Lakecia Benjamin lights up Leuven Jazz Festival

On his latest album StandArt, Tigran Hamasyan shows how jazz standards can also be played. With this record in his luggage, the Armenian pianist dropped by Leuven Jazz, together with Canadian bassist Rick Rosato and US drummer Jonathan Pinson. Leuven Jazz is a fine festival in the lively, historic student city of Leuven, not far from Belgium's capital Brussels, which is home to Belgium's largest and most important university dating back to the 15th century. The now ten-day event celebrated its 10th anniversary this year. To have someone like Hamasyan at this jubilee edition is wonderful, because the little Armenian is quite a big man on the keys. His piano playing is lively, complex, edgy and bubbling over with ideas, often infused with melodies from his homeland. The latter is not the case with StandArt, but the project is nevertheless exciting. The trio skilfully alienates the familiar melodies, varies them in tempo, takes them apart to reassemble them with shimmering piano notes. A standard like 'I Didn't Know What Time It Was' sometimes gets dragging hip-hop grooves mixed in. Really cool - even though Hamasyan didn't speak a single syllable during his entire concert, not even he was introducing his musicians.

Lakecia Benjamin and her quartet in the venerable Schouwburg in the heart of Leuven were much more communicative. Dressed in gold, the chatty US saxophonist and composer started her tour de force without much warm-up, with Coltrane pieces and material from her new album Phoenix, produced by Terri Lyne Carrington. Drummer E.J. Strickland relentlessly pushed the alto saxophonist forward in a performance like an energy booster. Intense, with cutting alto sax lines, but also with music with attitude. Then Benjamin skilfully rapped about self-determination, freedom or peace.

The final of the B-Jazz 2023 competition for young Belgian jazz talents will not take place until the summer in Ghent, but there was an interesting preliminary round in Leuven at the festival with four young bands, one of which will travel to Ghent. It will be the Belgian-Dutch quartet Anti-Panopticon by Belgian saxophonist and composer Lennert Baerts. Formed in 2019, the four-piece impresses with melody-loving, emotionally played material that moves in the fairway of mainstream jazz but stands out pleasantly thanks to its mature compositional structures and truly beautiful melodies. The only 19-year-old Belgian guitarist Eliott Knuets was also convincing with his newly formed quartet with the French pianist Noé Sécula. On the first weekend of the festival, he was even given a Carte Blanche for a concert, which he then performed with the US pianist Aaron Parks. And a band like the KAU trio, based in Brussels, showed how much young, hip Brit jazz in the style of Kamaal Williams has also found a following in Belgium.

The local LUCA Big Band, made up of students from the LUCA School of Arts in Leuven, entertained on the last evening of the festival with a programme focusing on South Africa. A great template for joyful moments for the Belgian-based South African singer Tutu Puoane, who also knew how to sing a powerful protest song like Nina Simone's Four Women in such a way that it went straight under the skin. With singer Adja Fassa and her project Adja, the festival ended with a promising voice of the Belgian music scene that was just taking off. With an easy-going mixture of neo-soul, R&B and jazz, a little spirituality and, especially for this evening, a few Nina Simone songs, the young Belgian and her lush band, including two background singers who were, however, a little underemployed, showed her great potential.