Bobby Wellins, Liane Carroll and Claire Martin get South Coast Jazz Festival swinging

Sell-out crowds turned out for three nights of carefully varied, engaging bills, spanning vocal stars, big bands, a British bop veteran, and the barely classifiable klezmer-circus-noir-swing of Mark Edwards’ Cloggz. The nightly walk from the train station past Shoreham-by-Sea’s Norman church, which looms magnificently over this old Sussex port, was almost pleasure enough, showing what organisers Claire Martin and Julian Nicholas’s home county and jazz have to offer each other. The real ale-replete, ideally-sized and welcoming Ropetackle Arts Centre added to the crowd’s audible, happy buzz between sets.

The VOX choir from county town Lewes’s Old Grammar School opened the festival, a community connection maintained with master-classes and workshops throughout the weekend. A Vocal Summit sold-out months in advance continued with British all-stars Joe Stilgoe, Ian Shaw, Liane Carroll and a Claire Martn cameo. Shaw brought his Joni Mitchell set, bringing out the longing and evocative Americana of ‘Night Ride Home’, the softly-sung, all-encompassing reach of Mitchell’s last song to date, ‘Shine’, and the sprightly cynicism of a song she covered, Rodgers and Hart’s ‘I Wish I Were In Love Again’. Tending to boogie bounce at the piano, Shaw was a considerably jauntier presence than Joni, to a fault when ‘Big Yellow Taxi’ became a double-speed comic duet with Martin.

Liane Carroll is no stranger to big-hearted ebullience and ribald asides. Tonight, though, eyes shut, she dropped without ceremony deep into Rodgers and Hammerstein’s ‘If I Loved You’, deploying the arsenal of effects and feeling which make her Britain’s best ballad singer: gliding through a line, pouring on the power with smoky timbre or scatting. Tom Waits’ ‘Take Me Home’, in which she swapped lines with Julian Nicholas’s soprano sax, gave loving, sentimental admonishment to a partner without whom “the world’s not round”. She held the “s” in ‘Wild Is The Wind’ with a caressing hiss, finding the song’s sultry exoticism, before turning it into gospel-scat and getting the Sussex crowd to clap on the off-beat. The sense we’d all be welcome back at her place in Hastings, especially if we brought our own bottle, meant Carroll’s melancholy skill stayed invitingly entertaining. Stilgoe, Shaw and Martin joined her for this extremely good-humoured Summit’s big finish.

The last time I saw Saturday’s first act, Bobby Wellins, was at the Glasgow Jazz Festival in 2013, headlining alone when his friend and musical partner Stan Tracey had to cancel that morning, as the illness which killed him that year started to bite. Wellins seemed bottomlessly sad then, and that is always somewhere in his nature. But on his 79th birthday, he appeared happy and purposeful, and played gorgeously. With Geoff Simkins’ alto partnering his sax, backed by the Gareth Williams Trio, Wellins was a busy bandleader, thinking and pecking at arrangements as he went in consultation with Simkins. His lines were inevitably on the short side, but the cool worldliness of his tone, its sense of interior, subdued soulfulness, remained. Hawkish, his quizzical look as others played became hood-eyed focus when he stepped commandingly forward. His first solo on ‘It Never Entered My Mind’ had a huge, breathy sadness. ‘See You, CB’, his tribute to his hero Clifford Brown, by contrast saw Wellins and Simkins in unison for a glistening, big city strut. The soul-jazz-style ‘The Promised Land’ referred to the country of Wellins’ beloved Americans, and their revelatory post-war visits. He ghosted through the repertoire they taught him. Young local musicians watched agog from the bar, learning themselves. The old stager even blew out all the birthday cake candles Martin presented him with. “There goes the diet – thankfully,” he purred. The crowd left floating on this music’s warmth.

Martin Edwards’ Cloggz (above) completed an unlikely but complimentary double-bill. Like everyone over the weekend, he communicated his music’s pleasure (Whiplash seemed a world away). The circus is the wellspring of Cloggz’ upcoming album. This was emphasised by back-projections of human cannonballs, and traumatised kids watching Punch and Judy during ‘Souvenir’’s bittersweet seaside waltz. Initially fox-masked bassist Terry Pack added to a highly visual show. With Julian Nicholas on sax and clarinet, banjo, accordion and harmonium among the instrumentation, they veered from woozy klezmer to the Big Top surrealism of Fellini favourite Nino Rota (though it was Morricone, with his Latin American theme from The Mission, whose music was covered). Imogen Ryall added hugely effective vocals and gospel-torch-song lyrics to Brad Mehldau’s ‘When It Rains’. Nicholas starred on his own ‘Mrs. Mephistopheles’, a giddy, spiral staircase of a tune. Then Edwards himself played rolling shivers of saloon-bar piano on Tom Waits’ ‘Johnsburg, Illinois’, before violinist Ben Sarfas’s star turn on John Williams’ ‘Schindler’s List’ theme brought out a stately, Yiddish flavour, and deep European blues. This good-humoured, strange brew was another great hit.

Peter Long’s Echoes of Ellington Orchestra and The Mingus Underground Octet wrapped things up on Sunday, bringing jazz’s great composers and big bands into the festival fold. There has to be another one in 2016.

– Nick Hasted

– Photos by Tim Dickeson