Cork Jazz Festival reviews: Takuya Kuroda, Alice Coltrane Celebration impress at Triskel
Alina Bzhezhinska and her band at Triskel Christchurch for the Guinness Cork Jazz Festival. Picture: Darragh Kane
Fusion can be a scary word for fans of jazz, or any music. But Takuya Kuroda gives it a good name. As a player, the Kobe-born trumpeter fits easily in the lineage of Donald Byrd, say, but his musical influences range far and wide. The prolific Kuroda has released five albums in the past decade, with loops, synths, and hip hop beats in the mix, in work that’s always groovy and soulful. His 2022 album, , is an Afrobeat-infused effort, featuring covers from the likes of Herbie Hancock. His latest, Midnight Crisp, has a cleaner sound though still heavy on funky beats.
In other words: it’s hard to know what to expect from this sold-out early evening show. At Triskel it soon becomes clear that, in a live context, this excellent group keeps it very jazz indeed, finding range and harmony, elaborating with solos, and generally creating more interesting, improvised music.
In keeping with Kuroda’s reputation for new music, we begin with an as-yet-unreleased track. Later, some of the best moments come from the high-energy piano playing of Takahiro Izumikawa, especially as he and Craig Hill on saxophone set off towards a crescendo which may never come, but which, in the rapid fingering, hard-blowing and some oomph from the drums, takes us somewhere special. This is a group that knows how to keep it varied, exemplified by a trumpet-sax duet that is witty and playful. Kuroda saves the most recognisable moment for last: his cover to Roy Ayers’s Everyone Loves the Sunshine. It’s a tonic, a ray of light, on a dark, wet October evening.
The harp doesn’t readily spring to mind as a jazz instrument, despite, of course, its associations with Alice Coltrane and Dorothy Ashby. But the Cork festival is getting used to the sound, with Brandee Younger appearing two years in a row recently, and now Alina Bzhezhinska back on these shores, with a tribute to Coltrane, during what the John and Alice Coltrane Home have dubbed “The Year of Alice”. (One assumes that the fact the main sponsor of the festival has a harp for its logo is merely coincidental.) Bzhezhinska is no stranger to the work of such a pioneer as Coltrane, and has studied her work, ideas, and beliefs.
That knowledge comes through as she explains the details and origins of the music she’s selected. The most remarkable thing here, however, is the assertiveness that Bzhezhinska brings to her playing. As the band featuring British saxophonist Tony Kofi fairly gallops through Los Caballos, for example, in loud, muscular fashion, it sometimes feels like the harp is lost, only for those glissandos to come again, cutting sharply through. It’s a balance Bzhezhinska strives for throughout.
The question of where Brian Jackson, who collaborated with Gil Scott-Heron, sits in the ensemble is not always clear. He does a fine job on piano, with occasional interludes on flute.
The band's excellent rhythm section - drummer Matt Holmes, and bassist Menelik Claffey (his dad is from Cork) - get into a groove as Jackson performs a spoken piece on what blues music really means, and the American also takes on vocal duties for a version of 'Rivers of My Fathers', the song he co-wrote with Scott-Heron for the album.
There is an awful lot of music in this jam-packed two-hour show (complete with interval). As the band returns for their encore, Bzhezhinska remarks, “This concert is never going to end until we play 'Journey in Satchidananda'.” Big cheers come up from the crowd, and we’re off again. One final exploration in which Bzhezhinska’s command of her complex, delicate-seeming instrument is astounding.
