The young American trumpeter Roy Hargrove brought his sizzling, hard-bop quintet to the opening night of this year's Cheltenham Jazz Festival. But it was an appropriate symbol of that shrewdly programmed event that a less expert European group delivered music at least as absorbing and in some respects more unpredictably distinctive.
Playing opposite Hargrove was British saxophonist Tim Whitehead, joined by the quartet with whom he made his excellent Personal Standards CD last year. The repertoire is exactly what the CD title says: there's a breathy version of John Lennon's Imagine, the Titanic theme is given a ghostly, Jan Garbarek-like timbre, while Dancing in the Streets is played as a flat-out rocker with free-sax diversions. In Liam Noble the band has a brilliant pianist of occasionally Jarrett-like persuasion who hardly plays a solo without at least one turn of phrase that brings you to the edge of your seat.
Roy Hargrove's band approached matters quite differently, going straight as arrows for the hard-bop and hard-swing traditions. They looked and sounded about as much like an American band as was possible: square-set men in suits, hitting the music between the eyes with a fierce, hustling energy, yet delivering it with hypnotic impassivity.
Unlike many of the respectful, Marsalis-inspired neo-classicists, Hargrove is a performer of fiery urgency and restless charm, and his solos bristle with high-note chatters, surging runs and Dizzy Gillespie-like drama. But he's also a superb manipulator of tone and timbre in more restrained music, as he demonstrated on Blame It on My Youth. This Hargrove quintet has been a regular ensemble for some years, and in the rhythm section's delectably effortless echoing of the classic Wynton Kelly/Phill Joe Jones sound of Miles Davis's 50s band, it certainly sounds like it. Classic jazz with an edge.
The Cheltenham Jazz Festival continues tonight with Arthur Blythe; tomorrow with Bobo Stenson, Jools Holland and Bobby Watson; Monday with Wayne Krantz and George Shearing. Details: 01242 227979
