Black Bottle Islay Jazz Festival

21 Sep 2005 in Argyll & the Islands, Festival, Music

Various venues, Islay, 16-18 September 2005

Arild Andersen.

QUEUES FORMING outside every concert told their own story. In its seventh year, the Black Bottle Islay Jazz Festival is surely now firmly established as Scotland’s most popular small-scale jazz event.

Much of the queuing was caused by the high uptake of weekender tickets, guaranteeing near capacity attendances in the island’s mostly modest-sized venues before the doors opened. But even in larger spaces such as Bunnahabhain Distillery’s beautifully located storage shed, the sight of people being shoehorned in soon became familiar.

There is, of course, a feeling – backed up by a shortage of available overnight accommodation and fully booked ferries – that almost the entire festival, audiences as well as musicians, is now being imported from the mainland. Indeed, if you want to take in the eighth edition – dates have already been announced as September 15-17, 2006 – you might be advised to get a room booked pronto.

Some of the homespun charm of the festival’s early years may have been lost as a result of this. But there’s still something special about being allowed into Islay House’s grand hallway to hear piano and clarsach duo Bachue adding jazz trumpet to the Doric ballad tradition, courtesy of special guest Colin Steele, or trekking out to Portnahaven, to the Atlantic’s edge, to hear international class jazz by pianist Brian Kellock’s trio on a Saturday lunchtime. Here, musicians and audiences alike fortified themselves for the long day ahead with home-baked scones and cakes during the interval. Very Village Vanguard, that.

Islay actually has its own Village Vanguard in the unassuming Bruichladdich Hall. Drive past it during the day and that’s exactly what you’ll do – drive past it without noticing it. It’s not exactly an architectural wonder of the world inside, either. Yet during every jazz festival it inspires musicians to play at the top of their game. This year it was Colin Steele’s turn. Playing to a loudly receptive audience, the trumpeter and his quintet, including recent recruit, saxophonist Konrad Wiszniewski, and the marvellously inventive pianist David Milligan, turned on the style.

Wiszniewski brings a hunger as well as improvising accomplishment to Steele’s Scottish-accented compositions, including the very apt ‘Paps of Jura’, composed on the ferry en route to last year’s festival, and it’ll be interesting, to say the least, to hear how the group develops with him aboard.

Whether Moishe’s Bagel should be filed under jazz is a matter of some debate – they swing and they improvise, so that’s qualification enough for me.

Fast developing into a force to be reckoned with, saxophonist Laura Macdonald’s Octet charmed the Saturday afternoon audience out at Bunnahabhain. This is another venue which seems to inspire musicians – although the Islay ethos of engendering a listening environment may also have an impact – and Macdonald’s finely voiced compositions gained in maturity with the confident playing of all concerned.

If there was a fly in the ointment this time around, it was in the programming of singer Tina May in Bruichladdich simultaneously with Norwegian bassist Arild Andersen and saxophonist Tommy Smith’s duo concert in the Round Church in Bowmore on Saturday.

It didn’t help that your reviewer drove round to catch the second half of May’s gig only to find the venue door jammed shut – possibly the first example ever of Islay being inhospitable. But a quick drive back to Bowmore granted the reward of hearing Andersen and Smith enlarging upon their first set’s variety.

Andersen’s beautiful tone and amazing dexterity, allied to a mastery of technology, produce a fabulous array of sounds with no hint of gratuitous novelty-seeking. His ‘Independency Suite’, which occupied the first half, found him and Smith creating almost orchestral variations on Nordic themes with clever use of rhythmical echo effects.

If it sounded a little tentative in places – this was only the duo’s second performance of it – there was nothing tentative about their second set. Full of good natured challenges, spontaneous invention, brilliantly agile playing of folk dances – from Arabic forms to reels – and sheer musical expression, this was artistry of a high order.

The final day’s programme might have been sub-headed ‘Whisky on a Sunday’ with a lunchtime farewell from the New Zealand-bound John Rae at Ardbeg followed by a late afternoon tribute to Charlie Parker by alto saxophonist Martin Kershaw at Laphroaig Distillery. Rae’s New Jazz featured the drummer in Art Blakey’s role as the (slightly) elder statesman leading a young band playing accessible, melodic numbers all composed by band members.

The pick of these were saxophonist Paul Towndrow’s brisk, grooving ‘Interjection’ and Rae’s own New Orleans-flavoured ‘Smelly Oxters’, a typical Rae juxtaposition of quality writing with a less than reverent dedication to a well-known but unnamed saxophonist. Rae has hinted that his move to the Antipodes may not be permanent, but if it is, he’ll leave a massive gap in the Scottish jazz scene.

Whether Moishe’s Bagel should be filed under jazz is a matter of some debate – they swing and they improvise, so that’s qualification enough for me. But there was no doubting their contribution to Islay. If ever a finale was aptly promoted as rip-roaring, it was the Bagel’s parting blast of rollicking Balkan dance music, emotive Sephardic blues and dramatic violin melodies. Not quite a party – the audience was probably too jiggered to dance – but an emphatically joyous coda all the same to an invigorating weekend.