The fourth year of BBC Proms broadcast from the Glasshouse in Gateshead features a perfect programme to entice musical magpies, with concerts from popular repertoire and established names to high modernism and new discoveries with a pick for every pocket; a steal at Proms prices (£8 standing to match the ‘promming’ dailies at the main summer-long season at the Royal Albert Hall). It will be the first time the Proms has been televised from outside of London, with schedules yet to be announced for Little Mix pop star JADE’s stellar appearance with Royal Northern Symphony and the orchestra’s lucid concert of Bach and Mendelssohn. It’s obviously fantastic for the region, though it stings to see such largesse while we watch two organisations Jazz North East and Sunderland Boundaries specifically struggling to find support for their autumn programmes, seemingly stuck in a catch-22 of funding applications.
At least there was, among the ambitious but well-organised programme, the BBC Introducing free stage on the concourse of the Glasshouse on Saturday afternoon, presenting a broad vernacular of young artists from jazz, classical, and contemporary folk: from Smith & Liddle’s acoustic guitar & piano tribute to the sunshine pop of Laurel Canyon, the sub-bass wallop of Frankie Archer’s electro-folk murder ballads and “songs about sex and pastry”, and young folk queen of the Tees Valley Amelia Coburn’s vinegar valentines. The refreshing and effervescent Astatine Trio played Beethoven’s Piano Trio Opus 1 No. 1 with that most desired combination of flamboyant style and crisp articulation.
Fergus McCreadie above all seemed more introduced than introducing. The Mercury-nominee and Radio 3 New Generation Artist allies a sublime lyricism with the harmonic richness and technical complexity of jazz and classical influences; his jazz-folk is less the folk of Amelia Coburg or Frankie Archer than that of Ralph Vaughan Williams or, in particular, Peter Maxwell Davies. While almost psychedelically car-lagged from Suffolk’s Latitude festival, he seemed to have graced his lyrical pastoral folk jazz with a seasoning of neoclassical ornamentations for the occasion of the Proms in familiar selections (Across Flatlands, Ardberg) and new (Wayfinder). One of the less familiar and most pasticheur Theloniuous Monk pure jazz tunes, Eronel, also stretched out his wild talent into Ran Blake territory.
[The main draw for jazz aficionados had taken place one night ahead of the Gateshead programme. Frank Graham has written about the ‘Round Midnight’ recording at Sunderland’s Fire Station concert hall with Soweto Kinch presenting and playing with Rivkala, Joe Webb Trio, and Theo Croker—showcasing three key directions of neo-soul, new-nostalgia, and neo-new music (whatever you want to call it, Theo Croker is still sounding streets ahead of everyone else) – link to review below.]
The absolute highlight at Gateshead was the debut performance of Angeline Morrison’s The Sorrow Songs, an album which takes historical stories and figures from black British experience and imagines them as if they were newly-discovered lost folk songs. The group includes Eliza Carthy and Trembling Bells’ Alex Neilson. The passion of the playing and the beauty of the arrangements take your attention away from the severity of the often grisly and tragic subject matter. The Sorrow Songs is a vital, imaginative masterwork that transmutes struggle into a powerful document of uplift and pride.
The ticketed programme at Gateshead was outstanding, and I’ve never seen a homecoming artist so well-received and loved as JADE with the Sinfonia, but the overwhelming hit of the weekend—with the whole centre overrun with families—was by far and away the CBeebies Wildlife Jamboree. In the longstanding spirit of the BBC’s Reithian remit, this was comically balanced simultaneously with the most challenging concert of the weekend, Sean Shibe and Friends in Sage Two. The notoriously talented guitarist played earlier in the week at the Berlioz Prom debuting ZEBRA (or, 2-3-74: The Divine Invasion of Philip K. Dick) composed by Mark Simpson specifically for Shibe’s electric guitar. This time he brought his acoustic to Gateshead but integrated it within an ensemble of seven. His solo performance of the Proms debut of James Dillon’s 12 Caprices showcased his precocious command of dynamic playing in volume and timbre.
Cassandra Miller’s Bel Canto deconstructs Maria Callas’ recordings of Puccini’s Vissi d’arte from Tosca: as an arresting exercise in woozy glissando (Shibe even playing with a slide); it has a slow motion tragic appeal reminiscent of Gavin Bryars’ The Sinking of the Titanic. Modern classical repertoire doesn’t get more rarefied than Pierre Boulez’s 1955 chamber cantata Le Marteau sans maître (The hammer without a master), whose still otherworldly-sounding sonorities are grouped across the voice, alto flute, viola, guitar, vibraphone and xylorimba in overlapping pairs sounding in breath, monody, plucked strings, long resonance, and struck keys. This avant-garde model makes it virtually a textbook for the ‘non-idiomatic’ end of free improvisation. In this centenary year of Pierre Boulez, it is he whom we have to blame… or thank!
