"The church has become the setting for a series of adventurous jazz concerts ......most of the time, the sheer beauty of its sound seduced us too, shimmering round the ornate Anglo-Catholic interior of St Cyprian’s, as Yoshiki Ban’s ornate candles guttered and flickered"
Alyn Shipton The Times 4 stars ****

Mike Westbrook

Alyn Shipton at St Cyprian's Church, NW1 4 Stars ****Monday 27th Mar 2006

It’s a fair certainty that Oil and Pencil on Cardboard ranks as one of the more unusual titles for a new jazz composition. It is also a pretty unusual piece, with the saxophones of Pete Whyman and Chris Biscoe scurrying across their range, snarling, screaming and swirling, with moments of lyrical calm thrown in. In celebration of his 70th birthday in the stone and gold splendour of St Cyprian’s, the piece proved that Mike Westbrook is still one of Britain ’s most creative, experimental and daring jazz composers.

His suite Art Wolf is a setting of lyrics by his wife Kate that celebrates the work of the Swiss painter Caspar Wolf, an 18th-century landscape artist whose depictions of the rugged alpine landscape were dramatically rendered into chippy, rocky musical structures.

The composer’s spartan piano conjured up the vastness of the chill mountain scenery in the opening to Pale Parasol, a reminder of Wolf’s practice of including everyday objects in his pictures to create a sense of scale. Meanwhile Kate Westbrook’s declamatory style, slipping from song to speech and from crisp English to German, teased out the metaphor of an artist whose very signature was a wolf, scratching a living from the inhospitable landscape.

Too much of this would be hard going, but Westbrook has learnt a trick ot two in his long career, and the musical diet was leavened with some simply breathtaking soprano saxophone solos by Pete Whyman.

Sinuous and sinister, his sparkling sound made the most of the glorious acoustic of the church and between some dazzling torrents of notes added a romantic lyricism. Most Westbrook concerts also have an inbuilt sense of fun, and although we had to wait for the second half for his congeniality and good humour to emerge properly, his four-piece brass band swaggered its way through Oil Paint on Canvas. This had all the lilt and lift of his best big-band writing, the composer’s bass horn setting up an ostinato against which the saxophones and Kate’s baritone horn swaggered and swung. This joyous feeling returned in the encore, a Martinique song whose Caribbean warmth sent us happily out into the alpine cold of a London evening.

Acoustic Triangle

Alyn Shipton, The Times 4 Stars ****Monday 12th Dec 2005

A bowed bass plays the opening strains of Allegri’s Miserere Mei, a French horn answers from behind a glittering rood screen, and finally the swirling tones of a soprano sax appear as well, echoing through the candlelit nave of St Cyprian’s.

Acoustic Triangle, founded by the bassist Malcolm Creese, lives up to its name, playing entirely without amplification. In this gentle, beautiful concert, it drew to a close a national tour of sacred places, in which the natural reverberation of churches, abbeys and cathedrals have been an integral part of its sound.

The band’s saxophonist, Tim Garland, is becoming something of a specialist in exploiting unusual acoustics, having earlier this year launched a project inspired by lighthouses, but this trio is the perfect setting for his playing. He and the band’s pianist (and occasional horn player), Gwilym Simcock, are also the composers of most of the repertoire. They produced some of the evening’s eeriest sounds together on Everyone’s Song But My Own, as Garland blew his tenor saxophone directly into the piano, and the strings carried on ringing with ghostly overtones of his phrases.

If the group has a weakness, it is that the seductive reverberance of its settings compel it to fill every nook and cranny with notes. Even Garland’s leisurely ballad Rosa Ballerina had its theme massively ornamented, and the group held itself back only with the encore, an unadorned reading of Miles Davis’s Blue in Green, that was all the more powerful for its simplicity. That said, most of the time, the sheer beauty of its sound seduced us too, shimmering round the ornate Anglo-Catholic interior of St Cyprian’s, as Yoshiki Ban’s ornate candles guttered and flickered in the draughts of a wintry London evening.

