The Jamie Cullum-headed Cheltenham jazz festival, a magnet for 20,000 visitors as it enters its third decade, is savvier than most jazz institutions about the popular touch – big-draw vocal stars have bookended the 2017 edition’s six days, with Laura Mvula playing the opener and Gregory Porter the finale. But a raft of creative eclecticism comes between, epitomised on a Sunday bill that included the modern R&B and classic standards-singing of young US singer-pianist Kandace Springs, a punk-jazzy sonic hurricane from Swiss trio Schnellertollermeier, Meshell Ndegeocello’s brooding songs of love in a threatening world, and the enduring fluency and zest of the implausibly 75-year-old piano giant Chick Corea.
Corea’s evening performance was simultaneously utterly familiar and vividly fresh. He played some much-loved originals from way back, and invited the kind of joshing audience-participation he’s leant on for years – a diversion that would be cheesy if he didn’t seem to be enjoying swapping ditties with the crowd just as much as flying through improvisations with such headlong rhythmic drive as to barely need a band. The pioneering trio music of his late keyboard hero Bill Evans was celebrated in an animated three-way conversation on the Evans vehicle Alice in Wonderland, and Thelonious Monk’s famously bumping chordal afterthoughts to tersely lyrical main themes surfaced in a buoyant account of that inimitable original’s Work. Corea’s world-jazz lyrical ingenuity glowed in the originals 500 Miles High and A Spanish Song – and if the closing segue of Joaquin Rodrigo’s Concierto de Aranjuez (delivered in an emotional tremor by Eddie Gomez with the bow) into Corea’s famously coquettish Spain, hardly came as a surprise, the standing ovation that rewarded it acknowledged both the star’s long life as a peerless virtuoso and influential composer, and the spirit of in-the-moment jazz he still relishes.
Earlier in the day, the 27-year-old Nashville singer-pianist Kandace Springs played an attractive if slightly overcrowded set mixing hard grooving and Broadway-ballad rumination, but her free-flowing swagger through Love Got in the Way and a storming version of I’m Only Human were memorable, as was an impulsive and borderline-defiant account of Lush Life.
The young guitar-led Swiss power trio Schnellertollermeier struck Springs’ mellow afterglow like electrocution. An airline cockup meant the loss of their hi-tech hardware, but despite this, they ripped into frenetically strummed avant-rock assaults, minimally pinging melodic loops over chattery rimshots, threateningly crackling electronics and even Stravinsky (in a piece quite properly named Massacre du Printemps) in a set of noisily virtuosic, spectacularly undaunted fury.
Despite a synth-heavy sound balance that overwhelmed the sensuality of her voice, singer-songwriter and bassist Meshell Ndegeocello sustained her reputation for powerfully personal work that’s accessible. She was delicate and lyrical on Leonard Cohen’s Susannah, baleful on Please Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood, folksy and sleepily scary on Crazy and Wild, and moodily insistent on Forget My Name and Good Day Bad from her 2014 album Comet, Come to Me.
