Laura Jurd always seems too immersed in the euphoria of music-making to be much tempted by irony, so the fact that her new band Dinosaur is the opposite of extinct maybe didn’t occur to her. At Kings Place, the cheerfully diffident but implacably focused 25-year-old trumpeter and composer, along with her superb young quartet, invoked the spirit of their debut album’s title – Together, As One – and the confident contemporary inventiveness of its journey across the jazz, folk and world music of the past four decades.
The gig followed the album’s tracklist, with one detour into the lyrically gliding Happy Sad Song, from Jurd’s startling 2012 debut, Landing Ground. The spacey keyboard electronics that contrast so tellingly with the leader’s clean, unbugged trumpet immediately featured on Awakening, as pianist Elliot Galvin’s liquid Fender Rhodes swooped against Conor Chaplin’s high-pitched bass guitar vamp, drummer Corrie Dick’s quietly clapping pulse, and then Jurd’s terse yet tonally gleaming short phrases. Zigzags between a folk-dance frolic, brittle short-note edginess and languidly porous melody on Robin displayed this band’s effortless idiom-swapping with commendable coherence, and on the lamenting Living, Breathing, Jurd’s silvery high-register sound floated imperturbably over a swelling, Bitches Brew-like funk groove from Galvin’s keys.
Following the tender theme of Happy Sad Song, Jurd began stretching her characteristically short, sharp-accented figures into poised long lines over a restless rhythmic flux. Extinct, a Dinosaur standout, set her yelping softly over Dick’s remorseless backbeat and triggered a wonderful break of squelching low chords and jagged ascents from Galvin, before a startling percussion solo of rubbed abstract sounds rising to booming kick-drum hits, hard tom-tom rattles and melodic cymbal-edge tones. Jurd’s Interlude, a slowly blossoming meditation with Dinosaur’s signature rhythm-section whimsy coming and going beneath it, closed a memorable gig – but one that also suggested this fine band has plenty more surprises in store.
- At the National Centre for Early Music, York, on 11 November. Box office: 01904 658 338. Then touring until March.
