Alina Bzhezhinska refreshes the harp’s repertoire for Ronnie’s debut

Making her Ronnie’s main-show debut, Alina Bzhezhinska’s Hip Harp Collective mixed ever-refreshing takes on old jazz-harp classics with music directly reflective of more modern concerns. After opening with Dorothy Ashby’s exuberant ‘Soul Vibrations’, she soon switched shades, discussing the urgency of the situation faced by her friends and relatives in Ukraine (including a teenage cousin who has had to “grow up overnight”, trading his regular after-school pastimes for Molotov-making sessions and hands-on training in the techniques of urban warfare).

What can jazz – a tradition birthed from the fires of transglobal injustice – seek to offer in such times? Few in the community would claim to have a coherent answer; but summoning up spirits such as these, definitely seems like a good place to start. Bzhezhinska chose to invoke the spectre of Trane with a captivating cover of ‘Alabama’: originally composed to match the cadences of a MLK speech on the 1963 Birmingham church bombing, in which four African American schoolgirls were murdered by the KKK – and now, six decades on, re-explored as ethno-nationalistic civilian bombings continue to loom heavy in the news.

The show, booked as a preview of Bzhezhinska’s upcoming album Reflections, featured all the musicians who cut the record with her. The group rose admirably to the intensities of the occasion, with Jay Phelps’ trumpet and Vimala Rowe’s guest vocals propelled forward by Mikele Montolli’s slip-sliding basslines and the double-drum setup of Joel Prime and Adam Teixeira, who drew artfully and forcefully from rock rhythms amidst loops from Latin America and beyond (‘Los Caballos’). For all the history of this hallowed stage, Ronnie’s early-show crowds are not always the easiest to visibly rouse – but Tony Kofi’s ever-poised energy soon set heads nodding, trading horn spirals and flurries over pointillist string plucks (…alas, John Coltrane died too soon to hear Alice play the harp he had bought her: Tony & Alina’s live experiments delve into these tantalising ‘what if’ zones with unrivalled imagination).

Naturally, it can be too easy to ‘compress’ the emotional possibilities of a concert such as this into its dominant narratives. In the end, it was always a showcase of varied moods, tensions, and human energies: thus, a late-set return to foot-tapping Ashby tunes did not seem at all out-of-step with the occasion’s overall flow. I left the venue humbled by the connective powers of music in dark times – but also by its limits as a response to the scale of ongoing geopolitical tragedy. Sometimes, however sublime the sounds are, they will never feel like enough.

Listen to Bzhezhinska’s Soul Vibrations single on digital platforms now: and the Reflections double LP will be out on BBE Music in Sep 2022. And you can donate to those affected by the Ukraine conflict donation.dec.org.uk/ukraine-humanitarian-appeal