On Friday's opening night of the monumental EFG London Jazz festival, that effortlessly cool old tale-spinner Hugh Masekela fittingly turned his personal jazz story into a universal one. Partnered only by long-time pianist friend Larry Willis, Masekela entranced the Royal Festival Hall with music and yarns about his jazz life, and his life as a South African under apartheid. The crowd caught on to his joy, as a student exile in 1960s New York, at discovering a music that didn't need high-culture accreditation or pop-chart statistics to be self-evidently wonderful, at sensing that improvisation and composition were two sides of the same coin – and clearly feeling that being rammed into a Harlem club with Miles Davis or Duke Ellington within touching distance was like being at a pub gig with Mozart.
London performance-poet and singer Zena Edwards opened the show with one of the 21 new pieces that have been commissioned to celebrate the festival's 21st birthday. Hers was an affecting collage of personal inspirations, ranging from Caribbean music and hip-hop to the Celtic folk singing of June Tabor. Masekela and Willis then opened on Herbie Hancock's Canteloupe Island (with the 74-year-old's flugelhorn phrasing sounding luminous and nimble, even if he does like shaking a favourite bag of runs, trills and bright exclamations), followed up by exhortatory African vocals, a beautiful jazz remake of the Stylistics' You Make Me Feel Brand New, Masekela's 1968 chart hit Grazin' in the Grass, some heartfelt, witty and immensely musical Louis Armstrong-like vocalising on Old Rocking Chair's Got Me, and When It's Sleepy Time Down South as an encore.
Later that night at Ronnie Scott's, in a show that was also broadcast live on BBC Radio 3, US organ trio Medeski, Martin & Wood rocked through their signature mix of dissonant blues and churning grooves. They were followed by the subtly battering double-drum pulse and Caribbean-inflected sax lines of new UK stars Sons of Kemet, and then by Norwegian virtuoso Arild Andersen, whose pensive folk-jazz double-bass themes and delicately flicked harmonics brought a hush to the club.
Delicacy and fierceness also mixed on Saturday at the Purcell Room, when Alexander von Schlippenbach's great free-jazz trio with saxist Evan Parker and drummer Paul Lovens met the lively contemporary-classical trio Noszferatu. Both bands played separately, and then joined with impressive coherence for three new compositions, juggling strictly counted percussion patterns, penny-whistle jigs, surges of sax improv and a few squirts of surreal humour. Jazz may have been distant, but it was an unmistakeable undertow just the same.
Available on BBC iPlayer until 22 November. Schlippenbach Trio and Noszferatu play CBSO Centre, Birmingham (0121-345 0600) on 19 November. Sons of Kemet play Barbican, London EC2 (0845 120 7550) on 21 November.
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