Chamber Music Rotorua

A Family Reunion

Celtic jazz – the thought of this particular stylistic hybrid leads to imaginings that don’t inspire confidence. Visions of Riverdance and the unfortunate diasporic “Oirish” songs that have such a dominant place in perceptions of Celtic music globally, and the restrained hipness of post-bop jazz jostling uncomfortably spring to mind, in a kind of “Lord of the Hep”. However, this apprehension was thoroughly put to rest by John Rae and his ensemble, made up of saxophonist Oscar Lavën, Ben Wilcock and Jack Harris, in their Rotorua performance at St Luke’s on the evening of 1 October, in what was a highly inventive and erudite exploration into the convergence between these two musics, and their distant – but distinct – ancestral links.

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The concert was made up of two sets, with each song introduced very charmingly by John. The first set opened with an adaptation of the drum tune Borve Castle, building layers of rhythm, bass, piano and saxophone into a complex polyrhythmic vamp. The Earl of Seaforth drew on the Scots tradition of long-form piping or pibroch, translating its ground-and-variations structure into jazz terms through improvisation. Freddy’s Tune explored the ‘Boston style’ where Irish tunes meet Fats Waller-influenced stride in a wonderfully dirty sound, while Ye Banks and Braes was given a brilliantly clear and concisely lyrical treatment. The set’s highlight was Uncouth and Without Form, an abstraction of the traditional pipe band march, strathspey and reel combo, which developed from swing and trad playing touches into a militaristic drums, syncopated interjections, hockets and a pseudo-rock beat, the effect of which was surprisingly futuristic. The set ended with Danny Boy, Oscar Lavën stretching and breaking up the tune’s profile against an almost lounge-style accompaniment from Ben Wilcock, who seemed to be playing nothing but the butter notes for this one.

The second set was where the concert really came to life, and included some of their strongest and most inventive material. Jock and Sioux, based upon three different drum movements, combined a piano ostinato, modal-sounding saxophone, interjections, pauses and rhythmic changes in a structure whose narrative flow felt more reminiscent of pop music than jazz. I’m Waulking arranged a traditional Hebridean call-and-response working song over an almost stadium-rock, anthemic backbeat, with blue notes and dirty saxophone timbre drawing the music towards the blues. I’ll awa home involved John singing a delightfully raggy street ballad from Dundee, while Mo run geal og had something of music theatre about it. Jock Steen - A Love Supreme alternated traditional jigs with quotations from Coltrane’s jazz classic. The concert ended in a superbly retro fashion with Ben Wilcock singing The Wild Mountain Thyme to his own waltz-like accompaniment, complete with audience participation.

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What made the concert particularly engaging was not simply the combination of Celtic folk music and jazz, but the stylistic diversity within and around both. Uncouth and Without Form became a sort of pop-jazz-minimalist groove tied together by formal repeats and reminiscences; Jock and Sioux sounded almost as if Harmonia were covering Kind of Blue; and Danny Boy seemed to play deliberately with trad-jazz schmaltz in a semi-ironic retro stylistic tribute. Their formal subtlety and lack of reliance on the standard tune-solos structure was highly engaging, avoiding the repetitive structures that can make jazz concerts difficult to maintain one’s attention on.

The deeper family connections between jazz and Gaelic folk music were particularly apparent in I’m Waulking. The blue-notes added to the traditional melody’s pentatonic sound gave a thoroughly down-home blues sound, while the saxophone’s dirty timbre and creative use of multiphonics highlighted the music’s rustic quality as it evolved to converge on the blues, and John Rae’s anthemic, half-time backbeat gave more than a hint of a Southern chain-gang. That Hebridean folk music should merge so comfortably into the blues should not surprise, however, when one considers that Anglo-Irish folk was a foundational influence in the blues’ formation; this was therefore not so much a crossing of stylistic borders as a handshake between distant cousins.

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Although the effect of the concert was dampened slightly by the noisy heating in St Luke’s, one was left with the feeling of having witnessed a delicate stylistic tight-rope act done with great aplomb. Nothing could be further from kitsch than the quartet’s clever, referential, well-informed and multi-layered approach. Throughout they relied upon and highlighted the interconnections between Gaelic folk music and jazz, the stylistic diversity that bred jazz to begin with, and its plurality of roots. The contribution of all the musicians was mesmerizing, with Oscar Lavën’s elaborate ornamentation, Jack Harris’s ever-present textural and rhythmic substance, Ben’s extrovert stylings and John’s heavily multi-layered, highly-coloured drumming. What was most engaging was the freeness and inventiveness of their approach, in how they alienated the music from its traditional use and familiar identity, yet always with one eye upon the big-hearted, earthy and communal origins of both musics, symbolized most strongly by the genuinely moving familial embrace of the audience in their concluding performance of Wild Mountain Thyme.