Trip back to 1970s with Swedish prog rock master
Edinburgh Jazz Festival Magnus Ostrom Band Queen’s Hall Rob Adams ***
IT IS now eight years since Swedish pianist Esbjorn Svensson, leader of the trio known as e.s.t., died in a diving accident, aged just 44.
The final project discussed by Svensson and his group, a collaboration with a symphony orchestra, will be released later this year. Meanwhile, the surviving members are leading their own bands and forging their own styles.
While e.s.t. took jazz from the Thelonious Monk era as an inspiration to point towards the future, drummer Magnus Ostrom is creating music that’s evocative of prog rock’s 1970s heyday with the added penchant for repetition for effect that’s drawing listeners towards bands currently on the fringes of jazz such as GoGo Penguin and Mammal Hands.
Ostrom seems quite open about finding comfort in the music and places he visited in his youth, recalling with fondness The Green Man and the French Horn, a pub he frequented while living in London in his early 20s that is now celebrated in the ballad of the same name that features on his latest album, Parachute.
His prog-rock muse has been apparent for some time.
Longing, a track from an earlier album that featured in the second set, was reminiscent of prog heroes Camel and achieved more of a natural flow than the newer pieces where the interlocking of guitar, bass, keyboards and Ostrom’s determined drumming often produced an effect that was more easily admired than loved.
He’s an engaging host, making entertainingly droll introductions, and his drum solo was pure theatre, leading to a finale and encore that trod a fine line but ultimately succeeded in being powerfully hypnotic.
Theatre RolePlay Pitlochry Festival Theatre Neil Cooper ****
A STORM may be brewing over London’s Docklands at the opening of the third play in Alan Ayckbourn’s Damsels in Distress trilogy, but that’s just a hint of the explosion to come when Justin and Julie-Ann attempt to host a dinner party for their respective parents to announce their engagement. As they prepare, hints of trouble ahead are already apparent, both through Yorkshire lass Julie Ann’s highly-strung brittleness and the phone calls from Justin’s already pickled mother. But it is only when ex-gangster’s moll Paige Petite literally drops onto the balcony from the penthouse upstairs that things really start cooking.
What follows once the parents arrive is a devastating portrait of turn of the century Britain riven by a north-south and class-based divide, where the only thing that’s on an equal footing is a destructively cloying patriarchal conformity. Director Richard Baron navigates a cast led by Christopher Price as Justin and Kirsty Mackay as Julie-Ann along a magnificent tightrope of tragicomic grotesquerie, so by the end you’re practically willing Justin to go on the run with Gemma McElhinney’s already reinvented Paige, saviour complex and all.
While McElhinney taps into Paige’s contrary complexities with a fearless mix of vulnerability and in-yer-face emancipation, it is Amanda Osborne as Ab Fab-style casualty Arabella who blurts out the play’s funniest line. In a world where even Paige’s lunk-headed minder Micky finds a sense of freedom while the real bad guys get what’s coming to them, the sozzled politesse with which it is delivered sums up the enormity of the social gulf she and everyone else totters so unsteadily between with comic class in abundance.