Though neon-lit jazz names such as Michael Brecker and Dave Douglas inevitably hijacked attention on the Saturday bill at the Cheltenham jazz festival, it was a heartening day right across the board. Up-and-coming players, encouraged by the Jerwood charity's Rising Stars programme, spawned several memorable performances.
Bryan Corbett, the young Birmingham trumpeter, caught the ear early on as a Freddie Hubbard enthusiast, as incandescent in tone as he was prowlingly louche and cool in demeanour.
Two other younger-generation UK players, saxophonist Denys Baptiste and drummer Seb Rochford, delivered scintillating sets of completely different dynamic casts. Rochford, a brilliant drummer with a distinctively soft, resonant sound, appeared with his harmonically subtle two-sax band Polar Bear, and as usual drew ecstatic applause. Baptiste hustled an expanded band (on his festival commission dedicated to Martin Luther King's I Have a Dream) into plenty of on-the-edge jamming to counterbalance the densely layered and highly sophisticated ensemble writing. He drew fine soloing from violinist Omar Puente, guitarist Phil Robson, trombonist Trevor Mires and American saxophonist Donald Harrison, and the holy-rolling gospel episodes weren't too far from hearing the late Charles Mingus.
The American pianist/ composer Uri Caine had several shows; Saturday's included his reworking of Bach's Goldberg Variations. It covered pretty impeccable authenticity, undermined elegant counterpoint with snoring noises from DJ Olive's decks, and veered into New Orleans jazz, Milesian postbop, and gospel cajoling from the earth-shaking vocalist Barbara Walker. It doesn't hang together, but Caine doesn't seem to mean it to.
Sax giant Michael Brecker, on the other hand, is more content to be a classical player from jazz history's point of view. In his astonishing one-man show he rolls up most of post-bebop sax history into a single tour de force of multiphonics and low-down blues. It is a bit of a circus act, but leaves you shaking your head in amazement.
Saturday's finale was also the opening night of American trumpeter Dave Douglas's Contemporary Music Network tour with his project Freak In. Douglas makes difficult things sound effortless, has a trumpet range from a trombone to a piccolo, and subjugates his skills to constantly changing wider musical objectives. Freak In is the 2003 evolution of the 1970s/80s Miles Davis electric fusion sound, and the ensemble clamour of Douglas's eloquent trumpet, Seamus Blake's dry sax lines, the dissonant-funk guitar of Dave Gilmore and a hell-for-leather rhythm section confirmed this gifted leader's talent for bringing jazz history roaring into the present.
