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Live Reviews
10th Bray Jazz Festival
Ian Patterson
Ian is dedicated to the promotion of jazz and all creative music all over the world, and to catching just a little piece of it for himself.It fell to drummer David Lyttle and saxophonist Soweto Kinch to bring the curtain down on Bray 2009. Lyttle has been a mainstay on the local scene for some years now and has earned a reputation as a drummer of real talent, having collaborated with Greg Osby, Dave Liebman, Jason Rebello and Tommy Smith. Most of the tunes performed alongside bassist Damian Evans and Kinch were Lyttle originals and underlined his skills as a composer too. Kinch for his part was in fine form; his extended solos, free-flowing and daring were suggestive of a young Sonny Rollins.
To the delight of a packed crowd, Kinch improvised a rap around key words suggested by the audience. When you hear the apparent ease with which his ideas are formulated and linked, and the fluidity of his delivery, the relationship between rap and his playing the saxophone becomes somehow clearer. At shortly after two A.M. the music stopped, and once last orders had been consumed the crowd shuffled out to join all the other late-night revelers spilling out of the bars and clubs.
The continued existence of many small, independent festivals in Ireland and elsewhere are threatened by the current economic malaise which has left one in ten of the population unemployed in the Republic of Ireland; many such festivals will not survive. It is a sign of the times that the national Irish press all but ignored the Bray Jazz Festival 2009, with the Irish Times reviewing just one concert due to cutbacks in coverage of the arts. The Bray Jazz Festival is too good a festival to disappear, and one can only hope that the support the festival has received over the last ten years from the Arts Council of Ireland and the Councils of Bray and Wicklow continues. Here's to the next ten years.
Photo credit
Ian Patterson
Robert Goode
