Dundee Jazz Festival

Various venues, November 14 to 18

Dundee Jazz Festival returns with its long-held commitment to presenting, if not quite something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue then a programme that draws on the jazz tradition, with its elements of swing and blues, as well as introducing less familiar musicians who are taking the music forward.

American blues artists Otis Taylor and Alvin Youngblood Hart open the mainstage programme at Gardyne Theatre, followed by a double bill of Argentinian gypsy-jazz-tango guitarist Gonzalo Bergara and Scotland’s own Rose Room.

The theatre also hosts trumpeter Colin Steele and saxophonist Richard Ingham’s respective bands, paying tribute to jazz icon Miles Davis and the Scottish Swing Orchestra honouring Benny Goodman and Glenn Miller.

Meanwhile, city-centre venues including Clarks on Lindsay Street, the Reading Rooms, the Underworld Café, and the Wine Press host Afrobeat troupe Nubiyan Twist, Kansas Cityborn, Paris-based singer Krystle Warren, and rising Scottish stars including saxophonist Matt Carmichael, singers Georgia Cecilé and Nicole Smit and current Young Scottish Jazz Musician of the Year, guitarist Joe Williamson.

In a programme also including the popular Jazz In The Ferry on Sunday afternoon and a special screening of the post-Hurricane Katrina documentary One Note at a Time in DCA, one band particularly stands out: Glasgow-based drummer Graham Costello’s STRATA, who appear at Clarks on Lindsay Street on Wednesday.

Graham is part of a movement, mostly products of the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland’s jazz course, who have made Glasgow a jazz hotbed lately.

His band, along with fellow festival guest and RCS associate Matt Carmichael, has just been announced among leading jazz magazine Jazzwise’s ones to watch in 2019, although Graham says he was the most unlikely candidate for involvement in jazz education when he applied to the RCS six years ago.

“I was always a fan of jazz,” he says. “I didn’t understand it, but I liked its improvisational nature, although when I played my RCS audition, I didn’t have a clue what was happening.

“I’d never played with a piano, or a saxophone or double bass, and it was quite an experience.”

STRATA grew out of course work at the RCS and the EP that followed surprised Graham by getting nominated as Best Album in the Scottish Jazz Awards.

The band’s music connects jazz with minimalism and rock and its monthly residency at Bar Bloc in Glasgow draws audiences eager to hear a performance that’s continuous, changing mood from meditative to fiery over an hour or so.