Eighteen years of reinventing music from Nirvana and Queen to Stravinsky with jazz trio The Bad Plus might have labelled Wisconsin pianist Ethan Iverson a fervent jazz populist. But he’s also a polymath of fascinating eccentricities and an anglophile. He celebrated all this, and his post-Bad Plus life, with a three-day residency at Kings Place in which he reimagined British music – all the way from Henry Purcell to Stan Tracey and Courtney Pine.
On Saturday, Iverson and writer Richard Williams talked Doctor Who, Soft Machine and British jazz, and locals Laura Jurd (trumpet) Pete Wareham (tenor sax), Tom Herbert (bass) and Sebastian Rochford (drums) helped him pay spirited tribute to the latter. Iverson impressively invoked the late Stan Tracey’s signature piano sound of limping Thelonious Monkish runs and irrefutable low-end bangs on Tracey’s sardonically jaunty Rainbow at the Five Mile Road, and Wareham’s quietly probing tenor lines expanded on Courtney Pine’s fine 1988 composition Beyond the Thought of My Last Reckoning. Jurd’s bright sound and narrative sense illuminated Nikki Iles’ serpentine Fly’s Dilemma and Jamaican great Joe Harriott’s Calypso Sketches, and Michael Gibbs’ And on the Third Day was a patiently beautiful slow-burn.
For the third part of Iverson’s residency, he joined with British pianists Adam Fairhall and Alexander Hawkins to apply improv thinking to the liberating structural foresights of renaissance composer William Byrd, to Constant Lambert’s and Percy Grainger’s early 20th-century flirtations with the blues, and to the classy boogieing of 1950s Trinidadian hitmaker Winifred Atwell. Iverson unfolded Grainger’s In Dahomey as a pretty ragtime piece (the composer conceived it after hearing Will Marion Cook’s music for the all-black In Dahomey revue in London in 1903), and Ray Noble’s Cherokee – a pop song that evolved into a classic bebop vehicle – with a secretive, prowling left-hand line and a flying double-time right. But it was a jam on Grainger’s Country Gardens that stole the show. Iverson’s input was jaggedly rhythm-bending, Hawkins’ a free-jazz firestorm and Fairhall’s like Abdullah Ibrahim playing Wagon Wheels. That jolting sequence wound up one of the most divertingly unlikely shows that can ever have featured on a jazz programme.
Elsewhere in the festival, Iverson’s Soft Machine enthusiasms might have been reawakened at the Pizza Express Jazz Club by Italian composer/pianist Maria Chiara Argirò and her subtly percussive, cinematically evocative ensemble – blending electronics, guitar, sax and Leïla Martial’s soaring vocals on the music from Argirò’s upcoming Hidden Seas album. She’s a quietly compelling presence in new European jazz.
• The EFG London jazz festival continues until 25 November.
