Cork Jazz Festival reviews: Impressive fare from Brandee Younger, Adam Ben Ezra, and Matthew Halsall
Brandee Younger and her group at Triskel during the Guinness Cork Jazz Festival. Picture: Darragh Kane
The second night of the 2023 Guinness Cork Jazz Festival might have had a touch of deja vu about it, with the return of Brandee Younger and another familiar face, Matthew Halsall, headlining at the Triskel and Everyman respectively.
But if booking New York harpist Younger solo was a bit of a coup last year, her return flanked by Rashaan Carter on bass and Allan Mednard on drums was a triumph in front of a sold-out venue. Where last year’s performance was dreamlike, delicate and meditative, the extra propulsion from Carter’s bass and the muscle of Mednard’s drumming made for a richer, more varied experience.
The combination was best exemplified by Unrest, a two-part suite composed during the pandemic. It opens with the solo harp: a gorgeous flowing melody which nonetheless has an urgency and drama suggested by its title and its origin. The second part sees the harp lifted by the rhythm section, before a prolonged drum solo like rolling thunder has shouts of approval coming from the crowd. Younger says she just “couldn’t hold back” in returning to Cork so soon, and a good thing too. This time, the full range of her music was to be heard.
Earlier in the evening at the same venue, we were back in solo-instrument territory. Adam Ben Ezra’s unique artistic project brings the double bass, so often modestly in the background, very much front and centre. With him it’s no longer merely the source of rhythmic accompaniment. From the off, his thrums, slaps, swings and grooves. With a scratch of his fingers, it sounds like a guitar; plucked again and it sounds almost like an oud. Ezra reaches across the musical world in this absorbing set: flamenco, reggae, and rock are heard.
But the Israeli’s sound is firmly rooted in the Middle East. With samples and loops recording and arranged live, his bass becomes an ensemble, and he his own backing singer. The control and precision are to be marvelled at. After he sets up a track before departing to the piano, there’s even a pause in it to allow for a keyboard solo. As warm applause greets his “prayer for peace”, it’s hard not to think outside the festival bubble, to more grave matters. That theme is brought into the encore, a rousing version of Come Together. Easier said than done, perhaps, but we need to keep believing.
Matthew Halsall’s set at the Everyman picked up on the spiritual dimension of the Triskel pairing. As with Younger, Alice Coltrane’s influence is clear in this set, where another Alice, Alice Roberts, plays the harp. Halsall’s latest album, An Ever Changing View, continues where 2020’s Salute to the Sun left off: all mindful meditativeness and nature sounds. With conga drums, chimes, bird song, harp, triangles, looped marimba samples, and ethereal fluting playing, it’s gentle with a very big G, this set.
But then Gavin Barras's bass might emerge to push things along, or Halsall himself might play a trumpet line that seems to bring a more familiar, urban jazz sound into the mesmerising, almost bucolic sound world his ensemble creates. After the intermission, Jasper Green at the piano and Alan Taylor on drums are given more room, suggesting that a show of two more contrasting halves might have been more satisfying. Nonetheless, the warming balm of Halsall’s music is hard to resist on a damp Cork night.
