This concert in the wonderful setting of Symphony Hall was a triumph for Xhosa Cole and his group of musicians and for the CBSO.
The concert featured an opening set devoted to Monk with Xhosa leading a group with himself on tenor sax, Byron Wallen on trumpet, Rachael Cohen on alto sax, Pat Thomas on piano, Josh Vadiveloo on double bass and Jim Bashford on drums. Pat Thomas started proceedings with a nice surprise, playing Pannonica on a celeste as Monk does in the original recording. The horns, initially just Xhosa and Byron, but on the second piece with Rachael, moved freely in and out of various Monk tunes.
The group played without amplification; the horns came across loud and clear, but I struggled to hear Pat Thomas’ piano and Josh Vadiveloo’s bass clearly.
The second set featured Guy Barker conducting the orchestra and the jazz group in his arrangement of Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue. It was wonderful to hear the musicians led by Xhosa, mostly key players in Birmingham collaborating with members of the CBSO as a recognition of the strength of both the music and jazz scenes in the city. It would appear that the support and mentoring they receive from the scene has given them the confidence to take their place on a larger platform such as this.
Perhaps the most impressive feature of Guy Barker’s arrangement of Kind Of Blue is the way he has taken Bill Evans’ piano solos and orchestrated them for the orchestra. Also very impressive were Josh Vadiveloo’s plucked bass lines leading into the arrangement of So What, Byron Wallen’s trumpet solos, Pat Thomas’s characteristically dramatic solo feature and various beautifully paced solos from Rachael Cohen on alto sax. We even had a trombone solo from, I think, Alistair White.
The audience, mostly a CBSO audience but with a number of jazz faces, clapped the solos and clearly really enjoyed it, giving Guy Barker and the orchestra a standing ovation at the end.
Credit should also go to the CBSO programmers for their openness to other genres of music. Coming up next month they are collaborating with hiphop and grime artists in the Legacy project led and conducted by Phil Meadows and in partnership with the Stunt label.
