Crowds Queue For Courtney Pine At Brecon Jazz Festival
Friday, September 1, 2006
Brecon is getting back to normal today after a weekend of jazz that saw large numbers of visitors, up to 70,000 people, flocking to the Powys market town for the annual festival.
While the event this year saw the curtailment of the street music programme, owing to crowd disturbances in the past, which some locals felt detracted from the atmosphere of the festival, nonetheless music could be heard everywhere on the streets and in the public places of the town. At one moment you could hear a band playing James Brown funk coming from the garden of a public house or at another it would be the New Orleans flavours of the Adamant marching band, regulars at Brecon for many years.
On Saturday, American saxophonist legends Benny Golson and Johnny Griffin, both in their seventies, gave a well received performance at the Market Hall. Golson opened with two of his songs that have become jazz standards, 'Whisper Not' and 'I Remember Clifford' and then followed with the amusingly titled 'Pierre's Blues', with Golson telling the audience that the tune was named after a bass player whose name "wasn't Pierre".
In the evening, at the Theatr Brycheiniog, Stan Tracey's Hexad opened with 'Devil's Acre' quickly powering through a superbly slick and funky set. Best of all was Thelonious Monk's 'Bright Mississippi' (that became 'Sweet Georgia Brown') and the characterfully cussed 'A Funky Day in Tiger Bay'. Trumpeter Mark Armstrong and alto saxophonist Nigel Hitchcock were especially on ticklingly good form.
By the end of Tracey's set the crowds outside and nearby were snaking slowly towards the nearby Watton Marquee to gain admittance to hear Courtney Pine's Resistance band. Omar Puente's Jean-Luc Ponty sense of attack provided the edge with Courtney on this occasion while the saxophonist himself was as full on as ever, powered by an up for it Robert Fordjour on drums. The highlight was a cunningly skilled meshing together of a Cat Stephens song seguing into a plantive Samuel Barber melody plus the Jean Michel Jarre-like ambient moan from Courtney's customised electronic wind instrument initially introduced aurally in the fog-like haze at the back of the stage as Darren Taylor held the lively band together.
Report: Stephen Graham
On Saturday, American saxophonist legends Benny Golson and Johnny Griffin, both in their seventies, gave a well received performance at the Market Hall. Golson opened with two of his songs that have become jazz standards, 'Whisper Not' and 'I Remember Clifford' and then followed with the amusingly titled 'Pierre's Blues', with Golson telling the audience that the tune was named after a bass player whose name "wasn't Pierre".
In the evening, at the Theatr Brycheiniog, Stan Tracey's Hexad opened with 'Devil's Acre' quickly powering through a superbly slick and funky set. Best of all was Thelonious Monk's 'Bright Mississippi' (that became 'Sweet Georgia Brown') and the characterfully cussed 'A Funky Day in Tiger Bay'. Trumpeter Mark Armstrong and alto saxophonist Nigel Hitchcock were especially on ticklingly good form.
By the end of Tracey's set the crowds outside and nearby were snaking slowly towards the nearby Watton Marquee to gain admittance to hear Courtney Pine's Resistance band. Omar Puente's Jean-Luc Ponty sense of attack provided the edge with Courtney on this occasion while the saxophonist himself was as full on as ever, powered by an up for it Robert Fordjour on drums. The highlight was a cunningly skilled meshing together of a Cat Stephens song seguing into a plantive Samuel Barber melody plus the Jean Michel Jarre-like ambient moan from Courtney's customised electronic wind instrument initially introduced aurally in the fog-like haze at the back of the stage as Darren Taylor held the lively band together.
Report: Stephen Graham