Love Supreme, Britain’s big jazz and soul festival, has been running since 2013 in the lush gardens of Glynde Place and now attracts crowds of more than 40,000 each summer. To celebrate its fifth anniversary, and to preview next month’s festival, its organisers assembled this budget-priced mini-festival in Camden’s Roundhouse.
With so many jazz heavyweights already booked for this weekend’s Cheltenham jazz festival, this bill’s headline acts erred towards the poppier end of things. Keyboard player Cory Henry is the most engaging figure to emerge from the bafflingly popular New York fusion outfit Snarky Puppy, and he certainly has a charisma that’s rare for a keyboardist – a freewheeling, stage-hogging extroversion that’s reminiscent of Beastie Boys’ organist Money Mark. What he lacks is material. Covers of songs by Prince, James Brown and the Bee Gees each feature some fine pitchwheel-heavy solos from Henry and fellow synth twiddler Nick Semrad, but the band’s dense, airless funk-rock doesn’t really give anyone space to breathe.
Conversely, the main headliner, Mr Jukes, had plenty of fine tunes but could do with a fraction of Henry’s stage presence. Many of us were shocked when the first album by this Avalanches/Gorillaz-style R&B project, God First (led by Jack Steadman, the singer of the distinctly average Bombay Bicycle Club), turned out to be rather good, and the standout tracks (Angels, Grant Green, Leap of Faith, From Golden Stars Comes Silver Dew) sound tremendous, as do the Wayne Shorter, Roy Hargrove and Lauren Hill covers. Unfortunately, the onstage optics – eight competent session musicians centred around the catastrophically unengaging Steadman on bass – let daylight in on the magic.
Some of the most interesting music appeared on the minor stages, tucked away in small spaces around the Roundhouse complex. The downstairs Seckler Stage only holds around a hundred bodies and became absolutely rammed at times, not least for a rare appearance by the revered British saxophonist Steve Williamson. His intense modal improvisations feature tricksy Afro-Latin rhythms, superbly negotiated by the remarkable 16-year-old drummer Zoe Pascal. The room also hosted the poetic modal jazz of pianist/singer Joy Ellis (featuring the excellent Rob Luft on guitar) and singer/guitarist Oscar Jerome (playing wonderfully odd R&B tunes and putting his guitar through some strange, goth-style FX).
An outside stage on the sunny first-floor terrace seemed to specialise in what has become a contemporary London micro-genre – the jazz musician duetting with a knob-twiddling DJ/producer. South Londoners Joe Armon-Jones and Maxwell Owin mix spacey modal jazz piano solos with abstract samples. North Londoners Blue Lab Beats mix the Dilla-style loops of troll-haired DJ Namali Kwaten with the smooth-jazz solos of left-handed pianist/guitarist/bassist David Mrakpor. East London’s Soccer96 ply a punkier kind of rave, featuring drummer Max “Betamax” Hallett. All three acts benefit from outside intervention: when Soccer96 invited a shouty poet and saxophonist on stage, it sounded gloriously like Ornette Coleman joining Sleaford Mods.
This spirit of adventure leaked on to the main Roundhouse stage with Brooklyn trio Moon Hooch, an unholy racket featuring tenor sax, baritone sax and drums. Their 45-minute set incorporated dubstep basslines, circular-breathing solos and a starring role for a three-foot traffic cone (inserted into the bell of Wenzl McGowen’s baritone sax). It’s a mix of high theatre and intense improvisation operating without a safety net, and was the most interesting act on this varied but impressive bill.
• Love Supreme is at Glynde Place, East Sussex, 29 June-1 July. Box office: 0844-888 9991.
