Review: Hailey Tuck, Glasgow Jazz Festival

Hailey Tuck, St Luke’s, Glasgow, Thursday June 21st  ****

 

The young Texan singer Hailey Tuck, who made her Scottish debut at the Glasgow Jazz Festival on Thursday, is not so much the next Madeleine Peyroux or Melody Gardot as she is their musical lovechild.

 

Like Gardot, she has an assured, controlled, sultry voice and a flair for drama, and like Peyroux, she has a spare, pared-back singing style, a way of hanging back from the beat and making unexpected forays into the upper reaches of her range.

 

Skipping onstage in a Jean Harlow frock and sporting her signature Louise Brooks bob, Tuck won the St Luke’s congregation over with her infectious joie-de-vivre and the self-deprecating humour she revealed as she recounted her escapades in the music world and how she managed to catch the attention of Peyroux and Gardot’s producer, Larry Klein, who produced her debut album.

 

Her storytelling skills were also much in evidence in the way she put over her eclectic programme; the range of song choices inspired – she said – by Klein’s ethos of sitting pop songs alongside jazz standards. So we had a bossa nova take on the Zombies’ Tell Him No, which worked well with Tuck’s sultry, seductive voice, and a brilliant version of Pulp’s Underwear which the coquettish Tuck evocatively brought to life.

 

Less successful were the over-aranged numbers in which Tuck’s vocals were drowned out by her trio, and her strange mutations of the familiar melodies of My Heart Belongs to Daddy and Trouble In Mind. The latter may have been a blues touching on suicide, but – as with every song on Thursday – it was sung with a smile by the kittenish Tuck, the cat who’s got the cream and just can’t hide her delight.

First published in The Herald, Monday June 25th

…………..

Programme

* Don’t Think Twice

* Sunday Morning

* Polka Dots and Moonbeams

* Trouble in Mind

* Alcohol

* Tell Him (Her) No

* So In Love

* Everything Happens To Me

* My Heart Belongs to Daddy

* Cry to Me

* Say You Don’t Mind

* Underwear

* Do You Know What I Means to Miss New Orleans

* St James Infirmary

* After You’ve Gone

* Junk (encore)

Edinburgh Jazz Fest Memories: Fiona Alexander

Fiona Alexander, one of the producers of the Edinburgh Jazz & Blues Festival, shares her memories of the event. She says:

“My very first brush with the Edinburgh International Jazz Festival was in the late 1980s when the Festival Club was in Edinburgh University Staff Club in Chambers Street. As a newcomer to jazz, I remember being amazed by all the music happening – three concerts running simultaneously on three floors with audiences moving from one space to another. I remember that I heard Lillian Boutté in my early days of jazz exploration and she made a huge impression on me – the musicality, the stories and the humanity.

“I started working with the festival in 1997. We wanted to develop it by adding more contemporary jazz, whilst retaining the established focus on traditional jazz and including the  special musical collaborations only happening in Edinburgh. So the programme featured Acker Bilk, Bob Barnard, Kenny Ball and Carol Kidd alongside John Scofield and Gil Scott Heron. The festival also featured the Mardi Gras, Jazz on A Summer’s Day, a Gospel concert at St Giles, The Blues Festival at the Caledonian Brewery and a late night club with the Alex Shaw Trio at the Caledonian Hotel.

“One of the most exciting aspects of the festival  is developing relationships with musicians and seeing the progress through the years – so the UK premiere for The Bad Plus took place at the Edinburgh Jazz & Blues Festival and they returned several years later with Joshua Redman playing one of the best concerts that I have ever heard.

“There’s a host of musicians who are informal friends of the festival – artists like Scott Hamilton, Ken Peplowski, Mr Sipp and David Berkman – who return to play regularly in new and different contexts. Some of the special collaborations have been very special indeed – the World Jazz Orchestra led by Joe Temperley, featuring Cecile Salvant, playing the music of Duke Ellington for example. The music and the atmosphere were electric. Tommy Smith and Courtney Pine both playing Coltrane – two very different approaches.

Joe Temperley with the World Jazz Orchestra, 2012

 

“Who have I been especially pleased to bring to Edinburgh? So, so many people. Hosts of international musicians like Christian Scott, Tia Fuller, Roy Hargrove, Ambrose Akinmusire, but also some really interesting smaller scale projects such as French pianist Baptiste Trotignon playing in Rosslyn Chapel, and young pianists like Aga Derlak and Enrico Zanisi. A host of Scottish jazz projects have been born at Edinburgh – New Focus (Konrad Wiszniewski with Euan Stevenson), Band of Eden co-led by Tom Bancroft and Laura Macdonald, and, coming right up to date, Alison Affleck with the all female Shake Em Up Jazz Band who are playing this year.

