Red Violin Festival / Gwyl Ffidil Goch : Cardiff, 2.10.2007 (GPu)

Cardiff’s nine-day celebration of the violin (October 1-9), under the artistic direction of Madeleine Mitchell, is packed with what can reasonably be expected to be musical delights. Unfortunately, heavy commitments elsewhere made it impossible for me to plan more than one full day at the festival (though I shall be hearing  - and reviewing – Friday evening’s concert by the BBC National Orchestra of Wales with Baiba Skride as soloist in Stravinsky’s Violin Concerto). My one full day was to be the first complete day of the festival – but the funeral of a dear friend truncated even that day, and I was able to take in only two evening events. (My late friend – having worked for a while as a critic of world music and being a great lover of jazz – would have found it fitting that my wife and I should spend the evening of a day which began with his funeral in the way that we did).

A free event in the foyer of the Wales Millennium Centre presented a richly rewarding recital by Jyotsna Srikanth, a fine violinist in the South Indian tradition of the instrument. As a child, Dr. Srikanth studied with the legendary violinist Sri R.R Keshavamurthy and gave her first performances before she was ten. Though the present recital was exclusively devoted to music from the Carnatic tradition, Jyotsna Srikanth is also very well schooled in the western traditions of the instrument, from classical to jazz-fusion, so she brings to her work a wide-ranging musical experience as well as sureness of technique and a power of passionate expression.

She played to the accompaniment of an electronic/pre-recorded drone and to the superb work of Ravishankar Sharma on the mridangam (a double headed drum, played with wrists and fingertips). The music they played was characterised by a fascinating variety of tempos and dynamics, by a marvellous interplay between the two musicians and by a bewitching emotional range  - in which exuberant joy and sharp poignancy rapidly alternated. Some pieces were built upon eight beat rhythms, some on six beat rhythms. Most were relatively short but the central piece in the recital was more extended and moved through four distinct phases, beginning with unaccompanied improvisation on the violin, moving into the composed section, played by both violin and mridangam, on to a lengthy (and very impressive) unaccompanied improvisation on the mridangam and closing in joint improvisation.

I claim no special expertise in this music. But it was not hard to feel sure that we were hearing music-making of a high order from two very accomplished musicians. Rewarding as the recital was it left one wanting more (never a bad sign!).

The second event of my truncated day at the festival was a performance by the Billy Thompson-Peter Lemer quartet, in St. David’s Hall. Thompson comes close to being a one-man violin festival in himself. Hearing him it is hard not to believe that he has listened to – and learned from – virtually everybody (in the west at any rate) who has ever played the instrument. He is clearly thoroughly steeped in the whole tradition of jazz violin – there are shadows (but no more) of everyone from Joe Venuti and Stephane Grappelli, Ray Nance and Stuff Smith, through to Jean-Luc Ponty, Didier Lockwood, Leroy Jenkins, Billy Bang and beyond. But he is obviously also familiar with Gipsy traditions and Blues violin à la Papa John Creach; there are moments when one hears Bach or Bartok, or the salon violinist, or Celtic fiddling, etc…! That might sound like an impossibly miscellaneous ragbag, or merely a kind of postmodern cleverness. But everything is fused together into a coherent and personal whole, played as it is with such passion and conviction; there is a consistent musical personality at work here. Thompson, in short, is a remarkable talent, a player of rock-solid technique and wildly various invention, one minute playing with a beautiful, orthodox tone, the next distorting his sound through a variety of means.

He is fortunate in working with a keyboard musician with an equally assured grasp of the jazz (and other) tradition(s) and with an equally open and inventive mind. Peter Lemer is one of the relatively unsung heroes of British jazz, a musician who never seems to have been given his full due. He was an early and important figure on the English free jazz scene, playing with the Spontaneous Music Ensemble and figures such as John Surman. He later worked regularly with musicians as diverse as trumpeter Harry Beckett and Annette Peacock. As befits one who studied with Jaki Byard (that master eclectic amongst jazz pianists), Lemer has wide-ranging musical tastes and ideas. Some of his playing is marked by a Monkish sense of space and oblique reflections of stride piano; sometimes he can sound as lyrically intense as Bill Evans or Paul Bley (with whom he also studied); his use of synthesisers takes him into very different stylistic territories (maybe the experience with Annette Peacock is relevant here). But, as with Thompson’s violin work, this diversity of idioms and backgrounds doesn’t, miraculously, fragment. An individual musical imagination holds it all together and speaks through it. I remain puzzled that Lemer’s work has not attracted more critical admiration over the more than forty years that he has been part of the British jazz landscape.

One of Lemer’s lengthier musical experiences was with Paraphernalia, saxophonist Barbara Thompson’s jazz-fusion band. Thompson played in Paraphernalia too. So did bassist Dave ‘Taif’ Ball, who also made a very valuable and effective contribution to proceedings. Their shared experience was obvious in the ease of their interplay and their capacity to second-guess what the others might do. The quartet was completed by drummer Steve Roberts, another with an enormous range of musical experience, “from rock to fusion to jazz to pop to ska to folk to reggae to dub”, as his website puts it. The flexibility inherent in such a musical range made him a very fitting member of a group so richly various in its musical language.

The Thompson-Lemer quartet’s programme consisted wholly of originals – by Billy Thompson and Peter Lemer themselves as well as some tunes from the band book of Paraphernalia. Whether in the gentle quasi-classical adagio of the violinist’s ‘Roath Lake’ (played without rhythm section), the uproarious, virtuosic energy of Lemer’s ‘Blues for Something Funny’ or the puckish rhythms of Lemer’s ‘another day, Another Holler’, there was an immense joi de vivre, an unegotistical enjoyment – and sharing – of their talents, that made this an outstanding programme. What a great shame that it was so sparsely attended.

The quality of these two events on the Red Violin festival’s first full day makes me even sorrier that I can’t get to hear more. They made – and I am sure that many later festival events  will do the same – an unanswerable case for the distinctive power of the violin, for its deservedly central position in music in the west and beyond.

Glyn Pursglove