Times were a changing this year at Cheltenham as the festival moved to a self-contained locale in the leafy Montpellier Gardens, a circus-style Big Top replacing the fusty familiarity of the Town Hall, the Jazz Arena providing a super-sized intermediary venue to the Pillar Room/Everyman Theatre and the Parabola Arts Theatre an intimate crucible for the more intense music on offer. The festival’s core jazz audience duly turned out in force for the likes of John Taylor’s darkly humorous commission (based on Kurt Vonnegut’s novel Harrison Bergeron) with his stellar Brit-jazz octet, as well as engaging late night sets by Seb Rochford and Kit Downes and the vibrant Coax/Loop Collective group Tweedle Dee. Yet the agenda this year seemed to be to put even more bums on seats and the vast 2,200-capacity Big Top demanded performances that edged more into showbiz territory or drove directly into funk (Juan Zelada and Miss 600), rock ’n’ roll (Imelda May) or jazz pop (Melody Gardot). So it was down to Gregory Porter to bring some soul-jazz class to bear on these stadium-esque conditions and he positively shone in the process. The ecstatic welcome gave way to a commanding performance, his voice resonating right to the back of the rafters. 

Festival guest director Jamie Cullum made a valiant cameo with this gospel-schooled colossus but even with his gruff voice sounding rich and note perfect, ‘Work Song’ was always going to belong to Porter, the taller man even punctuating the final chord with an aerial kick Cullum himself would have been proud of. Rejuvenated bass boss Marcus Miller was in similarly raucous form, with a hot young band straining at the leash and a bag of fresh new music from his latest album Renaissance the bassist seemed unstoppable. With altoist Alex Han and trumpeter Maurice Brown blowing up a storm the set’s highlights were a demented, dubbed-out ‘Tutu’ and encore ‘Blast’, Miller’s blazing slap bass solo closing the set with a sonic slam-dunk. By contrast Fieldwork’s head-scratching metronomic explorations made for a stifling listening and it was left it to the astonishing drumming of Tyshawn Sorey to inject some spiky, streetwise broken beats and soul into proceedings. Bill Frisell’s quirky alt.country rock slightly misfired in the Big Top setting but pianist Roberto Fonseca delivered an explosive contemporary Cuban jazz set in the smaller Jazz Arena, perhaps they should have swapped places. 

Tenorist of the moment Chris Potter recreated his beautifully nuanced chamber-jazz suite A Song For Everyone, backed with astonishing assurance by students from the Birmingham Conservatoire. Potter later joined the late night jam at the Hotel Du Vin alongside young bassist Dan Casimir, the Marcus Miller horns and students from the Trondheim Jazz Exchange for an outrageously unbuttoned bebop blow out. It was a great example of how jazz’s all encompassing ethic and attitude can work on both intimate and arena levels, as long as that spark of spontaneity remains intact.

– Mike Flynn

Marcus Miller (top), John Taylor octet (above, right), Gregory Porter and Chris Potter

Photos: Tim Dickeson

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