Chemistry fizzing to provide sum greater than the parts
Dave Holland, Zakir Hussain & Chris Potter Assembly Hall, Edinburgh
ON THE last day of the Edinburgh Jazz Festival, Indian tabla master Zakir Hussain, double bass hero Dave Holland and his younger frequent colleague, saxophonist Chris Potter, travelled musically a lot more propitiously than they had by rail, their Edinburgh-bound train having given up the ghost at Carlisle.
Holland’s jaunty Lucky Seven set the benchmark high and suggested a well settled chemistry between the three. Potter shifted between the reedy calling of soprano sax and muscular but lyrical tenor, over the insistent thwack and thunder of Hussain’s drums, while Holland’s warm-toned bass embarked on meticulously articulated solos, sparred with the tablas or raced them in tightly cascading runs.
The gracefully floating melody of Mazad released a cheerful bass excursion before soprano sax returned with querulous rejoicing. Later, a torrent of konnakol vocables heralded Hussain’s explosive percussive fusillade, before they left us with a brief but beguiling encore of Bedouin Trail, a swaying processional that faded out still escorted by that big, congenial bass.
Tommy Smith’s solo acoustic set commanded attention right from the start, as he paced slowly through the audience and on to the stage, while pouring a stream of melody and free-form improvisation from his tenor sax, ranging through, among other things, Robert Burns’s Red, Red Rose and that ever-circling Sixties hit, Windmills of Your Mind, linked by improvisational crooning and flutter- ing, baying and stratospheric shrilling, to morph finally into richly lingering elaborations on yet another rose, Duke Ellington’s Single Petal.