Queen’s Hall, Edinburgh, 1 November 2012, and touring

HARD on the heels of a notably successful tour leading the SNJO in a programme of music by Duke Ellington (see review), saxophonist Tommy Smith revealed a different facet of his music with Karma.

SMITH has led many quartets over the years, but the launch of Karma at the Edinburgh Jazz Festival two years ago introduced a new element to his wide-ranging career. The band marked a distinct shift in instrumentation, with electric keyboards replacing piano, and electric bass guitar rather than double bass.

Tommy Smith's Karma at the Queen's Hall (photo Andy Catlin)

In addition, it ushered in a distinct rock and funk inspired groove and energy on many of the tunes, something new in his own work, alongside contrasting material drawing on more folk-inspired influences from Ireland, India, Japan and Yemen.

It remains a powerhouse unit, with Smith’s endlessly inventive explorations on tenor and soprano saxophone, Steve Hamilton’s imaginative work on keyboards, the expansive breadth of Kevin Glasgow’s formidable 8-string bass guitar, and the irrepressible Alyn Cosker igniting the whole enterprise on drums.

An initial slightly tentative sense of the musicians finding their way back into the material on the first night of a UK tour quickly dissipated as they hit their stride. The quartet performed the material from their wide-ranging eponymous debut album in its entirety, and added a re-worked version of Tree of Knowledge (transplanted, musically speaking, to Northern latitudes) from an earlier acoustic quartet project, Forbidden Fruit.

In the second set, Smith introduced three new tunes to augment the more familiar material. Chaos Theory was a complex, high-energy mosaic of shifting moods, while The Whispering of the Stars beautifully evoked an icy exhalation of breath (the phrase itself is used to describe exactly that in northern Norway).

By way of encore, the joyous dance rhythms of Larissa – where, he told us, they have a dance called the karma – closed proceedings in exuberant style. The band will play in Aberdeen (7 November) and Shetland (11 November) in the course of their tour.

© Kenny Mathieson, 2012

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