Brighton Year-Round 2024
St Nicholas The John Lake Quartet Recital
The John Lake Quartet
Genre: Live Music
Venue: St Nicholas Church, Dyke Road, Brighton
Festival: Brighton Year-Round
Low Down
A summer-rich ensemble that could play in any season.
The John Lake Quartet performed at St Nicholas Church, Dyke Road, Brighton on August 14th
Review
The John Lake Quartet (John Lake, piano. Elizabeth Bustard alto and tenor sax, Matt Casterson bass, and Simon Cambers, drums) are known throughout the south east for their ‘modern melodic jazz’ – basically jazz from the 1950s onwards but short of the jazz fusion threads. It’s a real Sussex MJQ in other words. They arrive at St Nicholas Church for 50 minutes and 10 numbers of unalloyed celebration.
The sound in this acoustic, if you’re on the drums side is certainly timp-heavy. Matt Casterson’s bass was difficult to hear but out front it’s another story. Certainly Simon Cumbers plays with big band panache and the band feel moves away from the ‘cool’ of MJQ to a more extrovert and blazoned front. There’s a dash of post-war British jazz here.
Their notes are fine too: it’s god to see everything laid out in a programme sheet in such informative and engrossing detail – never long but thumbnails to entice.
First up was “Unsainted Thomas”, a Lake take from 2016 of a tribute to Sonny Rollins’ ‘St Thomas’ and appropriately upbeat in a style very much Lake’s own. That is, a big upfront sound, strong timps and a plangent sax breaking through. Piano has its moment and bas in quiet passages.
St Thomas itself, Rollins’ work from 1955 needs such treatment: it’s a huge ask for Bustard’s alto sax blazing through it with a great timps flourish at the end.
Lake’s own work returns in 5464 it takes Paul Desmond’s “Take Five” and particularly “Time Out” as signature tunes (I think the tie signatures are those enshrined in the title) and move to different melodic shapes, again powerful upfront and less elegiac than the Desmond original.
What Bustard does in her tenor sax in the original 1959 “Take Five” is another matter. It’s all darkened by the shock news of the death f guitarist Richard Bowen who only played here recently. Bustard takes a dark reedy almost operatic walk through this number, in contrast to her more clarinet-ish alto sax. It’s haunting.
Lake’s 2005 “After Midnight” is a homage to another upcoming number, that of Thelonius Monk. What Lake dies is crate a conversation round melodic wisps and direct quotes and builds up to a shimmering affirmation. This one also dedicated to Bowen, is tenebrous, like darkness at noon and midnight, and both post-party and post-Monk.
Monk’s own “Round Midnight” is elevated by Bustard and Casterson with gentle tapping by Cumber and Lake to a real version, faithful yet free.
Lake’s 2013 “Blues at Seven” referring to time-signature again is an upbeat rhythmically insistent allegro work with an optimistic sheen with darker moments. “Unsquare Dance” Dave Brubeck’s own 1961 ‘quirky dance tempo’ really is quite different to some of his other work but not notably unlike him. It’s unexpected and its offbeat qualities are given real panache, edge and swerve here.
Lake himself helms the Brubeck take on Chopin, his “Prelude and Interlude in E minor” which in this Lake version dates from 2015, three years after Brubeck’s death a day short of 92. Its remarkably close to the original Chopin on the piano, woven with delicate takes on timps, sax and bass. “Blue Rondo a La Turk” also Brubeck with tis 7/8 signature forms the interlude, and the title from Mozart’s 1779 Sonata is nimbly subsumed.
It does come out though I Brubeck’s original of from 1959 “Blue Rondo a La Turk”. Brubeck was inspired by some Turkish musicians paying this, though the original is reappropriated quite rightly from Mozart (Fazil Say has done this too). Keith Emerson dd a version in 1968. It’s quite a timp-rich piece, as it absolutely right, with the timps being associated with Turkish armies of the period.
This is a summer-rich ensemble that could play in any season.
