The Trinidadian steel pan doesn’t feature much in jazz history, but London’s Mark Cherrie has created a space for the instrument to shine. Taught to play by his father, Cherrie has combined his Caribbean heritage with a highly successful career as a keyboard player and film and TV composer. A previous album with an accomplished quartet, 2018’s Joining the Dots, showcased the pan on a variety of jazz and pop standards, Herbie Hancock and Miles Davis rubbing shoulders with Nirvana and Jimi Hendrix.
By contrast, all but one cut on Any Anxious Colour is self-penned, the exception being a supercharged version of The Carnival Is Over, unrecognisable from the Seekers’ dreary original. Other numbers find Trinidad’s carnival tradition similarly alive: Ole Mas is a funky workout, complete with whistles, on which Cherrie’s pan spars with John Donaldson’s piano. In different mood come Moonbeams and Butterflies and Somewhere a Star – slow, elegant ballads featuring singer Chantelle Duncan, where the pan’s dreamier qualities are in play. It is, however, a percussive creature at heart, comfortable rocking out on the title track or trading blows with Dave O’Higgins’s muscular tenor sax on the hard bop of Meet You at the Finish Line.
