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Cheltenham Jazz Festival
There's a musicians' joke: if you want to make a million out of jazz, start with two million. It's not a theory that's been tested much because players with that kind of headstart don't show up often but Hugh Laurie, former star comic and now the highest-paid actor on US TV for his lead role in the medical series House, might be about to offer the moment of truth.
Laurie, a lifelong early-jazz and blues fan, triumphantly closed the 2011 Cheltenham Jazz Festival backed by a punchy quintet dominated by the uninhibited Canadian guitarist Kevin Bright, and the material from his debut album, Let Them Talk. It was a very different notion of jazz from the mostly contemporary and often edgier variations that had shaped the six-day event.
But Laurie delivered it with a respect for long-gone originals of the art like Jelly Roll Morton, Huddie Ledbetter, Leroy Carr and JB Lenoir, a more than competent sideman's skills on piano and guitar, and an actor's instincts for the art of tribute without caricature in some fine vocals, that rekindled a music often abandoned to archivists and buffs.
"If I explode in a wet splash of ecstasy," Laurie initially warned the audience, "the gentlemen behind me will take care of all your musical needs."
They didn't need to but the music often reached critical temperatures just the same. The opener was a trad-jazzily adapted Thelonious Monk theme but only that and a piano and soprano sax interpretation of Summertime came close to contemporary notions of jazz.
A dramatic St James' Infirmary that began with delicate piano chords and became a roar in which Vincent Henry's tenor sax erupted out of chiming slide-guitar chords, a Huddie Ledbetter blues backed by Bright's balefully choppy rhythm, an eerie Joshua Fit The Battle of Jericho (backed only by ringing guitar sounds, tom-tom thumps and Laurie's stamping foot), and a devotedly patient Careless Love, all showed how determined Laurie was to make the focus the songs and not himself. James Booker's Let Them Talk and a Professor Longhair rocker for an encore, wound up a very unexpected tour de force.
Laurie's show contrasted sharply with most of the offerings on one of the UK's classiest and most eclectic jazz festivals but it was certainly a big noise to go out on, for an event full of eloquent ones.
In the sunshine on Sunday, jazz stereotypes of shadowy monochrome characters blowing saxes in cellars were dispelled by kids turning cartwheels on the grass, while Hendrix-like guitar chords in the distance ripped through ragged horn sections, tampering cheerfully with Strauss's Thus Spake Zarathustra, and the silver-haired, the rainbow-haired and the no-haired picked their way through marquees, sunbathers and bands.
Jamie Cullum, the festival's guest director, had wound up Sunday with a rare one-man show and his first gig since the birth of his and Sophie Dahl's daughter Lyra in March. "It's only the second time I've been out of the house since then," Cullum said wryly to an adoring audience. "And it's being simulcast in 75 cinemas in six countries."
Over two sets in which he visibly unwound from a nervous start, Cullum rattled through originals, pop covers and standards, with a yearning account of Radiohead's High And Dry, and Fran Landesman's classic Spring Can Really Hang You Up The Most – riskily but successfully joining intimate balladry to beatboxing – the highlights.
Earlier in the day, 2010 Mercury Prize contender Kit Downes and his powerful sextet had explored Scandinavian folk songs, contemporary bebop, and anthemic contemporary blues, and former Brand New Heavies keyboardist Neil Cowley had mixed jackhammering rock-piano chords with slinky swing and the purrs of a string quartet.
Norwegian Tord Gustavsen, a very different hitmaker in his homeland for barely-struck acoustic music of tiny, trickling motifs, softly-brushed cymbals, quietly humming double-bass parts, then played to an awed, church-like atmosphere, to which his Jan Garbarek-like saxophonist Tore Brunborg was flawlessly attuned.
And, despite a very powerful UK and northern-European presence at Cheltenham, the Overtone Quartet – a supergroup compromising pianist Jason Moran, saxophonist Chris Potter, bassist Larry Grenadier and drummer Eric Harland, rubbed home an unmistakable message about the enduringly muscular, and increasingly open-minded, lyricism of American jazz.