US drummer Jaimeo Brown is fascinated by how musical history can be the glue of a community’s life. An imaginative contemporary artist with wide horizons and a game-changing jazz approach, he has lately been exposing his ambitious studio work to the challenge of mixed-media live performance, dramatically unveiled by his Transcendence trio at Ronnie Scott’s this week.
As the house lights dimmed, a screen showed a silhouette dancing on a fog-shrouded railroad, accompanied by the hammer-rhythm chant of African American labourers from an early field-recording. Brown’s Transendence trio – with synth player and guitarist Chris Sholar and alto saxophonist Jaleel Shaw – steathily arrived, and the drummer launched a thudding hip-hop groove under Shaw’s clipped and wailing sax motifs. African images swirled behind them – fragile boats on wide rivers, processions of elephants, figures dancing and working and sleeping – as Shaw’s electronics set his alto harmonising with itself. The voice of Martin Luther King, railing against black America’s poverty, thundered across the soundscape, followed in a step-change of context and pitch by the work-chant of Japanese women, and Shaw began playing warm, unplugged jazz phrasing and quiet pad-flapping sounds.
The versatile Sholar veered into a classic Chicago blues guitar hook amid the sound of violent storms, and anthemic ensemble ascents swelled to orchestral force.
Readers of these descriptions might sniff cultural tourism, but this felt the diametric opposite: a unique contemporary jazz venture fuelled by palpably passionate commitment to match its creators’ imagination and skill.
- At Ronnie Scott’s, London, on 12 January. Box office: 020-7439 0747