“Of course things can go wrong. When dealing with so many people there are inevitably lots of incidents, but one of the main areas of daily concern used to be musical instruments not arriving with bands – the frantic call-round to find a bass saxophone at 4pm for a soundcheck staring in 60 minutes, or I remember taking delivery of e.s.t’s double bass just five minutes before their concert started. Now we more often supply an instrument in Edinburgh for people to use.

“Of course lost luggage also relates to suitcases and clothes not arriving, musicians missing rehearsals and so on. Weather for the outdoor events also give us pause – strong winds affect the stage in the Mardi Gras, rain affects the Carnival. I remember one particularly inconvenient shower on the afternoon of a concert we had planned for Princes Street Gardens – it poured between 2 and 4 pm – then the sun came out and it was a lovely evening. However, we didn’t get the same walk-up and lost a significant amount of money.

“There are various ways in which the Edinburgh Jazz & Blues Festival stands out from other jazz festivals. There is no doubt that the range of music from 1920s to today makes our programme distinctive, as does our creative curation process – we present a lot of ONLY in Edinburgh concerts which we make happen just for the festival – so for example last year we offered 10 concert to Brian Kellock and asked him who he wanted to play with and then presented concerts with Fionna Duncan, The Ear Regulars, Liane Carroll and so on.

“As I hope you’ve gathered we are thrilled across the board – it’s as excting to present BIG Name X as to present a really exciting breakthrough artist and that’s because we love the music. So we are thrilled this year to be presenting the New Wave of Scottish Jazz – Mark Henry’s new commission, to present the first ever duo concert with Martin Taylor and Curtis Stigers and to have a new hub for the Festival with Teviot Row.”

* The Edinburgh Jazz & Blues Festival runs from July 13-22. Visit www.edinburghjazzfestival.com

Next: Norrie Thomson

Edinburgh Jazz Fest Memories: Roy Percy

Roy Percy & Dave Blenkhorn, Edinburgh Jazz Festival, July 2017 (c) Alison Kerr

Scottish bass player Roy Percy was a student when he first became involved with the jazz festival; these days he can usually be seen in different line-ups throughout the event, and he’s kept busy the rest of the year as one third of the acclaimed Tim Kliphuis Trio and one quarter of the popular Swing 2018 band. He says:

“My earliest attendance of the jazz festival was in August 1984, when my school band was supposed to take part in the youth competition at the King James Hotel in the now demolished St James Shopping Centre. We didn’t play in the end (no-one can remember why!) but we attended and watched the bands and lots of speeches.

“I first played the festival in 1986 with John Elliot’s Dixieland Band. We won the youth band award that year. It was sponsored by Avis car rentals. The award had their motto on it – ‘We Try Harder,’ which we thought was very funny, everything considered.

“The bands were only allowed one older member (over 25, I think) and in our case that was banjoist Bev Knight, who now plays for Jim Petrie in the Diplomats of Jazz. Everyone in the band was at the Edinburgh Uni except for me. I was a proud Stevenson College boy!

“My first big thrill of the jazz festival was that first year – I was a festival volunteer and one evening I filled in for Milt Hinton’s driver. I carried his bass into Meadowbank for him. He was nice – chatty and friendly – but I was a bit shy of asking him too many questions. I loved hearing him play. He slapped the bass a little too, which I hadn’t expected him to be doing. Fantastic!

“The following year, I played at the festival in Swing ’87 – with Dick Lee on clarinet, and John Russell and Martin Leys on guitars. (I joined in November 1986.) We had Fapy Lafertin join us that year. In his prime, he was the best of the gypsy guitarists, and still not surpassed by anyone since.

“That same year, I drove Al Casey to Pollock Halls of Residence (where he was staying, almost unbelievably!) in my 1964 Rover P4. I took the longest route I could think of so I could chat to him, as he was friendly and happy to chat. He kept asking:  ‘Is this a Rolls Royce?’

