For most of the year, it can be an act of investigative journalism to discover where jazz is going on, so the 10-day London jazz festival, crowded with more than 100 gigs, comes as a heady change. On Saturday, adjacent halls at the South Bank Centre hosted two contrasting performances: one of fierce, abstract improvisation, the other of elegantly sumptuous big-band concert music.
At the Queen Elizabeth Hall was the six-hour Adventures in Sound project, which brought together British and international free improvisers, visual artists and DJs for a succession of individual performances and unrehearsed collaborations. Next door at the Royal Festival Hall, UK pianist Julian Joseph played his Radio 3 festival commission with a high-powered big band, augmented by the BBC Concert Orchestra and soul singer Mica Paris.
Adventures in Sound was true to its title, and threw in music-activated visuals for good measure. It brought together the loose and muscular but tradition-related free jazz of Delaware pianist Matthew Shipp, the sampling experiments of DJ Spooky, saxophone virtuoso Evan Parker, several Norwegian avant-garde players and the innovative UK keyboard player Matthew Bourne.
Bourne's music represented some of the afternoon's most uncompromising collisions of improv and free funk, with tapes of news broadcasts and TV announcements mixing with free-jazzy electronic scurryings. DJ Spooky's set, meanwhile, turned into an unexpectedly delicate, spontaneous decks/soprano sax exchange with Parker, in which the saxophonist deployed his dazzling, multi-linear investigations but showed himself open to playing abrasive, funky licks against the DJ's pumping beats. Shipp, one of the most formidable post-Cecil Taylor free-jazz pianists, then played a trio set of fierce, percussive energy, looking from the back like a man searching frantically in a huge, disorderly drawer.
Julian Joseph demonstrated once again his sophisticated and broad view of large-scale, orthodox-tonality jazz. Later in the evening he showed a contemporary sensibility influenced by both classical music and soul in his big-canvas premiere, The Great Sage. But after a slow start, he pushed his fascinating virtuosity as a Herbie Hancock-inspired pianist to its limits in a version of Sonny Rollins's Tenor Madness, with the veteran American tenor saxophonists George Coleman and Johnny Griffin as guests.
Coleman, a fast and imperious former Miles Davis sideman, swept through the standards with his usual aplomb (though his undisguised clock-watching was a little off-putting). The frailer and more tentative Griffin restricted himself to fragmentary phrases and the odd emphatic bell-note or inquisitive hoot. Drummer Mark Mondesir elegantly and unerringly lit everyone's way.
