Queen’s Hall, Edinburgh, 28 April 2012, and touring

HOME and its many diverse meanings and associations is a big subject to tackle in any form.

EDINBURGH-based saxophonist Phil Bancroft first devised this show as the result of a commission during the Year of Homecoming in 2009, and has continued to develop and expand the project in the intervening period.

Small as the World

The basic musical structure remained similar to the first performance of the piece at the Bosco Theatre during the Edinburgh International Jazz Festival that year, as did the line-up – Bancroft on saxophones (and laptop), Aidan O’Rourke on violin, the Amsterdam-based Australian trumpet player Felicity Provan, Graeme Stephen on guitar, Paul Harrison on piano and keyboards, Mario Caribe on bass, and Stu Ritchie on drums.

That represented four different countries of origin, and that role call was further expanded by an imaginative addition to the programme. The saxophonist had set up a link with violinist Kumaresh (Ganesh & Kumaresh have collaborated with one of Bancroft’s other projects, Trio AAB) in Chennai, via the medium of Skype.

Bancroft called the piece Technology, and after an initial hitch in establishing the connection, the technology worked surprisingly well, allowing the Indian violinist to play live from the music room in his home with the band on stage in Edinburgh, including a short duet with O’Rourke.

If the project has inevitably lost some of the surprise elements of that opening night at the Bosco (but not, of course, if you haven’t already seen it), it has gained both in new ideas and fresh content and a more finely-honed sense of direction.

It is a multi-faceted meditation on the many meanings of “home”, expressed in music, text, film and projections, with contributions from photographer Louis de Carlo, artist Josh Armstrong and members of the public who have contributed words and images to the project’s website. The stage set included a sofa and chair (although nobody sat in either), and the musicians performed the first half of the show dressed in that most archetypal of home garments, pyjamas.

The opening section focused on an amusing video shot in Bancroft’s own home, and gave a central role to his dog in the elegant melodic flow of Swim, Jenny, Swim. Home, Small As The World made use of text and photographs from diverse cultures (either by de Carlo or posted to the website), and featured Aidan O’Rourke and some of the most-soundtrack-like music of the evening.

Childhood allowed us to play a game of spot-the-musician from photographs of them in their youthful guise. Featuring Felicity Provan, it began with a slow section and then switched to a more energised vein in evoking the idea of play, a dual structure used in several of the pieces.

The music took a more spiky, kinetic direction in Travel, an ever-changing excursion featuring Graeme Stephen, and the violent disruptions of Nationalism / Voting For War. Although deprecating his own eco-warrior status (“I don’t compost as much as I should”), the saxophonist explored the fate of our planetary home in Gaia and the hilarious finale in which he, his wife, cat and dog fire off into space to the strains of his putative world-wide party hit, It’s Too Late Now, So Party On, with the band suitably decked out in low budget spacesuits (you can get a flavour on the videos on the project website – see below).

Home, Small As The World is at An Lanntair, Stornoway, tonight (30 April), and Eden Court Theatre, Inverness, tomorrow (1 May).

© Kenny Mathieson, 2012

Links

• Home, Small As The World