The third annual Love Supreme festival pulled one of its biggest crowds, and a collective good humour – kindled by the music, the scenery and the sun – audibly warmed hearts and imaginations on stage. Two singers who could hardly have been more different – Neneh Cherry and Dianne Reeves – performed as if their lives depended on it, and the Bad Plus with saxophonist Joshua Redman, Bill Laurance’s Project headed by the Snarky Puppy pianist and locals including Partisans and Get the Blessing often sounded as if they were close to their outer reaches. Love Supreme mixes edgy jazz with soul and R&B (Larry Graham and Chaka Khan were also among the day’s 20-plus attractions), and the evidence that this shrewd mix works was impossible to miss.
Neneh Cherry and the drums-keys duo RocketNumberNine played thundering avant-dance music from Cherry’s new album, Blank Project. She whirled through impassioned soul, rap and abstract improv with relish, in a thrillingly fierce set that was often lightened by Cherry’s playfulness, and powerfully influenced by the insights of her family friend and mentor Ornette Coleman.
Joshua Redman and the Bad Plus performed their current repertoire with wit, patient wistfulness and muscular free swing. Pianist Elliott Galvin’s trio mixed fast-moving postbop and whims like a slowly stalking, xylophone-themed Mack the Knife. A delighted-looking Dianne Reeves repelled the evening chill with a brew of salsa, ska and African grooves and a majestic standard, One for My Baby. Her scat flights were as emphatic as hammer blows yet as fluid as the sax solo she constantly mimicked with her hands. The pianist-composer Jason Moran’s 21st century Fats Waller reinvention – which he played wearing a giant Waller head – felt like a less integrated fusion of stride-piano swing and contemporary street-grooves than on his fine album, All Rise, but it represented Love Supreme’s perspective on what jazz for contemporary listeners can be.
• Love Supreme is until 5 July at Glynde, East Sussex. Box office: 0844 888 9991.
