A Tale Of Two Trumpets: Nick Walters and Charlotte Keeffe blow up a storm at Manchester Jazz Festival

Nick Walters’ diversely-inspired music, from his large-form Paradox Ensemble to recent albums Padm​ā​sana and Singularity, brings together the trumpeter’s life-long interests in Eastern forms, West Coast themes, rhythms of the African continent, and nothing less than the cosmic groove of the universe. Performing on the free stage at Manchester Jazz Festival, the quintet stretched out in a set of comet-coming down-steaming grooves, replacing the electronic impetus of Walters’ home recordings with a consistently creative level of extended improvisation from the players. 

Laurie Lowe’s ear for detail in a solid groove holds it all down with Nim Sadot on bass, while Walters and reedman Ed ‘Tenderlonious’ Cawthorne can both be found adding a bit of cowbell or shaker. Cawthorne is a flamboyant soloist with exotic tonal colorations, and Walters himself always has an absorbing mixture of vulnerability of forcefulness in his timbre. In this generous music, most of the harmonic movement is modal, heard in parallel chords within the mode, which can deplete a sense of drama. The semi-tone trick of Miles’s ‘So What!’ offers crunchy relief but is perhaps over-extended. Versatile pianist Rebecca Nash has a crucial role in underpinning both the vertical harmonic and horizontal rhythmic impetuses of the music, which the group brought to an impressive and appealing realisation. 

Charlotte Keeffe is an improvising musician of the avant garde with an under regarded demotic appeal. Much of the Right Here Right Now album is performed with the London Improvisers Orchestra, so her performance on the free stage at Manchester Jazz Festival was a great opportunity to hear the Right Here Right Now quartet more fully, ahead of an album on Discus later in the year. The trumpeter styles herself as a painter playing with ‘sound brushes’. Her style of ‘splashing colour’ upholds a splatter-gun approach to improvisation rooted in vocal affect and percussive effect. Puffing red-faced into the horn with a slightly tortured articulation, you can discern the visible attempt to get something impossible out of the instrument—which is in a sense true because the physics of the trumpet mouthpiece are so unforgiving and harder to nuance than a saxophone reed. 

Charlotte Keeffe at Manchester Jazz Festival

When music is described as painterly, no-one is thinking of George Stubbs, or Gainsbourough. They mean Jackson Pollock, or at a pinch Klee: a mystical connection to the self through spontaneity and unpredictability. Keeffe brings out the painterliness of the rest of the group, confidently leaning into abstraction with Ashley John Long bowing the double bass through FX and sounding like a theremin, Ben Handysides conscientiously attenuating the tempo on drums, and the never-noodly Moss Freed on guitar, a man who literally has a PhD in advanced harmonic thinking. 

Keeffe explained, or admitted, that her approach to composition is “intentionally vague: stretched out like plasticine or blu tack or chewing gum.” Such morphogenic music can be difficult to get a hold of. Her track ‘The Melody's In The Post’ is a hilarious riposte to criticism but a more cogent answer might come from ‘Sweet, Corn’, based around an almost Zeppelin-esque tight unison riff, closing an at times surprisingly funky set with a bit of old-fashioned rocking out. ‘Brentford’ (dedicated to her dad’s team) was relatively straightforward too, cycling a beautifully hewn Moholo-esque melody with wide steps and tumbling rhythms – way beyond my ken to sing or clap along to, and yet people did. “It’s a football chant!” It was a remarkable vindication of the intelligence and open-mindedness of audiences – an avant garde for everybody. 

AJ Dehany writes independently about music, art and stuff. ajdehany.co.uk