Antony Gormley’s bronze outside the Millennium Forum
Where better to hear ‘Danny Boy’ than in Derry one hundred years old this year, played in the right spirit by local alto saxophone and clarinet legend Gay McIntyre, who has just celebrated his 80th birthday. Performing an afternoon set on the second day of this year’s City of Derry Jazz and Big Band Festival McIntyre was in duo with guitarist Joe Quigley in the Rocking Chair on Waterloo Street. McIntyre performed several times during this year’s festival, and was joined by his son Paul and fellow Irish jazz legend Louis Stewart for a headline show at the Playhouse on the penultimate day.
On Saturday evening David Lyttle, the Irish drummer known to wider audiences for his band featuring Soweto Kinch and his championing of teenage guitar sensation Andreas Varady, performed in trio mode at the Playhouse theatre on Artillery Street with Dublin-based Australian double bassist Damian Evans and former Sting keyboardist Jason Rebello here on piano. Their set included music from Lyttle’s Charles Dickens and Edgar Allan Poe-inspired work ‘Dark Tales’, music the 28-year-old Waringstown musician and composer has performed during a Pizza Express Jazz Club residency in London with his band at the time featuring pianist Robert Mitchell. Also included in this accomplished set were the multi-layered composition ‘Childhood’, and Rebello’s knottily appealing tune ‘As the Dust Settles’. Lyttle’s style recalls Brian Blade’s a touch, with the same open, loose feel and a driving post-straightahead way about him. Rebello responded well, and in passages took me back to his halcyon Make It Real days in the 1990s.
The line-up in Derry this year also included crossover headliners Puppini Sisters and Pink Martini as well as an extensive Guinness Trail, a very inclusive concept featuring mostly free-entry gigs with events taking place all over the city and not just inside. In Guildhall Square there was a stage and a market and in City of Culture year the festival, now in its twelfth running, had an extra spring in its step. Caolán McLaughlin, one of the participants in the second day Neil Cowley masterclass at Henderson’s showroom, was on stage in the square with a covers band at Saturday lunchtime and bumping into this fine player later he mentioned an early evening set at the Bentley wine bar. Making my way over there at the Bentley Mark Black and the Trips really kicked in hard, with Letterkenny man Black’s style recalling the Stax sound of blues great Albert King at times allied with an expert swung groove from the drummer, and McLaughlin on keys adding authentic textures as the band slowed for effect.
Another of Cowley’s masterclass participants who goes by the moniker Grim (real name: Laurence McDaid) a tall, confident multi-instrumentalist, electronicist and singer who sang Leadbelly’s ‘Sylvie’ (‘Bring Me Little Water, Sylvie)’ a cappella quite fearlessly to begin with and who played bass guitar later was the support act at the Nerve Centre. His own dark and catchy song ‘Little Fizz’ was the highlight of the set for me.
Cowley’s set after a long unexplained delay was one of the best, and the most intuitive in terms of improvisational firepower I’ve seen the band perform to date. The audience responded well, and bassist Rex Horan played his socks off, with Evan Jenkins’ coiled aggression at the kit, and Cowley getting into the zone particularly on ‘The Face of Mount Molehill’, the title track of the band’s last studio album. The audience rose to their feet immediately at the end of the set and encore piece ‘She Eats Flies’ contained a superb bass solo from Horan as the band settled into a further improvisation-heavy groove that underlined the band’s sheer class. Stephen Graham