Preview: Edinburgh Jazz & Blues Festival

Published on Friday 23 July 2010 11:34

THE Edinburgh Jazz & Blues Festival, which gets under way on Friday, may no longer cater for fans of classic and mainstream jazz in the way that it used to, but amid the contemporary cross-over experiments there are still some tantalising concerts on offer to remind us of the good old days.

Having just realised that this will be my 25th Edinburgh Jazz Festival, I've been reminiscing about previous years. Many of the musicians who made past festivals so enjoyable are going to be playing at this year's event. There's Scott Hamilton, the American tenor sax giant, and Howard Alden, the virtuoso guitarist, who have both been regulars at the festival since the late 1980s and are among the stars participating in the Festival of Swing concert at the Queen's Hall on Tuesday.

Also on the bill for that show, a must-see for anyone who likes their jazz swinging, tuneful and accessible, is former Soprano Summit co-leader Bob Wilber, still nimble on the soprano sax as he settles into his eighties, and that man of many horns, multi-instrumentalist Alan Barnes, whose visits to Edinburgh reach back about as far as my own.

Sadly, there aren't any opportunities to hear Hamilton, Wilber or Barnes leading their own bands during the festival, so we'll just have to do what we jazz fans do best - make do with what's on offer and make it last us for another year.

Their fellow Festival of Swing-er, the veteran baritone saxophonist and Fife-born Ellingtonian Joe Temperley, is playing his own gig, An Evening With Joe Temperley at Assembly @ Princes Street Gardens on 2 August - and those of us of a mainstream persuasion will be there to hear him play with pianist extraordinaire Brian Kellock and reminisce about his long career.

One gig I'm sure to treasure for some time is Scots singer Carol Kidd's take on the Judy Garland songbook at the Queen's Hall next Sunday. She may be Scottish, but Kidd is now based in Majorca and therefore opportunities to hear her should be grabbed - even if you grabbed that last one, at the recent Glasgow Jazz Festival. This is the first time she has paid such an overt tribute to her all-time heroine, one of her primary influences, so it should be a treat.

In the days when it was worth taking a week off work, buying a railcard and preparing your liver for a few laps round the pub trail, one of the hallmarks of the festival was the way it would invite individual musicians to stay for a few days during which they'd be featured in all sorts of different line-ups.Fapy Lafertin, probably the best exponent of gypsy jazz guitar, is doing just that this year - albeit on a small scale - and of his two gigs, it's the one with the peerless Edinburgh band, Swing 2010, which promises to be a winner.

We Scots seem to have a particular penchant for the wonderful, intoxicating sound of a Hot Club-style band - so much so that there is another Scottish gypsy jazz outfit I'd recommend: Dundee's Havana Swing, which is playing at the Royal Overseas League tomorrow at lunchtime.

There's a fair bit of gypsy jazz around this year, not just because it is perennially, but also because this is the centenary year of the legendary Django Reinhardt who kickstarted the whole genre by fusing traditional gypsy guitar playing with the American swing he heard on jazz records that were catching on in Paris in the early 1930s.

New Orleans-based clarinettist Evan Christopher's Django la Creole band is another hot ticket for aficionados next week. This exciting group casts Christopher's Sidney Bechet-inspired clarinet and showmanship against a Reinhardt/Hot Club backdrop, and it makes for a heady mix. Christopher has made a few visits to Edinburgh in the past decade, and always impresses with his hot and sweet clarinet playing and flamboyant style.

American trumpeter Duke Heitger is another player who began visiting the festival in the past few years, and although he's on at the Festival of Swing concert, the best chance to hear him will undoubtedly be at the Jamhouse on Monday when he joins Ken Mathieson's Classic Jazz Orchestra for a programme of lesser-known Louis Armstrong tunes.

The classic jazz strand always used to be an area in which the festival excelled - who could forget such colourful groups as the Dry Throat Fellows from Switzerland, Sweden's Kustbandet or France's Hot Antic Jazz Band - and it's now essentially represented by this one ensemble. So it's just as well it's stonkingly good.

The Edinburgh Jazz & Blues Festival runs from Friday until 8 August. www.edinburghjazzfestival.com

• This article was first published in the Scotland on Sunday on 25/07/2010