Slovakia’s Serenaders turn up the heat in beautiful vintage setting
Crowded Spiegeltent anxiously awaited trio’s return to Scotland
Edinburgh Jazz Festival Bratislava Hot Serenaders Spiegeltent George Square, Edinburgh Alison Kerr ****
FOLLOWING their success at last year’s Edinburgh Jazz Festival, the Bratislava Hot Serenaders returned on Tuesday evening, to a packed Spiegeltent. This 19-piece ensemble is ideally suited to the beautiful vintage venue – both musically, with the Serenaders’ repertoire of 1920s and 1930s numbers, and visually, with their period style of dress, authentic period instruments and their famous period microphone which is tilted in the direction of whoever is soloing by their obliging, Jeeves-like, crooner.
Tuesday’s concert had a deja vu feeling about it, as many of the tunes had been played at last year’s show, and the same observations kept springing to mind as the Serenaders powered through a programme of 22 numbers in 90 minutes. Once more it was clear that this band has excellent hot jazz credentials, which revealed themselves immediately – on their exhilarating recreation of Duke Ellington’s Cotton Club Stomp.
Indeed, as was the case the last time the Bratislava Hot Serenaders came to town, the 1920s Ellington elements of the evening were the absolute stand-outs for jazz fans – after all, chances to hear such gems as Old Man Blues and Washington Wobble played so authentically and thrillingly are few. Wonderful takes on I Got Rhythm and Dinah were also highlights from the swinging section.
The bulk of the concert, however, was given over to the dance music of the day – novelty tunes, such as The Broken Record, and numbers involving the stylish vocal trio the Serenader Sisters, went down extremely well. All that was missing was a dance floor…
Pixel Festival Theatre Studio Rob Adams ****
ELLEN Andrea Wang is not the first Scandinavian woman to make currency from the line “I want to be alone”. It’s unlikely, however, that the supposed originator of the quote, Greta Garbo, who later denied that’s what she said, would have been playing a big, loping double bass figure at the time in a band that marries the spirit of free jazz with a pop sensibility and has a liking for inserting spot-on, three- and four-part vocal harmonies into a brassy blast of trumpet and tenor sax duetting.
This is Pixel, four Norwegians who are making some of the most refreshing, searching and accessible music on the world jazz scene. And they’re doing it on their own terms. If they want to sing about having the right to go to the generic place where Norwegians go to catch the sun, Syden, they will, and if the result sounds like Don Cherry meets the Andrews Sisters with lyrics by Quantum Jump, then that’s our good fortune.
Much of this concert was simply lovely. Wang and her colleagues, trumpeter Jonas Kilmork Vemoy, saxophonist Harald Lassen and drummer Jon Audun Baar, have a wonderful way of pacing their notes, sounds and rhythms, with Vemoy using judicious, subtly enhancing electronic effects.
They can be attractively broody, as is the Nordic way, but there’s also free-flowing energy at play, not least in Call Me, where Wang gets close to frantic in a twisting, intricate vocal line that’s underpinned by an assertive, muscular bassline, chorusing horns and Baar’s relaxed urgency. They’re back in Scotland in September.
Remembering Chet Baker City Art Centre, Edinburgh Alison Kerr **** IT MAY sound like the title of a
show, but Remembering Chet Baker is the name of the Scottish trio which, for the last four years, has been celebrating the music and musical style of the jazz icon who died prematurely 28 years ago.
As they hinted during Monday afternoon’s performance, there’s not much point in celebrating Baker’s life or him as a person: he seems to have hurt everyone in his life and, by all accounts, was really not a very nice human being.
That, combined with the inescapable fact that Baker was a master of melancholy, famous for such mope-fests as the misery laden ballads The Thrill is Gone and You Don’t Know What Love Is, could have made one suspect that this would not be the cheeriest way to spend a Monday afternoon.
However, nothing could have been further from the truth – thanks to the fact that singer/ presenter Iain Ewing punctuated proceedings with cheeky patter, and kept the mood light.
Both Ewing and trumpeter Colin Steele, who was on top form, have clearly been influenced by Baker’s lyrical, pared-back style and gentle, soft tone.
But, refreshingly, neither attempts to mimic him or recreate his solos.
It’s as if both musicians have been so steeped in Baker’s recordings that they can give the standards associated with him a lovely, Baker-esque, flavour, without resorting to impersonation.
Among the specific highlights on show were the classy, upbeat opener There Will Never Be Another You, which featured the first of a series of gorgeously understated solos by Steele; pianist Euan Stevenson’s elegant, Satie-like accompaniment on I Get Along Without You Very Well, as well as the two instrumentalists’ electrifying duet on All the Things You Are.
Emmet Cohen Trio Festival Theatre Studio Rob Adams ****
EMMET Cohen arrived on the jazz scene a generation or two too late to join Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers but the Miami-born pianist is just the kind of youthful talent that Blakey thrived on having alongside him.
Cohen also has the jazz message and is a fine evangelist for the music, having its history on the tip of his tongue as well as in his very accomplished fingers.
His concert on Tuesday was one of a number he’s involved in this festival and in a young professorial way he took his subject as the piano greats and imparted informed observations ahead of pieces illustrating the legacies of such masters as Nat King Cole, Bud Powell, Thelonious Monk, and the undersung Cedar Walton.
In Cohen’s eyes, jazz is street music and his playing, though virtuosic, is very clear, direct and communicative.
He swung Bud-hard on Powell’s Celia, played cultured blues on Walton’s Hindsight and took Monk’s Round Midnight into a compendium of dance metres, all the time working closely with and testing the fortunately highly tuned anticipatory skills of his superb drummer, Bryan Carter and Glasgow-born, now New York-based double bassist, Aidan O’Donnell.
This year’s festival cover star, Carter also sang The Nearness of You beautifully and with great soulful poise in a detour between Cohen showcasing his own compositional talent on Distant Hallow, and celebrating Fats Waller with a slightly over-extended medley that nonetheless underlined again this still only twentysomething musician’s grasp of where jazz has been and where it might be going.