Jazz In the Round, Sam Barnett Quintet & Interchange, Cockpit Theatre, 30 October 2017

While Waiting For Action

This was a well cool evening of jazz.  An exciting new 10 piece (dectet) of female jazz players supported by a quintet of extremely talented teenagers.

It is all explained in this Jazz In The Round at The Cockpit link – click here.

Just in case they aren’t so good at archiving at The Cockpit, I have scraped the raw HTML so you’ll still be able to read the text at least here.

I happened across this pretty much by chance. Rohan Candappa is going to try out a new performance piece at The Cockpit 31 October, so I looked at the website for the place, as I didn’t know it, although it is more or less “on my manor”.

I spotted this concert and checked out a couple of YouTubes and audio links  for the performers. I liked what I saw and heard – Janie did too – we booked it.

This is the YouTube I checked out for the Sam Barnett Quintet:

I found the following Spotify link for the Interchange/Issie Barrett stuff – click here or below.

First up, the youngsters. Jez Nelson from Jazz FM introduced the acts:

Jez Nelson with the Sam Barnett Quintet

All good musicians, but Sam himself plus the drummer Zoe Pascal were the standouts:

Janie felt that the Sam Barnett compositions were too reminiscent of the greats, e.g. Miles Davis. “Not original enough”, she said. “He’s sixteen years old for goodness sake” was my response to that.

Composing Their Own Stuff

The Interchange dectet also compose their own stuff; not just Issie Barratt but all of them compose. We heard five pieces by five different members of the ensemble. The standout piece for us was Palmyra by Shirley Smart the cellist. All ten are superb musicians. The standouts for me are the multi-instrumentalists Yazz Ahmed, Helena Kay & Tori Freestone, plus the percussionist Katie Patterson.

To add to the arty coolness of it all, Gina Southgate was there, right behind us, painting the ensembles as they played:

Gina Southgate’s jazz art

Slightly to detract from the late-nighter coolness of it all, I was well tired after a weekend of outings and I’m back here again tomorrow, so I fired up my smart phone and pressed the “come and get me” buttons as soon as the gig ended, which slightly curtailed Janie’s chat with Gina Southgate.

Anyway, we’d had a great evening, which we rounded off with some smoked fishes, salad and wine back at the flat, before flaking.