Jazz breaking news: Match&Fuse keeps prog-jazz rocking with Mopti, Kairos 4tet, Led Bib and Troyka
Tuesday, July 30, 2013
Now in its second year, this ambitious, roving pan-European festival, which stopped off at the Vortex in Dalston and Rich Mix in Hoxton last Thursday and Friday, has already generated a substantial following.
Masterminded by Dave Morecroft of WorldService Project with collaborators in half-a-dozen European countries, Match&Fuse is deterred by neither boundaries of genre or nation, offering authentic, original live and mostly jazz-based music to audiences starved by the glut of commercial karaoke pop.
The ‘Match&Fuse’ name and concept implies joining up as well as blowing up, and the skilful programming created an appetising balance of new and established talent. The programmers’ boundary-blindness still allowed, sensibly, for some generic distinction between the Vortex-hosted bands, all of which were centrally jazz, and the Rich Mix line-up, with jazz-rockers Led Bib enticing the curious into an invigorating night exploring the borders of punk, grime, and drum ’n’ bass.
Thursday began with the group that was, for me, the discovery of the festival. Norwegian quintet Mopti (pictured), voted young musicians of the year at the 2012 Molde Jazz Festival in Norway, made their London debut with a compelling display of both acoustic and electronic improvisation. Despite the clammy London heat, they conjured a tone-poem of Scandinavian stormy cold, with snatches of Kristoffer Eikrem’s folk-tinged trumpet melody, questing like an albatross through an electric storm of Aleksander Sjølie’s extreme guitar and Andreas Wildhagen’s elemental drums. Harald Lassen, on saxes, mouthed everything from woody contemplation to screaming delirium while Christian Meaas Svendsen, on acoustic bass, was a subtle yet pivotal figure, seeming to meander across their soundscape like a lost traveller, while in fact holding each piece together with his endlessly spinning harmonies.
Their set ended with a joint performance with the Laura Jurd Quartet, a cornucopia of crazy invention. Mopti’s debut album, Logic, should be well worth investigating when it comes out in September. Trumpeter Jurd’s band provided the next set with a display of astoundingly cool, unfeasibly mature musical intelligence. The key relationship is between Jurd’s coolly modulated trumpet and Elliot Galvin’s shrapnel piano runs, but they are supported with understated brilliance by Corrie Dick’s stick-wizardry and Conor Chaplin’s solid bass.
Parisian improvisers Actuum offered a set of spiky, dynamic energy, full of Ornette Coleman-esque speedy, scrabbly bravado. There was an engagingly self-deprecating irony in their presentation, with pieces about the Smurfs, and another, entitled ‘UFB’ (Ugly French Bastard), presenting an unusually bleak view of French womanhood. Alongside an undoubted technical brilliance and irreverent fun, their music would be the richer for a greater tonal variety, and capacity for the lyrical as well as the scabrous.
Thursday’s programme ended with a typically fresh and dynamic set from Kairos 4tet. Adam Waldman, taking centre stage, threaded the band together with his clean, sometimes klezmer-tinged soprano phrasing, but Ivo Neame, decorating Waldman’s swooping melodic line with handfuls of minimalist piano harmony, and Jasper Høiby’s mesmerising, rangy bass both offer expert support. And drummer Corin Dick, playing with the band for the first time, constantly renewed the rhythm with his inventive riffing.
On Friday the Rich Mix programme led the audience on a tour of the fringes of jazz territory. The jazz element in all three of the supporting acts – Hawaiian-shirted Italian grime-Samba outfit Ay, Polish drum ’n’ bass fusion group JazzPospolita and punk-jazz Hot Head Show – was in all three cases modest, but there was skilful, original music-making aplenty to enjoy that stretched the musical horizon more broadly than many festivals dare. Headliners Led Bib, who have a new album out in the autumn, showed how much fun it can be to charge a two-horn quintet with rock power, adrenaline and some catchy sampling, in their typically invigorating blast of pulsing bass, psychedelic electronica and ecstatic sax wails.
The last of the Rich Mix events overlapped with Friday’s Vortex line-up, so I missed Brass Mask, Tom Challenger’s octet of horns and drums, and solo guitar improviser Chris Sharkey, but caught the final set from Troyka, with Chris Montague, Kit Downes and Josh Blackmore giving a masterful demonstration of writhing, surging guitar lines, switchback tempo changes and a fingertip control of mood, from delicate introspection to muscular thrash.
High summer may not be the best season for Match&Fuse to come to London, given the range of competing festival and outdoor attractions at this time of year, but the format still demonstrated its unique value with a fresh and varied line-up it would be difficult to envisage anywhere else. Having gone on a short UK tour over the weekend, it will make its next London appearance some time during the London Jazz Festival, but its great strengths, portability and flexibility, means some shape-shifted version could light up at any time near you.
– Matthew Wright