Andy Sheppard, St George's, Bristol, 9th November, 2017 - gig review

And I Loved It

[for Isobel]

Can you have convivial jazz? I should say you can have any adjectival music you care to describe, especially jazz with its expansive range, but for this review my naming is set up by the prelude to attending this fine show by the warm welcome and meal I enjoyed before travelling into Bristol. My thanks to our hosts for the early evening where a most pleasant dinner and company segued so precisely into a most pleasant performance from Sheppard and band.

Pleasant is seemingly faint praise for a jazz gig, but when I attach the other descriptors of mellow, pretty, soft, breathy and melodic to what could be a longer totally positive list, you’ll get the gist and link to convivial. This was a performance based in melody and gentle delivery overall, Sheppard’s breathy sax playing setting up each song to grow into the fuller playing, with Eivind Aarset’s guitar and electronics providing often ambient landscapes to the whole, and also including a lovely echoplex-esque a la John Martyn accompaniment to a signature song of the night based as it was on three notes, according to Sheppard, sung by a bird in his garden, assuming he wasn’t telling us a magpie. This also reminded of JM and Sheppard’s accompaniment to the gorgeous My Creator on The Cobbles album.

Michel Benita on bass provided tight mirrorings of melodic lines in most of the songs, and in one he also established and sustained a great riff that livened up the pace – a little. Indeed, those wanting a rip-up of notes might have been disappointed, but that wasn’t the case with me. There was one song near the end where Aarset demonstrated the wonderful growl and argument of his electronics, and Sheppard did run some speedy rise and falls around this. Sebastian Rochford on drums was a precise anchor throughout, often dancing around his cymbals.

Most of the beautiful songs played last night were from Sheppard’s upcoming album Romaria due for release in January 2018. I do look forward to that. It will have its own nuances, no doubt, but I can’t imagine it capturing the finesse of Sheppard’s playing live – the sweet shifts into higher octaves when he plays, especially in the gentleness of it all, is sublime. As my aural companion on the night said at one point in the performance, playing at such a pace and relative calm requires great skill.

This skill and pleasing/pleasant/palpable control was most evident in the sweet surprise of the band’s encore, a calming, convivial cover of The Beatles’ And I Love Her. A lovely end to a lovely gig.

Mary Spender - support for the Walker/Thompson gig, St George's, Bristol, 17th February, 2016

Brilliant In and From Bristol

Her Vigier guitar in Revolution Green will for the moment serve as a partial metaphor for the elegant as well as sassy talent that is Mary Spender. It is a pretty guitar, yet that is mere show if played with little skill – I imagine my amateurish attempts – but when Mary picks it up at the start of her support slot, the immediate fluidity of her setting-up is impressive as well as tempting. There is a blues run that is suggestive too, and when she sings, this is where the promise is fully realised.

Supporting Ryley Walker with Danny Thompson at last night’s St George’s gig would seem a daunting task – as it so often is with an expectant audience – but Spender instantly performs with confidence and clarity: a voice that is pure and ranging; her guitar playing with such felicity, a slap and picking that has a jazzy characteristic as much as the blues. Her fine songs are often sung in tandem with the guitar work deftly picking out the key melodies, and her vocal tone resonates wonderfully – especially in the fulsome acoustics of the venue. There is a beautiful self-harmonising [I am guessing] vocal work-out on her The Electric EP I picked up with two others last night.

I was generally impressed, and having picked up and listened to those three available cds [two studio eps and one live recording in Philadelphia] as well as all the music on her web site – which includes a sweet video cover of Nirvana’s Smells Like Teen Spirit – I feel excited to have heard this emerging talent on that stage.

To anyone reading this review, I would recommend an immediate visit of Spender’s site here to listen to the music available. And it is all in the listening, and I can confirm that she excels both live and in recording [if you can make her The Louisiana gig in hometown Bristol on the 31^st March, she will be playing with a band and that will be interesting, but the soloing is damn fine enough].

I don’t think I quite accounted for the ‘sass’ I wanted from my opening metaphor. This is for me always a positive quality, and I take from it the essence of being confident. I liked her confidence in making it clear to the audience last night that she has taken her journey: she has travelled, played in America, recorded in Nashville, and this has taken some years. She is now ready and releasing her debut album in October of this year, and I look forward to that. I look forward to seeing her play again and sharing this discovery with a wider audience.

Ryley Walker with Danny Thompson, St George's, Bristol, 17th February, 2016

Ryley and Reverie

Ryley Walker is a young American guitar artist, his artistry clearly in the instrumental work across a variety of open tunings and finger-picking dexterity that is quite outstanding, and also in the jazz-infused songcraft where, on record - especially his most recent Primrose Green - his backing band augments those inflections, and, in live performance, the extended jamming as with last night at the wonderful St George’s in Bristol. That he was accompanied there by the legendary Danny Thompson on double bass augmented this performance to levels of bliss.

Midway through last night’s gig Walker referred to one of the instrumental improvs as a ‘boogie jam’ which I quite like as an upbeat assessment, but it struck me that they were most like ragas, and his performance of these seems characterised by a trance-like immersion in the soloing where sudden bursts of chord strikes are balanced by delicate finger-picks and occasionally the sweetest minor chord sequences.

All the time Thompson played his exquisite bass where dropping into the lower notes resonates with such soothing power, and then he bends glorious notes to meander within the tunes. The audience was clearly gathered to see Danny playing as much as Ryley – judging from his reception – but it was palpable how Walker asserted his presence in a mutually assured construction of folkjazz symmetry, this their first gig of a tour and perfectly at ease in the virtuoso partnership.

Walker is also a consummate folk artist, this also more evident I would guess in a live performance of acoustic guitar – though amped – and double bass, compared with on record, though his first All Kinds of You veers more to this than the jazzier and at times psychedelic PG. His singing is also heavily influenced by a folk tradition, the obvious echoes of influences like Nick Drake, Bert Jansch and John Martyn. In his more trance-vocals, one can hear Tim Buckley and Van Morrison with yelps and hollers and grunts and other guttural expressions of emotion. His vocal variations on the singular word alright were hypnotic.

The main set last night ended on Primrose Green, and its distinctive riff remained with me long afterwards. Most affecting personally, however, was the first song of the subsequent encore, a gentle acoustic playing and singing of Sweet Satisfaction, the most poignant of the John Martyn echoes of the evening. Walker doesn’t use his voice quite like the instrument Martyn eventually made his own distinctive sound, but he did sing with the beautiful clarity of earlier Martyn, and the chord sequence, as well as slap playing, could have been a song from JM’s early period too. All the time this was being performed I couldn’t help but wonder what kind of nostalgic reverie was going through Thompson’s mind, such a long-time musical collaborator and great friend of John Martyn. I think I saw these two play live together twice many, many years ago, and Thompson must have a sense of fond memory when performing with the youthful Walker, reminding of those days. I have no doubt that any such sentimentality – nothing wrong in that – is wrapped in a profound professional regard from the senior legend to the emerging talent of Walker, whose volatile life exploits and experiences would seem to mirror some of the boisterous existentialism of the Thompson/Martyn years! 

Review/comments previously on Ryley Walker on this blog can be found here.