Mark Kavuma, Liane Carroll, Jackson Mathod and more get the Palace Pier swinging at the first Brighton Jazz Festival

The first Brighton Jazz Festival in many years is a daring end of the pier show, staged a third of a mile out above the deadly, storm-churned Channel. The Palace Pier is otherwise closed at night, revealing a secret, atmospheric world of urban foxes, haunted house and giant tea-cup attractions which gain surreal eeriness in the dark. With Brighton’s Verdict Jazz Club and nearby Glynde’s Love Supreme in abeyance, local promoters Eddie Myer and Jack Kendon have braved Covid with these five nights “from the deep tradition to the cutting edge”.

Pianist and singer Liane Carroll starts the week with multi-reedist Julian Siegel. Carroll typically times a yarn involving a bathing woman’s tap-trapped toe, a plumber and Acker Bilk’s bowler hat with showstopping hilarity but, with Siegel’s drolly supportive bass clarinet, also finds kind faith in the playboy theme ‘Alfie’. There’s a throaty drag on Carroll’s voice, older and earthier than before, as she sings ‘Give Me Sunshine’, scatting her mantra of “love and love and love”. Nina Simone’s ‘Sinnerman’ has its words smeared and composer’s rattling-paced piano mined, matched by Siegel’s racing, riverine soprano sax. The battered, proud romance of Tom Waits’ ‘Picture in a Frame’, with its suitor “calling in my Wednesday best”, finds Carroll’s head flung back and Siegel soaring too, as the careworn singer finds ecstatic liberation in the song.     

The Sara Oschlag Quintet are more traditional American Songbook interpreters. Opening Cole Porter’s ‘I Love You’, though, Jason Henson’s soft, slow tumble of acoustic guitar notes and Oschlag’s singing of the death’s-bed words are an oasis of beauty, before Chris Coull’s clarion trumpet. They support Alan Barnes and David Newton, straightahead masters who play with delicate, warmly romantic introspection. Ellington’s ‘The Mooche’ is Harlem exotica with Barnes’ breathy clarinet swing and Newton’s fluttering stride piano, his ‘Tonight I Will Sleep With A Smile On My Face’ a wartime V-disc obscurity played with drowsy baritone sax and the piano’s lullaby comfort. Newton is sedentary, silent straight man to Barnes’ dry wit, recalling the great Southern soul keyboardist Spooner Oldham in his personal abstraction and professional purpose. Their latest CD, Ask Me Now, is impossible to meaningfully turn up, and live too, limpid understatement defines them.

Howes3’s double-bill with trumpeter Jackson Mathod, by contrast, really feels like Friday night for a packed, dancing student crowd, Howes3’s heavy, high-volume fusion mildly recalling Miles’ Agharta-era darkness on ‘Fuck the System’. Jazz outlier Jackson Mathod’s band (pictured above with saxophonist Emma Rawicz) is unrulier in support. “Crank it up!” he hoarsely pleads on ‘Come On Now’, with its rubbery bassline and Afrobeat hints. As a session musician, Mathod played Glastonbury with Stormzy, and he deals in raw thrills.

Mark Kavuma & The Banger Factory were forged in Brixton club nights, and fuse London’s new jazz generation’s freshness with unabashed devotion to the bop the trumpeter’s peers bury deep in their DNA. Tonight’s nonet has near-big band power. Veteran tenor Mussinghi Brian Edwards, though, leads a dreamy tune shivering with impressionistic colour, and a David Mrakpor vibes solo is magical, suspending time as he picks out resonant, glowing patterns. ‘The Banger Factory’ lets the alto scream, before Kavuma waves in a smoky Edwards coda. “I can die happy now,” one exhilarated punter gasps.

The intergenerational QOW Trio (above) places promoter/bassist Eddie Myer next to iconic drummer/vicar Spike Wells and young saxophonist Riley Stone-Lonergan, the latter speedily dexterous on Charlie Parker’s ‘Cheryl’. Stone-Lonergan is all tone and feeling on ‘God Bless the Child’ as Wells breaks out the brushes and mallets, while Myer’s hard-plucked, low funk pulses beneath Dewey Redman’s ‘Qow’. The band’s laughing contentment at their exchanges demonstrates their unassuming but exacting purpose. The Terry Seabrook Quintet then close the week by celebrating Wayne Shorter’s music, the air slurring with the brass’s careening passage in ‘Prince of Darkness’. Shorter’s 1973 tribute to his then wife, ‘Ana Maria’, is a ballad both oriental and occult in its emotionally rich shadows and sunbursts of bliss, qualities also explored in Seabrook’s three-movement tribute ‘A Shorter Suite’. As the pier shuts, Brighton jazz breathes again.