Of the rising generation of jazz artists who have internalised hip-hop and let its hustling rhythms twist the older tradition’s language, Texas pianist Robert Glasper has been the most visionary, influential, and creatively faithful to both sources. At Koko on Monday, in the EFG London jazz festival, an uprated version of his popular Experiment band swerved between funkily street-sharp, heavily electronic jazz with loose and lengthy instrumental improv blowing through it, and romantic R&B vocals from the tracklist of their new ArtScience album.
They cut loose on something pretty close to old-school jazz, with saxophonist and singer Casey Benjamin’s fast and freeboppish alto sax solo wailing over jazz/hip-hop drums pioneer Mark Colenburg’s calculatingly pummelling percussion. Glasper unwrapped a long keyboard improvisation of impulsive sprints and telling pauses after Benjamin’s dreamy vocal on No One Like You – the pianist travelling, as he often does, at a leisurely and lyrical pace, while the rhythm section thundered on unconcerned. The Experiment’s new single, Find You – with its smacking backbeat, ghostly vocoder sounds, scything piano fills and howling, rock-guitar break from Mike Severson – gave way to cheers for London R&B singer Lianne La Havas, turning up for a soulful jam with the ever-hospitable leader. In the closing stages, a taut and twisting Benjamin soprano sax solo – intricately jazzy though it was - gripped the crowd’s attention with its palpable sense that a human being with something urgently interesting to say was intent on passing it on.
Minnesota-born trio the Bad Plus bent the rules in their own ways at a festival gig at the Scala on Sunday, though with no lightshow and a lot less hoopla. The more spartan feel was established at the outset by the sparky British sax/drums duo of Binker and Moses, before the Bad Plus split their set between originals and material from new all-covers album It’s Hard. A noughties classic, pianist Ethan Iverson’s moving and hypnotic Everywhere You Turn was a standout, and Cyndi Lauper’s Time After Time was turned by canny dissonances and unceremonious accelerations from the wistful original into a fascinatingly gawky sibling that Thelonious Monk might have played. Barry Manilow’s Mandy, a typically cheesy choice from these canny ironists, put Iverson in waywardly trilling classical mood, while bassist Reid Anderson and drummer David King ducked and dived through busy countermelodies, offbeat slams and scolding percussive harangues.
Piano-led jazz from a quieter world and older sources came from Norwegian star Tord Gustavsen’s new trio, playing the festival the same weekend. Their treatments of Norwegian folk songs and Lutheran hymns were often hushed and reverential, but also periodically rose as gospel-driven dramas, or tingled with fine detail from the leader and superb acoustic percussionist Jarle Vespestad. The remarkable Afghan/German vocalist Simin Tander (often singing in Pashtun and fusing Madeleine Peyroux-like elisions, pure-pitched recitations and a few soft animal snarls) showed the rapt matinee crowd exactly why the word’s out about her in European new-music circles.
• The London jazz festival runs until 20 November.
