We have also covered:
James Brandon Lewis – Byron Wallen (Jon Turney)
Flight Call – Jazz Concert for Schools (John Watson
Conservatoire Exchange Concert – Parabola Arts Centre Programme (Peter Slavid)
Lady Nade sings Nina Simone – Kokoroko – Nubya Garcia (AJ Dehany)
The concerts covered in this round-up are: Billy Cobham, Keyon Harrold, Neil Cowley Trio, Georgia Mancio and Alan Broadbent, Claire Martin, Blind Boys of Alabama, Olivia Murphy Orchestra, Aria Soul, Jools Holland and his Rhythm and Blues Orchestra, Buena Vista Social Club, Ni Maxine, Submotion Orchestra, Misty In Roots
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The first post-war Cheltenham Music Festival took place in 1945 with just three classical music concerts. Doesn’t sound like much, but Cheltenham was a key part of Britain defining its peacetime future as a coupling of progress and nationalism. There are now four festivals each year, each of an international flavour: literature, science, classical music, and of course jazz. In 2022 we celebrated the 25th edition of the jazz festival. In 2025 we are celebrating the 80th anniversary of the original festival.
Someone else is also 80 (until 16 May when he’ll turn 81)… so let’s dive straight into Cheltenham Town Hall on Saturday afternoon with Jazz Legend of the weekend Billy Cobham. He’s one of the architects of jazz-rock-funk-fusion, and his Time Machine Band dove deeply into his 1970s heyday in a set that was admittedly nostalgic with cuts including “Red Baron” and “Stratus” from 1973, “Total Eclipse” from 1974, and “Tinsel Town” bringing it right up to 1986. It was a full-on double order of chops with a side order of chops, with Cobham still spectacular behind that menacing double kick kit, with a stupendously tight and disciplined band including Gary Husband on keys (electric piano with amp distortion in full service), Antonio Baldino on trumpet, Björn Arkö on saxophone, Rocco Zifarelli on guitar, Andrea Andreali on trombone, and Victor Cisternas on bass. The fast and furious funk fusion was hungrily devoured by a reverent audience including a trainload of all the London shredding guitarists.
Cheltenham Town Hall seems to have been a major haunt for me, where I saw and reviewed Kokoroko, finding the South London band deserving of a mainstream breakthrough, and in Nubya Garcia, a homegrown saxophone diva in full flight at the end of a long US tour. The festival’s decision to make many of these concerts standing shows was mostly vindicated by such performances.
Misty In Roots maybe got closest to getting me shuffling. Like Billy Cobham, their heyday might have been in the 1970s but they are the absolute template for crossover British roots reggae, still as relevant and committed as ever, still making tough music for tough times. Gospel group The Blind Boys of Alabama have been around even longer, though not with the same lineup given that they were founded in 1939. Their physical blindness and their religious faith drive their overcoming music, though their songbook has a touch of the profane in the sacred, ranging from “Amazing Grace” to “Way Down In The Hole” (their version being familiar as the theme for the first season of The Wire). The guitarist led one of the blind singing trio in a walk around the hall to shake hands with everyone, and it was a great moment of shared humanity.
The Parabola Arts Theatre programme featured the two gigs I most regret missing: Minorcan pianist Marco Mezquida, evidently the discovery of the weekend, and Musho – Sofia Jernberg & Alexander Hawkins, with the British pianist and birthday boy reportedly at the top of his game. The Parabola is where they put on all the serious jazzer’s jazz and Peter Slavid reviewed the whole eleven-strong programme curated by Alex Carr, the eminently well-chosen successor to Tony Dudley-Evans. TDE’s commissioning of Olivia Murphy produced an outstanding new symphony-length oratorio Siren Cycle with a large-scale ensemble including some free-jazz stalwarts Charlotte Keeffe and Alice Gardener-Trejo, with Olly Chalk on piano helping to lead us through a wildly ambitious odyssey dramatising four sisters lost at sea. Its intricacies might have been lost on some of the audience, but there was no more impressive event over the whole weekend. The trio of singers also included the lady of the festival, singer Lucy-Anne Daniels, who also performed with the BBC Concert Orchestra’s Soul Jazz Summit, and NYJO again for her tribute to James Baldwin, listed as The Fire Inside.
Away from the Parabola, Dunkertons Tap House is a well-endowed craft cider drinking complex and farm shop some five kilometres out of town. On the Thursday I enjoyed another superior tribute, Lady Nade Sings Nina Simone, there.
Just as enjoyable were Georgia Mancio and the Alan Broadbent Quartet performing songs from their new album
A Story Left Untold. The singer-and-pianist partnership has gifted us some forty-two original songs over twelve years. I was impressed by their politically charged four-song sequence linked by a theme of false truths, but sadly I had to leave at minute 75 during “One for Bud”, biking back to Cheltenham Town Hall for Claire Martin.
