The South Bank's annual Rhythm Sticks festival may be a celebration of the central place of percussion in new music, but it's always about a great deal more than drumming. Typically for the festival, the evening fronted by former Weather Report and Michael Brecker sideman Peter Erskine showcased this fine drummer's enabling amd composing skills as much as his technically remarkable talents at the kit.
The show was split between a trio set for Erskine, French-Vietnamese guitarist Nguyen Le and bassist Michel Benita, and a wide-screen extravaganza for the trio plus the BBC Big Band. A varied programme spanned a Pat Metheny-like lyrical guitar grooving (albeit with Nguyen Le's much harder edge) and a sumptuous, thickly-textured, Gil Evans-influenced orchestral sound.
The first half was as much Nguyen Le's gig as Erskine's. This often thrilling young guitarist wasn't in quite the explosive form that he found with his own regular ensemble at the Cheltenham festival in May, but he nevertheless reasserted his independence of approach and mix of fierce intensity and fastidious precision. Not to mention his rich tonal palette, which allows him to suggest traditional Vietnamese strings, the sounds of breezes, birds and violins, and furious bursts of good old-fashioned guitar-star headbanging. All three trio members contributed pieces to the first set, from Le's dreamy ruminations, shaped by Vietnamese folk song, to Erskine's punchy fusion, with multicultural splicings, and Michel Benita's flying, melodically treacherous post-bop sprinter Pirates, in which Le and Erskine baited and prodded each other into the most hell-for-leather improvised flights of the night.
Nothing as incandescent happened in the subsequent orchestral setting, and Le's role was inevitably scaled down, but there was the compensation of a wider dynamic range and inventive soloing from trumpeter Guy Barker and saxophonist Andy Panayi. Erskine's attractive Bulgaria suggested Pat Metheny's mid-west rather than mid-Europe, but coasted gracefully on the orchestra's smoothly oiled swing; In The Still of The Night was a delightfully lateral arrangement of solo riffing; and the composer's selections from the Music For Brass And Percussion project that he brought to the UK earlier this year pulled African-American jazz and Scottish folk themes closer together than could ever have seemed likely on paper. A man of many parts - powerfully co-ordinated, too.
