonist on the various courses that she oversees.
Macdonald’s status as one of Scotland’s now more experienced bandleaders, certainly in an age of so much youthful involvement in playing jazz, goes hand in hand with her ability to command both the stage and the auditorium, in this case Glasgow Royal Concert Hall’s acoustically suitable studio space, and to present mostly original music of consistently high quality.
Several of the pieces here were drawn from the Commonwealth Games suite that Macdonald composed last year and heard independently and alongside such masterly standards as Benny Golson’s Whisper Not and Hoagy Carmichael’s Skylark, played as a scintillating duet with pianist Peter Johnstone, they sounded like medal-winners.
Unity, with its dancing rhythm and folkish melody hovering somewhere between Africa and Scotland, and the waltzing, beautifully melodic Siothchaint (Gaelic for peace) particularly captured the Games’ multicultural nature and showed that even this early in the new group’s life, it’s a swinging, creative and mutually supportive organism.
Macdonald improvises with both marvellous tonal variation, often progressing from superlight to tough and terse and back again, and an ear for meaningful phrasing, and in the resourceful, momentum-building Johnstone, the solid yet mobile Brodie Jarvie on bass and the superbly alert, lightly assertive, tonally aware Doug Hough on drums she has young players who can bring her compositions to variously bewitching and muscular fruition.