Various Venues, Islay, 11-13 September 2009

ISLAY Jazz Festival 2009 will be remembered for some stunning music, weather that suggested a favourable arrangement with a higher authority, and two incidents of airborne invasions.

Trygve Seim and Frode Haltli

One of these incidents was benign, its perpetrator seemingly having confused Ionad Chalium Chille Ile in Bowmore with the RSPB Centre at Gruinart and after being humanely captured and released through the front door, flew off into the night. The other airborne guests were an unalloyed menace who all but sabotaged the festival’s opening concert at Finlaggan on Friday.

The ancient seat of the Lords of the Isles provided, in theory certainly, a fantastic open air setting. Here in the late afternoon sunshine, among the ruins from whence MacDonalds controlled a significant part of the Atlantic seaboard in centuries past, a modern-day Macdonald, saxophonist Laura, engaged with Tom Bancroft on bodhran and an audience primed to hum droning notes on cue in a specially commissioned piece called For Two.

Suggestive of John Coltrane in My Favorite Things mode communing with the music that might have accompanied ancient clan feasting and celebration, this neatly tied in the location, the jazz festival and a nod towards the Scottish Government’s Year of Homecoming. Appreciating music increasingly became a challenge in the circumstances, however, as Islay’s midge population homed in.

Quite how Norwegian saxophonist Trygve Seim and accordionist Frode Haltli, cast in the role of Norsemen returning to the Viking lord and MacDonald clan founder, Somerled’s bailliewick, then managed to complete Seim’s commissioned Islay Suite is a cause of some wonder.

Written in three movements, it certainly captured the Longing, Travelling and Homecoming implied in its subtitles, with Seim’s typically yearning, glissando style carrying out over the adjacent loch and Haltli’s variously rugged and sweetly nimble accompaniments adding richness to the atmosphere.

But with the audience being eaten alive, only the hardy – and your correspondent – remained to hear its beautifully hymn-like finale, and to catch Seim’s smacking of a winged pest onto his cheek in the most restrainedly eloquent coda.

Seim and Haltli later made an impromptu appearance as support to the saxophonist’s group, The Source, at Bruichladdich Hall, and gave a brilliant concert of their own on Saturday at Ionad Chalium Chille Ile, which developed into a quintet performance as Seim’s Source colleagues joined in for the second half.

The range of expression the saxophonist and accordionist create on a repertoire extending from Scandinavian folk melodies to Middle Eastern songs of praise, Jewish laments and even Bob Marley’s ‘Redemption Song’ is truly extraordinary. In Haltli’s hands, the accordion becomes almost like a church organ, capable of making the tiniest notes sustained with breathtaking control and huge rumbling sounds alike.

Indeed, control is a Source watchword also. Their Friday concert showed amazing communication between the four musicians, with Seim, trombonist Oyvind Braekke and bassist Mats Eilertsen taking turns to lead the music into a new phase.

This is essentially free improvisation with linking themes, with the two horns coiling at times harmoniously and at other times with robust aggression, and throughout it all drummer Per Oddvar Johansen adding subtle touches, a quietly precise drive and a musical sensitivity that involves Indian bells and a bowed saw as well as knowingly applied sticks, brushes and beaters.

It was Johansen also who provided the resolution to Saturday’s joint performance – a kind of re-imagining of The Source and Different Cikadas album, with Haltli replacing the Cikada String Quartet – in the shape of his MmBall, its hauntingly insistent melody and quietly throbbing pulse remaining in the mind long after this master class in musicality, eclecticism and searching adventure had concluded.

Elsewhere, Laura Macdonald’s sextet gave a fine concert featuring older tunes and a quintet of new pieces written as part of her festival commission. These were melodically assured and played with a blend of vigour, enquiry and eminently compatible temperaments, with tenor saxophonist Phil Bancroft, pianist Paul Harrison and Macdonald herself making particularly creative solo contributions.

Bancroft was at the heart of another instalment in the zany, left-field but entirely congenial adventures of Trio AAB at a Lagavulin distillery that, on Sunday, might easily have been located on the Mediterranean’s shores. And adding a local touch that, in separate gigs, both broadened the festival’s musical palette and gave a sample of the shape of jazz to come, were father and son Giles and Alfie Perring from the neighbouring island of Jura.

Perring Snr’s trio’s blend of 1960s arts lab, bluesy swagger and technology-assisted melodic experimentation didn’t entirely convince, and the teenage Alfie’s trumpet and pocket trumpet playing sometimes showed more ambition than control. But his young sextet, bolstered by a hastily enlisted Simon Edwards on bass guitar, had plenty of promise, not least in drummer Steven Henderson and alto saxophonist Kirsty Duncan (from the Isle of Skye), as they gave good accounts of Charles Mingus, Benny Golson and Clifford Brown favourites.

© Rob Adams, 2009

Links

• Islay Jazz Festival
• Rob Adams