Photographs sourced from the EFG London Jazz Festival website;
http://www.efglondonjazzfestival.org.uk

Way in to the Way Out: Arun Ghosh and Zoe Rahman,
EFG London Jazz Festival, 15th and 16th November 2014

The final part of my 2014 EFG London Jazz Festival coverage relates to this two part event held on consecutive days at the beginning of the Festival. The scheduling over two separate days didn’t really lend itself to my day to day coverage and so the event appears as a separate feature.

“Way in to the Way Out” is part of the Festival’s spoken word strand and features two leading British jazz musicians giving their personal take on the history of jazz illustrated by recorded snippets of recordings by famous/influential jazz figures plus occasional live performances by the participants themselves. The events are free of charge and take place on the stage of the Front Room in the foyer of the Southbank Centre’s Queen Elizabeth Hall.

I dipped into the inaugural “Way in to the Way Out” event in 2013 which featured North East born musicians Chris Sharkey (guitar) and Andy Champion ( bass) of the band Shiver explaining how they came to jazz via the worlds of prog rock and heavy metal.

This year was very different with two British-Asian performers, clarinettist Arun Ghosh and pianist Zoe Rahman first describing their different routes into jazz before going on to reveal how jazz had subsequently prompted them to begin exploring the music of their shared Bengali heritage. It was a fascinating story and I found myself attending the event on both days, partly by design, partly because it fitted into my concert schedule.

Logistics had meant that I was only really able to scratch the surface as far as Sharkey and Champion were concerned, interesting though it was. However with all due respect to the Geordie boys I found Ghosh and Rahman more convincing, they seemed better prepared and were more prepared to illustrate their precepts with performances of their own, which was a real bonus. We were treated to some excellent solo piano and clarinet performances plus a number of sparkling duets. Rahman has played on Ghosh’s albums and the pair’s musical rapport carried over into the talking. I’ve seen both musicians leading their own bands and both are ebullient performers and great communicators whose obvious enthusiasm for music readily transmits itself to audiences. It was no different here and the crowd were intrigued, absorbed and charmed in equal measure.

The first session saw Rahman describing jazz as “the best art form” as she spoke of the early influence upon her of the music of jazz pianists Dave Brubeck, Herbie Hancock, Horace Silver and Alice Coltrane.
Born to a Bengali father and an English mother Rahman and her saxophonist/clarinettist brother Idris were brought up in Chichester and Zoe also studied classical piano to a high standard but always preferred the freedom offered by jazz and popular music, singer Chaka Khan’s version of Dizzy Gillespie’s “A Night In Tunisia” helping to bring these two particular strands together.

Rahman enjoyed a relatively affluent upbringing and still speaks with a cut glass English accent. Ghosh was raised in Bolton, retains a strong Lancastrian twang and had more of a “street” upbringing. Jools Holland’s boogie woogie piano playing on the theme tune to “Only Fools And Horses” was a very early musical influence as was the Nina Simone song “African Mailman”. But it was Courtney Pine’s 1986 d?but album, “Journey to the Urge Within” that held the most significance, a young British born artist making a success of playing jazz, Ghosh illustrating his point with a recording of Pine’s tune “Sacrifice”, actually sourced from Pine’s follow up album “Destiny’s Son + The Image Of Pursuance”.

Back to Rahman for a recording of Horace Silver’s best known tune “Song For My Father” and a solo piano performance of Rahman’s first ever composition “Apple Pie”, a piece that was recorded in trio format on her d?but album “The Cynic” (2000). Rahman studied classical piano at the Royal Academy Music playing the music of Bartok, Stravinsky and Shostakovich among others before completing a music degree at Oxford University with a dissertation on the works of the late, great Bill Evans. She also studied jazz performance at Berklee College of Music in Boston, USA, where she was heavily influenced by the music of her mentor, the pianist Joanne Brackeen. Rahman’s later albums have included several performances of Brackeen’s compositions and a solo piano performance of her “Egyptian Dune Dance” turned up a little later. 

Dave Brubeck’s “Take Five” was an influence on both musicians, and an early example of Indian rhythms on jazz composers. The pair played the piece as a duo and also teamed up on Ghosh’s own composition “Headrush”.

The spirited exchange of ideas between Ghosh and Rahman, both verbally and musically, was a characteristic of both “Way in to the Way Out” events, with Ghosh talking of the somewhat unlikely combined influences of veteran jazz violinist Joe Venuti and the Manchester indie rock scene characterised by the Stone Roses, Oasis and The Charlatans. The music of Thelonious Monk, Miles Davis and Duke Ellington represented more common ground with versions of Monk’s “Confessin’” and “Jackie-ing” being used by way of illustration.

