In complete contrast to Friday, Saturday in Cheltenham dawned in bright with warm sunshine, much to the delight of the audiences. The Saturday Parabola programme featured five very different events, starting with the regular student project which Cheltenham produced with support from the Birmingham Conservatoire. LINK TO REVIEW
The second event came from Charlotte Keeffe’s Right Here, Right Now Quartet, featuring Ashley John Long on double bass, Ben Handysides on drums, and Moss Freed on guitar, with Keeffe on trumpet and flugelhorn. On stage, Keeffe is an enthusiastic communicator about her music. Free improvisation may seem complex, but she explains her love of squeaking and growling sounds, engages the audience in chanting the name of her band, and shows her enjoyment in a way that’s totally infectious.
After that came a project that was a bit of a departure for the Parabola. David Ola’s Lucumi Project is an Afro-Caribbean carnival band built around Ola’s powerful drumming, with three steel pan players plus sax and trumpet. The project was designed to tell stories about the movement of the African diaspora, although shortened versions of these were featured on Saturday. The music, however, stands in its own right: infectious Afrobeat and Cuban rhythms, with some fierce improvising, would have had the audience on their feet dancing had there been space. The Lucumi Project have a gig booked in June at the home of carnival, the Tabernacle in Notting Hill, where they will perform their full show.
In complete contrast, the next event featured Kit Downes on piano with vocalist Norma Winstone. This was a duo performance featuring intimate music that will appear on an ECM album later this year. Winstone may be 82, but she neither looks nor sounds it. She may use less vocal pyrotechnics than in her youth, but instead her voice has a warmth that you can touch. Downes has been a regular at Cheltenham for many years, and has graduated from bright newcomer to legend in no time. He has always been a fine solo pianist, and we heard some of that, but in this duo he has adapted that skill into being the perfect accompanist.
