Universal Hall, Findhorn, Wednesday 11 August 2004

Herlin Riley

THE NAIRN JAZZ FESTIVAL is very much a traditional and mainstream jazz event, but every now and again Ken Ramage throws in an artist working in a more modern context. The Herlin Riley Quartet fitted that bill this year, and delivered a memorable performance in the second of their two festival performances in a mercifully cooler Universal Hall.

If the weather had eased off, there was no reduction in the musical temperature. That has been at sizzling point all week, and Riley and his associates ensured that it would remain so. The drummer is most familiar as the man behind the kit in the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra and in most of Wynton Marsalis’s own projects over the past 14 years, but he demonstrated here that he is a natural bandleader in his own right.

Not content with some of the most propulsive and musical drumming currently to be found in jazz, he threw in a rap in the course of their energised version of Miles Davis’s ‘So What’ and sang in exchanges with the audience on a Cajun song he learned from the legendary Danny Barker as a young teenager, and also on the traditional New Orleans style encore, ‘Paul Barbarin’s Second Line’, a tribute both to his home town and the great drummer who wrote the song.

The meat of their two high-powered sets lay in more modern material, although we are still talking about the 60s for much of it. Thelonious Monk’s ‘Green Chimneys’ provided a challenging opening as the band hit their stride. John Coltrane’s ‘Impressions’ paid tribute to the great saxophonist, but their version of ‘Softly, As In a Morning Sunrise’ in the second set also owed a great deal to Coltrane’s signature style.

Saxophonist Tim Green is a relatively recent recruit to jazz from a more funk and rhythm and blues context, but he sounded anything but a tyro in engaging with the music. Pianist Doug Bickel was outstanding, and bassist Rodney Whittaker, another bandleader in his own right, was a magisterial presence at the heart of the band, and contributed his composition paying tribute to the late pianist and co-founder of the Modern Jazz Quartet, ‘John Lewis’.

Riley also featured a couple of his own compositions, and threw in a slice of down home soul jazz, Big John Patton’s ‘Funky Mama’, to close the first set in boisterous and good-humoured fashion. They concluded their scheduled set with a fiery version of the Ellington-Tizol classic ‘Caravan’, a final reminder of just how good this band is.

A bit too modern for the audience? Not a bit of it – they roared their approval at the end, and brought the band back for that final bit of fun with Barbarin’s song.

© Kenny Mathieson, 2004