An angled elbow, a raised baton, and the 44-piece EFG London Jazz Festival Orchestra was off, gliding into Open Up Your Senses, a dreamy tune written and sung by rising US star Tyreek McDole. “Won't you open up your senses, eliminate pretenses,” crooned the Haitian American, 25, in a baritone so warm it seemed to ruffle your hair. It was a fittingly sumptuous start to the EFG London Jazz Festival's long established opening gala, in which a dazzling roster of soloists, the famous and about-to-be, took turns to celebrate that most universal of instruments: the human voice.
London's soul queen Natalie Williams delivered a cover of Stevie Wonder's Dancing to the Rhythm, a tune whose original gigantic orchestral backing, all slaloming horns and vertiginous strings, was ably replicated here. From the off, the arrangements of conductor Guy Barker — a national institution, longhaired in a sharp blue suit — cast a sort of radiant jazz haze over the likes of Marvin Gaye's classic What's Going On, charismatically sung by UK-based vocalist Vula Malinga, and Till There Was You, the show tune covered by the Beatles and here by young New Yorker Stella Cole, a throwback singer whose sepia-tinted charm just needed a few floating hearts and fluttering love birds.
One of the evening's big guns was Tanita Tikaram, the multi-million-selling British folk-pop chanteuse whose debut album Ancient Heart went gangbusters in 1988, and who has released sporadically (and less successfully) in the years since. A self-penned song, 2016's rhythmic if underwhelming Glass Love Train, had its edges polished by a horn section that included trumpeter Klara Devlin, a former BBC Young Jazz Musician of the Year nominee, as did Twist in My Sobriety, Tikaram's signature smash hit, which she later bounced on to croon in a voice as low and mellifluous as it ever was.
Bouncing on, too, was guest conductor Jack Murray, a 20-year-old Guildhall music and composition student recommended to Barker by his mentor Jeffrey Wilson. Lanky in black tie, Murray took the podium to assuredly direct the orchestra through his own arrangement of Gimme Dat, a groove-based tune written and sung by magnetic Nigerian Irish singer Caleb Kunle, a name to watch.
Three-time-Grammy winning American diva Dee Dee Bridgewater, a highlight, took the vibe up a notch, shimmying on in a silver sequined pant suit and silver cat eye glasses to holler and scat her way through the 1965 swing-bop tune Flying Saucer, which she'd reimagined back in 1999 with Japanese nu-jazz trio U.F.O. returning later in a draped black dress to perform a tribute medley to vibraphone legend Roy ‘Everybody Loves the Sunshine' Ayers, who passed away in March.
Homages to departed icons were a theme: Jacqui Dankworth, fresh from performing Sondheim Follies in Belfast, honoured her mother, the great British jazz vocalist Dame Cleo Laine, who died in July, with a trilogy that included the scat-tastic Ridin' High. Kunle remembered James Brown with rousing takes on I Feel Good and It's a Man's World (whose patriarchal riffings were fabulously quashed by Williams and Malinga's spirited interpretation of Chaka Khan's I'm Every Woman).
There was Barker's orchestral paean to six heroes of British jazz, two of them — Courtney Pine and Andy Shepherd — still blowing their own horns, four of them long gone: pianist Stan Tracey; John Dankworth, Laine's husband; and his fellow sax players, Joe Harriott and Tubby Hayes. While this was welcome acknowledgment of the UK jazz elders that paved the way for the current scene, omitting to include influential female jazz musicians (saxophonist Barbara Thompson, say?) felt like an oversight.
After a reminder from host Jumoke Fashola that each featured singer has their own headline Festival show, everyone piled onstage for the encore: a medley tribute to Stevie Wonder, 75 this year and very much alive and kicking.
“Ain't nothing but the city, living for the city,” they belted en masse, the astounding jazz voices singing, just for this evening, about London.
The EFG London Jazz Festival is on until November 23; efglondonjazzfestival.org.uk
