Dazzling polyrhythms … Tigran Hamasyan at the Queen Elizabeth Hall, London. Photograph: Andy Sheppard/Redferns via Getty Images
John FordhamThe Guardian, Wednesday 20 November 2013 16.08 GMT
Not since the days of the anthemic finales and light-show theatricals of the Esbjörn Svensson Trio has a stage in the London jazz festival vibrated with so much pop-jazz energy as was unleashed on Tuesday by the 26-year-old Armenian Tigran Hamasyan. Like the late-lamented Svensson, Hamasyan is a jazz pianist who composes like a songwriter and is influenced by his homeland's folk music.
He's also a pop and dance fan who loves seeing audiences jumping in the air rather than tapping jazz-savvy feet. But Hamasyan really does turn it all the way up to 11 (he liked Black Sabbath as a child, and it shows) and – at least in his current stage show – keeps his huge pianistic and improv gifts tightly under wraps. This week's London jazz festival gig had less light and shade than the Armenian's new Shadow Theater album) and focused on a heavy dancefloor vibe. But if some jazz fans who had been drawn by Herbie Hancock's or Brad Mehldau's embrace of Hamasyan eventually found themselves thinking "please make it stop", plenty others were audibly happy for the show to go on all night.
The gifted Swiss-Albanian vocalist Elina Duni opened the gig with her UK debut, delivering a coolly emotional, flawlessly pitched fusion of jazz phrasing and Albanian folk music with pianist Colin Vallon's trio: her return can't come too soon. Hamasyan then bounded on stage to mash the folk theme, dazzling polyrhythms and crunching backbeats of Shadow Theater's Drip.
He combined the nursery-song simplicity of The Poet with a hard-hitting funk groove, a folk theme and a swooping Charles Altura guitar break, and let his fine singer/keyboardist Areni Agbabian's glowing vocals sustain the rootsy feel in a mercurial, heavily electronic mix. The agile Agbabian began to dart and scat like a Balkan Flora Purim on The Year Is Gone. If Hamasyan's festival-commissioned piece was a perfunctory mix of a pretty piano theme and a headbanging groove, the set's climax – with its squelching, subterranean monster-bass dance hook and jackknifing synths – showed just how he adores contemporary music at its most visceral.
Read more: http://www.theguardian.com/music/2013/nov/20/tigran-hamasyan-review
0 Comments:
Post a Comment