“At the halls, I made him a hot chocolate in the shared kitchenette and asked him about Fats Waller. ‘Best fun, strongest pianist I ever knew. So inventive too. I was a kid and learned so much, so quickly too. I gotta pee now.’ And that was it. Afterwards he went back to asking me about my car!”

Next: Fiona Alexander

Edinburgh Jazz Fest Memories: Alison Kerr

Alison Kerr (in black, at piano), listening to the Hot Antic Jazz Band, Drones, 1987

If it hadn’t been for the Edinburgh Jazz Festival, which celebrates its 40^th anniversary this year, I wouldn’t be writing about jazz now…

It was August 21, 1986, and I was 14 years old when I first accompanied my dad on one of his annual week’s worth of jaunts to Edinburgh during the jazz festival. By this time, he had evolved a jazz festival routine – he booked a week off work, bought a festival rail pass (this was back when the jazz festival coincided with the other Ediburgh festivals), resumed a smoking habit that hadn’t been indulged since the previous festival, and met up with different pals (with varying degrees of interest in jazz but an equally strong interest in beer), at the many licensed premises that doubled as venues.

This was the now long-gone era of the famous jazz festival Pub Trail, when brewers sponsored the jazz festival, the packed programme resembled a paperback novel, and you could hear local and international bands – some semi-professional, some wholly; all enthusiastic purveyors of classic and trad jazz – in pubs all over the city. On my first day at the jazz festival I heard the French band who quickly became lifelong favourites – the Hot Antic Jazz Band. And my fate was sealed ..

That was one strand of the Edinburgh Jazz Festival. The other was the one with ticketed gigs, usually an afternoon or evening long session with two or three sets featuring different line-ups. When the festival introduced their now-fabled Gold Star Badges (in 1986), you could dip in and out of three or more gigs in a night, and follow your favourite bands or soloists around town.

In our case, this invariably meant legging it from somewhere like the Festival Club on Chambers Street over to the Spiegeltent in Charlotte Square and then to the Royal Overseas League on Princes Street – where, that first year, I saw the pianist whose appearance in Edinburgh was the reason for mine, the nimble-fingered Dick Hyman – before the inevitable mad dash for the last train back to Glasgow.

Of course, there was no guarantee that you would get into a gig which you hadn’t been at from its kick-off, which is why – in 1991 – there were nearly tears when we ended up standing OUTSIDE the Tartan Club at Fountainbridge (that year’s incarnation of Harlem’s legendary Cotton Club) listening as best we could to an eight-piece all-star band featuring Yank Lawson, Scott Hamilton, Marty Grosz and Kenny Davern (I vividly recall being blown away as Scott Hamilton brilliantly evoked Lester Young’s iconic solo on Back in Your Own Backyward), when we had left perfectly good seats at the Spiegeltent and would have heard Leon Redbone if we had stayed on after the Dry Throat Fellows, another favourite quirky European group. Needless to say, the atmosphere on the train home that night was not the best …

Those early years at the Edinburgh Jazz Festival – me in my mid-teens; my dad in his early 40s – undoubtedly ruined me for everything that came later. I revelled in the camaraderie, rejoiced in observing the characters onstage and off (there was a motley crew of eccentrics – the “Coke Can Kid” and “Monsieur Hulot” were two of our favourites – who would turn up every year and usually be in competition for the front row seats), and delighted in the lack of segregation between audience and musicians which meant that when I emerged from my front-row seat at the end of a gig, my father would tell me he had just had a pint with one of the musicians we’d admired earlier in the day.

Probably the greatest gift the jazz festival gave me – apart from these unique opportunities to spend time with my dad – was the chance to hear some of the greats from the heyday of jazz. The veteran jazz musicians I was privileged to hear during my teens reads like the personnel listings of favourite records from the golden age of jazz – Doc Cheatham, Harry Edison, Buddy Tate, Al Casey, Al Grey, Milt Hinton etc.

Thanks to the jazz festival, I held the door open for Milt Hinton. I heard Art Hodes, who had played piano for Al Capone. I heard Al Casey, who had been in Fats Waller’s bands. And later, as a young journalist, I received annual invitations to his New York jazz festival from Dick Hyman.

Then there are musicians we got to hear for the first time in Edinburgh – and went on to enjoy at successive festivals. If it hadn’t been for the Edinburgh Jazz Festival, I would not have come across the wonderful guitarist, singer and raconteur Marty Grosz as early as I did, and for bringing him into our lives, I’ll be forever grateful to the festival. Few other musicians lift the spirits as he can, and his duo gigs with clarinettist/saxophonist and fellow wise-cracker Ken Peplowski at Edinburgh in the late 1990s, early 2000s were the main highlights of those festivals for many of us.

