Royal Academy Junior Jazz end-of-year gig at Ronnie Scott's

Left to Right: Nick Smart, Gareth Lockrane (Head of the Royal Academy’s Junior Jazz Department),
Mike Walker, Simon Colam

Fran Hardcastle writes...

This fifth annual Royal Academy of Music Junior Jazz end-of-year gig at Ronnie Scott's was the first under new Head of Junior Jazz Gareth Lockrane.  I had the pleasure of dropping to hear the next generation of working jazz musicians, currently starting from the tender age of 13 showcase their impressive talents through music from Mike Walker and Iain Ballamy and well-known standards. The students' impressively assured ensemble performances, coached by Lockrane and Simon Colam showcased a few stars in the making.

Previous Junior Jazz Course graduates have included Kit Downes, Josh Blackmore of Curios, Dave Hamblett, Freddie Gavita and busy bassist Tim Thornton.

The only Junior course which is dedicated solely to jazz has a near 100 per cent success rate in placing students in conservatoire jazz courses. The kids travel from as far as Bristol and Lincolnshire and bursaries and scholarships are available. Visiting musicians have included Joe Lovano and Dave Liebman. The efforts of Lockrane and Colam with the support of former head of the Junior Department, (and now the Royal Academy's  Head of Jazz) Nick Smart resulted in a rewarding gig on Sunday. Keep an eye out for next year’s gig if you’re into star-spotting.

Two Sunday gigs from Tom Millar and Gareth Lockrane

Mike Walker: Photo credit: Vernon Hyde

Just back from holiday this morning, it's a joy to be writing about two linked gigs with just that right sprinkling of optimism. They're both on Sundays (one this, one next), they're both debut outings, they both involve the Mike Walker (above). Until quite recently, Mike was extremely successful in keeping virtually all knowledge of his genius as a secret within the BB4 postcode, but that secret is now definitely getting out!

This Sunday June 26th at the North London Tavern from 7 30 pm marks the debut of Tom Millar as bandleader. A couple of years ago, Tom was trying to make the Cambridge University undergraduate music course bend, extremely unwillingly, in the direction of jazz. After a stint at the Royal Academy of Music, he's now clearly in his element. I'm looking forward to Sunday. Tom's other band members are James Opstad on bass, Alex Roth on guitar, and Mike Clowes on drums. Featured composer: Mike Walker.

Next Sunday lunchtime 3rd July at Ronnie Scott's Mike Walker is featured as soloist with three small bands and one big band from the Royal Academy of Music's junior jazz programme. This Ronnie's gig marks the first major outing for Gareth Lockrane in his new role for the Academy's head of the Junior jazz department.

Review: The Impossible Gentlemen

Photo Credit: David Forman

The Impossible Gentlemen
(Pizza Express, Dean Street. Monday 13th June. Review by Chris Parker)

Devoting their first set to pieces from their eponymous Basho album, but airing (mostly) new material in their second, The Impossible Gentlemen (left to right above: Steve Swallow, Gwilym Simcock, Mike Walker, Adam Nussbaum) utterly charmed a full house on this, the first of their two-nights
engagement at the cellar club.

The 2010 tour by this band, (reviewed by LondonJazz here) resulted in three out of five Jazz UK journalists voting their gig the best of the year, and praise for their album has been uniformly warm – 'imagine guitarist Pat Metheny's trio masterpiece, Day Trip (Nonesuch, 2007), add a pianist of commensurate genius, and you are banging on the disc's front door. It is that good' a representative example – so they're clearly doing a lot of things right, and their opening number, guitarist Mike Walker's 'Clockmaker', contained a fair number of them: ease of interaction, graceful but powerful soloing, a rhythmic buoyancy attributable in no small part to Steve Swallow's deft picked basslines, but also to Adam Nussbaum's restless probing round the beat.

With the mellifluous, resourceful piano of Gwilym Simcock intertwining with Walker's delicate guitar work, the bar was set high for the rest of the concert, but Simcock's 'You Won't be Around to See It' (loosely based on 'Softly, as in a Morning Sunrise'), Walker's 'Wallenda's Last Stand' (dedicated to the leader of a family of tightrope walkers), his driving album-opener 'Laugh Lines' and the slow-building burner 'When You Hold Her' maintained the musical standard, each tune drawing a precisely appropriate guitar tone from Walker and solos of cascading but controlled urgency from Simcock.

The US rhythm section provided most of the second set's compositions, Simcock's appropriately breezy Fremantle Doctor' (inspired by a refreshing afternoon wind in the Western Australia port) aside, and the consequent slight shift in emphasis, from fluent, almost pastoral lyricism to a tenser, slightly jazzier approach, was immediately noticeable. Nussbaum's 'Sure Would Baby' drew yet another cracking guitar solo from Walker, Swallow's set-closing 'Ladies in Mercedes' proved a joyous romp courtesy of its relentlessly ascending melody, and Nussbaum's 'Days of Old' (based on a tune sung by his then eight-year-old daughter) was a tender (but surprisingly gutsy) encore.

The hallmark of the band's album is the quartet's discernible enjoyment of and respect for each other's playing; this live performance, assured and relaxed yet consistently musicianly, each participant unfussily virtuosic, was simply small-group jazz at its unequivocally enjoyable best.

impossiblegentlemen.com