Interview: Kyle Eastwood, jazz musician

THE Carnegie Hall in Dunfermline, to which Kyle Eastwood brings his band on 5 February, happens not to be the only venue by that name he’s played. Some years ago, the California-based jazz bassist and composer appeared at that other Carnegie Hall, on 7th Street, New York, with his then quartet, as part of an Eastwood After Hours tribute to his father, Clint, the actor, director and jazz fan, who contributed a bit of piano playing to the event.

“Hey, I’ll have played both of them now,” responds Kyle who, at 43, remains happy to discuss the Clint connection which, inevitably, tends to crop up in interviews. “People are always curious about it, but I don’t mind talking about it,” he tells me. “I’m proud of him and what he’s done in his career, and he brought me up listening to some pretty good music and turned me on to the two things I love the most, music and cinema.”

If the sounds he and his band are bringing to the Fife Jazz Festival, which runs from 3-5 February, are anything to go by, his childhood in Carmel, on the Californian coast, spent listening to his father’s records of John Coltrane, Miles Davis and Charlie Parker (the subject of Eastwood Senior’s 1988 film Bird) has proved fruitful indeed. The first concert he can recall was being taken by his father to the nearby Monterey Jazz festival in the mid-70s.

“It was the Count Basie Big Band, when Basie was still alive and still playing with them. My father knew a lot of musicians, so we’d go and watch from backstage.”

Now when Kyle returns to Monterey, as often as not it’s to play there, having long since emerged from any shadow his father may have cast. He’s become recognised as a gifted musician and composer, collecting glowing reviews for his jazz work and also composing film scores, not least for some of his father’s work including Letters from Iwo Jima and Gran Torino, for which he and fellow composer Michael Stevens persuaded Clint to bring his rasping vocals to the closing song, before it was taken up by Jamie Cullum, who wrote the lyrics.

When it comes to jazz, Eastwood Jnr switches deftly between fretted and fretless five-string bass guitar and double bass, and the band he brings to the Byre Theatre in St Andrews on 4 February (already sold out) and Dunfermline the following night are a well seasoned, well bonded bunch of musicians he’s been playing with consistently for the past few years. Eastwood is joined by Andrew McCormack on piano, Graeme Flowers on trumpet and flugelhorn, Graeme Blevins on tenor and soprano saxes and Martyn Kaine on drums.

Their current album, Songs from the Chateau, suggests a powerfully tight-knit outfit, taking on board funk and Latin jazz influences snappy brass and drum drive but also able to create a vivid tonal palette, as in the album’s expansive, Miles-ish canvas Andalucía, or in the purposeful yet darkly nocturnal shuffle of Moon Over Couronneau. Couronneau is the name of the chateau in Bordeaux where the band recorded the album.Most of the time, says Eastwood, they recorded during the day and relaxed in the evening although, occasionally, as with Moon Over Couronneau, there was some postprandial recording – “so there might have been a little bit of wine influence on one or two tracks”.

Quite apart from the benign influence of Bordeaux Supérieur, the atmospheric nature of numbers such as Moon have a cinematic quality that seems to tie in with Eastwood’s other composing hat. “You have a lot more freedom when you’re doing a jazz album, writing music for your own project,” he says.

“Doing film music is a different challenge; you have to write music that’s supporting images already on the screen and there are certain things you have to hit. They might want only five or ten seconds of music for one short thing, or a scene might be ten to 15 minutes long so you have to build it up. And sometimes, where edits fall isn’t naturally musical, so you have to work round it. It’s fun, but it’s totally different.” He’ll be squarely in jazz mode when he and the band hit the fifth Fife Jazz Festival, which takes place across 16 venues ranging from concert halls, Carnegie or otherwise, to village hops.

Apart from the Eastwood band, the programme features the return of Fife’s greatest jazz export, Joe Temperley, the baritone sax veteran who leaves his chair at the New York’s Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra to solo with the Fife Jazz Orchestra in a programme of Duke Ellington’s music, while another, much younger member of the New York orchestra, pianist Dan Nimmer, also heads Fifewards.

Other Scottish jazz talent featuring on the bill includes Fionna Duncan, singing her way through Scottish jazz history, the Scottish-based Brazilian bassist Mario Caribe, sax and trumpet quartet Brass Jaw, and singer Angela King, while a strong blues contingent includes expat Scots singer Maggie Bell returning to perform with Blues and Trouble.

The Festival will also present a tribute to that extraordinary New York street musician and composer Moondog, featuring young players Ruaridh Patterson and Calum Gourlay in the newly assembled and resonantly titled Art Ensemble of Fife.

There’s a nice touch, too in the legendary jazz accordionist Jack Emblow, appearing with the superb guitarist Martin Taylor in that Mecca of Scottish accordion music, Auchtermuchty, home of the late, great Sir Jimmy Shand.

• The Kyle Eastwood Band plays the Byre Theatre, St Andrews, on 4 February (sold out) and Carnegie Hall, Dunfermline, on 5 February. See www.fifejazzfestival.com