Brad Mehldau/ State of the World
London jazz festival ****/***
Brad Mehldau is one of the best-loved jazz pianists to have appeared in the past decade - which was why the Queen Elizabeth Hall opened up its backstage area on Friday to accommodate more customers, in the process creating something like a club atmosphere. Mehldau was appearing as part of the trio that produced a remarkable sequence of recordings in the mid-1990s, with Larry Grenadier on bass and Jorge Rossy on drums. "We sort of draw [the audience] into our own little backyard," is how Mehldau describes their collaboration.
Mehldau embarks on most musical adventures as if he were trying to edge into a party without drawing attention to himself; he began with a soft mid-tempo and a typically fragile, unfolding flower of a tune. Having acclimatised the crowd to the fine details of the dynamics, the trio ran through the flowing waltz At a Loss, the plaintively reflective movie-score rhapsodising of the ballad Resignation (gently accelerating into a caressing Latin shuffle) and then the standard Alone Together. This was a delightful piece of Mehldau meditation, beginning unaccompanied with the tune disguised in darting left-hand figures against woodpecker clatterings in the right, then giving way to a clear, ringing and decisive bass solo by Grenadier, and a drum break of shrewdly controlled fire from Rossy.
One of the consistently mesmerising features of Mehldau's playing is his classical recitalist's left-hand independence, which gives even a bop-flavoured piece greatly expanded resources of melodic contrast and creative tension. He is also unpredictable in his treatment of familiar songs. If he hid the melody of Alone Together, he played the familiar belting confession of Secret Love absolutely straight - but at about a quarter of its usual tempo, and with the choked, elided, vocal cord of a torch singer somehow expressed in his delicate touch.
Nick Drake's River Man swelled into a drama of hissing cymbals and rumbling mallet-work, and Radiohead's Exit Music For a Film allowed the conversational interplay of the band to shine. Roars for encores brought the trio back plenty of times, but Cry Me a River was the most telling of them.
Mehldau and his trio were appearing as part of the London jazz festival. Every year someone complains that the event is trading under a false name because of the presence of hip-hoppers, turntable-whirlers, worldbeat ethnicists, classical players, performance art accordionists and so on. Saturday, the last big night of the festival, was definitely one for the fundamentalists to avoid. Yet there was plenty of jazz in it: it just played more of a character part in a different kind of show. A variety of spaces around the Festival Hall played host to some of the ensembles that had made the Serious Sampler series at the Spitz club such a fascinating diversion all year.
Andy Sheppard and Claude Deppa's encounter with avant-garde DJs Rita Ray and Max Reinhardt was a big feature, as was Asian programming-and-tablas duo Badmarsh and Shri. But the evening was kicked off by former Loose Tubes trombonist Ashley Slater, making the most of his expressive soul singer's voice.
Slater characterises what he does with his fusion band Big Lounge with such seductive terms as "Andy Williams on acid", but for the most part it's not so much wrecked cabaret music as a pretty convincing soul and funk act, despite the presence of jazzers Steve Arguelles on drums and Benoit Delbeq on keys. Eddie Stevens on Hammond and synths did, however, add wild forays of abstract, slashing organ chordwork, as well as riffs from such unlikely and distant sources as the Doors.
Big Lounge's frenetic whimsy was a long way from the earthiness of the next band, New Orleans funkers Galactic. Galactic blasted a half-full Festival Hall audience back in its seats with an infectiously ferocious - and typically Delta city - mix of honking, yelping funk sax playing, brilliant wake-the-dead drumming, and the raw and majestic singing of Theryl DeClouet.
The night also featured an unconventionally ambitious project in Spacer vs the Orchestra, an 18-piece ensemble of young British classical musicians and DJ Luke Gordon, aka Spacer. Spacer's headlong deckwork, and a churning drum'n'bass feel to the rhythm section, gave the set an edge-of-the-seat urgency, and the forcefulness and pin-sharp accuracy of the acoustic performers made the overall sound fitfully thrilling. But after a while the tonal resources of the band seemed underused by its frequent reduction to a riffing unit, and apart from a handful of rugged sax breaks, it lacked the improvising soloist that might have imparted more contrast. But it's an intriguing venture, and one there'll be plenty of variations on.
