Rod Youngs: New From Old
VICTORIA KINGHAM at Jazz Hastings
It’s strange how musical appreciation changes over the course of half a century or more. What sounded to the majority uncompromising, unmelodic, on a first hearing, fifty years later sounds merely – modern. It happens with classical music, though it takes longer – Prokofiev, Schoenberg, Shostakovich were all once greeted with incomprehension and protest.
It happens with jazz too, though the development trajectory has been much faster. In the very early 60s it was still thought of as ‘popular music’ following from the forties and fifties, the wild post-war dancing, the big-band formations, the cosy American TV shows. In the 1960s however a number of seminal jazz musicians rapidly took the music out of this realm into something serious, innovative, and inventive. Max Roach was one of these musicians, taking the idea of jazz drumming beyond ‘time-keeping’ into something more subtle and instrumental, patterning around melodies, writing, fronting, improvising, transforming the nature of the small jazz combo and enabling modern jazz to emerge as a distinct genre. Roach’s own history reads like an A-Z of American jazz, a lifelong list of collaboration with the best, and you can read it on Wikipedia without me restating it here.
Rod Youngs, a gifted drummer, presented us with an exceptional evening’s music as a tribute and dedication to Max Roach. It was superb. And the long reach of the jazz innovations of the mid-sixties was reinforced. These are not easy tunes – even now, they are not ‘easy listening’ tunes, but they are part of the accumulated heritage of jazz in the way that Pollock and Warhol are part of the heritage of visual art. Youngs’ quintet patently know each other’s music, and they are all highly accomplished enough to make the performance look easy and relaxed. They have evident enjoyment in each other’s achievements, and Youngs’ lead from the drumkit is minimal, but decisive. The sound of the lead saxophone and trumpet, often stating the melody in unison, sometimes in harmony, is joltingly reminiscent of the arrangements of the mid-sixties, yet because each individual musician is skilled and inventive, the music is fresh.
Tony Kofi is a much respected, assured British alto player who is constantly in demand; Byron Wallen is from a musical family, based in London, which includes his composer sister Errollyn Wallen (and if you haven’t heard her music, you really ought to listen to it immediately – she justly has international status as a composer and singer). His playing is lyrical, original, educated. Bass player Larry Bartley has been a staple of the London jazz scene for some 25 years, performing or recording with major bands. Renato Paris the pianist, aside from his musical closeness, his sensitivity to Rod Youngs’ ideas, turns out also to be an accomplished voice improviser, a scat singer.
As is often the case, the evening gained momentum and unity towards the end, and the last couple of numbers, Members Don’t Get Weary and Absolutions, were, you might say, the absolute business; every musician took a shining solo, and a very full set ended late into the night, engaging an enthusiastic audience to the end.
The Rod Youngs Quartet played at Jazz Hastings, EHSAA, on Tuesday 6 August. Next up: Rebecka Edlund’s Virgin Forest Band, Tuesday 3 September. jazzhastings.co.uk/upcoming-gigs
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