Burns lives on through his letters

Published on Sunday 9 August 2009 21:59

THE second of the Edinburgh Jazz Festival Orchestra's two jazz festival concerts at the Queen's Hall on Saturday night was not as unambiguously successful as its midweek Ellington programme, nor as well attended. That was perhaps to be expected on both counts, given the more ambitious and experimental nature of the programme.

Pianist David Milligan was commissioned to produce music inspired by the correspondence between Robert Burns and Agnes McLehose. The pseudonyms they used, Sylvander and Clarinda, also gave the piece its title.

It was described as a song cycle in the festival brochure, but that was inaccurate. It was a loosely related series of instrumental compositions for the jazz orchestra, interspersed with songs from Burns's own massive repertoire, sung by Annie Grace, Corrina Hewat and Karine Polwart.

For this writer, the combination was an uneasy one, and the songs did not really work well in the context of the music for orchestra. Milligan's writing for the band, though, was very impressive, combining good, strong melodies with intelligent harmonic structures and plenty of lovely incidental detail in the ensemble writing and instrumental combinations.

The orchestra was again first-class, and baritone saxophonist Joe Temperley added his own stamp to proceedings in a guest slot just before the interval that combined a solo version of My Love Is Like a Red, Red Rose with the feistiest of Milligan's new tunes, Faultless Monster, and a second appearance on the closing arrangement of Ae Fond Kiss.

The music remained solidly located in jazz idioms, with less overt reference to folk influences than might have been expected from a composer-musician with a foot firmly in both camps, especially given this remit.

The final, purely instrumental, tune of the set (he didn't reveal the title) sounded closest to a folk theme and featured a fine solo from alto saxophonist Loren Stillman, one of many striking solos in the course of the evening.

Milligan also featured in Friday night's performance at The Hub by trumpeter Colin Steele's Stramash, and his contributions on piano were the outstanding element of another excellent outing for this jazz-meets-folk experiment. Bassist Calum Gourley stepped in at short notice to complete the jazz quintet part of the band, alongside Steele, Milligan, saxophonist Phil Bancroft and drummer Stu Ritchie.

Fiddler Catriona MacDonald and cellist Su-a Lee were also present from the original line-up, with piper Simon McKerrall and fiddlers Alasdair White (who looked a little uncomfortable, but played well enough) and Shona Mooney stepping in on this occasion.

The lengthy first half featured arrangements of material outside of the commissioned suite, which Steele wrote on Islay, but they seemed to leave insufficient time to do full justice to that core material after the interval, when things seemed a little rushed. Overall, though, it was another successful outing for a notable achievement that may now gain wider currency with the official release of the CD.

Drummer Stu Brown's Raymond Scott Project is another home-based project that has made it on to CD, although it will not be released until October. On Saturday afternoon at The Hub, Brown led his six-piece band through their carefully transcribed arrangements of the idiosyncratic US pianist and composer's music.

They incorporated some of Scott's pioneering experiments with electronic music (including a reversal of the contemporary norm in which the musicians emulated a machine, Scott's "bass line generator") alongside his zany, kinetic jazz compositions, many of which were later recycled in cartoons.

The now-familiar set also included two new arrangements being played for the first time, the sinuous and rather mysterious Snake Woman and Celebration on the Planet Mars, a typically quixotic up-tempo creation.

Danish trio Ibrahim Electric took a very different approach in their late-night gig at the Voodoo Rooms on Friday. Drummer Stefan Posberg, guitarist Niclas Knudsen and Jeppe Tuxen on the Hammond B3 organ feature the classic soul-jazz instrumental line-up, but there the resemblance to the traditional ended.

They are really a freed-up, improvisatory rock band with jazz influences, and their energetic, high-tempo, riff-and-groove-based music ensured that, while the crowd may have had to stand in the seatless venue, no-one was liable to be standing still.