The church has become the setting for a monthly series of adventurous jazz concerts, and this one, tailored to its glowing acoustics, was an ideal close to the year, as well as the launch for Acoustic Triangle’s CD Resonance, recorded during its six-month pilgrimage.

 

F-ire Collective

John Fordham, The Guardian Tuesday January 11, 2005

3 stars / 5 stars St Cyprian's/Spitz, London

From students to budding stars, young folk singers and samba bands to jazz virtuosi, the London-based F-ire Collective embrace a remarkable amount of creative music-making.
The Collective has been showcasing the diversity of its informal membership at various venues over the past week. Saturday's Spitz performance - involving saxophonist Stephane Payen, Royal Academy of Music students and the French-Belgian trioOcturn - has already rocketed into my list of 2005 shows that will be hard to match.

Last week's opener at St Cyprian's Church was devoted less to jazz and more to offbeat contemporary song, with three duos featuring vocalists. Deborah Jordan's flexible, eloquent voice and the formidable pianist Robert Mitchell's mix of jazz references and classical precision gave both contemporary improvised music and soul ballads fresh spins. The flute-like, storytelling singer Julia Biel then unfolded some soft Latin and ethereal music with acoustic guitarist Jonny Phillips, and a young folk singer, Olivia Chaney, demonstrated with harpist Sefa Steer that F-ire's magnetism for new talent extends in many directions.

At the Spitz, after a tricksy large-group set from the Royal Academy band and Payen, Octurn played a more dazzling set than might have seemed possible from a trombone/bass guitar/drums lineup. Trombonist Geoffroy de Masure, a brilliant inheritor of the techniques of the German veteran Albert Mangelsdorff, gave a stunning display of tonal variety, rhythmic surprises and melodic invention. Drummer Chander Sardjoe's rolls and cymbal sound contrasted with episodes of metronomic minimalism, and bassist Jean-Luc Lehr's lyrical six-string bass solos were shapely. It was Steve Coleman meets the Bad Plus. Sensational.

John Fordham, The Guardian 4 stars ****, Wednesday January 5, 2005

Four days before the latest catastrophe to tax the hopes of the religious, 73-year-old American pianist Jack Reilly premiered a jazz suite in a London church composed as a personal thanksgiving for life. Reilly survived cancer in 2002. His Green Spring Suite is dedicated to the medics who saved him, and the Baptist church he attended during the worst of it.If that implies pious music of sotto voce intonations, bear in mind Reilly's track record, which includes partnering legends such as Ben Webster, George Russell and Sheila Jordan, and a body of ruggedly distinctive jazz composing. He played the London premiere of the Green Spring Suite with locals Dave Green on bass and Stephen Keogh on drums, and though the organisation was tight and the mprovising spliced into narrow gaps in the structure, the music emitted a flickering brightness that was of a piece with the glimmers and dancing reflections in the candlelight.

Reilly's opening pieces reflected his Bill Evans allegiances in their quiet flourishes and shifting harmonies, and the mid-tempo swinger Oncological - its suspended unaccompanied release leaning on the main theme - displayed his remarkable clarity of single-line playing over Keogh's delicate cymbal beat and Green's sure-footed walk. Some of the music suggested French pianist Jacques Loussier's spinning of jazz lines out of classical harmonies - sometimes contemplatively, sometimes against a Latin undertow from Keogh's brushwork.

The second half brought a delicious wash of dewy sounds turning into a dancing vamp (Gobaj); a growling bowed bass intro that became a trickle of treble piano notes thickening into Gershwin-like chords; a swoony movie-music theme that evolved into free-improvisation; then Blues For All, the only older Reilly composition. Many pianists have grown on the Bill Evans tree, but Reilly is special.

Geoff Eales

John Fordham, The Guardian 4 stars **** Thursday October 28, 2004

Playing piano for the BBC Big Band might typecast you as a swinger who turns few unplanned corners, but that would be unfair both to that increasingly loose-limbed ensemble and the irrepressible Geoff Eales, who occupies its piano chair. Eales was launching a solo album and exploring an impromptu duet relationship with Michael Garrick - an influential older-generation British pianist recently reprofiled through DJ Gilles Peterson's Impressed albums - at St Cyprian's church, near Baker Street.