Chris Dave
Glasgow's annual Jazz festival begins next week (26-30 June), and though the bill is pretty diverse – pianists as different as the rugged Stan Tracey and quicksilver young Venezuelan Leo Blanco, for instance, or vocalists as distinctive as the fearlessly soulful Sarah Jane Morris and the graceful balladeer Carol Kidd – the late-night visit by American drummer and producer Chris Dave and his Drumhedz group on 28 June (they also play two late shows at Ronnie Scott's on 4-5 July) has to be the pick of the bunch.
Last year the electrifying Dave was a key figure in neo-soul star D'Angelo's comeback tour (as both drummer and musical director), and he was a powerful presence on Adele's 21 album. Yet despite the dominance of contemporary R&B, soul and hip-hop in his life, the man that Roots legend ?uestlove described as "probably the most dangerous drummer alive" has acquired a jazz following whether he sought it or not, and almost all the gigs on the Drumhedz current European tour are at jazz festivals.
Dave has said that the ethos of the Drumhedz – a floating group of friends primarily bonded by a devotion to making live music – was never much more than "think of what a record company would not want you to do". But anybody with jazz sympathies who picked up on him through his UK visits with pianist Robert Glasper won't be surprised by his jazz stature. Like the late jazz-drums innovators Max Roach, Elvin Jones and Tony Williams, Dave often seems to work in two time zones at once – maintaining a pulse without banging home metronomically repeated hits, while simultaneously keeping up parallel volleys of polyrhythms, hip-hop licks and fast, asymmetrical patterns that sound, at first, like the noise of a party in another room. Because his vocabulary comes from today's street music and dancefloors, he sounds totally contemporary, but the jazz effect is the same as for the great drummers who preceded him – improvisers in his company are offered a multiplicity of rhythmic choices, which shake them out of knee-jerk habits of phrasing. Even the most familiar jazz gets to sound different.
Reading on mobile? Listen here
Above, by way of the BBC's Jazz on 3 is a glimpse of how that process works, on a jazz classic: John Coltrane's Giant Steps – or Stepz in this incarnation, of course.
Tom Rainey Trio
A very different kind of US drummer – LA-born Tom Rainey – is unlikely to appear on an Adele session any time soon. But if Rainey's connections are with the most uncompromising of contemporary-jazz radicals (saxophonist Tim Berne is a long-time employer), he's charismatically capable of getting a jazz room shaking its collective booty, as his New York trio with saxophonist Ingrid Laubrock and guitarist Mary Halvorson showed UK audiences on a short tour this month. The group hit London's Vortex Jazz Club on the same night Django Bates' Beloved trio played Kings Place, but just dropping in on their second set provided plenty of evidence that this group's growing reputation – notably for balancing astringent free-improv with a kind of skewed funkiness, or the lyricism of earlier jazz – isn't undeserved. The resourceful, closely-attentive Laubrock, often inhabiting the tenor-sax soundworld associated with Evan Parker, would blow earthy multiphonic tones or delicate sighs over Halvorson's sliding chords and shimmery tremolo effects, and Rainey's light brushwork – and then erupt into raucous shouts as the drummer built up a crunching, abstract-rock groove. Airier, more boppish music (like a kind of post-Coltrane Cool School jazz) followed, then pure-texture expeditions of long sax whoops, tolling chords and soft cymbal-edge squeals. It was the kind of intimate, expert, empathetic and often very exciting music that draws doubters toward free-jazz, without flinching from any of its creative challenges.
Reading on mobile? Listen here.
Here's that lineup at New York's Barbes bar last year.
Branford Marsalis July visit
Jazz FM's three-day Love Supreme festival on 5-7 July has its share of stars on the borderlines of jazz and pop (notably Bryan Ferry, with his early-swing makeovers of Roxy Music classics), but the return of Branford Marsalis to the UK will be a highlight of the weekend for many. The eldest, sax-playing Marsalis has often been the enigma of that dedicated jazz dynasty – gifted and eloquent, sometimes seeming a fitting holder of the baton passed by Coleman Hawkins, Sonny Rollins and even Coltrane, but with a more inconsistent output on record than his trumpeter brother. The gig will be a chance to check out Branford's long-running quartet with drummer Justin Faulkner - who replaced original member Jeff "Tain" Watts three years ago, and brought his own brand of light-touch intensity to 2012's Four MFs Playin' Tunes album. Here's Branford himself, filling in some context for that session - and for his view of jazz in general.
Trevor Watts
Reading on mobile? Listen here.
When Ornette Coleman's undermining of mainstream song-harmonies and boldly intuitive approach to group improvisation first surfaced on the jazz scene in the late 1950s, the effect enthralled a few initiates and devotees, and mystified or even horrified plenty of others. It took openness, playing and listening skills, and a splash of bloody-mindedness, to side with Coleman's methods as a player back then – or even to take them further, as the early experimenters on the embryonic European free-improv scene were to do. Two of the most significant pioneers in Britain were the drummer John Stevens and his close associate, alto saxophonist Trevor Watts. The pair had performed together during military service in the RAF in Germany, and by 1965 in London, Stevens was simultaneously involved in regular jazz groups (including guitarist John McLaughlin, among others) and a free-improv collective with Watts, Evan Parker and other avantists called the Spontaneous Music Ensemble – a venture that was to become legendary in the annals of European free-jazz. The messianic Stevens died in 1994, but the now 74-year-old Watts has remained very active - in various improvising outfits, but also in highly accessible, percussion-driven world-music bands that have reached audiences all over the globe.
Reading on mobile? Listen here
A profile of the saxophonist by filmmaker Mark French has just been released, based on a long interview and featuring a lot of spontaneous playing with partners, including pianist Veryan Weston and drummer Mark Sanders. But here's a Watts group in more exuberant, dance-groove mood - his Celebration Band, live in Macedonia.
Mulgrew Miller
Lastly to Mulgrew Miller, the much-loved and now much-missed American pianist, who died at the age of 57 on 29 May. Miller wasn't the kind of player who wanted to turn music upside-down; his playing was the quintessence of the style of jazz that always sounded like a song – albeit one with a lot of notes in it. But he was a jazz musician with the kind of unquenchable imagination and good-humoured grace to keep making mainstream-to-bop materials sound fresh – and he had a generosity of spirit that always sought to share them, whether as an educator or as a selfless ensemble player.
Reading on mobile? Click here
Here's Miller doing what he did best with another great departed jazz hero – former Miles Davis drummer Tony Williams – and bassist Ira Coleman, on Green Dolphin Street, from the Williams trio's 1996 album Young at Heart.
