While Ronnie’s staff team pressed home advantage in the midweek jazz quiz in the bar upstairs, nudging the Jazzwise team into second place, the club’s winning ways continued with full houses once again for the first week of the 3rd Brit Jazz Fest.

Looking at the week’s schedule so far (with another week to go), you could be forgiven for thinking we’re entering a new big band era. The Ronnie Scott’s Orchestra, Humphrey Lyttelton’s originals and the Michael Garrick Big Band were followed on Wednesday by the hottest representative from the new generation. Ben Cottrell’s Mancunian 14-piece Beats & Pieces dazzled with a glorious, full-bloodied set demonstrating all that’s good about big band jazz. Their infectiously high spirits are reminiscent of their main influences, the fellow British  orchestras of Colin Towns and Loose Tubes, and with healthy abandon, their likeable leader Cottrell can slip Radiohead into the equation, the band playing sumptuously over Thom Yorke’s sampled vocal as well as grinding out a loping groove, Cinematic Orchestra-style.

Gang camaraderie as well as talent meant young musicians can blossom here. Notably, trumpeter Nick Walters, the Jazzwise-dubbed “man whose triangle of a beard would make Gandalf proud” – noted on stage with much amusement by Cottrell; and especially alto saxophonist Sam Healey and tenor Ben Watte who soared with buckets of soul as well as bop, as well as the atmospheric, effects-driven guitarist Anton Hunter.

In suitable contrast making up the other half of this night’s double bill were the more mellifluous strains of saxophonist Adam Waldmann’s Kairos 4tet, a very promising heir to UK international stars such as Julian Arguelles and Iain Ballamy, the kind of ex-Loose Tubes saxophonists marked by the ECM brush. As on their recent Statement of Intent album, the icy yet soulful singer Emilia Mårtensson guested as well as joining Beats & Pieces later for their last number in which her vocals were looped into a multi-layered psychedelic sandwich. The big band tradition is alive and well and living in Manchester. 


– Selwyn Harris