Howard Assembly Rooms, Leeds 13th Feb 2025
The Howard Assembly Rooms has gone for a jazz club vibe (mimicking the nearby underground Domino Club), with tables and drinks service to the table. All they need is a girl with a tray of cigarettes and we’re in a prohibition-era speakeasy. But it’s not that sort of jazz; not at all. This is serious stuff, no pauses between pieces, no time for applause, no show-boating solos. It’s more like an event at the (also nearby) Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival.
It is a serious album that Elliot is playing through here and a fascinating one, but tonight somehow ups the ante into eighty minutes of concentration. I find myself admiring the musicianship but feeling unmoved by material that I’d liked on record. This could have been the result of following the emotionally expressive support act of Laura Jurd on trumpet and Martin Green on accordion. The shifts into traditional jazz (St James Infirmary Blues) and folk (Pretty Saro) and back out let proceedings move from drone into jaunty and tugged at the feelings. Following this with a bleak aural sculpture was an ill-judged move.
Galvin’s piece is impressive, just too fixed and implacable for a live performance in this context. Perhaps if I’d come expecting contemporary classical music I would feel differently, but the album misleads in being accessible despite the challenging aesthetics and having a feel of ensemble interaction that is absent tonight, and that’s the opposite to the way live jazz usually goes.
The performers are excellent and Galvin is fully engaged, hunched over the Steinway or electronics, adjusting his modular synthesiser, carefully curating the piece. Ruth Goller’s bass guitar (also appearing with Jurd and Green on support) is unexpected at many points – using harmonics, damped strings and non-traditional approaches. Sebastian Rochford on drums is occasionally the pulse but more often a commentary, another instrument, a sideways accompaniment or lead. Mandhira de Saram’s violin is similarly serious and cerebral. Notably, Laura Jurd guests in the main set and the piece is one with a groove and feel, but she leaves and the band shifts to playing what sounds like insect fear atop washes of cymbals. Creak, scrape, Rochford playing tick-tick-tick-bang and I enjoy the polyrhythmic section that develops. As the evening shifts to an elegiac piano and violin section before pensive solo piano, I feel relieved.
I love ‘difficult’ music and often seek it out but tonight I didn’t feel an emotional context and I didn’t feel this was jazz in the sense of live creation or comment from an ensemble of peers; more a through-composed piece with no space for response to the feelings of the evening, the performers or the attendees. The playing was exceptional but I was left with no more than the thoughts that I really must seek out Laura Jurd’s work and that Martin Green is the most interesting solo component of folk-prog supergroup, Lau.
Laura Jurd and Martin Green – the evening’s support act