Let Them Call It Jazz
VICTORIA KINGHAM on Jerry Bergonzi (tenor), Jason Rebello (piano), Steven Keogh (drums), Mark Hodgson (bass) at the Hastings Jazz Club.
Anybody who has read Jean Rhys’ magnificent, tragic, heartrending story Let Them Call It Jazz will realise that in 1962, this genre name had different connotations from the present-day. Then, it was enjoyed by cool, subversive young intelligentsia – and Jean-Paul Belmondo, breathlessly. Before rock and roll burst on to the scene, it was a well-trodden path to musical popularity and production success, particularly among Black American musicians having started, essentially, as dance music.
Today many people I talk to will say they don’t like it, it isn’t musical, it is too discordant, it’s too ‘intellectual’ – as though most music wasn’t intellectual. I think they may be talking about what used to be called Modern Jazz, or they have possibly heard the 1960s radical departures of Ornette Coleman, Albert Ayler, Andrew Hill, Cecil Taylor, and more. But jazz, with its virtuoso musicians, its striving, its breadth, its presentation of a musical world well removed from anything I knew, was always my first love.
These days, I have to redraw my auditory boundaries. I was asked recently, rhetorically, why most of the audience at the Hastings Jazz Club were over 60, and this leads me to widen out these reviews. Because there is in fact an extraordinary youth jazz scene in the UK. It happens in clubs and venues up and down the country. If you want to see how, I strongly recommend a BBC programme called Jazz UK: Spitting Fire, put together and presented by Tina Edwards.
Apart from energy and enthusiasm, what is very evident is that these young bands, whose influences range through hip-hop, garage, trance, reggae, African music, and dance, all strongly acknowledge their debt to their jazz predecessors: Miles Davis, Pharaoh Saunders, John Coltrane, Alice Coltrane, Charlie Parker, Wayne Shorter. So if you are talking about jazz now, this is where the young audiences are. You don’t just sit and watch nicely and applaud the solos. You join in and rave and dance and have strobe lighting – and maybe some MDMA as well. The music is compelling, and in a totally different sphere from the expectations of the last couple of generations.
So the relative staidness of jazz at the Stade (!) is becoming old-fashioned; audiences listen sitting down and might have a glass of wine or a bottle of beer or two. Nevertheless the place is rammed, with the monitor in the back bar fully utilized. The mainly male well over-50s groovers – approaching nerdiness, but that’s a different discussion – applaud enthusiastically, but conventionally, at the end of each number, and appreciate the brilliance of the solo breaks. Nobody dances, though people nod their heads a lot.
The power of Jerry Bergonzi’s quartet is undeniable. He’s an old-school, professional, standard-format jazz leader. Within that framework what he presents – apart from a couple of really bad jokes, I wish they wouldn’t – is musically fairly adventurous. This is as much due to the inventiveness of Jason Rebello on upright piano, supplying his trademark, exploratory, off-the-wall chord patterns, as it is to Bergonzi’s tenor lines.
The numbers were a mixture of standards and originals. The standards, Witchcraft, On Green Dolphin Street, and a kind of double-time, double-bar version of Blue in Green, all evidenced original thinking, a broad interpretation of the chords. Fronted by Bergonzi, the numbers were presented in a predictable format – tune, solo improv breaks, sometimes alternate 4s, 8s, recapitulation – and Bergonzi addressed the audience in between to name the tune and the musicians. The best number was the last one, Body and Soul, with a terrific a capella break by Bergonzi topping off the evening.
Polished, rounded, radically different from the wilder, more intense jazz-dance scene evidenced above. Nevertheless a fine session at this excellent club, and may its audiences grow apace – or at any rate younger!
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