Newton Conference Centre, Nairn, Wednesday 6 August 2003

Junior Mance

THE NAIRN JAZZ FESTIVAL is now in full swing (pun, sadly, intended), and this year’s programme is maintaining the festival tradition of featuring an especially strong line-up of jazz pianists.

Yesterday’s lunchtime concert featured our own Brian Kellock, named best Instrumentalist in the BBC British Jazz Awards last week, with his Handful of Keys band in a tribute to the music of Fats Waller. The main evening slot went to another return visitor, Chicago master Junior Mance.

The pianist was joined by bassist Andy Cleyndert and Steve Brown. Appropriately enough, that combination first came together in Nairn, and liked the experience so much that they formed a band. Mance ventured to suggest that they now sounded like a real trio rather than piano plus accompaniment, and he will get no argument from me.

His own style draws on the strengths of a powerful combination of swing, bebop and blues, and his material reflects those poles of influence. The band played their interpretations (often at unusual tempos) of classics from the Basie and Ellington books alongside Thelonious Monk’s ‘Ask Me Now’ and ‘Blue Monk’, a handful of standards and ballads (including Mance’s luminous solo reading of the Ellington-Strayhorn ballad ‘The Single Petal of a Rose’), and – of course – several blues.

The pianist’s ornate elaborations on the melodic and harmonic material were beautifully complemented by Cleyndert and Brown, and both provided fine solos in their own right. The trio were joined in their last three tunes by alto saxophonist Jesse Davis, a former pupil of Mance’s who is now an established name in his own right, including what seemed to be an epic blues-drenched version of ‘Willow Weep for Me’, and a sizzling account of Thelonious Monk’s ‘Rhythm-a-Ning’.

The Nairn Jazz Festival 2003 continues until Saturday 9 August.

© Kenny Mathieson, 2003