Roger Manins’ band embodied everything that the name of the Jazzgroove Association implies. It had a beautiful jazz/funk/R&B groove from beginning to end.
Drummer Warren Trout is renowned in this area, but I had not heard bassist Brendan Clarke in quite this idiom. Wonderful. Beautiful sound, solos that began with big simple figures that reinforced the beat and announced that some blistering stuff was on the way. And it arrived always in exactly the right place.
Aron Ottignon, even as a teenager, established himself as a pianist who could do practically anything, with authority and individuality. There were times on this night when he managed to open out into a kind of fantasy of chromatics and dissonance without disrupting the groove orientation. Nor is there much that guitarist Carl Dewhurst can’t do at least as well as any guitarist you might name. On this night he eschewed feedback and distortion— at which he is a master—for a big, clean panging sound that stung as sharply as any rough edged blues. Some rasping and hoarse edges were employed by Roger Manins on his tenor saxophone, and they brought some blissful screams from the audience, but he too seemed intent on proving just how bluesy and groovy you could be without calling on all the raunchy devices at your disposal all the time.
Manins’s sound is rich, big, dark, yet fine; fluent, beautifully modulated. This was an appearance as a kiwi, because he has moved back home with his wife and daughter to be with his ailing mother. Kiwis in the audience who called out requests had their accents sent up by Roger, who has been in Australia long enough to realise that it is as bizarre a way of speaking as Strine. My request for a tune about Timaru, where I once lived, was ignored. Wrong island perhaps.
This music reminded me of many things. Ray Charles’s band playing jazz. Dizzy Gillespie’s band playing Doodlin’, the Adderley brothers playing Jive Samba. It was smooth and sweetly grooving rather than wild and raunchy, but it reached the soul.
Opening this night were an ensemble chosen by me at the request of Jazzgroove, just to show how wide is the range of stuff presented. I can say that Matt McMahon, Mathew Clare, Ben Waples and Josh Green gave me all I had hoped for and more, but of my own performance I can only say that I had a great time. Unlike my experience when I was asked to perform with an international composer last year, I felt that I was with friends. I was not frozen out of conversations by an Old Boys network nor pointed at and laughed at—‘Oh, maaan, oh, maaan!’—by a beaky, bald looney maestro with mad bulging eyes (the great man himself), who if he looked in the mirror with any objectivity would realise he looks every bit as ridiculous as I do. What a contrast.