If the opulent playing of Venezuelan pianist Leo Blanco justified the description “orchestral” when he was last in the UK, his orchestra has just got bigger.
Blanco, who couples jazz and classical piano sophistication with detailed research into the African threads in Latin-American music, played solos of focused tumult – in which themes and ostinatos appear and vanish, rhythmic hooks prod and fade, contrapuntal lines wrestle. He’s working now on a big-ensemble project at his base in Boston, and multiple voices seem more audible in his piano playing.
Blanco performed solo piano and some impromptu duos with vocalist Christine Tobin, an original who has similar urges to bring unusual jazz material to the stage.
Blanco’s first four pieces confirmed his diverse power. There was the multilinear Roots and Effect with its urgent, love-song themes and chordal ferment and a churning Peruvian dance. The jazzier, almost Chick Corea-like Vals No 5 followed, then a swerving rhythmic stomp over a steady left-hand rumble that wound up in a South African townships groove.
Christine Tobin joined him (the pair had met only four hours earlier) on WB Yeats’s The Song of Wandering Aengus, the singer giving the poem a melody of typically lateral lyricism peppered with spookily hooting long tones and a burst of nimble scat. She then delivered the standard I Didn’t Know What Time It Was with clarity and cool nuances over Blanco’s walking groove.
In the second half, the pianist evoked a brittle, bouzouki-like sound from the plucked strings that became a Latin-jazz whirl, and played the Hermeto Pascoal theme Bebê with a sober dignity that somehow highlighted its vivacity all the more.
Somebody should give Leo Blanco a big cross-genre band and a festival night to himself, to show all sides of his multifaceted talents.