Where Mancio and performs original songs, Martin covers the wider song repertoire, here performing an all-Gershwin concert. Hearing and learning the actual lyrics makes it much easier to follow proceedings when jazzer’s jazzers start deconstructing them, Martin is one of the most appealing voices of the mainstream, with a deft touch that helps cement Cheltenham’s long standing association with Radio 2.
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The main festival site on the beautiful Regency pleasure gardens of Montpellier features the large marquee venues the Big Top and Jazz Arena , and the free stage, where on the bright and shining Saturday afternoon I managed to catch one-to-watch nu-soul singer Aria Soul, an enticing talent supported by a highly accomplished band with backing singers, in an impressive display closing with a ten minute Gil Scott-Heron track. I think I enjoyed Aria Soul more than the slightly less-new nu-soul singer Ni Maxine earlier the same day in the Jazz Arena Showcase—though perhaps the most vital moment of the weekend for me occurred during her set of mostly smooth grooves. Maxine’s take on Nina Simone’s “Four Women” was an upsetting reading of a particularly upsetting song, with that brooding low-note piano line played on the bass with anguished electric guitar and a steely central performance from the singer making a devastating argument.
The standing space of the large marquee of the Jazz Arena was home to several other memorable concerts. Missouri-born trumpeter Keyon Harrold has worked with massive names—Glasper, Common, Nas, and even Diana Ross—and has been described by Downbeat as “the future of the trumpet.” Regardless of his humility against such embarrassments, I was genuinely surprised at the serious jazz purpose in this performance, a long concert demanding kudos as a serious jazz player with cutting edge chops rather than nostalgic nods, with some serious players in the band, Jermaine Paul on bass, Charles Haynes on drums, and Rashon Murph on keys. Opening with a half-hour swim through Freddie Hubbard and Miles Davis, and then going further out, it was great to hear the solid jazz underpinnings of tracks from his album Foreverland, barely recognisable without all that expensive production and arrangement and all those guest vocalists and MCs. A second half-hour segment was really quite moving, with Harrold talking frankly at a personal level. His singing wouldn’t win awards, but the journey was touching until it tipped over in a final fifteen minute segment proselytising on motivational mind-freeing exhortations. We all need a boost, but what we really need is jobs.
Leeds quintet Submotion Orchestra, playing from their new EP Five Points and a 16-year catalogue, brought their dense dark dubstep sound with the thickest sub-bass of the weekend, racks of synths, plenty of non-tonal electronic noises for ear-candy, overlaid with haunting flugelhorn and high female vocals, declaring an ambition to “bring you down and bring you all the way back up.” They brought some of us back up, but for others including me it just went on too long. In the same Arena, time flew by faster for Neil Cowley Trio, back from a seven-year break in a two-decade relationship, in a focused but tonally and emotionally wide-ranging set. The British trio of Cowley on piano, Rex Horan on bass, and Evan Jenkins on drums, might have been my favourite of the weekend. The music is a dramatic and passionate fusion of modernism and romanticism. Their discipline obeys a lean, angular modernity, distinguished by a creative restriction of almost finger playing with chord voicings pared to a skeletal sound that just sounds unspeakably cool.
Another favourite moment in the Jazz Arena was the Family Concert on Sunday morning. A handpicked house band The Happy Vampers entertained a melee of children and toddlers scurrying about and dancing and singing to songs like Randy Newman’s “You’ve got a friend in me” and “When the saints”, the engaging band in each case teaching a different aspect of the music: hand signals, audience response, improvisation, swung rhythm, call and response, and the blues. It was actually a great jazz explainer for anyone. I could learn a thing or two. Ingeniously comparing jazz to pizza, each player performed the same melodic snippet but each with their own individual flavour. Pete Horsfall’s njuda trumpet was particularly tasty.
This kind of appeal to families and non-specialists is the special forte of Cheltenham, even though jazzers may shake their collective heads at the state of the headliners bringing the money in. This year’s most baffling-not-baffling headliner was Roger Daltrey , closing the festival in the Big Top after I’d gone. I also missed Macy Gray
singing her massive mega-hit, but nonetheless I still have “I Try” earwormed in my head twenty-five years on. In the Big Top I also saw Buena Vista Social Club – props to them for sustaining the party all these decades. Jools Holland and his Rhythm and Blues Orchestra was directed with military precision by Holland, who is a genuinely knowledgeable music fanatic. Just as exposure on his shows can be hugely significant for upcoming artists— so Cheltenham, in its 80th year, can be important for artists coming up in the music or just ploughing lonely furrows in the fringes. It contains multitudes, with no contradiction.
With thanks to Jade Beard and the rest of the festival team for all your help in making our team so welcome.
