It’s About That Time…
VICTORIA KINGHAM on Darius Brubeck at Jazz Hastings
Another packed night at the best jazz club this side of London. Chairs are brought in from everywhere, jazz club organisers meet and greet, friends and neighbours sit down, everyone anticipates a good time. I love this audience. I love this club too. It’s decorated with silver and gold garlands, a Christmas tree with lights – very traditional, unlike the jazz which follows.
Ethnomusicologist and ex-professor Darius Brubeck always pays tribute to his father’s compositions, but is a musician of a different order. Since settling in Rye, he has toured regularly with the same band – Matt Ridley on bass, Wesley Gibbens on drums, and the elegant, extraordinary Dave O’Higgins on tenor saxophone. This highly accomplished yet relaxed quartet presented a well-designed set, particularly notable for its less standard time signatures – 7/4, 6/4, 5/4, 9/8. This careful rhythmic variety made for appealing listening: in a groove, but neither stilted nor pretentious. The band have recorded many of the numbers, mostly on Live in Poland (2019) or Years Ago (2016).
Brubeck spent years teaching and playing jazz in South Africa, a fact acknowledged by a version of the Masekela number Nomali. Their version was edgier – O’Higgins’ and Brubeck’s inventions are more modern jazz and less African modal than the original. The simple beauty of the tune evoked a small tear, as did the memories of Masekela, Pukwana, Feza, McGregor, Makeba – the whole South African sound transported to England away from prohibitive apartheid.
Another favourite was the evocative ballad Sea of Troubles (cf. Hamlet, everyone’s favourite bipolar antihero) presented in the second, highly integrated, set. It’s a two-chord alternator in a gentle 7/4, leaving plenty of space for O’Higgins’ exploratory improvisation after Ridley’s drum intro and Brubeck’s tumbling waves of notes. The sound is lovely – O’Higgins plays a mellow, breath-coated, Conn 10M saxophone (favoured by luminaries like Benny Carter, Coleman Hawkins and Lester Young), incorporating a vintage echo into his post-Coltrane phrases. But the surprise of the evening was a version of Blowin’ In the Wind – an extraordinary choice, but in fact recorded by this quartet in 2008, withhe change of time signature to 5/4 bringing it an eerie ambience and swing. One more tribute was a medley of the music of Dollar Brand (Abdullah Ibrahim), incorporating some of Ibrahim’s characteristic, open South African piano sounds, and dedicated to St Leonards’ own ex-South African jazz promoter, Reg Hendrickse.
Numbers by Brubeck père included Pick Up Sticks, the legendary Blue Rondo a la Turk (definitely a blues!) and inevitably Take Five, one of the few jazz tunes to top the popular charts. Way back, I almost wore out the single that featured both these. Faster, more upbeat, less Desmond obviously, but there it was in its augmented glory. The encore was Winter Wonderland, oh-so-muzak nowadays, but this 5/4 version was upbeat and interesting, and made an impressive end to an evening of rhythmic variety and invention.
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