Albums I really like, Bands/Artists I rate very highly, Gigs I've enjoyed

CD review and album launch: Ife Tolentino: Você Passou Aqui, 2 Aug 2013

04/08/2013 Mary James 1 Comment

Brazilian guitarist and singer Ife Tolentino waited eight months to launch his album Você Passou Aqui (You Were Here) in the UK because he wanted to launch it at The Vortex, and The Vortex is always busy so he had to wait. Such loving attention to detail distinguishes this album of standards and compositions from more familiar Brazilian music. You think you know what Bossa Nova sounds like, but this album has something else. It has a fragility which hints at its inspiration – Iceland, land of ice and fire, but also of tiny alpine flowers, midnight sun, silent landscapes, which contrasts so powerfully with the fecundity of the Brazilian landscape of lush forest, beaches and exotic blooms and flamboyant carnivals.

The album was recorded in Iceland with the Icelandic musicians listed below. It consists of standards like S’wonderful (which sounds as if it had been written by Jobim, not Gershwin), compositions by Jobim himself and own compositions. Especially beautiful is Me Chama (Call me) which has a haunting refrain which prompts me to reflect on the fragility of life in Iceland, where short days, tiny population and possible volcanic extinction make for a very thoughtful approach to life where you savour life’s beauties, especially if they are fleeting. The lyrics are poetic, sparce and beautiful. All the musicians are caught in the spell, tiny cameos such as the sax on Como num Conto, sparkle like stars.

At The Vortex, Ife was joined by Liam Noble on piano and Julian Siegel on saxophone. Ife’s vocals are unhurried, intimate like conversation, he makes it sound very easy and natural. The languor was reflected in Liam Noble’s sparce piano accompaniment, his fingers barely spanning a few keys yet sometimes delicately skittering or bubbling like lava. In Teco Teco Julian Siegel had no difficulty shadowing Ife’s tongue-twisting lyrics and speed, like dancing on coals. I do not speak Portuguese so to me most of the compositions sounded sunny but reading the sleeve notes I see this is misplaced. Many are sad, lonely and wistful. But George Harrison’s Here Comes the Sun reminded us that album launches are joyful times. It was a special evening and it’s a lovely, gentle, thoughtful album by a very accomplished singer guitarist.

Albums I really like, Bands/Artists I rate very highly, Quick reviews

Brief thoughts – Roberto Olzer Trio: Steppin’ Out

29/07/2013 Mary James Leave a comment

I first heard the Roberto Olzer Trio play the Sting cover Every Little Thing She Does is Magic and bought the album on the whim that any trio containing bass player Yuri Goloubev was worth listening to. My hunch was justified. This is a lovely album of jewelled lyricism by Italian pianist Roberto Olzer. The jaunty Sting cover is not typical of the album, it is memorable but then so are the other nine tracks. Roberto studied the organ and I think this shows in the delicate layers of sound that hang around like the echo of an organ in the fan vaulting of a cathedral, you look up and feel wonder. The album is very visual, each track seems to tell a story, from the unsteady Madman of the opening, to FF (Fast Forward) which seems to want to trip up each musician. Especially beautiful is tragic Gloomy Sunday where the bass is intent on wallowing in misery. The sound swells and falls, like good ideas dismissed out of pessimism. You almost need to listen to each track on its own, they are exquisite short stories you want to savour.

It was recorded and mixed by Stefano Armerio in June 2012 (he also recorded Maciek Pysz’s Insight). Deserves a wider audience, especially in the UK.

Roberto Olzer, piano

Yuri Goloubev, double bass

Mauro Beggio, drums

http://www.robertoolzer.com/

Jazz venues, Thoughts

In praise of … regional jazz clubs

25/07/2013 Mary James Leave a comment

I want to sing the praises of regional jazz clubs in general and one in particular that is now close to my heart – Stratford Jazz. That’s Stratford-upon-Avon, not East London or Ontario. Many times I have sat in the cosy upstairs room at The Chapel No 1 Shakespeare Street, enjoyed the gigs, discovered new sounds, loved old ones, made new friends and never once thought about how it all comes together, the hard (but enjoyable) unpaid work that goes into making a gig happen. Well, now I have an idea. Stratford Jazz has been in existence since 1986, its gigs since 2003 set out here. The most cursory glance at this list reveals people who are now established, such as Andrew McCormack and Michael Janisch, the latter now running a record label. Which brings me to the point of this post. Regional jazz plays a crucial role in an artist’s development. By all means live in London, record in London, play most of your gigs in London, but small jazz venues exist to provide you with an appreciative audience and we don’t forget you.

Stratford Jazz is at a crossroads. Our mainstay, Roy, is planning to hand over the running of the club. An open meeting conjured up volunteers to set out chairs, man the door, take money, produce flyers, man the sound deck, run the raffle, help with the website and social media. I have the latter role. We still need help with booking bands and paying them, running a membership system, drafting press releases etc etc.

