Edinburgh International Festival: The Americas is giving jazz a rare spotlight in this year's music programme

Published on Friday 26 March 2010 18:23

UP until now, jazz has figured only three times in the Edinburgh International Festival – an All Stars concert with George Melly in 1962, Mike Westbrook's The Cortège in 1979, and Oscar Peterson in a late-night concert the following year. So its rare appearance this year, with concerts from the Scottish National Jazz Orchestra (SNJO) and guitarist John Etheridge, is a welcome inclusion.

Historically, it has fallen to the Fringe and the long-running Edinburgh Jazz & Blues Festival to fill the gap, but Tommy Smith, the director of the SNJO, feels that this represents an even higher profile. Two pages of the 2010 EIF programme are devoted to jazz and contemporary music.

"It's a great opportunity for us, and we have to make sure we make the most of it," says Smith. "The Jazz Festival is already important, but the International Festival is such a huge stage in terms of exposure."

Festival director Jonathan Mills says: "The focus of this year's Festival on the contemporary cultures of the Americas makes it absolutely appropriate to include jazz in the 2010 programme," he says, "as indeed it has in the past, depending on the focus of each Festival.

However, Edinburgh already has an International Jazz and Blues Festival of course, and so we are already very well served in the artform."

Love it or loathe it, there is no getting away from the significant role jazz has played in American music (and from that, internationally). It has been called America's classical music, and hailed as their most original contribution to 20th century music.

The choice of the SNJO also looks like an obvious one, but needed a roundabout intervention from John Cumming, a London-based Scot who runs the UK's principal jazz promoters, Serious. The Festival approached Cumming about putting together a big band, and he was able to tell them that they already had arguably the best in Britain on their doorstep.

The festival also had Gunther Schuller, a noted American jazz composer, conductor and historian, waiting in the wings. Schuller was already contracted to conduct the Royal Scottish National Orchestra in a programme of music by Copland, Ives and Gershwin (the original jazz band version of his Rhapsody In Blue).

With Lyon Opera's production of Gershwin's Porgy and Bess also among this year's headline events, the choice of the Miles Davis-Gil Evans collaboration on music from that opera is an apposite one.

Moreover, it is repertoire that the SNJO has played before. They first performed the Davis-Evans version of Porgy and Bess along with Sketches of Spain in 1998, with Gerard Presencer as trumpet soloist. Schuller will conduct the band this time, with American trumpeter Kenny Rampton as the likely soloist.

Smith won't have a playing role in that part of the concert – Evans's scoring for the session used only an alto saxophone playing colour tones, focusing instead on winds and French horn (an instrument that Gunther Schuller played on the original recording session).

"It's basically a ten-ten split, with ten jazz players and ten classical," Smith explains.

"There were not that many wind players on the original recording, but you need them to realise its full tonal qualities. Gunther has transcribed the Gil Evans arrangements pretty much as they are on the record."

Smith has worked with Schuller before, when he conducted Scottish composer William Sweeney's saxophone concerto, An Rathad Ur, in Iceland in 1993, with the saxophonist as soloist. Schuller has worked quite a bit with the concert's other American guest, the great saxophonist Joe Lovano, and Smith has also collaborated with Lovano on a number of occasions, so there is a network of relationships already in place.

Smith is still at work on finalising the rest of the programme for the Usher Hall concert, but it's certain it will include music by Duke Ellington, Count Basie and Dizzy Gillespie, and a number of arrangements which Michael Abene has prepared for Lovano, including the latter's own A Bird's Eye-View, his take on Charlie Parker, and Cool, inspired by another Miles Davis project, Birth of the Cool.

It promises to be a memorable occasion, and is backed up by two concerts featuring jazz guitarist John Etheridge, a man whose CV ranges from jazz-rock with Soft Machine to Hot Club swing with Stephane Grappelli and collaborations with classical maestro John Williams.

The first features his Grappelli-inspired band Sweet Chorus, and the second is a solo recital, both at The Hub.

Jazz is grouped with contemporary music in the programme brochure, including a concert from the Kronos Quartet in repertoire indelibly associated with the group, Steve Reich's classic Different Trains and George Crumb's Black Angels.

Mezzo soprano Sarah Connolly teams up with one of Britain's most underrated jazz pianists, John Horler, in a programme of show tunes, and accordion virtuoso James Crabb offers two programmes devoted to the music of South and North America respectively.

In Music Theatre, The Gospel at Colonus features the Blind Boys of Alabama in a mix of gospel, soul and jazz.

&#149 The SNJO, conducted by Gunther Schuller, play the Usher Hall on Thursday 26 August. Visit www.eif.co.uk for a full list of jazz performances.