EIF music reviews: JLCO Plays Ellington | Up Late: Jazz Jam

JLCO Plays Ellington, Usher Hall ★★★★★

Wynton Marsalis’s Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra turns Duke Ellington’s music into an opera that sings in all the world’s voices. So Ellington, as a vastly travelled diplomat for the US State Department in the mid 20th century, must seem the perfect musician to bring focus to the present uneasy celebrations of US independence.

The orchestra is astonishing: it breathes together and swings together around bursts of exultant virtuosity. Five saxophones croon, burp and swirl in front of erupting, shining brass. Bass, percussion and piano pad like panthers. Nothing is ever excessive, even when the sound becomes bold, then enormous.

A catalogue of great numbers introduced a dancing line of tremendous soloists, the most startling, perhaps, the remarkable Summer Comargo whose trumpet told stories of outrage, serenity and hilarity.

In Black, Brown And Beige, written for Carnegie Hall, Ellington hoped to give African-Americans a deeper historical sense of themselves that would expresses the complexity of the African American experience, from the horrors of slavery to the cultural renaissance and activist struggles of the 1930s and 40s.

The music’s clear voice, setting straight our smug official white histories, is profoundly emotional, yet tight and brilliant. All Rise, we’ve been told. With JLCO, we flew. Mary Miller

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Up Late: Jazz Jam, The Hub ★★★★

This late-nighter radiated talent, both mature and emergent, as the seasoned duo of pianist Joe Webb and drummer Domo Branch steered the aspiring youngsters they were mentoring in the festival’s Rising Stars of Jazz strand, plus American guests, through a hugely satisfying programme of jazz classics.

Youngsters and guests alike stepped up to the plate with a vengeance, delivering punchy brass chorales and impressively fluid tenor and alto saxophone solos – prompting enthusiastic audience responses.

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There were many highlights – not least the sassy mute trumpet squalling from Summer Camargo, Liam O’Neil and Anthony Hervey in the Petersen-Terry number Brotherhood Of Man, saxophonists Paloma Cobbs Silva, Arda Daltaban and Zoe Downs trading phrases with panache in Sonny Rollins’s Tenor Madness, then the laid-back stateliness of Goodbye Pork Pie Hat. A trio spot from Webb, Branch and double bassist Enzo Keyan Mpore, meanwhile, brought gospel-inflected dignity to Hymn To Freedom.

A rollicking take on Jerome Kern’s All The Things You Are saw beefy brass responses to Douglas Wright’s piano and there was a fine duet between Webb and Silva on clarinet in Earl Hines’s Blues In Thirds, before an ensemble delivery of Branch’s own Blues For The World brought things to an exuberantly swinging close. Jim Gilchrist

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