Misfit City

A quick London jazz update, in two contrasting flavours (jazz-pop in a plush Soho brasserie; wild improv and thick sound in a Lambeth art space).

Live At Zédel presents:
Alice Zawadzki & Jamie Safir
Brasserie Zédel, 20 Sherwood Street, Soho, London W1F 7ED, England
Saturday 24th December 2016, 7.00pm – information

“Following a sold-out show in January, Alice Zawadzki and Jamie Safir return to their favourite venue for an evening of power-ballads and pop-songs: rearrangements of ’70s, ’80s and ’90s classics stripped bare and drastically re-imagined in this intimate jazz setting. Described by ‘The Guardian’ as “a genuine original” and by ‘MOJO’ magazine as “something of a phenomenon”, Alice truly possesses a unique musical gift on both voice and violin. Tonight she will be ably accompanied by accomplished, young pianist and arranger Jamie Safir, a regular at Zedel, and a creative and virtuosic improviser whose sensitivity and skill when accompanying vocalists has led to him work recently with Will Young, Ian Shaw, Olly Murs and Barb Jungr amongst others.”

I couldn’t find any clips of Alice and Jamie working together (they’ve done this show before at Zédel, but no-one seems to have thought to film it). Still, to give you an idea, here’s Alice’s separate guitar/violin/bass trio cover of Nobody’s Fault But Mine, brought down to a thrumming pitch of apprehension. Not that the original’s a power ballad, but it fits the mould if you stretch the latter beyond belief (and carefully ignore the fact that the original’s actually a Blind Willie Johnson blues moan rather than a crushing Led Zeppelin behemoth), though I’m not sure whether she’ll be applying similar techniques to Hold The Line, Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us Now or other ‘School Disco‘/’Guilty Pleasures’ stalwarts.

 
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LUME presents
LUME Festival 2017
IKLECTIK, Old Paradise Yard, 20 Carlisle Lane, Waterloo, London, SE1 7LG, England
Saturday 24th June 2017 & Sunday 25th June 2017 (3.00pm to 10.30pm, both days) – information http://iklectikartlab.com/lume-festival-2017/ here, https://luminouslabel.bandcamp.com/merch here and here https://www.facebook.com/events/539918599729636/

At the same time, London experimental jazz organisation LUME will be throwing a two-day performance party in the shape of their own yearly LUME Festival. Drawing on the success of last year’s event, it brings a selection of old and new faces to town.

Both of the LUME organisers are bringing along their own quintets: Cath Roberts’ growling, exploded free-blues explorers Sloth Racket (with tenorist Sam Andreae, guitarist Anton Hunter, bass player Seth Bennett and drummer Johnny Hunter) and Dee Byrne’s flowing, cosmological, space-jazzing Entropi (with trumpeter Andre Canniere, keyboardist Rebecca Nash, drummer Matt Fisher and bassist Olie Brice). So too is Derby vibraphone theorist Corey Mwamba, playing his extended piece ‘as_the_tex(t): body’ in a band featuring Robert Mitchell, Rachel Musson, Liran Donin, and Richard Olatunde.

Newer to LUME are multi-layered Newcastle trio Archipelago (Christian Alderson, John Pope and Faye MacCalman, who throw piano, tapes, mbiras and handheld Monotron synths into the jazz-meets-garage-rock fusion of their bass/reeds/drums lineup) and the stormy murmuring chants of Laura Cole’s jazz-folk sextet Metamorphic, in which she’s joined by saxophonists John Martin and Chris Williams (the latter also of Led Bib), drummer Tom Greenhalgh, loop vocalist Kerry Andrew (of Juice Vocal Ensemble) and a bass chair that’s filled either by Paul Sandy of The Rude Mechanicals or by Sloth Racket’s Seth Bennett. Also in the mix are solo sets by visually-minded trumpeter and laptop wizard Alex Bonney (of Splice, Loop Collective, Leverton Fox and many others) and by electric trombonist and field recorder Tullis Rennie.

On top of this, there are some new entanglements. There’s the “brutally physical” Manchester/London teamup of David Birchall, Andrew Cheetham, Otto Willberg and Colin Webster; the Ma/ti/om percussion/bass/woodwind teaming of Matilda Rolfsson, Tim Fairhall and Tom Ward; plus whatever the random ensemble shuffle of The Hat Speaks throws up. To round off, there’s the mass blowing of the LUMEkestra as it debuts new work by Sam Andreae, Adam Fairhall, Dee Byrne and others.

Time details and daily lineups below, plus the usual wobbly stack of tunes, snippets and aural collisions to warm you up for the event.

Tags: Alex Bonney, Alice Zawadzki, Andrew Cheetham, Archipelago, Blind Willie Johnson, Chris Williams, Christian Alderson, Colin Webster, Corey Mwamba, David Birchall, Entropi, Faye MacCalman, Jamie Safir, John Martin, John Pope, Juice Vocal Ensemble, Kerry Andrew, Laura Cole, Led Zeppelin, Liran Donin, London (England), LUME (event), LUMEkestra, Ma/ti/om, Matilda Rolfsson, Metamorphic, Miss Roberts & Rude Mechanicals, Otto Willberg, power ballads, Rachel Musson, Richard Olatunde, Robert Mitchell, Sam Andreae, Seth Bennett, Sloth Racket, The Hat Speaks (event), Tim Fairhall, Tom Greenhalgh, Tom Ward, Tullis Rennie