For nearly four years, the Con Cellar Bar in Camden has provided a showcase for some of the UK’s top jazz talent at its Monday evening sessions. Run by trumpet player Richard Turner, it is a great example of young musicians making things happen for themselves. While predominantly featuring local rising stars, the Con Cellar has pulled off a coup in luring some leading musicians from the US down its narrow staircase, including Mark Turner, Larry Grenadier, Jeff Ballard and Donny McCaslin. Con Fest is the mini-festival spun off from this weekly gig, providing a distillation of the outstanding music which can be heard at the same venue every Monday.

Julian Arg?elles’s quartet headlined the opening night of the festival and featured a stellar line-up: Gwilym Simcock on piano, alongside long-time Arg?elles collaborators Steve Watts on bass and Martin France on drums. In a cellar full to bursting point, and with the band as close to the audience as was physically possible, the atmosphere before this gig was highly charged. The group channelled this energy into their playing, delivering two sets of engaging and impassioned music with a rich melodic vein running through it all.

Arg?elles is a tenor player who combines a flawless technique and warmly expressive tone with a fluent post-bop vocabulary. At this gig he also tapped into free jazz influences, at times echoing Ornette Coleman’s primal, blues-inflected sense of melody. The group soon hit its creative stride and began the second number with a four-way conversation of bluesy fragments, free of any regular pulse but held together by a clear narrative shape. This evolved into a fast-swinging section which had no predetermined harmonic progression, reminiscent of the ?time-no changes’ approach used by Miles Davis’s great 1960s quintet. Here, Simcock dug deep to deliver some of the most uninhibited improvisation I’ve yet heard from him; the small upright piano only slightly dampened the intensity of his playing. On the waltz that followed this, Arg?elles gave a glorious solo which revealed the folkier side of his playing as the group evoked shades of Keith Jarrett’s European quartet with Jan Garbarek.

After a brief interval, none of the heady atmosphere in the room had dissipated. The quartet maintained the superlative standard of musicianship, beginning the second set with Coleman’s ?Broadway Blues’, which featured a lively and arresting exchange between Arg?elles and France. However, one of the few possible criticisms of this gig was the volume of France’s snare drum, which was sometimes close to eardrum-splitting levels in the enclosed acoustic of the cellar. The standard ?Everything I Love’ was a highlight from this set, as attractively intertwining streams of melody effused simultaneously from Arg?elles and Simcock for several choruses. On ?Evan’s Freedom Pass’ (the punning title affectionately dedicated towards free jazz legend Evan Parker), Arg?elles delivered his freest playing of the evening. This infectious final number sent many of the audience out into the early morning whistling its catchy, odd-metered theme.

Earlier in the evening, a sixteen-piece big band co-led by bassist Calum Gourlay and trumpeter Freddie Gavita somehow managed to squeeze into the modestly sized main bar upstairs. The numerous small group commitments of the band’s members must have limited the rehearsal time available for this project. Nevertheless, this did not show during two sets showcasing the impressive compositions and arrangements of Gourlay and Gavita, in which the section playing was impeccably tight. Much of this music occupied territory somewhere between the sophisticated orchestral vision of Kenny Wheeler (as on ?Nightmare’ and ?Steven Fry’) and a more mainstream bop style reminiscent of the Thad Jones/Mel Lewis orchestra (notably so on Gavita’s arrangement of ?Scrapple from the Apple’). On ?Giant Crab Island’, a New Orleans funk feel entered the mix as James Allsop’s baritone sax doubled up Gourlay’s bass line during a mesmerising groove, one of the standout moments of the gig. 

The high standard of the compositions was matched by the quality of the improvising. Tom Challenger on tenor sax and Martin Speake on alto stood out in particular: both contributed a couple of highly articulate solos, perhaps drawing more heavily on the language of be-bop than they would in their own small groups. Gavita on trumpet also impressed, while Gourlay’s solos managed to penetrate through the background noise of a chatty Friday evening audience, a testament to his considerable abilities on the double bass. Hopefully this band can find the time in their diaries to get together again soon; even in London it is all too rare that you get to hear a big band of this calibre.