The World Jazz show trip of India 2024, hosted by Banyan Tree, swept into Mumbai for a night of really amusing jazz. It blew in like a cyclone– properly so, being curated by Alexander “Hurricane” Beets, a great exponent of the tenor saxophone.
Banyan Tree need to be praised for standing firm with their jazz undertaking; it is acquiring momentum in India with each succeeding World Jazz edition.
This is the 4th succeeding year that the World Jazz Festival is being kept in several cities in India. Allure, as in previous years has actually been of outstanding quality regardless of the absence of “huge names” from the world of jazz. Jazz music resembles a substantial ocean with dazzling star entertainers in it; Beets appears to have the propensity of uncovering some star skill and bringing them on the World Jazz trips to India.
The curation of the occasion was managed extremely well and showed to be a success even with those in the audience who were not always routine jazz listeners. Each band played simply a couple of numbers before another was presented; this range of circulation exercised well. Very few in the audience were all set to leave at the end of the show, a real ‘evidence of the pudding’.
The music of jazz is now ending up being rather a universal noise, financing and loaning from diverse musical sources in its journey.
The night offered jazz (music and artists) varying from Brazil to South Africa, Macao and Hong Kong with stopovers in New Orleans, New York and Amersfoort in the Netherlands. Jazz from the noise of a huge band with a horn area, the mild and delicate bossa nova from Brazil and requirements were all on screen with a generous dollop of the Blues included. It was an extremely pleasurable mix.
Numerous jazz masters were honored– from the saxophone huge John Coltrane, the South African jazz pianist and author Abdullah Ibrahim (previously referred to as Dollar Brand), Count Basie, Horace Silver, Duke Ellington and all the artists who have actually added to making jazz the supreme live efficiency art kind there is.
The Tom van der Zaal Quartet with the incredible Fleurine on vocals and guitar played a number of mild, delicate Bossa Nova tunes. One was a structure of Fleurine’s which she sang both in Portuguese and English bringing with a generous taste of this sensual rhythm from the land of Jobim. Tom van der Zaal was to return later on at night with his great playing on the tenor saxophone.
Playing a completely various design of piano, Siu Tin Chi from Macao, a certainly classically skilled pianist played 2 reflective numbers, both her own structures– “The Dance” and “Inner Child”.
John Coltrane was appropriately bestowed an excerpt from his magnum opus, “A Love Supreme” by Ben van der Dungen on saxophone with his quartet. Justice was done to Coltrane in this performance.
Alexander Beets led a horn area of 4 saxophones with a perky variation of Count Basie’s never-ceasing “Jumpin’ at the Woodside”, so valued by the audience which then required a repetition- and got it.
This show covered the history of jazz with music from the 1930s as much as today time. The music and its discussion was valued by the fair-sized audience.
We need to have much more such jazz shows in Mumbai.