So if you would like to help us please follow us on Twitter @StratfordJazz, please “Like” us on Facebook https://www.facebook.com/stratfordjazz.org.uk and best of all, please come to our gigs. In the next few months we host Chris Bowden, Marco Marconi, Casey Greene, Tom Hill, Greg Abate, Ben Markland, Ed Jones and Alan Barnes. We are a small club but each event is special. People travel from miles. You won’t forget it.

And anyone with ideas of how we can attract young people, please let us know via our Facebook page or tweet to us. We want to survive for at least another 27 years.

Stratford Jazz

Bands/Artists I rate very highly, Thoughts

Some thoughts on Rothko, megalithic architecture and jazz…

12/07/2013 Mary James Leave a comment

I felt at home in the 6000 year old Hal Saflieni Hypogeum, Paola, Malta. The shapes were familiar, I had seen them in Rothko. These mysterious underground chambers, majestic burial places, were excavated by hand using tools of antler and flint, the limestone smooth as silk. Their perfect proportions of aperture and lintel thickness struck me as timeless. These softly lit caverns awed us to silence. In our mind’s eyes, we heard the scrape of flint on stone, the drip of rainwater in winter, the quiet conversation of the workmen eons ago. In a museum in Valletta we saw some offerings to the dead taken from these chambers. A tiny sleeping woman, fashioned from stone, her winter skirt of sheepskin-like stone gently crinkled at its hem, her best skirt. Such humanity touches us across the millennia. Move forward to the 20th century, and Rothko. His Red on Maroon could overwhelm you. Those huge vertical columns and apertures look like windows or doors, the sombre tones shift as you gaze at them, making you feel uneasy. But there is nothing there.

Maroon by Maciek Pysz on his album Insight was inspired by this same Rothko. It’s contemplative, and unlike the other compositions on this album, this one is not sunlit, it is permeated by loss and reflective sadness. As I stood in one of the chambers of the Hypogeum I heard Asaf Sirkis’s gentle udu drum, it could have been the patter of rainwater, or a drum from 6000 years ago. Yuri Goloubev’s delicate bass playing could just as easily have been inspired by the painting or the need to ease our passage from life to the afterlife as I experienced in those cool chambers.

All too soon, we were in a sunlit street, wondering if we had imagined all that was beneath our feet, marvelling that such beauty could have been visualised by our ancestors and then made to happen.

Albums I really like, Bands/Artists I rate very highly

Album review: Asaf Sirkis Trio: Shepherd’s Stories – released July 2013

27/06/2013 Mary James Leave a comment

A sheep and a lamb gambol on a green hillside, the artists stand in a forest, they wear hoods – they could be shepherds. They aren’t of course, they are members of the outstanding trio of drummer Asaf Sirkis. This is the same trio that gave us Letting Go in 2010. And now this album, Shepherd’s Stories. It’s as if those three years are just a few minutes, as if time does not really matter to Asaf. The haunting harmonica of the earlier album has made way for voice and flute, and just as effectively. The trio has its own recognisable sound – a mix of out-of-this-world pulsating guitar trajectories and shimmering, sizzling, explosive percussion. The guests add more than colour, they add another dimension, a very human one that we can connect with.

In the sleeve notes Asaf tells us that Shepherd’s Stories are reminders of where we have come from, they are metaphors for feelings deep within us, that come unprompted when we hear certain melodies. In a well-balanced album, this idea of atavistic memory is most strikingly demonstrated in two tracks – Traveller and Together. In Traveller, the gentle, cool and beautiful voice of Sylwia Bialas takes us to distant lands where shepherds guard their flocks, where simple tunes move us, where we feel at home. This simplicity is deceptive, it hides complex bass picking, the subtlest drumming and blended voices. Then in Together the ravishing, mellifluous flute of Gareth Lockrane takes me straight into the Middle East, to an almost biblical time. As a boy, did Asaf hear melodies like this one float across hillsides in his native Israel? It is quite timeless, Asaf is right, we already know this tune, this touching emotion, even though most of us lead urban lives. The opening is like the breathing you adopt in meditation, you push other thoughts aside as you relax. You might have imagined from looking at the instrumentation (guitars and drums), and hearing the searing guitar on the first track, that this would be a rock-jazz album but it isn’t, it is overwhelmingly serene and very rewarding.

This album will definitely grow on you. Highly recommended.

All compositions by Asaf Sirkis

Asaf Sirkis, drums

Yaron Stavi, electric bass

Tassos Spiliotopoulos, electric and acoustic guitars

with guests Sylwia Bialas, voice; Gareth Lockrane, flute; and John Turville, fender rhodes

www.asafsirkis.co.uk

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