Festival Pavilion, Museum Green, Swansea. 14 June 2024.
For the 2024 Swansea International Jazz Festival – which coincides with Sir Karl Jenkins’ 80th birthday year – Festival Director Dave Cottle and Sir Karl got together with Laurence Cottle and hatched a great idea, billed in the festival programme as Sir Karl “returning to jazz for the first time in fifty years.” As he told John Fordham in THIS INTERVIEW: “We got to thinking about my 80th birthday and connection with the festival, and came up with the idea of some new arrangements for tunes I’d written for Graham Collier, Nucleus and Soft Machine, with Laurie’s big band playing them.”
Sir Karl has been the festival’s Patron for some years. Laurence’s big band have also appeared at the festival a couple of times. In 2018, for example, the band played a program of Tower Of Power repertoire.
Sir Karl and Laurence were born, nearly eighteen years apart, within 8 miles of each other in the Swansea area. They have previously worked together on some of Sir Karl’s projects, including music for adverts.
For this concert, the arranging duties were split between Sir Karl for the first half and Laurence for the second. Originally the pieces weren’t written for a big band line-up, so adaptation was needed, and since no scores for some of the pieces, these had to be transcribed from the original recordings.
The concert began by Sir Karl giving some background and context for the pieces in the programme. He mentioned the 1966 Barry Jazz Summer School which he attended as a student as being the place where he met Graham Collier, who then asked him to join his group. He also said that for him, 1966 is also inescapably associated with the Aberfan colliery disaster, an event which he later wrote a work about “Cantata Memoria: For the Children/Er Mwyn y Plant”.
The first piece was “Down Another Road” from which the concert got its title. This was originally featured on a Graham Collier group album of the same name. It’s got a funky rock type groove but is actually in 5/4 time. Solos were by Ben Waghorn on baritone sax, Nichol Thompson on trombone and Graeme Blevins on alto sax.
Another piece from the same original album “Lullaby For A Lonely Child” followed. This piece has a nice slow groove in 6 and harmonically in parts is similar to “Resolution” from John Coltrane’s “A Love Supreme” which had only been written a few years earlier. This featured solos by Sid Gauld on flugelhorn and Trevor Mires on trombone.
Other pieces in the first half of the concert were a nice ballad entitled “Theme For An Unmade Movie” which featured Nigel Hitchcock on alto and Mark Nightingale on trombone.
“Elastic Rock” was a piece originally recorded on a Nucleus album of the same name and this was described as being a 4/4 beat with some ‘elastic’ bars, which I guess is where the name comes from. This featured solos by Sid Gauld and Rob Fowler on tenor sax.
The first half closer was a complete contrast, an re-working of a much more modern piece “Rosa” from the “Adiemus Colores” album. This was only originally recorded in 2013 and is in the style which most people would associate with Sir Karl. It has a Samba type feel to it and featured solos by Laurence Cottle on bass, Tom Walsh on trumpet and Jim Watson on piano.
Most of the second half of the concert was taken up with “Penumbra II”, a suite which had been originally written for BBC Jazz Club broadcast in 1971.
The first movement starts off with a solo piano introduction and for this Sir Karl came out of the audience and played. The melody and harmony of this were reminiscent of a Kenny Wheeler type piece. Once the movement was established the distinctive sound of Nigel Hitchcock’s alto sax was heard to good effect plus a feature for James Copus on trumpet. The second movement which had a funk shuffle type groove featured Jim Watson, Nigel Hitchcock and Martin Williams on tenor sax, and the final movement featured Harry Maund on trombone.
The concert ended with another piece originally from the “Adiemus Colores” album “Amarilla” (meaning ‘yellow’). This piece has a sort of Mexican Mariachi type feel to it with the trumpets playing in that characteristic way. This featured Nigel Hitchcock plus a drum and percussion interlude featuring Ed Richardson and Max Mills. The sound engineering by Tony ‘Splinter’ Davis was excellent throughout.
To sum up, a really interesting and exciting concert showing the jazz repertoire from a long time ago, together with some more recent pieces by one of the world’s major living composers, and played by one of the UK’s top big bands.
Laurence Cottle Big Band
Saxophones : Nigel Hitchcock, Graeme Blevins, Rob Fowler, Martin Williams, Ben Waghorn
Trumpets: Tom Walsh, Sid Gauld. Andy Greenwood, James Copus
Trombones: Mark Nightingale, Nichol Thomson, Trevor Mires, Harry Maund
Piano: Jim Watson
Drums: Ed Richardson
Percussion: Max Mills
Bass: Laurence Cottle
One Response
Excellent review. Little known fact: the rousing fanfare section of the third part of Penumbra II later appeared as “Fanfare”, the opening track on Soft Machine 6.