Musicianship Remains Undiminished at Ever-Expanding London Jazz Festival

By Ammar Kalia I Dec. 5, 2023

An opening-weekend high point came in the form of Chicago drummer Makaya McCraven’s show at the Barbican with the London Contemporary Orchestra.
(Photo: Sulyiman Stokes)

The EFG London Jazz Festival and the show keeps on getting bigger and bigger. This year’s 31st edition, which took place Nov. 10–19, was a 10-day extravaganza that featured over 300 acts playing across more than 70 venues throughout the city — meaning that no matter which part of town you might have ventured to, top-quality improvised music was ever-present.

Gaining an overview of a festival on this scale is a gargantuan task, since programmers curated lineups that covered almost every aspect of jazz’s varied identity: from legacy celebrations of Pharoah Sanders and Wayne Shorter, to living-legends sets from Ron Carter and Charles Lloyd, homegrown talent in the shape of saxophonist Emma Rawicz, Dave Okumu and Tom Skinner, as well as experimental pursuits from the likes of Rarelyalways, Bill Orcutt, Tyshawn Sorey and others.

Yet, such tyranny of choice also produced a fantastic array of highlights. An opening-weekend high point came in the form of Chicago drummer Makaya McCraven’s show at the Barbican with the London Contemporary Orchestra. Returning to the festival following a triumphant 2022 performance, McCraven’s string accompaniment for this 2023 concert was perfectly pitched to flesh out the luscious orchestrations of his latest album, In These Times. In a tightly packed show of just over an hour, conductor Robert Ames’ LCO provided gorgeous harmonic swells and textural ambience between McCraven and his band’s bursts of rhythmic flair. Opening on the fast-paced ride cymbal patterns of “Seventh String,” the LCO provided a delightfully delicate top-line melody before giving way to a muscular vibraphone solo from Joel Ross. While on downtempo interludes like “Lullaby” and “The Calling,” strings swept cinematically across the sold-out auditorium, showcasing McCraven’s skill as a composer as well as a drummer.

In fact, McCraven’s drumming prowess was largely muted throughout the show to make way for the intricacies of the orchestration instead, only letting his arms truly fly on closing number “In These Times.” Here, as trumpeter Marquis Hill soared through a keening solo, McCraven toyed with a sense of tension and release between the band and the orchestra, with the rhythm section holding down a fiendishly complex staccato groove while the strings laid out languorously, until both built to a glorious drum-driven crescendo. Head down, sticks blurring as the track peaked, McCraven cemented his place not only as one of his generation’s finest and most intuitive drummers but equally as a songwriter capable of moving audiences in ever-expanding settings.

Across town at the Southbank Centre, London-based saxophonist Camilla George harnessed West African rhythms in a polished set celebrating her Nigerian heritage. Interlocking seamlessly with bassist Daniel Casimir, George’s melodic lines were lyrical and light, tripping with ease over the sludgy funk of “Epke” before interweaving with an infectious Latin clave on “Abasi Isang,” both taken from her latest release, 2022’s Ibio-Ibio. Yet, when it came to exploring the breathy range of the saxophone, it was the processed MIDI woodwinds of L.A. experimentalist Sam Gendel that pushed the boundaries of the instrument.

Sat bowed over a laptop and with his giant mop of hair obscuring his face, Gendel and percussionist Philippe Melanson launched into 90 minutes of almost uninterrupted, unexpected soundscapes during their show at Milton Court. Using the force of his breath to trigger sounds on a digital saxophone, Gendel’s choices varied from elegiac piano to Baroque harpsichord, ’90s R&B acoustic guitar and a sprightly jazz bass. As Gendel blew hard to loop intricate harmonies, Melanson swiftly grounded these phrases in the minimal, sampled hits of his electronic percussion pad. At one point pitting a loop of his own breath against Gendel’s frantic sax lines, before triggering a dog bark to signal the transition into a new tune, the pair’s show was an intriguing and often revelatory blend of the embodied with the otherworldly, unified by the meandering force of improvisation.

Over in east London at the bar Juju’s, drummer, MC and producer Kassa Overall similarly broke down genre divisions with a performance of his latest record, Animals. Accompanied by virtuoso saxophonist and percussionist Tomoki Sanders, Overall’s quartet bridged the gap between jazz, hip-hop and free improvisation, effortlessly blending instrumental technicality with dexterous lyrics and the eternal thump of a groove. At times enlisting Sanders on electronic drum pads, himself on the kit and Bendji Allonce on percussion all at once, Overall delivered a body-moving rhythmic assault, traversing everything from a spliced cover of Snoop Dogg’s “Drop It Like It’s Hot” to the bossa nova balladry of “The Lava Is Calm” and sociopolitical lyrical intricacies on “Prison And Pharmaceuticals.”

When the band did away with the form of their song structures, they soared. Providing space for Sanders to blow into a free-jazz fury, for pianist Matt Wong to glide through high-speed chromatic runs and for Allonce to rattle through polyrhythms on the congas, Overall proved himself a consummate bandleader, holding the ability to stick to head-nodding hip-hop beats as much as cutting loose into a boundary-pushing sense of sonic liberation.

Finally, to round out the festival’s proceedings on a more subdued but no less entrancing note, Snarky Puppy band members Bill Laurance and Michael League debuted their new duo project at the Southbank Centre. Showcasing an almost telepathic sense of improvising intuition, the pair launched into a series of deeply felt, intricate bass-and-piano duets from their 2023 album Where You Wish You Were. Luxuriating in the softness of their dynamic, they produced imaginative soundscapes on album highlights “Sant Esteve” and “Kin,” while artfully deconstructed versions of Pat Metheny’s “Question And Answer” and D’Angelo’s “Spanish Joint” illustrated how their 20 years spent playing together have produced a masterful grasp of precision harmony. In leaving space far more than overplaying with virtuosic runs, Laurance and League allowed the rapt audience to experience a gamut of emotions in the silence.

It was the perfect show to close EFG London Jazz Festival’s final day, illustrating not only the event’s range but also its capacity to produce beauty and musical surprises amid such varied selection. No matter how much the event grows year on year, the world-class quality of its musicianship never diminishes. DB