Isaiah Collier, Meshell Ndegeocello, Joel Ross and Vincent Herring’s Something Else among the highlights at North Sea Jazz 2024

The North Sea Jazz Festival is where the American Big Beasts go, and it’s no surprise that they do: based at Rotterdam’s Ahoy complex, North Sea is apparently the world’s largest indoor music festival, with a dozen large arenas and a handful of smaller stages hosting 75,000 visitors annually.

Artist in Residence this year was the genre-defying singer and bassist Meshell Ndegeocello (below), who presented a different performance each day in three different venues. On the first night she appeared with a fine band including Sons of Kemet’s Tom Skinner on drums and Justin Hicks on vocals – the latter with a range that eerily resembles Meshell’s own. As one would expect, this was a powerful, fiercely political gig: she harbours angry contempt for much that goes on in the USA and specialises in forthright pronouncements like “We won’t fight your filthy battles”. She quoted James Baldwin’s “Hatred, which could destroy so much, never failed to destroy the one who hated”. The confrontational messages are tempered with beguiling melodies and sinuous funk grooves, including a rubato version of ‘Feel Like Making Love’. In more than three decades as a pioneering crossover artist, Meshell Ndegeocello has never sounded better.

Chicago-born saxophonist Isaiah Collier had an equally trenchant political message, delivered Black Power-style in shades, a Palestinian keffiyeh and a small black toque: “You said freedom has a price, but is that freedom worth your life?” Once again this was urgent, passionate music, much of it in the free-floating Pharoah Sanders vein, but often Collier’s rasping tenor spoke beautifully of injustice and human suffering. At one point he screamed through a miniature loudhailer. But there was sweetness as well as rage, with long rippling cadenzas from his band The Chosen Few, which featured Johnathan Blake on drums and our very own Ashley Henry on piano. Collier turned out to possess a fine tenor voice, and by the end he had the audience singing about peace and love in three-part harmony.

Young vibes supremo Joel Ross (below) was another festival highlight. His Good Vibes band of young virtuosos play fresh and urgent swinging jazz in a familiar tradition, but with its own contemporary character. Like Milt Jackson (and our own Nat Steele), Ross plays the vibraphone with just a pair of mallets, which means his focus is on lightning fast runs rather than the more chord-based approach of most modern players, who generally use four. His terrific ensemble includes Maria Grand, a cool hipster of the tenor saxophone, and bassist Kanoa Mendenhall, who has a warm, busy and inventive style. While the tunes were mostly culled from Ross’s recent Nublues album, which features versions of ‘Central Park West’ and ‘Equinox’, they finished with Coltrane’s ballad ‘After the Rain’, which Ross recorded for his 2020 collection Who Are You.

Elsewhere around the Festival it was standing-room only for guitarist Kurt Rosenwinkel and an all-star band that included long-time collaborators Mark Turner on tenor, Ben Street on bass and Jeff Ballard on drums. The leader drew on material - ‘Zhivago’, ‘A Shifting Design’ and ‘Filters’ - that this line-up recorded for his 2000 album The Next Step, finally including the title track, on which Rosenwinkel switched to piano. This was a tight, disciplined set in which the improvisation took place within clear parameters.

André 3000’s New Blue Sun was the polar opposite - free-improvised electronica from start to finish, performed on a stage enveloped in almost total darkness apart from a curiously refracted laser beam. André Benjamin is better-known as half of the rap duo Outkast, who had a worldwide hit in 2003 with the tune ‘Hey Ya’. Here, he played a variety of flute-like instruments including an ocarina, some kind of Lyricon and a flute the size of a drainpipe. It was impressionistic, futuristic music, performed with a jungly backing of hand-percussion and rippling synthesisers.

By contrast, listening to Vincent Herring’s jazz-funk band Something Else was like sliding your feet into a comfy pair of slippers at the end of a hard day. Mingus Big Band alumnus Dave Kikoski (piano) shone in the Joe Zawinul role, as did drummer Joris Dudli, drafted in at very short notice after Lewis Nash apparently broke his leg getting out of the bath.