Brecon Jazz: a festival reborn - Mark Doffman
On 9th January this year, Brecon Jazz Festival Ltd went into liquidation. Twenty five years of jazz in the mountains seemed to be at an end after the 2008 festival suffered considerable financial losses. The scale of loss seemed to take everyone by surprise and says something about the fragility of the jazz economy. However, just as Brecon’s obituary was being written up, the Hay Festival stepped in and the project was reborn this August.
This rebirth is really welcome on a number of levels. There are relatively few jazz festivals of this scale in the UK where the town itself becomes the platform for the music and where the staging of the music moves away from the large urban settings that we tend to associate with jazz. Of immediate value for our project was the opportunity for an uninterrupted weekend of recording performances by black British artists.
Our focus was on three performances: Empirical, Dennis Rollins' ‘Griots to Garage’ and Badbone. Each concert, in rather different ways, developed narratives of black history as the backdrop for the sounds coming from the stage, explicitly so in the show by Empirical and Dennis Rollins ‘Griots’ project. Empirical celebrated the political life and music of Cannonball Adderley with a set of numbers associated with the saxophonist ending with drummer, Shaney Forbes, ‘duetting’ with one of Cannonball’s political raps. The gig began with an excellent preamble by journalist Kevin LeGendre who laid out the great sax player’s contribution to the civil rights movement.
Within a much a much broader framework, trombonist Dennis Rollins gave a virtuoso solo performance in ‘Griots to Garage’, making use of loops and pre-recorded tracks which led the audience through an assemblage of black musical styles that highlighted moments and places within the history of the black diaspora.
Our final concert of the weekend was ‘Badbone & Co’, another Dennis Rollins project, but this time featuring the trombonist with an extremely fine band whose core material is drawn from the classic funk of the 60s-80s but whose work also nods and winks at most of the rhythms from the Black Atlantic. This was no history lesson but we, along with our tapping feet, were taken on an absorbing tour of the recent musical past. For this final gig of the festival, the choice of group was perfect. The music was sufficiently celebratory to send the audience home very happy and just funky enough to prompt the usual ‘but is it jazz?’ debate in the interval drinks queue.
A fine weekend of music and a great opportunity for the project.
This rebirth is really welcome on a number of levels. There are relatively few jazz festivals of this scale in the UK where the town itself becomes the platform for the music and where the staging of the music moves away from the large urban settings that we tend to associate with jazz. Of immediate value for our project was the opportunity for an uninterrupted weekend of recording performances by black British artists.
Our focus was on three performances: Empirical, Dennis Rollins' ‘Griots to Garage’ and Badbone. Each concert, in rather different ways, developed narratives of black history as the backdrop for the sounds coming from the stage, explicitly so in the show by Empirical and Dennis Rollins ‘Griots’ project. Empirical celebrated the political life and music of Cannonball Adderley with a set of numbers associated with the saxophonist ending with drummer, Shaney Forbes, ‘duetting’ with one of Cannonball’s political raps. The gig began with an excellent preamble by journalist Kevin LeGendre who laid out the great sax player’s contribution to the civil rights movement.
Within a much a much broader framework, trombonist Dennis Rollins gave a virtuoso solo performance in ‘Griots to Garage’, making use of loops and pre-recorded tracks which led the audience through an assemblage of black musical styles that highlighted moments and places within the history of the black diaspora.
Our final concert of the weekend was ‘Badbone & Co’, another Dennis Rollins project, but this time featuring the trombonist with an extremely fine band whose core material is drawn from the classic funk of the 60s-80s but whose work also nods and winks at most of the rhythms from the Black Atlantic. This was no history lesson but we, along with our tapping feet, were taken on an absorbing tour of the recent musical past. For this final gig of the festival, the choice of group was perfect. The music was sufficiently celebratory to send the audience home very happy and just funky enough to prompt the usual ‘but is it jazz?’ debate in the interval drinks queue.
A fine weekend of music and a great opportunity for the project.
posted by Jason Toynbee at
3:27 AM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home