By the late 1990s, the pub trail was gone, and the informality that we had loved was a thing of the past as the musicians we wanted to hear were usually scheduled to play in the sobering (and non-smoking) Hub venue and being kept well away from the audience.  Our favourite musicians might still be coming to the festival, but if they did it was usually just for one or two concerts. My father no longer needed to book a week off work.

The festival had rolled on to a new era. But what luck to have lived through those early days and to have had just about enough nous to appreciate that what I was witnessing was special.

In the run-up to this year’s jazz festival, I’m publishing a series sharing memories of the jazz festival from across its 40-year history, and from the perspectives of punters and performers alike. If you would like to share your stories and photos, please email me on girlfriday71@yahoo.com

Next: Roy Percy

Edinburgh Jazz Fest Memories: Forrie Cairns

Forrie Cairns (third from left in front row), with Jim Galloway (centre, on soprano sax) playing When the Saints Go Marching In at the Edinburgh Jazz Festival’s Guinness Book of Records attempt at biggest ever jazz band. This was just, says Forrie, one section of the band!

One-time member of the Clyde Valley Stompers and a fixture on the Scottish jazz scene from the 1950s onwards, Glasgow-born clarinettist Forrie Cairns enjoyed the Edinburgh Jazz Festival as both a player and a listener. He says:

“I was working virtually non-stop in Switzerland for the first 30 years of the jazz festival. But on the odd occasion when I took part in it (I think four altogether), what always excited me was the way Mike Hart (before it became more of committee-run event) managed to arrange those great afternoon Pub Trail gigs and the ones in the Festival Club with all the unusual line-ups comprising the musicians from the various visiting bands.

“For example, in the mid- 1980’s I came over for week with Bob Wallis and although I worked each night with Bob at various venues, I found myself one afternoon duetting with John Crocker, the sax/ clarinet player from the Chris Barber Band. It was great fun.

“That same year gave me the unique opportunity one other afternoon of listening for one hour to the two wonderful horns of Warren Vaché and Spanky Davis, the resident horn man at Jimmy Ryan’s Club in New York. Two quite different styles and two musicians at their peak, not attempting to blow each other off the stand, but rather complementing each other in quite superb fashion. Those musicians who crowded into the Festival Club that day were so lucky. That was the Edinburgh Festival at its best.”

Warren Vache & Spanky Davis with Kenny Ellis (bass), Festival Club, 1985

Next: Alison Kerr

40 Years of the Edinburgh Jazz Festival

Scotland’s first jazz festival was born out of an experiment, 40 years ago, when local antiques-dealer and banjo-player Mike Hart brought together a number of local bands plus a couple of well-respected soloists from England and staged a mini festival in a ballroom in the capital.

Its success, plus a visit to the Sacramento Jazz Festival, inspired him to seek sponsorship for the first Edinburgh International Jazz Festival which took place in 1979, and featured a variety of semi-professional bands from here and abroad.

But it was in 1980 that the EIJF began to operate a policy which helped define it: it began to hire individual jazz stars, many of them veterans of the great American bands of the 1930s onwards, who had been sidemen in their youth but were now happy to be more in the spotlight.

Into the mix, Mike Hart added younger players who were part of the mainstream revival. All these musicians would stay for several days, if not a whole festival, at a time and would be mixed and matched in different line-ups, often featuring Scottish talent in the rhythm sections.

The jazz festival continued in this manner until the mid-1990s, by which point the blues festival had been added, the dates no longer fell within the main Edinburgh festival period, and the pub trail had come to an end.

In 1997, the festival was produced, for the first time, with Assembly Direct (now Jazz Scotland), ushering in a new era in which even more sub-genres of jazz were represented at the festival, and new collaborations and projects were championed, but always with a basic respect for classic and trad jazz and the keepers of the jazz flame ..

The Edinburgh Jazz & Blues Festival (July 13-22) celebrates its 40th anniversary with a gala concert on the opening night and various other events – visit www.edinburghjazzfestival.com for details. 

In the run-up, I’ll be publishing a series sharing memories of the jazz festival from across its 40-year history, and from the perspectives of punters and performers alike. If you would like to share your stories and photos, please email me on girlfriday71@yahoo.com