Reviewed: Bray Jazz FestivalMermaid Arts Centre
Jazz festivals are judged by their main events and, in this regard, Bray has won a deserved reputation for delivering quality. With names such as Dave Douglas and Louis Sclavis on its 2007 roster, the event promised to do exactly what it says on the tin, but this time the shades were a little more variable.
Nevertheless, there was much to enjoy. Dave Douglas's Keystone, inspired by the silent-era comedies of the tragic Fatty Arbuckle, mixed jazz sensibility with rock rhythms and pop, although, apart from a humorous Sloe Olive, DJ Olive's contributions seemed largely peripheral to the action. If it lacked the depth and profundity one associates with Douglas, the trumpeter's music was accessible, brilliantly performed and - unexpectedly, considering its very contemporary feel - wonderfully evocative of Arbuckle, especially Scopes, Flood Plane, Kitten and Photosynthesis. Sharing the bill with them, White Rocket - Seán Carpio (drums), Greg Felton (piano), Jacob Wick (trumpet) - recaptured some of the fire of their debut a year ago. But infrequent get-togethers and the austerely difficult original music increasingly made the repertoire, largely unchanged in the interim, seem like challenge for challenge's sake.
Pierre Dørge's New Jungle Orchestra was a delight, musical multiculturalism full of love, witty pastiche and breath-taking precision. In Pot Pu . . . Rí, a prelude for church organ morphed into St Louis Blues, Africa was visited for Jubee Jubee (with audience participation), Dukish Mingus wryly jostled two jazz greats, and elsewhere Bollywood and the Orient were raided, before they closed with Ellington's The Mooche.
It was a show, but with superb instrumentalists and great heart.
Opening for them was the Mikkel Ploug Quintet, in as a replacement for the scheduled Mike Nielsen. With Michael Buckley (saxophones), Simon Jermyn (bass) and Wick added, only Carpio and guitarist Ploug remained from the quartet which played at the Helix last month.
It was thus essentially a pickup band; sometimes such groups click, sometimes not. But its chances were not helped by the fact that the music was all original, written by Ploug, and, despite an enormous effort on the part of Carpio and Buckley to inject it with vitality, it never came to life. Wick had perhaps his best moments on the rather open-ended Logic Unlogic, but Ploug, who is highly regarded here, remains - personally - an unconvincing soloist; head versus heart, with head winning.
That dichotomy was underlined by the closing concert, which featured France's Louis Sclavis with his L'Imparfait des Langues quintet, and Berlin's Der Rote Bereich. Sclavis, who is a virtuoso on bass clarinet and soprano saxophone, has drawn together a band that offers everything from free improv, rock and sampling, to funk and faint echoes of straight-ahead bop.
Perhaps the reason was festival fatigue, but it was curiously uninvolving. Impressive, certainly; the band was precision personified. But what seemed so fresh and vital on the group's signature ECM release felt more like automatic pilot here, sheer virtuosity taking over from any sense of discovery. One felt bludgeoned by the weight of it all - and there was a sense that the feeling had spread to the audience.
In contrast, Der Rote Bereich - Frank Möbus (guitar), Rudi Mahall (bass clarinet) and Oliver Bernd Steidle (drums) - were just as stunning instrumentally, but they had characteristics conspicuous by their absence from Sclavis's calculated work.
The rhythmic and contrapuntal intricacies of their harmonically sparse music were informed by heart, wit, humour and freshness of invention, qualities to which the audience readily responded.
