An American couple in the audience at this year’s Wall2Wall festival at Black Mountain Jazz reminded me of the famous Miles Kington quip about leaving South Wales to seek jazz in London only for him to discover that a lot of it had decamped to South Wales, albeit temporarily.
He was talking in the days when the Brecon Jazz Festival was an international event and sometimes shipping jazz megastars direct to Powys from Europe, and on at least one occasion from America, for single appearances.
This year’s annual Wall2Wall at BMJ, 20 miles away in Abergavenny, was more modest, especially with the further loss of the Thursday night gala dinner at the Angel Hotel – absent for a few years now – but Kington would have recognised that metropolitan jazz luminaries performing in Wales was the norm.
Few shine more brightly at present than the group led by bassist Misha Mullov-Abbado, which opened evening events at the Melville Theatre on the Friday playing Misha originals, including charts from the latest album, Effra, though with only pianist Liam Dunachie present from the recording. The others doing sterling duty at the festival as well as the leader were Adam Chatterton (t, flh), George Crowley (ts), Tom Smith (as) and Jay Davis (d). The bassist’s feeling for sharp collective interplay and no-holds-barred soloing embodied the best of contemporary metropolitan energy if not its more intrepid experimentation.
The final night belonged to singer-pianist Ian Shaw, who last made a festival appearance at one of those erstwhile Angel dinners. His cabaret delivery on that occasion was repeated here, in a witty, informative and highly original collection of songs by David Bowie and Joni Mitchell. Bowie and Mitchell jazz? you query. Well, Shaw invests all his material with soulful jazz feeling, even if sometimes it sounds a tad mannered. Anyway, the music has incorporated far more apparently chalk-and-cheese combinations.
BMJ’s midway acknowledgement of regional jazz expertise was made on the Saturday night, with an appearance by The Siglo Selection, a young big band from Cardiff featuring singer Kat Rees. I couldn’t make that gig but by all accounts it further boosted the theatre’s performing space as one that no visiting musicians have yet found wanting, whether a trio or, like this one, a larger combo firing maximum decibels.
The festival’s big attraction was non-musical: an exhibition on the Melville Centre’s walls of Her Frame, Her Sound, the all-women show of jazz photographs, organised by London singer-songwriter Fiona Ross, who was in town for the first time and making her first visit to Wales to see it mounted and to enjoy the other events.
The photographers were Tatiana Gorilovsky, Monika Jakubowska, Vuyo Giba, Enid Farber and Kasia Ociepa. The inaugural display at London’s Karamel Club included work by Val Wilmer but her offerings were completely sold and withdrawn, so she was not represented in Abergavenny, the exhibition’s first stop on a tour.
The concept of female jazz musicians photographed exclusively by women is Ross’s response to the heavy, almost exclusive, male dominance in the field, at the very least in terms of who’s behind the lens. Ross, who runs Women In Jazz Media (WIJM) sees the presentation as helping to redress the gender imbalance. Ociepa came to Britain from Poland and arrived in Abergavenny as a jazz lover, establishing herself as BMJ’s house photographer. Both Ross and Ociepa were interviewed for the festival by broadcaster John Hellings.
Wall2Wall owes almost everything up front to Mike Skilton and Debs Hancock. A talented singer who’s studied with Lianne Carroll (and appeared as a member of Welsh National Opera’s community chorus), Hancock, as well as superintending front of house all weekend, played a sophisticated duo gig with the young Cardiff pianist Newman Tai.
Sunday offered a full day of out-and-about events as a run-up to Shaw’s finale. Pianists played in cafés and restaurants. Members of the club’s regular workshops for young musicians, the BMJazz Kats, local choir Synergy, and Ian Cooper’s Ukulele Orchestra gave their all in the town’s Tithe Barn. And they spot them very young at BMJ, where the kiddies were catered for at a free “drop-in” workshop.
Catering for all tastes and ages and meeting all eventualities in one weekend was an achievement. As that American couple said and as Miles Kington once discovered, “It’s all go here in Wales.”
