Tigran, Marcus Miller, Courtney Pine and Grace Jones help Love Supreme Jazz Festival’s 10th birthday go with a bang

It’s towards the end of Tigran Hamasayan’s Saturday night set that the “Love Supreme effect” really kicks in. His trio blend heavy metal dynamics, intense improvisation, classical romance and his native Armenian folk melodies. On ‘Ara Resurrected’, his booming piano bass notes are interspersed with jittery, jumpy shards and elegiac, mysterious passages, the piano notes falling like petals, then finishing with a thunderous giant’s tread.

Tigran tears it up - Photo by Tatiana Gorilovsky

He has played superficially similar music elsewhere, but in the grounds of Tudor mansion Glynde Place, where Love Supreme Jazz Festival established its annual downland utopia 10 years ago, jazz is heard, received and so made differently. Pint-glass salutes, pogoing and mighty cheers are greeted by the trio with gratefully clasped hands, and two genuine encores. As dry ice clouds the stage, a beautiful piano melody played with classical introspection meshes with more metal thunder to further roars, pushing Hamasayan deep into a transported spot where time-signatures fry in improvisatory heat.

Bass titans of contrasting eras headline the South Downs tent. Marcus Miller could have replaced Jaco Pastorius in Weather Report if he hadn’t been otherwise engaged with Miles Davis, and ‘Mr. Pastorius’, from his last Miles collaboration, Amandla (1989), sees another East St Louis trumpeter, Russell Gunn, play muted, mournful and Milesian. The mood goes right back, invoking mid-20th century street-corner cool. Current bass king Stephen Bruner, aka Thundercat, is part of the crucial LA nexus including Kamasi Washington and rapper Kendrick Lamar. With his geek-stoner playfulness and beatific grin, his drummer’s glitterball crash helmet and his retro-futuristic, sci-fi R&B improv, he’s also in Sun Ra and George Clinton’s freaky lineage. The music can be baroquely psychedelic and inchoate, a clunky maelstrom of bass/synth thrashes bookended by Bruner’s Prince-like falsetto. ‘Lone Wolf and Cub’ finds a clearer path from his lovely, strummed start, finally cohering into a simple bass phrase.

Courtney Pine - Photo by Tatiana Gorilovsky

Ever the showman, Courtney Pine’s already playing soprano sax as he enters stage-left, joining his Jamaican-rooted House of Legends band. His switch to EWI for most of the gig isn’t, though, the prettiest sound. Righteous sympathy for “our [refugee] brothers in France…catching hell” restores focus, and after a patriotic shout-out to Ben Stokes the day before his adrenalin-scorched Ashes century, he lauds the inclusive “energy of the UK that we’re manufacturing right now.” This is truly present at Love Supreme, where young and old, male and female and black and white mix with special ease, and leave uplifted.

New Blue Note sax star Immanuel Wilkins starts the spiritual ballad ‘Fugitive Ritual, Selah’ by meditating on a pretty, melodic phrase, his full tone gaining a staticky burr. His elegiac, nearly noir notes then accrue overwhelming power, his sax staying steady even at skidding velocity – not sheets of sound, but his own, cleanly articulated thing, in music of lustrous, golden textures.

Following Friday night’s gospel-soul-powered main attraction, Gabriels, the Jazz In The Round stage became the late-night last action in town, where teenagers wandered in and danced to UK pianist Sultan Stevenson’s slaloming hard bop – Love Supreme’s effect again. On Saturday, too, Devon-raised tenor Emma Rawicz is, like Stevenson, delighted by the crowd’s size and vibe.

Jazzmeia Horn - Photo by Tatiana Gorilovsky

Yussef Dayes’ solo debut Black Classical Music is imminent, and its spiritual jazz warmth is helped by quietly charismatic saxophonist Malik Venner, as Dayes takes double-time, snare-rattling flight. The weekend’s vocalists meanwhile include retiring soul great Candi Staton, Mica Millar, and Jazzmeia Horn, who arches backwards to hurl piercingly pure high notes and joyous scat, leading her band in a leisurely deconstruction of ‘Our Love Is Here To Stay’. “Sick remix of Gershwin,” the man next to me murmurs.

Italian Londoner Gabriele Pribetti mutates his sax into stuttering fairground skronk. Israeli ECM pianist Shai Maestro then shares some of Tigran’s qualities, to a less demonstrative Sunday crowd. When he sinks deep into a tone poem solo, the crowd wordlessly sing its attractive melody back to him, like an impromptu South Downs choir. Mulatu Astatke’s Ethio-jazz mesmerically resurrects 1970s Addis Ababa clubs, now as lost as Atlantis.

Grace Jones - Photo by Tatiana Gorilovsky

Grace Jones headlines Sunday’s main stage sporting a startling gold mask. Meanwhile, London saxophonist Binker Golding plays from his celebratory hybrid of Huey Lewis and John Coltrane, Dream Like a Dogwood Boy. Pianist Sarah Tandy’s rippling honkytonk chimes and guitarist Billy Adamson’s drivetime cries from the heart help Golding take ever sharper corners, like a big-finned 1950s car. Jones’ ‘My Jamaican Guy’ blends with his last sax screams, as I pass between Glynde Place’s griffin-topped gates and return to a less perfect world.

Photos by www.tatianajazzphoto.com