The pair also declared a shared love of Charlie Parker’s “Lester Leaps In”, John Coltrane’s “Blue Trane” and Herbie Hancock’s “Maiden Voyage”, jazz classics all. Likewise the Miles Davis albums “Porgy And Bess”  and “Sketches Of Spain”, the duo describing the latter as “the first world music”. Admiration was also expressed for the classic Wayne Shorter composition “Footprints”, these days a modern day standard, and the ground-breaking Miles Davis album “In A Silent Way”.
As a piano specialist Rahman also cited the Chick Corea album “Now He Sings, Now He Sobs” plus the avant garde influence of Cecil Taylor.

For his part Ghosh emphasised the influence of hip hop artists such as Q-Tip and Adam F on his music and his clarinet solo over the sound of programmed beats made for an upbeat conclusion to a fascinating hour’s worth of words and music.

Perhaps more significant though was an earlier duo performance of “Do You Wish To Forget?”, a song by the venerated Bengali poet and songwriter Rabindranath Tagore that appears on Rahman’s 2008 album “Where Rivers Meet”. This was a beautiful rendition of a tune that shares a melody with “Auld Lang Syne” and it provided a gateway into the second part of this event.

I was back on Sunday for the second part of this event and the increasingly confident pairing began with a duo performance of Duke Ellington’s “Blue Pepper” from his “Far East Suite”, a neat link to Ghosh’s own “A South Asian Suite”, the clarinettist’s latest album. Ghosh also cued up a snippet of the recorded version featuring the screaming trumpet of Cat Anderson.

Rahman talked of her love of working with drummers, notably with Gene Calderazzo in her current trio/quartet. She spoke of her admiration for Ellington’s trio featuring Charles Mingus and Max Roach, the crux of all this being the importance of rhythm on both jazz and Indian music. Further evidence came with a recording of John Coltrane’s seminal interpretation of “My Favourite Things” with Trane’s soprano sax audibly influenced by the sound of the double reeded shenai while the bass and drum parts of Jimmy Garrison and Elvin Jones were clearly inspired by the “three against two” rhythms of Indian tabla players. Next we had a little audience participation as we tried to clap out various Indian and African rhythms in time with the clarinet and piano. As I’ve written before it’s bloody difficult, making a fool of myself in public in this way only strengthens my admiration for all the musicians I hear on stage and on record.

A recording of “Passion Dance”, a modern day standard/classic by Coltrane’s pianist McCoy Tyner offered another example of an Indian style pulse within a jazz framework, the rhythm borrowed from exponents of the dhol and the tabla.

Ghosh spoke of his admiration for the “Indo-Jazz Fusion” albums of violinist John Mayer and saxophonist Joe Harriott and also of the varying pan global approaches of Don Cherry, Charlie Haden and Stephan Micus. 

Rahman then talked of the influence of Alice Coltrane on her Mercury Music Prize nominated album “Melting Pot” (2005) as well as the more tangible inspiration of Indian artists Hemant Mukherjee and Rabindranath Tagore on both “Melting Pot” and “When Rivers Meet”, the 2008 album jointly credited to herself and her brother Idris Rahman (reeds). The album was a musical investigation of the siblings’ Bengali musical heritage, an interest piqued when Zoe transposed some of her father’s old vinyl recordings of Bengali music on to CD. The “Rivers Meet” recording saw Zoe and Idris visiting India and Bangla Desh and several guest vocalists from the sub continent appear on the album alongside Zoe’s regular jazz trio. Zoe then performed a solo piano version of a tune called “Day Has Past” but it’s not a piece that seems to appear on any of her albums.

Meanwhile Ghosh also spoke of the influence of Tagore on his own “A South East Asian Suite” which has been recorded in full on the album of the same name, released in 2013 and still Ghosh’s most recent recording to date. It features contributions from both Zoe and Idris Rahman. With the two musicians now fully in performance mode they delivered delightful duo versions of the album’s “River Song”, a hymn of praise to the Ganges, and the Sri Lankan flavoured “Journey South”. 

I suspect that this was probably meant to represent the end of the show but the irrepressible Rahman had one more tune for us. She spoke of the influence of the great Nigerian musician and activist Fela Kuti on the Indian civil rights movement and played a solo piano version of her Fela inspired composition “The Calling”, from the album “Melting Pot”.

These two lectures cum performances had delivered in full the celebrated Reithian virtues as Ghosh and Rahman informed, educated and entertained. It was fascinating to learn of the innumerable threads connecting jazz with various types of world music plus the strands of hip hop and rock and educative to discover that the process could very much be a two way thing. That it also fitted into the very personal musical perspectives of the two performers was even more remarkable.

The playing itself was a wonderful bonus, I’ve seen both musicians leading their own groups on numerous occasions but to see pared down versions of some of their tunes in such an intimate setting was very much the icing on the cake. And, of course, it was all delivered with great personal charm by both protagonists, with Zoe looking as elegant as ever. Well done to both of them for an event that exceeded my expectations. As a rule I’d far rather hear music being played than merely somebody talking about it, but in this case I’ll make an exception.     
   

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