Wildflower power-up Brussels Jazz Festival

The 10-day Brussels Jazz Festival happens in just one venue, the visually and sonically impressive Flagey, a converted 1930s radio studio with distinctive Art Deco design. Flagey is situated next to the Ixelles suburb’s two small lakes, just a short tram ride to the south of the city. Flagey has three performing spaces of varying sizes, so when the headlining seated concerts conclude in its main Studio 4, and audience members descend the stairs, they are met by the doubtless pulsating sounds of the night’s final set. In this open foyer space, there’s plenty of standing room, a bar along one side, and a band selection that’s chosen for its afterhours groove-power. So it was when London’s own Wildflower trio struck up at 10.40pm last Wednesday.

Tenorman Idris Rahman was already establishing an aura, before the crowds arrived, setting up billowing respiratory shapes in cahoots with drummer Tom Skinner and bassist Tom Herbert, the latter filling in for Leon Brichard. What a fine replacement! Ostensibly, this trio operates in the spiritual jazz zone, and that’s an apt description, although their music is also peppered with Ethiopian and Afro-slowbeat vibrations, with even a touch of old English folksong.

Herbert continually provided intricately compulsive lines, repetitive and melodic in his electric psych-bass contortions. Skinner built up brisk rotary patterns around his skins. Rahman occasionally switched to a small wooden flute, this being the only one of his bands where he uses that instrument. He’s mostly known for two decades of fronting Soothsayers, but nowadays also runs another band called Ill Considered. 

The amount of stamina required for Rahman to maintain his tenor power over the course of around 90 minutes is quite breath-taking, literally. For most of the time, he’s right at the core of the music, crouching down at the front lip of the stage, communing with the increasingly ecstatic crowd. Then, he’d step back to the drumkit, pointing his horn at Herbert and Skinner, as if to instruct them on the next strategy, or to fill them up with palpable energies. Rahman got into some gospel honking, and the audience responded, yelling back at his slurred, brawling solo. As the dry ice mists flooded, Rahman killed his own reverb with a foot-pedal stamp, and then peaked further, as he roamed back to the front. The tunes seeped into each other, and Jaz Christodoulou-Lee guested towards the end, for some twin-tenor exchanges, stepping into mainline jazz mode. He’d already played with the Neue Grafik Ensemble earlier, so there was a strong element of UK takeover at this festival, as in previous years.

Two days later, the Kamao Quartet played a lunchtime set in Studio 1, as a collaboration with the Djangofollies festival, running concurrently with the BJF. This was a very different set, as gypsy jazz is at the heart of Djangofollies, whose schedule extends well beyond Brussels to spread its bands around Belgium in a sequence of mini-tours. Although led by the French singer/guitarist Jean de Talhouet, Kamao are regulars on the London scene, but for this set they were joined by Manouche fiddler Tcha Limberger, a key presence on the Belgian Djangophile circuit. A gypsy jazz character pervaded, but the songbook went well beyond customary material, alighting on Jimmy Giuffre’s ‘Four Brothers’, which allowed ample solo space for tenorman Dave Shulman, who also rippled his clarinet around the more Manouche-ed numbers. Thelonious Monk went to Havana, with an individualist Cuban gyration around his ‘Ask Me Now’, then Limberger shone on a quick-trotting ‘After You’ve Gone’, scatting as well as fiddling, both of these activities executed with élan.

Another compelling Studio 1 set came from the Ragini Trio, fronted by leading Belgian saxophonist Nathan Daems, augmented by Indian classical singer Sawani Mudgal and the well-familiar Serbian keyboardist Bojan Z. Their music melded traditional raga song-form serenity with some hyperactive Indo-jazz fusion flights, as Mister Z swapped between acoustic and electric keys, bringing in a classic Bollywood retro-synth sound for the gig’s lightening-up encore. Mudgal made gestures with two locked fingers, making geometric shapes in the air that could have been either guiding her vocal lines, or expressing them, or probably both. Daems followed the Kadri Gopalnath path towards sensually expressive fusion, although plunging deeper on tenor, instead of alto saxophone. Together, the quintet balanced carefully between these traditions, achieving a highly sensitive marriage.