Two of jazz’s best virtuosi improvising at the speed of thought, a Pulitzer-winning artist telling the story of comics to music veering from swing to Schoenberg, a 13-year-old pianist with the touch of Herbie Hancock, and a majestic singer rooted in 150 years of gospel music were the four totally different standouts from the first two days of the 2016 London jazz festival. Saxophonist Joshua Redman and pianist Brad Mehldau, the graphic-novel genius Art Spiegelman, teenage prodigy Joey Alexander and jazz-gospel vocalist Lizz Wright were opening night stars whose diversity insisted that, if anybody still thinks jazz is only for sagely nodding silver-haired beardies, they’re a very long way out of time.
Redman and Mehldau startled even their seasoned fans at the Barbican on Saturday night. After Mehldau’s catchily rocking Always August, and truculent tenor sax blurts and radiant falsetto sounds from Redman on his Mehlsancholy Mode, the saxophonist’s ingenuity on Sonny Rollins’ Sonnymoon for Two told the crowd they were witnessing a performance a cut above even this pair’s usual standards. And Mehldau confirmed it in an unaccompanied break in which his control of separate melody lines let loose on the fly never lost its careering momentum. Redman (who had tweeted the single word “dread” as Trump won) wryly reflected on the mixture of guilt and relief they felt at taking refuge in music-making away from America, before the pair concocted streams of songlike lines, separately and together, on a bewitching visit to the ballad I Should Care; a gently introduced but increasingly frenetic burn through Mehldau’s The Distance; and a standing-ovation encore with Charlie Parker’s Ornithology. If it was a refuge in music, a lot of people in the hall sounded volubly grateful for it.
On Friday night, the great graphic novelist Art Spiegelman’s show Wordless! was a fast, funny and visually stunning history of graphic storytelling, cheered on by its similarly insurgent 20th-century sibling, jazz. Silent-movie specialist Phillip Johnston’s resourceful Silent Six group set sinister vamps throbbing beneath Spiegelman’s hilarious account of how 1950s zombie comics had creatively warped his childhood; dirgey marches shadowed the dark woodcut landscapes of Belgian pioneer Frans Masereel; and wild klezmer dances and free-jazz trombone blasts mingled with the visions of Lynd Ward and Milt Gross. Despite a head-scratching five-minute technical hitch, it was a show of infectious off-the-radar fascination.
Later that night at Soho’s Pizza Express, the extraordinary 13-year-old Bali-born pianist Joey Alexander played for Radio 3’s Jazz Now live show, sidestepping jazz wunderkinds’ usual temptation to set the keys alight, and sounding instead as if he had all the time in the world to say exactly what he meant. The gig also featured the joyous eloquence of German pianist Michael Wollny and accordionist Vincent Pierani, the peppery hard bop of young Scottish saxist Helena Kay, and the simmering power of singer Lizz Wright.
•The EFG London jazz festival runs until 20 November.
