Jazz breaking news: Sons of Kemet limber up for studio session today with storming appearance at Jazz in the Round
Tuesday, February 28, 2012
Flashmob opened the second Jazz in the Round triple bill last night at the Cockpit theatre in London’s Marylebone.
The four-piece, coloured by guitar and trumpet lines featuring the hotly tipped Cornish guitarist Ryan Williams, Flashmob come highly rated if reclusive on the underground Britjazz scene. Williams is not the most demonstrative player, but with a firm grasp of modernistic harmonies hinting at times to an early-period John Scofield direction, with Rory Simmons a shimmering foil to introversion, and cleverly weighted drum rhythms, the band showed considerable promise here playing music from their debut album.
Andrew McCormack’s solo piano set next on made its mark quickly with a lovely fresh take on ‘Bye Bye Blackbird’, which stripped the standard of its cloying chirpiness without taking away anything from the song’s inherent playfulness. The first two songs were definitely the pick of the set, with McCormack's instinctive feel for building on the bedrock of Keith Jarrett's 1970s pre-Köln Concert ECM sound a feature. This performance – solo isn’t something McCormack often does – held up to the intense scrutiny of the in-the-round format. You can’t really hide, and with plenty going on including real-time painting by artist Gina Southgate the Cockpit was less a venue for feathers to fly than a fiery furnace of molten creativity.
Sons of Kemet, (pictured, photo by Roger Thomas) who go into the studio today, to record their debut album, got the theatre moving and turned up both the heat of the furnace and the roar of the fire, with gutsy Ethio-jazz and dazzling Coptic scale work outs from Shabaka Hutchings leading the charge on tenor sax. Oren Marshall mined deep under the Marylebone streets to provide this great band in the making with subterranean tuba rumblings that Tom Skinner and Seb Rochford did their damndest to destabilise. Despite the architecture of the sound being clearly visible and the routines easy to fathom after a while, the band has a spirit and a gutsiness that clearly won out. Kemet is like a fast car that jumps the traffic lights and never looks back.
– Stephen Graham