Bill Frisell, ever a folksy chameleon who can bring quirky grace to the most ostensibly roughneck material, and make a simple guitar band sound like a choir, was at the London jazz festival playing music from his new Guitar in the Space Age album. A moving and dreamily poetic Shenandoah opened the set, a meditation on the Kinks’ Tired of Waiting for You was spine-tingling, and the Byrds’ Turn! Turn! Turn! was beautifully arranged for Frisell and his fellow guitarist Greg Leisz. If some of those old guitar hits left the band’s improvisation skills a little high and dry, Frisell’s unannounced first-half sideman role with Sam Amidon, the gifted young folk singer, was a big bonus.
Amidon, whose expository voice is close to a traditional folkie’s but whose material is full of dark twists, rivetingly cohabited with Frisell’s spacey electronics and Chris Vatalaro’s boldly polyrhythmic drumming. In a disarming chat with a charmed crowd, Amidon even sang a long Chet Baker jazz-scat break, as if it had only just popped into his head.
Away from the big stages, there were plenty of fascinations over the festival’s opening weekend. French pianist Guillaume de Chassy’s witty, dramatic and improv-inviting music steered a completely enticing jazz-meets-Shakespeare show amid the flickering candles at the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, with saxophonist Andy Sheppard evoking caresses and murder, drummer Christophe Marguet mimicking the rustling advance of Birnam Wood, and Emma Pallant a stirring narrator. On the Barbican freestage, Swiss electric-violinist Tobias Preisig subsumed his obvious virtuosity into the dark and hard-grooving group sound of a promising young quartet who clearly know a lot about contemporary musics, as well as one another. And Empirical’s Nathaniel Facey served up a raft of scintillating new material – for a superb quintet including trumpeter Steve Fishwick and pianist Elliot Galvin – that pushed to another level the argument that he’s the fastest maturing young saxophonist/composer on the UK scene.
• The EFG London Jazz Festival continues until 23 November.
