Pickaquoy Centre, Kirkwall, 25 June 2003

THE ST MAGNUS FESTIVAL has an international reputation as an event with classical music at its core, but the festival has increasingly featured both traditional music and jazz (not to mention theatre, dance and visual arts) within its programme.

Tommy Smith

The finale of this year’s festival pushed jazz to greater prominence than ever before. Saxophonist Tommy Smith brought the Scottish National Jazz Orchestra to the island for the first time to perform in the final main evening concert at the Pickaquoy Centre. To mark the occasion, the festival commissioned a new piece from the group, The Orcadian Suite.

It ran a bit longer than ideal, and apparently offended some sensibilities in the hall, clearly unused to the musical language of jazz, or the (normal) volume level of the band. Each of the five composers – Mario Caribe, Chris Greive, Tommy Smith, Don Paterson and Brian Byrne – chose an Orkney-related theme as their subject matter, and produced a variety of different approaches.

Caribe’s atmospheric evocation of the ancient history of Skara Brae included a powerful soprano solo from Martin Kershaw. The saxophonist figured again in Chris Greive’s impressionistic Ocean – Liquid History, which built from slow, abstract beginnings into a more expansive outcome.

Tommy Smith once rehearsed a concert at The Ring of Brodgar to an audience of cows, and commemorated the event with a spectacular stampede in his piece, which was written as a late substitution when pianist Steve Hamilton had to withdraw from his proposed section.

Don Paterson paid tribute to Orcadian writer George Mackay Brown in Countryman, while Brian Byrne’s Dance on the Stones of Stennness rounded out the commission.

The band turned to the music of Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn after the interval, reprising their performances of The Nutcracker Suite as featured on their Highland Tour earlier this month, albeit with only the most basic (or no) piano comping.  Whatever the objections raised afterwards (and I heard of them only at second-hand), they were given a good reception by a sizeable audience, and responded with a raucous romp through Charles Mingus’s Nostalgia in Times Square by way of an encore

Tommy Smith had already featured twice in the festival prior to the SNJO concert. On Tuesday night he teamed up with pianist Brian Kellock in St Magnus Cathedral. The duo tailored their approach to the acoustic of the venue, and worked their way through a series of extended meditations on standards and contemporary jazz tunes by Steve Swallow and Smith himself in highly inventive fashion, but at slower tempos and in more spacious style than usual.

Smith also took the soloist’s role in a fine lunchtime concert with the BT Scottish Ensemble, playing his own arrangements of Chick Corea’s Children’s Songs. These are virtually re-compositions of Corea’s solo piano originals rather than simply arrangements, and both music and performances confirmed the excellent impression they made when first performed last year.

Reports suggested that the classical element of the programme had been a notable success this year, and on the evidence of the BBC Philharmonic’s scintillating final concert at the Pickaquoy Centre on Tuesday, that was easy to believe.

© Kenny Mathieson, 2003