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2007: Reasons to be cheerful

By Chris Parker

 

Although 2007 saw some memorable and exhilarating gigs played at the Vortex by stellar US visitors – chief among them violinist Mark Feldman – both with his own band and in a stunning duo with pianist Sylvie Courvoisier– ( pictured left), solo pianist Uri Caine and saxophonist Tim Berne – the year was arguably most notable as marking the emergence of club-filling UK bands, a relatively new (and very welcome) phenomenon foreshadowed by the likes of Partisans, Polar Bear and Acoustic Ladyland, but now involving much larger numbers of musicians, many connected with the Loop and F-IRE Collectives, but all symptomatic of the extraordinary strength, in depth, of the current British jazz scene.

There is undoubtedly a new vibrancy and confidence infusing contemporary UK jazz, epitomised by the energy and imagination that inform the music of bands such as Porpoise Corpus, Outhouse, Dog Soup, Led Bib and Fraud, but there is also poise and maturity – perhaps best exemplified by Empirical (pictured right) in their music and – particularly noticeable in the fine disregard of apparent conventions of jazz instrumentation notable in such projects as Basquiat Strings, the Portico Quartet and Phil Robson's Six Strings and a Beat – a commendable desire to explore (or perhaps, more accurately, to ignore as irrelevant) the boundaries of the music.

And this is to ignore the already established figures who continue fill the club: the aforementioned Partisans have gone from strength to strength in 2007; Christine Tobin, John Etheridge, Hans Koller, Ian Shaw, Barb Jungr, Ingrid Laubrock, Billy Jenkins and Robert Mitchell – to name but a few – have all delighted capacity crowds there this year at one time or another, and one-off gigs by, for instance, Alex Bonney's Quartet (a wonderful Albert Ayler-inspired set), thrilling Russian-born altoist Zhenya Strigalev and the exquisite trio Gee, Gallo and Minetto have also provided memorable evenings' music.

Put on the spot and forced to identify a musician who might be thought best to personify the reasons for all this enthusiasm and optimism, however, I'd have to go for Gwilym Simcock (picture below): there are many good, even great pianists around at present; there are a number of fine composers/arrangers, too.

There are also a fair number of accomplished bandleaders, some of them capable of spearheading both large and small aggregations, and a select band of solo instrumentalists as adept at hushing a room with individual interpretations of standards as with their own material – it is a rare bird indeed, however, who combines all these attributes, and Simcock is that unusual animal.

 

 

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