Various venues, London Two of jazz's best virtuosi improvising at the speed of thought, a Pulitzer-winning artist telling the story of comics to music veering from swing to Schoenberg, a 13-year-old pianist with the touch of Herbie Hancock, and a majestic singer rooted in 150 years of gospel music were the four totally different standouts from the first two days of the 2016 London jazz festival. Saxophonist Joshua Redman and pianist Brad Mehldau, the graphic-novel genius Art Spiegelman, teenage prodigy Joey Alexander and jazz-gospel vocalist Lizz Wright were opening night stars whose diversity insisted that, if anybody still thinks jazz is only for sagely nodding silver-haired beardies, they're a very long way out of time. Redman and Mehldau startled even their seasoned fans at the Barbican on Saturday night. After Mehldau's catchily rocking Always August, and truculent tenor sax blurts and radiant falsetto sounds from Redman on his Mehlsancholy Mode, the saxophonist's ingenuity on Sonny Rollins' Sonnymoon for Two told the crowd they were witnessing a performance a cut above even this pair's usual standards. And Mehldau confirmed it in an unaccompanied break in which his control of separate melody lines let loose on the fly never lost its careering momentum. Redman (who had tweeted the single word âdreadâ as Trump won) wryly reflected on the mixture of guilt and relief they felt at taking refuge in music-making away from America, before the pair concocted streams of songlike lines, separately and together, on a bewitching visit to the ballad I Should Care; a gently introduced but increasingly frenetic burn through Mehldau's The Distance; and a standing-ovation encore with Charlie Parker's Ornithology. If it was a refuge in music, a lot of people in the hall sounded volubly grateful for it. Continue reading...
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Camille Mullens
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January 2019
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