A few months’ delay in the publication of a record is nothing unusual…but anticipation for November’s debut performance has now been brewing for four years after the planned 2020 showcase was disrupted by Covid.
Guitarist and bandleader Rob Luft was commissioned to write the music by Festival Director Roslin Russell. She says: “I am so looking forward to Rob’s gig because it will bring to completion a process which we started more than four years ago. Rob’s quartet was scheduled at CJF2020 for a special debut performance with the Amika String Quartet. Covid restrictions meant the performance could go ahead but with no audience. We recorded the event at Cambridge Junction and streamed it on MixCloud. It was such a beautiful performance and we felt we had to do it justice and bring this music to the real live audience it deserves.”
Rob Luft explains: “I knew the 4 wonderful musicians in the Amika String Quartet as we’d already worked together on Alice Zawadzki’s 2019 album Within You is a World of Spring, so I jumped at the chance to arrange some of my own compositions for them to play.” Following the 2020 livestream, the music was recorded the following year at Maida Vale Studios for a BBC Radio 3 broadcast, but has still never been performed before a live audience.
Besides the original commission, November’s concert will feature the four tracks on Luft’s new album, Dahab Days, plus new arrangements of compositions from his first two albums on Edition Records.
“I’ve scored up these earlier pieces of mine in a much more orchestral, expansive way,” he says. “It all sounds very lush and quite folky too, somewhat inspired by the likes of Vince Mendoza, Vaughan Williams, Delius & other masterful orchestrators!”
CAMBRIDGE JAZZ FESTIVAL runs from 8-24 November. Artist in Residence is Dennis Rollins MBE.
