Folk, jazz etc.: EJF set to compile a digital document of the Jazz Festival

Published on Thursday 9 February 2012 00:00

Martin Kershaw’s third release, The Howness, performed at last year’s Edinburgh Jazz and Blues Festival, will be one of the inaugural releases by EJF records, writes Jim Gilchrist

ROGER Spence was having a busy day last Friday. As a director of Jazz Scotland, he had spent the morning at Lochgelly to assist at the launch of The Band, a year-long community music project. Lochgelly is best known as the home of the now defunct tawse, but it is also the birthplace of baritone sax star Joe Temperley who, at 83, is very much with us, still playing in New York’s Lincoln Centre Jazz Orchestra, and is patron of the Band project, which is particularly aimed at engaging people who have not previously been involved in music.

With £250,000 worth of funding from Creative Scotland as part of the current Year of Creative Scotland, the project is being delivered jointly by Jazz Scotland and the arts organisation ON at Fife. But Temperley was also back on his native turf to play at the fifth Fife Jazz festival last weekend, also organised by Jazz Scotland, which chalked up unprecedented sales. However, what I was primarily phoning Spence about was yet another venture in which he’s involved, the new recording label officially launched this week by the Edinburgh Jazz and Blues Festival.

EJF Records is a bid to capitalise on the wealth of Scottish and international talent which converges on Edinburgh in August for the jazz festival, often for one-off or occasional projects or band groupings, and which the festival organisers are now anxious to document, disseminating the creative energy of the festival to a wider audience.

EJF Records’ first two recordings – saxophonist Martin Kershaw’s third release, The Howness, and singer Angie King’s I Told You So – have been available, if not widely, since last year’s festival. Releasing them now under the EJF imprimatur launches a schedule which should see the appearance of four other recordings made last year by the festival as well as the first two titles also becoming available to download.

“We invest a lot of money in presenting a concert that is often only heard once,” says Spence, who is producer for the new label. “We want to attract audiences who don’t necessarily attend the concerts, but could potentially listen to the music either on the web or via a CD.

“We made six recordings around last year’s festival, with help from the Scottish Government’s Jazz Expo programme, and some of those will be released on our own EJF imprint and some will be released via other people’s labels. In effect we want to create a festival that’s digitally available.”

Kershaw’s The Howness, the follow-up to his widely acclaimed Elegy for Eduardo Paolozzi, sees the saxophonist in the muscular company of pianist Paul Harrison, bassist Euan Burton and drummer Doug Hough, with guest appearances by guitarist Graeme Stephen. Kershaw also crops up on King’s album, along with a seasoned team of pianist Brian Kellock, Kenny Ellis on bass and Tom Gordon on drums.

Both groups, Spence points out, were formatted largely owing to the prospect of the jazz festival performances and recording. Even more of a “one-off” project created for last year’s festival was saxophonist Konrad Wiszniewski’s New Focus reprising of Stan Getz’s classic jazz-and strings album, Focus, which, according to Spence, the new label hopes to release “pretty soon”.

Other groupings recorded in association with last year’s festival and which Spence envisages appearing either on the EJF label or elsewhere are Scots-based Brazilian bassist Mario Caribe’s Jazz Bossa project, the Edinburgh Jazz Festival Orchestra’s performances of music by trumpeter Colin Steele and pianist Dave Milligan, and Trio AAB’s collaboration with the Indian violin duo Ganesh Kumaresh.

Spence would like to see such offshoot recordings happen almost as a norm, thus “digitally documenting the creative activity of the festival itself”.

• For more information, see www.edinburghjazzfestival.com/festivalrecordings

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