JJ 09/90: JVC/Capital Radio Jazz Parade

Thirty years ago, Mark Gilbert saw Pat Metheny, Herbie Hancock, McCoy Tyner and Stan Getz at the Royal Festival Hall. First published in Jazz Journal, September 1990

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Herbie Hancock

The annual six-concert series which serves as London’s summer jazz festival kicked off with the all-star supergroup of Jack DeJohnette, Herbie Hancock, Dave Hol­land and Pat Metheny.

The event was interesting on several counts: It found DeJohnette in an uncommonly populist mood, with much of the evening’s material drawn from his Parallel Realities album; it featured Dave Holland several times – and rather awkwardly – on electric bass, an instrument he hasn’t played with any prominence since he was with Miles Davis 20 years ago; and it confirmed the sugges­tion on recent albums (Gary Burton’s Reunion and the Metheny/Holland/ Haynes Question And Answer) that Pat Metheny is ready to blow swinging if over­wrought modern jazz.

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After a modest start, and despite the RFH’s unforgiving acoustic, Herbie Hancock proved to be the evening’s star soloist. Using a strap-slung keyboard, he stole the show with a torren­tial workout both onstage and among the audience on his own Blue Note classic, Eye Of The Hurricane.

Later in the week, hard bop of a similar vintage received a rather more perfunctory reading in the hands of the McCoy Tyner Trio with Freddie Hubbard and Ralph Moore. The saving grace of a directionless set was Tyner’s solo rendition of Someone To Watch Over Me, but still one wonders what happened to the unique stylist of the Coltrane quartet.

The Tyner group was half of a double header with Stan Getz, and one might imagine that the jazz muse was late arriving at the RFH, because by the time Getz took the stage, magic was in the air. Getz played masses of lithe, com­pelling tenor, whether accompanied by the trio of Kenny Barron, Terri Lyne Carrington and the enormously versatile bassist Alex Blake or the trio plus synthesists Eddie Del Barrio and Frank Zottoli. The bigger group promoted three numbers from Getz’s new Latin American album, Apasionado, and provoked either spatter­ing, lukewarm applause or resolute silence from the purists in the audience. They were there for the velvet and iron Getz of Voyage and Anniversary and got it in rela­tively good measure, although at some­thing under an hour, the set seemed little more than a showcase.

Other events in the week featured BB King, Dr John, David Sanborn, Lee Rite-nour, The Yellow Jackets, Dave Brubeck and George Shearing.