Glasgow Jazz Festival
Partisans/John Taylor/Fat-Suit
Rio Club and City Halls
Rob Adams
FOUR STARS
Three generations of British jazz - the enduring, the evergreen and the burgeoning - displayed their singular talents down Jazz Street, as Candleriggs is rapidly becoming known, in a canny piece of festival programming on Thursday.
Partisans are a band of the 1990s, almost twenty years together, and still playing music that enquires and drives on with dynamism, rhythmical acuity and a sharp improvising edge. With Julian Siegel switching between tenor and soprano saxophones and bass clarinet and Phil Robson varying between a classic jazz guitar tone and more aggressive, metallic timbres, they present a great range of colours on tunes that variously punch with cop car chase urgency, create atmospheres of both menace and mellowness, and dance to bassist Thad Kelly and effervescent drummer Gene Calderazzo's grooves.
The City Halls' Recital Room piano has had many able fingers, hands and occasionally elbows play its keyboard but the great John Taylor brings a very personal kind of spontaneous poetry to his solo work. His dedication to Kenny Wheeler, his late, long-time confrere in chamber jazz trio Azimuth and the classic John Surman Quintet et al, was an especial treat among a procession of gems, with tender affection and a deep sense of connectedness emerging from a piece that, by his own admission, required no little concentration.
Back in the pop-up Blue Note that is the Rio Club, the mighty Fat-Suit fizzed with superb orchestral energy, latin rhythms, folky airiness and frankly gorgeous, swelling jazz harmonies, their new material confirming that this youthful team is continuing to make giant steps forward and favourites such as the bubbling Don't Die Octopi demanding not to be discarded.
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