Songs of protest find their groove at jazz and blues fest
Edinburgh Jazz & Blues Festival – reflecting that multifaceted entity that is jazz itself – has come a long way over the four decades since it was founded in 1979 by Mike Hart, with 14 mainly trad bands playing in pubs and other venues throughout the capital. The 40th iteration, which kicks off this coming Friday, both looks back to the art form’s formative crucibles of New Orleans, Hot Club and American songbook, and to today’s bewilderingly Protean contemporary manifestations, from Nordic jazz to the latest grooves and eclectic fusion from New York, not to mention Scotland’s own vigorously creative jazz scene.
And it is from New York that a timely reminder comes of the traditional role of jazz as a defiant shout in the face of racism and oppression. Among the bill-toppers is the Vijay Iyer Sextet, a powerful ensemble led by pianist Iyer whose 2017 album on ECM, Far From Over, has collected a multitude of plaudits (including Iyer’s fourth Downbeat Critics’ Poll award). In his sleeve notes for Far From
Over, Iyer cites the transformative potential of music and comments: “As the arc of history lurches forward and backward, the fact remains: local and global struggles for equality, justice and basic human rights are far from over. We hope that our music both reflects this truth and offers a useful residuum that might outlast it.”
When I ask him whether his music is a reaction against the disturbing times in which we live, he agrees, speaking from New York, then adds: “But that’s not new. The history of this music called jazz is a history of defiance and resistance – an insistence on being heard and seen as human beings.”
A clarion call, then, amid Trump’s America and a wider, troubled world, but Far From Over goes far beyond the arts-activism its title implies. A muscular sextet (which plays Edinburgh’s Assembly Hall on 17 July) including Graham Haynes on cornet and electronics, Steve Lehman on alto sax and tenor saxophonist Mark Shim, it can veer between pianistic delicacy and explosive outbursts, such as the all-out bebop attack of Down to the Wire, the drum excursions and spooky electronics of
End of the Tunnel or the distant horns and tidal echoes of Wake.
The title track commences with an ominous, almost mechanistic advance which I found faintly reminiscent of Mars from Holst’s Planets, a comparison that makes Iyer laugh: “I used to play that when I was a kid playing violin in orchestras.”
American-born of Tamil Indian heritage, Iyer has long left any single genre behind him. A professor of Music at Harvard since 2014, as well as his jazz trio and sextet work, he composes string quartets and orchestral music, performed by the likes of the Boston Rider quartet and the Silk Road Ensemble. Less easily pigeonholed ventures have included the Veterans’ Dreams project with poet Mike Ladd, based on accounts from black American veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts.
Writing a “classical” piece, he says, involves much of the same decision-making processes that he has to make in real time playing jazz: “About how to shape an experience in time and how to communicate a series of sensations. That’s the sort of understanding I’ve been cultivating mainly through live performance.”
The sextet formed in 2011 and has been developing organically since then: “They’re all very strong players, striking soloists but also very interactive. There’s a sort of hard bop sound that people expect, but there’s so much more you can do, especially when you incorporate electronics – although we don’t use that too much; it’s still all very physical.
“In terms of dealing with texture and space, not everyone needs to be playing all the time.” And he doesn’t see it as that different from his more long-form compositions: “It’s thinking about orchestration, essentially.” The 40th Edinburgh Jazz & Blues Festival runs from 13 -22 July. See www.edinburghjazzfestival.com
“The history of this music called jazz is a history of defiance and resistance”