Various venues, Cheltenham
An American saxophone legend wearing the mantle of John Coltrane, a virtuosic British duo working the cracks between jazz and modern chamber-music, and a star jazz eccentric were among Saturday's confirmations of the Cheltenham jazz festival's enduring instinct for quality.
The chamber-duo was the intimately congenial partnership of saxophonist Julian Arguelles and pianist John Taylor, which delivered its intricate time-jugglings and melodic switches in the afternoon. Taylor's ambiguous harmonies and Arguelles's penchant for long-lined melodies can leave the music without explicit anchor-points at times, but the pair's gospelly account of In the Bleak Midwinter provided plenty.
The 70-year-old Arkansas tenor saxist Pharoah Sanders, Coltrane's firebreathing tenor partner in his final 60s bands, left much of the work to his inspired local rhythm section in the evening, but they ran with it so dynamically as to resoundingly wake the legend up. A poignant account of the ballad Naima, a honking, bass-walking blues workout and a yearning My Favourite Things all showed that Sanders charisma is still intact.
Later on, Django Bates delivered a new Radio 3 commission of typically spiky and affably eccentric swing ? inspiring his band (augmenting the Kit Downes electric trio Troyka with horns) to play raucously bumpy riffs over low electronic churnings, mind-boggling polyrhythms, or cheery circus-band struts bursting out of free-improv squeals. It's yet another sound-palette for an already prolific composer currently on perhaps the biggest roll of his career.
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2011/may/01/cheltenham-jazz-festival-review
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