Ambrose Akinmusire Quartet
Samora Pinderhughes/ EOS Kammerorchester
I am spending a couple of days in Cologne, and this is going to be the first of three concert reviews from Cologne Jazz Week. CJW is a major festival, with a lot going on all over town, and I am just dipping in to the programme while I am here, rather than trying to do justice to the whole venture
Both halves of the Sunday night double bill I heard – Ambrose Akinmusire’s Quartet followed by singer/songwriter Samora Pinderhughes with newly-minted arrangements of his songs with chamber orchestra – showed how much deeper and fuller the live experience always is. The concert took place in the 800-seater concert hall of the Cologne’s music Hochschule with a lot of musicians in the audience. Note to myself for next time: this hall has a no bags/no cases rule which is enforced with implacable rigour.
Ambrose Akinmusire was in his regular quartet with Harish Raghavan on bass, Justin Brown on drums and Sam Harris, piano. If one goes back to albums by this group such as “A Rift in Decorum” from 2017 and “On the Tender Spot of Every Calloused Moment” from 2020, it is clear how far this group has come. Akinmusire’s range of floaty tonal colours and control has become a real treasure trove. Perhaps he was also thinking forward to a solo trumpet show in an abbey later in the festival…Harish Raghavan just plays with more heft and authority, Sam Harris is the explorer of both simple and complex things and he has more freedom to roam, and Justin Brown has even more latitude to explode and dominate. A group which has found its way of being by staying together and gigging over several years is becoming rarer, but it makes a group like this which has grown and deepened what it does all the more welcome.
Cologne’s EOS chamber orchestra, formed in 2008, has a raison d’etre of finding its players opportunities to play in other contexts than the classical canon, and fine bassist/arranger Hendrika Entzian has risen through the ranks to be co-director. Her orchestrations of songs by singer-songwriter Samora Pinderhughes, performed with two close collaborators of the singer – second voice Daniela Murcia and electric bass Joshua Crumbly – gave depth, atmosphere heft and scale to Pinderhughes’s songs. The whole programme had been given just one day in rehearsal involving Pinderhughes, there was also one arrangement from a new album that needed hasty writing, but the overall effect of this set was a clear sense of calm and total professionalism, and it is to the credit of the orchestra and its conductor/ director Susanne Blumenthal – that Pinderhughes’s dual imperative of not just protesting but also healing, there so vividly in just about every song. Pinderhughes has a light and ethereal voice, and for it to have been caught in such good balance with an orchestra for this one-off performance was also impressive.
