Claire Cope is an interpreter of tales. The pianist’s latest compositions, inspired by female explorers and written for an eleven-piece ensemble, rise and fall across dramatic narrative arcs. One can only hear a ten-minute musical hero’s journey so many times before getting the idea, but Cope’s Ellingtonian knowledge of how best to utilise her wildly talented band injected the tunes with dynamism and variety regardless. Alternately trudging and bounding through vast harmonic landscapes, Ensemble C re-imagined the path-breaking journeys undertaken by its leader’s muses and transplanted their grandiosity into a Hammersmith basement.
For the most part, Ensemble C faithfully recreated the just-released Every Journey. Save for a mix-up regarding the form in second set opener ‘Amboseli’, the band cruised through ninety minutes of multifaceted works with an ease that belied the surely difficult task of wrangling eleven gigging musicians from their bases across the country. Cope acknowledged Maria Schneider, Pat Metheny, and Kenny Wheeler’s vital Music for Large and Small Ensembles as influences, and her bouncier tunes reflected contemporary works from arrangers such as Jim McNeely and Miho Hazama. She also displayed a gift for crafting surprising textures, such as the blend of keyboard and guitar swells that opened the set, or the stirring moment on The Birch and the Larch when the sound of a tinny, muted trumpet emerged from guitarist Ant Law’s jangling acoustic strums like a desperate cry from one of the song’s doomed lovers.
Vocalist Brigitte Beraha had her moments, including a nimble dialogical improvisation with flugelhornist Mike Soper on ‘Home’, but there were imprecisions too. Beraha’s greatest contribution to Ensemble C — demonstrated with aplomb throughout Every Journey — is her pristine clarity of tone, enabling Cope to deploy her often as a sixth horn and imbue thickly-voiced chords with an airy lightness. It therefore speaks to both the tightness of the horn section and Beraha’s essentiality to it that her momentary slips in live performance were even noticeable, but that they sometimes marred an otherwise sharp performance.
Catching saxophonist Matt Carmichael out of his Scottish folk-jazz comfort zone was a real treat. The Glaswegian star featured on ‘Flight’, a hard-grooving standout from the album made punchier still in person by unison lines from Anoushka Nanguy on trombone and Rob Cope (whose baritone sax solo on ‘Isabel’ was another highlight) on bass clarinet. While patiently building memorable motifs and bluesy articulations into blistering, register-spanning runs, Carmichael showed how much character his breathy, voice-like affect can lend to a composer’s palette.
Carmichael’s solo was one of many moments enhanced by the percussion duo of Jon Ormston and Jack McCarthy. Despite generating onslaughts of sound, the two — Ormston on drum kit and McCarthy on auxiliary percussion — never stepped on each other’s toes. They wove busy textures from interlocking hand drum patterns, dotted shimmering chimes into guitarist Ant Law’s inventive comping, and kicked the beat into high gear at just the right moments to push Cope’s sprawling stories to greater heights. Even frantic closer ‘That Nabongo Feeling’, which rushed to the edge of total dissipation, held together to the finish line thanks to Ormston and McCarthy’s infectious chemistry. With a full round of solos astride a restless, shifting groove, the piece provided an energetic finale to a triumphant evening.
