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More delightful Auroville jazz
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The performance by the Matt Littlewood Trio was a refreshing treat
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Smooth sailing Littlewood has a fluent style and rich tone
I’d written in my last concert review that if I heard one more trio of guitar, bass and drums, I’d scream blue murder. Looks like my guardian angel, wanting to spare me the pain that would undoubtedly ensue from screaming, was looking out
for me, for soon thereafter I was treated to a concert by tenor saxophone, bass and drums. So refreshing was the treat that I was forced to go back on my decision not to review any more of Olive Beach’s series of (alternate) Monday night jazz concerts.
This one was on May 19 and featured Matt Littlewood on tenor sax, the redoubtable and familiar Keith Peters on electric bass guitar, and Suresh Bascara on drums. Bascara was described in the handout as French and Auroville-based but is clearly of Indian origin. Littlewood is British and also lives in Auroville, and is, as the handout informs us, also a pianist (though of course we didn’t get an opportunity to hear him in that capacity in the limited elbow room available at Olive Beach).
The performance was already chugging along when I entered. From that point on the trio played perhaps a dozen tunes, mostly jazz and pop standards but at least, as I remember, one composition by Littlewood. Littlewood seems to have a preference for ballads, with extensive solo improvisation of course as the main jazz input.
All three musicians took solos, especially Littlewood and Peters, and acquitted themselves creditably. The challenge was especially tough on two of John Coltrane’s compositions, “A Love Supreme” and “Giant Steps”, and one of Sonny Rollins’s, “St. Thomas” (a calypso written by him to celebrate his parents’ place of origin in the American Virgin Islands). (I’ve noticed from Rollins’s web site that on a current tour of Japan he’s played this classic more than once, no doubt in response to insistent audience demand.) The trio were equal to the challenge.
Littlewood has a fluent style and rich tone on the tenor sax, and Peters, who has been taking more and more solos whenever I’ve heard him perform in the last couple of years, is both inventive in improvisation and solid in accompaniment.
Peters, as regular readers will recall, is from Chennai, so all the talent on display was from out of town. Not quite, though. The audience included Mili Nair, who sang alongside Amit Heri’s augmented trio (augmented by Holger Jetter on violin) at Olive Beach’s first concert, and Arati Rao, an established voice on Bangalore’s jazz scene.
They were invited in turn to join the Littlewood trio, and gamely did so, Rao first contributing a sizzling rendition of George Gershwin’s “Summertime” and then Nair pitching in with a peppy version of Fats Waller’s happy-go-lucky “Honeysuckle Rose”, both of them with plenty of vocal improvisation, apart from the trio’s instrumental solos.
Olive Beach’s acoustics are not great for singing (or speaking – I couldn’t catch most of Littlewood’s announcements), so all the more credit to Nair and Rao for attempting to, and largely succeeding in, making their voices slice through the other sounds. I wrote in my review of Heri’s concert that Jetter is part of an apparently thriving jazz community in Auroville. Littlewood and Bascara provide ample confirmation of this, and I at least would like to see if Auroville’s jazz talent can be pooled into a concert for Bangaloreans’ delectation. My friend Jagadish of Radio Indigo, who presented Agog’s concert at the Grand Ashok and very justifiably protested, when I threatened to scream blue murder, that I hadn’t been listening during last winter when quite a few jazz concerts weren’t guitar-led, might explore the possibility of putting Auroville jazz on display here in full strength. And if he does so, how about commandeering a piano for Littlewood to show us his chops in that department?
JAZZEBEL
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