Posts Tagged ‘John Hollenbeck’

Harmonic Festival Directors Percy Pursglove and Chris Mapp

Photograph courtesy of Russ Escritt

The Harmonic Festival was a great artistic success that really showcased the immense amount of talent in Birmingham.  A particular success was the way in which the various contemporary jazz communities were all made part of the festival.  Clearly the core of the festival were the two nights at the CBSO Centre, where the New York band Claudia Quintet played on the Friday and a range of Birmingham bands played the Saturday, but the Thursday night session at The Yardbird and the Friday evening Rush Hour Blues sessions were included in the programme.  And it was serendipitous that Dave Holland was in town in the week of the Harmonic Festival and thus the performance by Conservatoire jazz students of his compositions at the Adrian Boult Hall on the Wednesday could be included in the programme. It was also great to have longstanding members of the jazz community like Ben Markland and Sara Colman playing in the same programme as graduates and students of the jazz course, Percy Pursglove, Aaron Diaz, Chris Mapp, Lluis Mather, Nick Rundle etc. and also to have represented the free jazz scene through the great improvising trio with Paul Dunmall, John Edwards and Mark Sanders.

Peter Bacon (The Jazz Breakfast) has a good summary of all the sets he heard during the festival so I won’t go into detail in this blog; you can read Peter’s review here.   What I will reflect on in this quick review is how the various bands, but in particular John Hollenbeck’s Claudia Quintet,  showed how composition in jazz is changing and how there seems to be a trend in certain New York bands towards redefining the balance between the notated passages and the improvisation (see also Steve Lehman’s Octet).  Claudia Quintet’s performance was dominated by Hollenbeck’s brilliant compositions which drew on the textures available through the interesting instrumentation of the group with vibes, accordion, piano as well as the more usual sax, bass and drums.  In a sense this was a contemporary jazz equivalent of Duke Ellington’s writing for the sounds of the various players in his big band, but with very intricate layering of sounds that draws on contemporary classical music and rock as well as jazz.  There were still of course excellent solos, notably from Drew Gress on bass, Matt Mitchell on piano and Chris Speed on sax and clarinet and in the second set from the two Birmingham additions to the group, Percy Pursglove on trumpet and Steve Tromans on Rhodes piano, but all these solos fitted into the overall framework of the writing.

It is interesting to contrast this approach with that of Dave Holland.  Dave writes a huge amount of material for his various groups and when he spends a week in the Conservatoire student groups work  with Dave, rehearsing  and then performing  carefully selected tunes of his.  Dave writes great tunes, but they are very much vehicles for improvisation designed to set up solos from members of the band.

In this context I found Chris Mapp’s writing for his new group Gambol particularly successful.  He drew on various Birmingham themes,  blues bands as well as The Blues football team, balti, markets and the rather odd people you meet in the streets.  Nearly this material had a strong identity into which the improvised solo passages from the band fitted perfectly and thus the approach had much in common with Hollenbeck’s in wanting to escape from the head + solos and head out formula so common in jazz.

Tony