MILD: January 2011

Happy Birthday to the Late Late Show at Ronnie's

Fran Hardcastle celebrates the first year of the Late Late Show at Ronnie Scott's

Tomorrow, Tuesday night is the first birthday of what has fast become an institution for us night owls, The Late Late Show at Ronnie Scott's. Apart from being a magnet for musicians finishing gigs, the Late Show has become a place where a lot of young jazzers can get their first break. The Show places musicians of all generations on one plateau. Stan Sulzmann or Jim Mullen can be seen alongside names like Jim Hart, Lewis Wright and Henry Armburg Jennings.

Host Michael Mwenso provides opportunities for young musicians from the jazz courses to be heard. I was recently wowed by two singers from the RAM, Emma Smith and Kwabena Adjepong. Students from the music colleges and from other London universities like UCL and Kings College also come to hang out and learn about the music. I've rarely heard Mwenso announce a tune without providing some interesting titbit about the composer.

If you're lucky (which happens quite frequently), the big names in town will drop by and sit in. In the past year alone, Wynton Marsalis,(above) Robert Glasper, Christian Scott, Ethan Iverson from the Bad Plus, Adam Nussbaum, Jason Rebello and Freddy Cole have all sat in. Joss Stone has also made an appearance. One night, the entire personnel of Michael Buble's Big Band dropped by. Quite regularly, you'll hear a treat from British favourites like Ian Shaw, Cleveland Watkiss or Gwilym Simcock.

Mike Mwenso told LondonJazz: Wynton Marsalis spoke of its rarity saying, "we haven't had anything like this in New York for over twenty years". Jason Rebello sat in recently and commented, "it's just like the old days, but better. People are listening to the music."

So thank you to all of the fantastic musicians who have appeared in the Late Late Show over the past year and kept the party going. Happy Birthday.

The Late Late Show, 11pm - 3am, Mondays to Thursdays, Ronnie Scotts.

Kim Kardashian at the SAG Awards

Kim Kardashian arrives at the 17th Annual Screen Actors Guild (SAG) Awards held at The Shrine Auditorium on January 30, 2011 in Los Angeles, California.

Sofia Vergara at 63rd Annual Director's Guild of America Awards in Hollywood

Actress Sofia Vergara arrives at the 63rd Annual Director's Guild of America (DGA) Awards Dinner held at the Grand Ballroom at Hollywood & Highland Center on January 29, 2011 in Hollywood, California.

Review: Zena James

Zena James, Album Launch, Captivated
(Pizza Express Dean Street, January 23rd 2011, Review by Brian Blain)

Zena James launched her new album, Captivated, at the Pizza Express in Dean St last Sunday, and the whistles and whoops from a good Sunday night crowd proved that she is steadily acqiring a fair number of fans for her brave leap into the soul-laden subtle groove end of the jazz spectrum. On stage she projects a warm,engaging personality,and an infectious sense of enjoyment in the work of her fellow musicians that is really captivating, showing no fear when she attacks an exposed high note in an arrangement in contrast to the mellow quality of her vocal sound in the lower range of her expressive voice. No histrionics, just heartfelt emotion. Her choice of material was almost impeccable ,with Joe Sherman's That Sunday, That Summer and Stevie Wonder's I Can Only Be Me two of the most touching things that I have heard in months. Her treatment of Human Nature, fast becoming a crossover favourite was just gorgeous,and only the backbeat treatment of Gypsy In My Soul, usually a natural swinger, didn't work for me, sounding a tad slow and 'down' but not in the good way that jazz is supposed to make it.

Her band was brilliant, never over playing or forgetting who the audience had come to see. A new face on piano and keys, Mike Guy, Mike Bradley on drums (both members of the Thriller band) and electric bass virtuoso Pat Bettison, not too long back from a few years in New York,really understand how the understated groove thing works while Simon Allen on all three of the main saxophones threw grenades into the room every time he stepped up to the solo mic. It was obvious that Zena was loving every minute of their work,and it was that shared sense of enjoyment that,as much as anything ,that came off the band stand to the listeners to put smiles on their faces all round the room.

Nice too to see the presence of fellow vocal artists like Trudy Kerr, Shireen Francis, Sarah Ellen Hughes, Josh Kyleand Emma Smith, members of the toughest part of the whole jazz scene. Zena has been getting a good radio response to the new album and on this showing, thoroughly deserves it.

Captivated is available from Zena James' website

Review: Evan Parker/ Django Bates

Django Bates Beloved Bird Trio and Evan Parker
(Vortex, January 27th,2011, review and drawing by Geoff Winston.)

“There’s been a misunderstanding" said Django Bates – we thought we were guests of Evan, and he thought he was a guest of us … and we’re still trying to work it out!” Bates explained the evening's conundrum to the audience as his ‘Beloved Bird’ Trio – Petter Endh (bass) and Peter Bruun (drums) completed the first of the evening’s fizzingly empowered improvisations with Evan Parker.

The opening number had offered a series of false ‘natural endings’ followed by manically energetic resumptions, then moving through a few bars of gospel call and response, and rounding off delicately. Taken as a whole, the first set was a performance of swerving pace and sheer concentration, but also of shades and nuances. The four musicians would raise the stakes aggressively, and then let sounds fleetingly and gently float. It was mesmerizing.

The second set kicked off with ‘Plan B’, which Django imagined is what the punters (all very happy and demonstratively enthusiastic throughout) may have been expecting – the Trio performing their interpretations of Charlie Parker, a project which was a happy by-product of a teaching assignment at the Rhythmic Music Conservatory in Copenhagen coinciding with a Parker celebration in the same city.

For ‘Scrapple from the Apple’, ‘Hothouse’ and – as Django put it, “the hard one” - ‘Moose the Mooch’, which ended on a crazy latin carnival tone – a sort of Monty Alexander on speed, Evan Parker sat to the side and took it all in, reflecting Django’s stated aim of ‘not putting a … saxophonist in the position of having either not sound like Charlie Parker, or to try to sound like him!"* They just flipped in to this quite different jazz vocabulary, offering pure and authentic bebop mainstream phrasing as part of their revealing deconstructions.

Evan then rejoined the Trio for a final extended extemporization - which included Django on tenor horn, splitting the quartet into brass - and rhythm sections, and a meditative encore. A wonderful range of body language reflected their individual approaches. Django’s arms traced Escher-like perpetual motorway flyover patterns as he reached back and forth, over and under across the keyboard. Bruun was ever fluid, in constant motion as he subverted the drummer’s role, lifting the cymbal off its stand and placing it on the tom, or holding the stick plumb-vertical on the tom, while maintaining a calm demeanour. Endh, by contrast, was inwardly focused, his face taut in his solo as he compulsively exorcised an obsessive rhythmic pattern, with deft accents from Bruun. Parker, for his considerably expressive light and shade, and fluent bluff and bluster, was very much a physically self-contained and undemonstrative figure, yet he reached out to and led the trio into a rich framework, in similar fashion to the way Django set markers for the Bad Plus in his collaboration with them last November.

This was an evening when mutual respect led to fine moments of intangible, unspoken, mystic communication.

(*) From Django Bates' interview with Ethan Iverson for BBC Jazzon3 reproduced HERE
www.vortexjazz.co.uk