Tao, Glasgow Jazz Festival review: 'delicate drum patter and mournful trumpet'
Drummer Roan Anderson and his quartet are the latest RSA alumni to light up the Glasgow Jazz Festival, writes Fiona Shepherd
Tao, Drygate, Glasgow ★★★★
Glasgow Jazz Festival, the city’s longest running music festival, is proudly marking its 40th edition this year with 40 shows, including a return to its spiritual home in the Old Fruitmarket, the atmospheric venue festival organizers (including long-running artistic director Jill Rodger) helped to create back in 1993.
Greenock drummer Roan Anderson wasn’t even born then, but he and his gifted peers from the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland’s jazz course have become the heartbeat of this festival. They are a small annual cohort but routinely punch above their weight, a revival scene worth celebrating.
Anderson went on to be named BBC Scotland Young Jazz Musician of the Year 2025 and he kicked off this year’s festival with his band Tao, a quartet of “best friends” completed by bassist Chris Quinn, trumpeter Liam O’Neil and Ewan Johnston on keys, all rigged out in indoor shades for that photosensitive chic.
Perhaps deliberately, their opening tune was titled Dimming Light. Johnston set up a gothic organ drone, layered with delicate drum patter and mournful, dubby trumpet which built to a reverberating siren cry accompanied by lithe, powerful bass and some glistening licks on keys.
Revive was a more laidback proposition with haunting trumpet and a luscious and lyrical piano solo. West Graham Street made the titular West End thoroughfare sound like the location of a rainy film noir while Swept Away was a mellow funk-tinged meander with a heroic fuzz bass solo and an outbreak of Bob James-style synth wibble. Changing their tune again, they unleashed a quasi-doom metal bassline and heavy rock drumming leavened by lightning trumpet trills and twinkling keys.
In Anderson’s words, this “a lotness” was countered with a “chill” cover of Elliott Smith's Angeles before they marked the release of new track Emotionally Unintelligent with scrapper bassline and querulous trumpet, mellowed out by the languid scatting of guest vocalist Hannah Findlay.
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