Nigel Price brings the spirit of Wes Montgomery to a rocking Saturday night at Ronnie Scott’s
Peter Jones
Monday, October 11, 2021
The acclaimed guitarist brought the house down with his string-tinged 11-piece take on the music of Wes Montgomery
The hardest-working man in showbusiness is no longer James Brown but our very own Nigel Price: online jazz guru, saviour of the Swanage Jazz Festival, single-handed organiser of multiple huge tours of the UK, nominated for the 2021 Parliamentary Jazz Award for Best Ensemble – and an accomplished guitarist too. So it was hardly surprising that he not only sold out Ronnie Scott’s for both Saturday night shows, but brought ten musicians on stage, including a string quartet, and went 15 minutes over time at the end of the first show. Inexplicably, this was the first time in 600 gigs at “Jazz HQ” that he’s played the main room under his own name.
The occasion was the launch of Price’s much-lauded Wes Reimagined album (Ubuntu Music), on which he gives each Montgomery composition a twist and sends it off in a whole new direction. Hence the slow, sleepy ‘Leila’ was injected with a double-shot of adrenaline and turned into an upswing rampage. ‘Far Wes’ became a waltz, on which organist and long-time collaborator Ross Stanley demonstrated his mastery of nudge and nuance, whisper and swell. And ‘Jingles’, a hip, syncopated Wes-defining tune if ever there was one, mutated into an energetic samba, enlivened further by a terrific rhythm battle between drummer Joel Barford and percussionist Snowboy.
As Price pointed out, Wes Montgomery had a lot to do with bringing latin and funk styles into the mainstream jazz repertoire. The premise of both the album and the gig therefore made a lot of sense: to use the tools that the great man left us. And it wasn’t always a question of kicking everything into a higher gear: the joyful ‘So Do It’ became what Price introduced as “a depressing downtempo bolero.” In fact, it was more like more a gorgeous Henry Mancini cheese-fest. The night ended with Tony Kofi (alto) and Vasilis Xenopoulos (tenor) trading licks with guest Callum Au (trombone) on the closer ‘Cariba!’, done as a funky shuffle, sweetened yet further by the young string quartet Phonograph Effect Strings.
Photos by Carl Hyde