When Frank Zappa announced that jazz wasn't dead, it just smelled funny, it was more than just a gag. Good jazz is supposed to make you stop and sniff the air. It's supposed to have something about it you can't place, perhaps be a concoction of ingredients that aren't usually mixed together. The proof is being scattered all over London this week.
Packed houses have certainly been dispelling any last remnants of the regularly exhumed 'jazz is dead' theory. The London Jazz Festival, which runs until Sunday night, is staging 160-odd gigs in more than 30 venues around the city, backed up on the radio by cosponsor Radio 3.
Nobody who believes jazz is a weird Masonic activity enjoyed in pub back rooms by inscrutable blokes with beards could have kept the delusion going after the festival's opening blast last Friday. Up in Dalston, outside the New Vortex jazz club, 200 musicians aged from eight to eighty blew a massed-sax fanfare written by Andy Sheppard before fireworks erupted over the locality.
Down the road at the Barbican Centre, British piano legend Stan Tracey and that idiosyncratic improvising genius Wayne Shorter then set the bar for the week by playing what might well turn out to be one of the 2006 festival's most unforgettable gigs. Shorter's onstage mannerisms were as compelling as his music, and inseparable from them. Sometimes he'd play a single hooting note, then shuffle sideways a step and play it again, slightly changed - as if one special place on the stage was the proper home for the first sound but there had to be a different one for the next. His stunning drummer Brian Blade, bassist John Patittucci and pianist Danilo Perez, picked up every prompt, twisted and turned them, and threw them back at the boss. It was explosive evidence of a music rammed with life - and, yep, it smelled exhilaratingly funny, too.
It was music-making at the edge, and a couple of thousand people knew they were in on something special, even though hooks or familiar melodies were hardly touched on. Almost everyone in the audience stood and hollered for encores. The set was as fresh as the moment, but the materials and the approach go back a hundred years, to when jazz players first started hurling tempting musical morsels into improvisational stews. The results transformed the way the world hears music, since blues and jazz gave birth to rock'n'roll - and the rest is history. The London Jazz Festival celebrates just that.
Did you hear these gigs, or have you heard others in the festival that made a big impression on you? If you haven't caught up with this jazz extravaganza so far, you've got until Sunday. Check the programme here.
