Friday afternoons seem to be coming with alaring regularity at the moment; but that is also a good thing, when each Friday afternoon signals the start of a live music concert streamed on YouTube whilst being performed, this time, thankfully and happily to a socially-distanced live audience, at St Luke's Church in London as part of the Lonodon Symphony Orchestra's season of 'Summer Shorts'.
This afternoon was the turn of the percussion section to take the spotlight, and indeed the LSO Percussion Ensemble headed by Neil Parry played 3 pieces for us on marimbas, vibraphones and piano.
Starting with a piece originally written as a duet, but arranged by one of the ensemble members, Simon Carrington, we heard Chuck Corea's "Duet Suite". This four-part, four-person arrangement really opened out the soundscape and timbres. A jazz influenced piece of some complexity full of rich colours. It's quite a long piece, composed in 1978, and has all the requisite contemporary sounds and chord structures associated with that decade. There is also an underlying Spanish feel to some of the rhythms too, whish is a deliberate attempt by Corea to hark back to his own heritage.
For the final two pieces we welcomed jazz pianist / composer Gwilyn Simcock to ther stage. Simcock played piano in both pieces, both of his own composing. The first of these was movements 2 and 3 from his "Suite For Percussion Quintet". Again a very thickly composed piece; a dense sound of continuous ebbing and flowing through jazz-infused harmonic and melodic ideas which develop on and from each other. Despite being composed in 2018, there is very much a retro feel to this music. Stylistically it is reminiscent of a 1970's Jazz cafe where the pianist would sit improvising whilst you ate, drank and made small-talk. Other parts of the piece though are much more urgent and driving and could easily be used as background music to a thriller or cop-chase from the 1980s.
The concert finished with Simcock's own arrangement for percussion quintet of 'Barber Blues'. The piece starts with a driving rhythmic piano left hand ostinato, introducing instruments and melodies one by one on top of it and then extemporising and developing from here in a jazz version of a Bach 'Invention', all in the style of American composer Samuel Barber (hence the title). Very clever.
Contemporary jazz percussion at its best. Loved it!
Reviewer - Matthew Dougall
on - 21/8/20
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