In 30 years of juggling jazz, community projects and world music, British composer Tony Haynes has often been stuck with the label of worthiness. But his new suite, If Paradise..., performed on this tour by his Grand Union Orchestra, joins styles and sources from Asia, the Americas and Europe. It is the most rousing and coherent work of his long career.
In the first half of the evening, Grand Union's adapted African chants - reprofiled as exuberant shouts from the brass and reeds over Brian Abrahams' rumbling drums - swept aloft the contributions of local schools, choirs and student instrumentalists. The effect was to fill the room, as Haynes has always sought to do, with the possibility that the experience of music-making might change at least a life or two.
The second half's If Paradise ..., conceived as a contemporary story wrought from traditional ones, was at times a darker affair, its poetry dominated by war and loss, mostly leaving the expression of frontier-crossing and ideology-bustingempathy to the music.
Davina Wright's rich soul voice opened it with the Song of Solomon (Richard Scott's searing counter-tenor joining to make a contrast that tingled the spine), before Bangladeshi singers Lucy Rahman and Akash Sultan first took the music east, through a Trilok Gurtu-like episode of thumping Asian funk, before they and Scott wriggled through a section closer to the leaping intervals and spiky melodies of contemporary classical music.
Explosive, polished and grooving trumpet playing came from the classy brass trio of Claude Deppa, Paul Jayasinha and Byron Wallen (Deppa quoting Mack the Knife and the Miles Davis theme Jean-Pierre over a reggae pulse); Chris Biscoe's slippery soprano sax mingled eloquently with Baluji Shrivastav's sitar; hot and Mingus-like ensemble sections gave way to funereal incantations, then switched abruptly into fast straightahead swing.
There were many sharp individual performances, but Tony Haynes' emergence as a tighter and more inventive jazz ensemble writer has resoundingly replaced Grand Union's tendency to didacticism with a new life-grabbing glee.
