Lavery are a painterly eight-piece from Dublin, freshly formed in 2023, with a single What I Want and the a three- track EP Jade Garden behind them. Their confident EFG London Jazz Festival debut at the Bull’s Head, Barnes, was a tantalising look forward to their next recording sessions in January, and a fine introduction to a precociously realized vision.
Singer Anelise Furkin has the power and grace of a complete and versatile jazz chanteuse, but something else too. She speaks frankly between songs about “my struggles with being a musician: when you’re gonna give up, and think ‘Now I’ll get a tech job‘, the struggles between the uneases within me..” Her honesty is disarming. When she reaches into her soul she reaches into yours as well.
“Anemone” was written while struggling with anxiety, “mixing up stuff that happened and was gonna happen.” Anemone foregrounds her vocal presence and complex personality, with a soaring vocal and a killer tempo change. “Little By Little” describes the paralysis of “the feeling like you can’t do it”. The songs are invested in personal meaning, demons and doubts but communicated with a resonating force, and the octet conveys the emotional charge through sensitively forceful arrangements, tempo changes, and a collaborative creativity of their friendly band dynamic.
As-yet unrecorded tune “Algae” features some of the band’s characteristic not-so-secret weapons: a deft key change, a facility with change of tempo, time signature or feel. They pass through a key change and where “What I Want” moves into a faster tempo, “Algae” slips into waltz time, and then the ‘hole in the song’ or eye of the storm where the band develop material atmospherically. The emotive vocals and swelling brass rise to an emotive ending. They have a mastery of structure, taking you on a journey all in the one song, epic episodic structures travailing through breathy scene setting, rising tension, explosive dynamic, restraint, the eye of the storm, the mysterious interlude and reinvigorating reprise.
Aido Kimura‘s rich electric bass tone is a mainstay, characterising the band and adaptable to any of their soul, jazz, and eclectic impulses. The format gives them modest space to speak to individual personality. The distinctive personalities of the soloists are deployed sympathetically between tunes, with Martin Farrelly‘s energising trombone, and between the two saxophones the jazz brain of Rory Fleming on tenor and the soul heart of Richard Ng on alto.
Listening ahead to the EP, they absolutely had me at “Saudade”, the untranslatable Portuguese word embracing a complex skein of personal and historical yearning and loss. Anelise Furkin is Brazilian from Salvador where her family is based. “I miss them deeply” she mourns, and the ‘home feel’ of language and theme gives the song both class and depth of feeling. Based around an interpolated/altered bossa nova feel (nicely handled by Keith “KJ “Jordan on drums” with Kaelan Zipoli on piano), the heart of the arrangement is the horns, which are replayed dynamically by the band, rich but never quite overpowering or fussing the song.
Anelise Furkin’s hero is Esperanza Spalding, who introduced her to jazz (in a musical sense; in a personal sense it was her dad). “I Know You Know” is solidly realised but sounds comparatively conventional in the midst of their own burgeoning crossover style. Interestingly, her comment on Mongo Santamaría’s 1969 jazz standard “Afro Blue”, “We would love this song to be ours but it isn’t”, felt redundant. Miles Davis’s 1958 standard “Nardis” — with another significant tempo change— is characteristic of the group approach, which is to be “the vessel of what the song wants to be” through their own distinctive personality and deep groove.
Such emotionally rich music weirdly reminds me in a good way of Evanescence. If jazz emo could or should exist, I’m absolutely here for it: it’s accessible but feels deep. On “What I Want” she sings “I want something real/ Someone I can be myself still”. Introducing the set closer “Amiuge” (the Portuguese word for “often”) the lyrics dramatise a dire impulse: “If this is all you have to give me even if it’s just this I’ll take it.” Talking about these crumbs, Anelise Furkin says “I started writing about love a lot recently: a breakup that was hard and still is hard— thinking about it and not being able to say it: the habit of waiting for crumbs, and thinking you have to stick around.” Then she looks directly at you and states, “And you don’t, and I didn’t.” She wards against “losing yourself before losing someone else,” advising “Keep chasing yourself, folks.”
