Music
Whirlwind Mini Fest
Stereo, Glasgow
Rob Adams
FOUR STARS
Does Mike Janisch ever sleep? The London-based American bassist has already justified his record company, Whirlwind’s name in documenting large swathes of jazz activity in the UK, with US-derived releases also, in its five years of operation.
He’s put together a jazz for babies CD series and run a weekend festival featuring one hundred musicians, all the while figuring in apparently more gigs than the average diary can accommodate. Now, here he was, direct from a recording session, at the heart of three bands on the second night of the Glasgow stopover of a marathon UK tour that he organised and largely financed.
Whirlwind has been particularly supportive of the Scottish scene and over the two nights at Stereo four of the bandleaders whose work has featured on the label were highlighted. Tuesday’s local heroes were trumpeter Ryan Quigley and pianist Tom Gibbs and with Janisch’s muscular presence their groups displayed their strong but different musical personalities: Quigley’s tough, forthright and downright exciting, if with gentler, heartfelt reflection on Hoagy Carmichael’s ballad Skylark, and Gibbs’ more patient, often delicately beguiling but with killer build-ups on both his own and alto saxophonist Adam Jackson’s solos on the superb final piece, Rebecca’s Song.
Janisch’s own group, Paradigm Shift, was a different beast again, a sextet featuring both a conventional, two saxes and trumpet frontline and electro sounds driven and buoyed by a dynamic rhythm section featuring the leader on bass guitar as a well as the acoustic option. The music was surging, searching, with marvellous honking, free-flowing soprano saxophone from Jason Yarde, and hugely descriptive, not least on Janisch’s almost filmic, carousal-inspired Mike’s Mosey.
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