21 Shepherd, August 28
9/10
Pianist Mike Nock’s first intimations of the Forgotten Love motif gave me shivers. Tears even welled in my eyes. Why? I was hearing live for the first time ever music from a record that turned my world upside down when I reviewed it in 1982.
Impressionism and jazz had been bed-mates for over 20 years by then, but this was the apotheosis: the bass and pianist’s left hand playing a forlorn, descending ostinato; the melody sparse and poetic; the drums blurring the rhythm towards abstraction; the improvising gathering an operatic intensity.
This was the centrepiece of Ondas, Nock’s sole album on the highly prestigious ECM label, the home of Keith Jarrett, Arvo Part and many others from the pinnacle of jazz and classical music, recorded with bassist Eddie Gomez and drummer Jon Christensen. Now Nock was joined by bassist Ben Waples and drummer Laurence Pike, and the music’s unfolding was phenomenally moving on so many levels, including hearing it reinvented. A recording documents a specific time, but with jazz, every moment can be remade in infinite ways, and this was as dramatic as revisiting a house you lived in 44 years before, to find it rebuilt, repainted and re-landscaped.
They played all the album’s five compositions, and where Forgotten Love was painted in watercolours, the title track was more like slashes of charcoal and crayon. Visionary and particularly the sombre Land of the Long White Cloud featured singing solos of such delicacy from Waples on the double bass, with Land bringing out flashes of Nock’s trademark elfin playfulness, otherwise quarantined on this material. The climax was Doors, the album’s most energised piece, which beckoned Pike to the foreground with his imaginative figures and beautiful-sounding drums and cymbals.
Playing an encore was perhaps a misstep.
Nock’s trio was final band on night two of the annual three-night Inner West Jazz Fest, curated by Pike and Clayton Thomas. Saxophonist Sam Gill’s trio, with bassist Jacques Emery and drummer Simon Barker, opened the concert. While Gill’s compositions are often defined by razor-edged melodies, he plays them with such warmth of sound as immediately sets up a dichotomy between anguish and insouciance. He improvises, meanwhile, with the freedom of a child who’s just learned to whistle, often crafting lines that are questions rather than answers. The music could collectively be as eerie as a Darlinghurst alley at 3am, or as tumultuous as a broiling sea created by Emery and the astonishing Barker, with Gill providing the white caps. Their set, unhappily, was terminated by a medical emergency in the audience.
Guitarist Jess Green, drummer Dylan van der Schyff and saxophonist Sandy Evans then launched their enchanting album Even Quiet Embers Carry Fire. Green and van der Schyff share an uncanny textural and rhythmic rapport, which provided constantly shifting fabric for Evans to soar above with her massive tenor and spry soprano, from freneticism to meditative calm.
https://innerwestjazzfest.org/