Music
Piano Lounge: Jazz
Glasgow Royal Concert Hall
Rob Adams
FOUR STARS
Glasgow Music’s Piano Lounge is quite the Steinway to heaven for jazz listeners. In one room there were two of these beauties “spooning”, affording Euan Stevenson and Dave Newton the luxury of bringing their keyboard partnership out of the electronic age to maximise the former’s Debussy-like lyricism and the latter’s concisely swinging, deeply mined lines as they danced through One Note Samba and daringly reconfigured and developed Cheek to Cheek.
Stevenson was also joined by another regular partner, Konrad Wiszniewski on tenor and soprano saxophones, with Andy Sharkey (bass) and Doug Hough (drums), for a suite from their winning New Focus repertoire. But although there was much high quality original material played during an afternoon of concerts, including Finn Irlo Rantala’s wonderfully effusive Freedom, complete with string-dampening by his hotel towel, reinvention was a particularly strong recurring theme.
Liam Noble camouflaged Girl from Ipanema brilliantly in dense, ever-changing rhythmical patterns, giving subtle harmonic hints before finally revealing the melody. His solo set could be quite demanding at times but it rewarded the effort with equally oblique then blossoming readings of The Way We Were and Gillian Welch’s gospel anthem I’ll Fly Away and a great, romping Maple Leaf Rag.
Gwilyn Simcock’s solo interpretations included a delicate Every Time We Say Goodbye and a lovely dedication to two recently departed heroes, John Taylor and Kenny Wheeler on the latter’s typically wistful Everybody’s Song But My Own. His duetting with Rantala also produced a marvellously hard swinging version of Kenny Barron’s Voyage. For a snapshot of twin-piano possibilities, though, the same pair’s reading of Simcock’s extraordinarily physical, highly charged Antics takes some beating.
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