Singer Jacqui Dankworth has just made the best album of her career (As the Sun Shines Down on Me, for jazz label Candid), and surrounded herself with premier-league jazz improvisers in her brother Alec on bass, Mike Outram on guitar and Roy Dodds on drums.
The album's tracks dominated the last night of this festival in the village of Guiting Power, near Cheltenham. But Dankworth also stepped outside its predominantly fragile and occasionally melancholy mood to launch into bar-strutting blues and playful Latin party music.
Her range often echoes that of her mother Cleo Laine in its stretch from airy high sounds to a reverberating low purr. But if the singer found her strength in the upper atmosphere to be occasionally faltering in the first half, her rich tonal palette, some very distinctive new angles on familiar jazz songs and the buoyancy of the players' variations gave the show a momentum that swept the tremors aside. Alec, one of the best jazz-bass exponents, fired off a succession of urgent solos that were all resoundingly different. Outram is a young jazz guitarist with world-class credentials, and his sympathetic support for the band leader was a centrepiece of the performance.
Outram indicated the chapter-like development of his improvisations on a softly padding September in the Rain. The guitarist and singer reworked Blue Moon as a folk song, with Dankworth spinning spookily up from a distant low thunder to a fading falsetto. Soul-phrasing lent poignancy to a heartfelt Not Like This, and a similarly low-key duet with Outram on the second half's In a Sentimental Mood was exquisite. Stevie Wonder's Knocks Me Off My Feet was another guitar-vocals duet that caught the song's ecstatic essence, and a Ben Okri poem furnished some of the best lyrics of the night. Drummer Dodds uncoiled a quirkily soft-sounding Latin-drums break on This Can't Be Love, and an encore on Bob Dylan's I Threw It All Away stirred some of the singer's most subtly dramatic manipulations of a lyric, and the most elegantly melodic of solos from Outram.
