Cork Jazz Festival review: Davis, Coltrane and Ellington get worthy tributes
Keyon Harrold and Marcus Strickland played Thursday at the Everyman for the Guinness Cork Jazz Festival. Picture: Darragh Kane
Keyon Harrold and Marcus Strickland certainly have the resumés for taking on a tribute to Miles Davis and John Coltrane, in what is the centenary year for both these giants of jazz. Harrold played the Davis parts for the soundtrack to Don Cheadle’s biopic, while among Strickland’s recent releases is inspired by Coltrane's
Their festival opening night concert, at the Everyman, was titled 'The Music of Davis and Coltrane'. Probably a better description would have been the “legacy” of those musicians. Harrold, a warm, charismatic and crowd-pleasing front man, described his music on the night as the “glue”. But really, it was more like the cake, with Davis and Coltrane being the icing, and maybe the sprinkles, too, every so often.
Once you accepted this, it was an evening of intriguing listening. You never quite knew when a familiar few bars might pop up among Harrold’s catchy compositions. blows in as something sharply deconstructed, for instance, while and are arrived at by surprising circumlocution.
The effect is of a hip-hop-like sampling of these classics. This is not so surprising, given the lineup's eclectic abilities. With Shedrick Mitchell on keys, we stray into gospel territory whenever he hits the organ, while Charles Haynes on drums and Nir Felder on guitar provide their own versatility. It’s not so much “So What”, as “so, what the hell will we hear next?”
If Strickland is a little underused, there’s no doubting the mastery of Harrold. His tone is rich, his sound powerful. No wonder Jay-Z comes looking for this guy.
On Friday at the Triskel, Jason Moran showed you can have a tribute concert that mixes more fidelity to and sustained interest in the source material, but which also leaves room for astounding invention and originality. In this case, Moran, back at the Cork festival for the first time in around two decades, was worshipping at the altar of Duke Ellington.
Moran won the Rising Star award at the festival in 2002. If there was an award for festival Super Star, he could have been given that on Friday too. This was not just music as poetry, but musician as poet, as actor, lecturer, raconteur.
In one particularly dramatic moment, he turns away from us, intent on his hands, hunched spider-like over the lowest bass clef keys. From there comes an undulating, thunderous sound, a hypnotic ostinato excavating the underbelly of Ellington’s
Afterwards, Moran explained his thinking: what kind of fantasy did a successful black man born in 1899 have? A body at the piano, the hands in a “hard battle” between darkness and light. From here, it had to be a haunting version of music as meditation.
But it wasn’t all gloom, by any means. is delightfully lively. For that boogie-woogie gem, Moran does as Ellington himself did, breaking from the piano to click his fingers, an instruction to the audience that’s immediately taken up. Moran is our guide and teacher here, but for a beautiful moment, we, too, are part of this glorious performance.
