Review: Cheltenham Jazz Festival 2019, various venues

It was raining as I arrived at the Cheltenham Jazz Festival site, and the Montpelier Gardens grass was beginning to threaten mulch. Happily Friday’s shower was pretty much it for rain, however, and the rest of the weekend saw the gardens rammed with picnicking groups and the town thronged with between-gig jazzers. The musical programme would also prove to be full of rewarding entertainment

The truly dazzling Andreas Schearer (Pic Tim Dickeson)

As the clouds cleared, the band SUNSHINE proved as illuminating as the name suggested. It takes a lot to upstage Soweto Kinch, but while his brilliant sax and well-thought rap poetry ran through the trio’s music it was Swiss vocal gymnast Andreas Schaerer, playing off regular guitar foil Kalle Kalima, who truly dazzled. His combination of old-school scat, free vocal experimentation and beat-boxing would always be a fine novelty but the integrity of it to SUNSHINE’s tightly improvised set was flawless. Their full-tilt performance opened this year’s Parabola Theatre programme and raised a bar that would inevitably haunt the weekend.

Abdullah Ibrahim (pic: Tim Dickeson)

Cheltenham always has a good array of big name jazz ‘greats’ and Saturday saw three contrasting appearances, starting with veteran UK saxophonist John Surman’s Brass Project with composer John Warren. Unfortunately the hour-long piece, while well performed, was fairly uniform in pace and style and Surman himself only featured for all too brief ‘guest artist’ moments. Seated at the piano on the Big Top stage, the 84 year old Abdullah Ibrahim chose a similar role, leaving his band Ekaya to play most of the music, himself only interjecting snatches of melody or short linking passages that teasingly hinted at an exquisite touch otherwise denied us.

At a mere 50 years old US jazz star Joshua Redman hardly counts as a veteran but easily proved his worth as an international jazz star on the Town Hall stage. His epic tenor sax solo for Never Let Me Go was a spell-binding display of musicality, while his trio’s deconstruction of Mack The Knife was both clever and entertaining. When he brought on Soweto Kinch for an unplanned guest appearance the two wrangled superbly through a blues tune that ended, honours even, in a classic dual blowout.

Yilian Cañizares (pic: Tim Dickeson)

Past memories of a great Jazz Arena set from Roberto Fonseca were stirred by fellow Cuban pianist Omar Sosa’s full throttle performance with Venezuelan percussionist Gustavo Ovalles Palacios and Cuban singer and violinist Yilian Canizares. As with Fonseca, the life-affirming energy of Cuba’s music shone through every note Omar played, whether tempestuous chord flurries, ringing Montuno dance riffs or eloquent ballads. Yilian’s equally committed vocals and vigorous stage presence well-matched his piano, and their combined insistence on us all having a good time meant that we certainly did.

Rymden: Bugge Wesseltoft, Dan Berglund, Magnus Öström (pic: Tim Dickeson)

They did rather overdo the stage smoke in the Jazz Arena, something that almost overcame Rymden’s bass player Dan Berglund at one point. It didn’t inhibit the music, though, which had an intricacy of structure only a genuine supergroup like this could risk performing. Impish keyboard player Bugge Wesseltoft threw in thunking synth, fulsome piano and deft Fender Rhodes (even hitting the latter’s inner workings), while the former EST rhythm section of Berglund and Öström kept a flawless empathy. They were, in short, pretty awesome.

This year saw a new venue in the basement of the House of Fraser store – the carefully black-draped walls couldn’t hide the parquet flooring underfoot but the dingy underground vibe was there. The programme there came from Gilles Petersen, champion of the popular new dance-derived jazz scene. Given the nightclub context, perhaps the lack of a view of the musicians (there wasn’t a stage) perhaps shouldn’t have mattered, but the Vels Trio set didn’t seem to get people dancing either. New tracks promised more, however, with broken beats, tricky time signatures and longer melodic lines indicating a willingness to move from the slow-paced strictures of dance production.

Julie Campiche (Pic Tim Dickeson)

But it was in the Parabola Theatre, favoured by festival artistic consultant Tony Dudley-Evans, that the most interesting discoveries were made and, after Friday’s SUNSHINE triumph, Sunday saw another Swiss musician captivate a crowd with style. Harpist Julie Campiche deployed a complexity of electronics, some ‘prepared piano’ style tricks and her excellent quartet’s energy, notably in the long suite Onkalo/To The Holy Land, a doom-laden narrative about planetary extinction that conjured amazing almost visual soundscapes. She was followed by Norwegian saxophonist Hanna Paulsberg’s Concept, an acoustic quartet playing melodic contemporary jazz with Hanna’s restrained approach a model of lyrical efficiency and confidence.

Things wound up at the Parabola on Sunday night with Hermia-Ceccaldi-Darrifourq, or rather Biardeau-Ceccaldi-Darrifourq as illness forced Manuel Hermia to miss the gig. If anyone was flagging by this stage this was a wake up call – drummer Sylvain Darrifourq even used an alarm clock from time to time. This was quite unnecessary, however, as the sonic battering of sax, cello and percussion was a remorseless evocation of 80s Industrial music, albeit without the power tools. After 60 minutes a divided audience left muttering in disagreement about what they’d just experienced – surely the very definition of a successfully experimental project and what a good jazz festival should always offer?