Kyle Eastwood Live Review @ Ronnie Scotts (London) - 22 Jul 2009

Kyle Eastwood

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Live Review

I've seen the house band, the Ronnie Scott Allstars, a few times this summer and again they are in great form, playing a left-field set, fresh and cool and worthy of the ticket price itself. The Nancy Wilson and Cannonball Adderley torch song The Masquerade Is Over is a stand-out for me, