The moment when Billy Higgins interrupted his band's suspiciously guileless sway through The Girl From Ipanema with a nerve-splintering thrash of abstract guitar noise will have been for some among the piquant memories of this year's excellent Cheltenham jazz festival. But for those whose idea of jazz this is not, the festival also included intelligently creative expanders of the tradition such as pianist Brad Mehldau and American saxophonists Joe Lovano, Bob Berg, Greg Osby, Mark Turner and Chris Potter.
Starting the six-day event's last weekend, Potter explored the material dedicated to past sax giants from his new Universal album. The only negative surprise was its slightly restrained respectfulness on disc. But live performance suggested it might be a slow-burner, with pieces such as the Lester Young dedication The Visitor and the ruggedly Michael Breckerish High Noon seeming far more urgent.
If Potter was a shade cerebral for some, Don Weller's big band was the straight-swinging antidote. Though they took a while to warm up, Weller's Basie-like arrangements, with their cross-sectional banter, train-hooting trumpet cadences and exuberant shouts, made this a fine example of big band bravura.
British pianist Nikki Yeoh's trio had Saturday afternoon's audience standing to shout bop riffs behind drummer Mark Mondesir's dazzling closing solo. And though Yeoh's own improvising is going through a tentative phase, her multilayered, melodically wayward, probingly unjazzy themes grow increasingly fascinating. New York drummer Jim Black's AlasNoAxis played laptop computers as well as more regular hardware. Although its thrashing, guitar-led blasts of free-funk noise dislodged some listeners, and its minimalist melodies could have had a little more substance, the set was often exhilarating.
A different kind of thrash, mixing traditional Vietnamese music with the Hendrix-Scofield-Stern line of headlong guitar wailing, came from Nguyen Le on Sunday. His astonishingly virtuosic set, a brilliant compositional and ensemble performance as well as a showcase for the leader's guitar, was a triumph.
Meanwhile, the heavyweight US hornmen, Osby, Turner and Lovano, highlighted the general sax move from muscular Breckerish Coltraneism towards a cooler, contrapuntal, interweavingly linear manner. On Saturday night Osby and Turner played a superb set of intricate melodies reminiscent of Lennie Tristano, but with an unexpectedly funky diversion into The Sidewinder. Lovano's versatile Sunday-night quartet (three of them, including Lovano, took turns on drums) preferred Ornette Coleman's scuttling themes, sudden pauses and long, clamorous blues wails, mixed with the Chet Baker/Gerry Mulligan contrapuntal approach. The impact may seem more preoccupied on disc but, as a distinctive and theatrical festival band, it can't miss.
