Music / Jazz
Review: In’n Out, Fringe In The Round
Apparently it’s all the go up in That London to do this but it was a new one for most of the Fringe In The Round audience. For the first half of the evening we all listened to a record – In’n Out, recorded in 1965 by saxophonist Joe Henderson and his quintet – and then a crack quintet of Bristol jazz musicians revisited the album live.
Opening act – In’n Out (pic: Tony Benjamin)
That’s actually quite a challenge, when you think about it. It’s one thing to play a ‘standard’ tune that’s been batted around for some 60 years – jazz players do that all the time. But offering up the definitive recording by Blue Note legends just before you play it yourself does rather raise the bar for an audience’s expectations. If that seemed daunting to the Fringe In The Round All Stars, however, you’d never have guessed by the confidence with which they took on the task. But first – we listened, much to the bemusement of the young couple who came in looking for jazz only to find a roomful of people looking at a stage full of instruments with nobody actually playing. Surreal.
Rebecca Nash, Alex Merrett, Will Harris, Nick Malcolm, Dave Smith (pic: Tony Benjamin)
The live set, once it started, was an interesting combination of respectful homage and personal styles. The opener Brown’s Town gave Alex Merritt’s tenor sax the chance to evoke the hard-bopping energy of Joe Henderson’s original, pushed on by Dave Smith’s urgent drumming – very much influenced by the great Elvin Jones who played on the recording. Nick Malcolm’s trumpet took up the flow with echoes of the great Kenny Dorham, stabbing and jabbing between fast bopping torrents, the drumming snappier and Will Harris providing fluid free-flowing bass. Keyboard player Rebecca Nash wisely eschewed the distinctive hard-edged pyrotechnics of McCoy Tyner – it’s just not her style – but offered instead rhythmic energy and sweeps of sustained harmonies, rich in texture and tightly fitted to the overall sound. In short – they nailed it, but in their own way.
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Will Harris, Alex Merrett, Nick Malcolm, Dave Smith (pic: Tony Benjamin)
And so it went on, through the looser and swingier Punjab with its freer drifting passage to the groovier Short Story with tight sax and trumpet unison. The fulsome ballad Serenity particularly suited Nick’s trumpet style as well as providing Will with the opportunity for an emphatic solo. Rebecca’s imaginative electric piano exploration then fed into a group improvisation that sounded both contemporary and appropriate to the album’s time. By the time they closed with the title track it felt that they had all found their place in the sound, with more super-tight unison from the horn players, assertive piano and bop-style bass and drums and a spirited old-school sax solo from Alex to finish.
It was an interesting experience, to both properly listen to an album and then to appreciate the jazz process as it was re-realised, and you could see why the idea had caught on. But it really relied on having the calibre of players to do it justice and, on this occasion, they happily proved well up for the task.
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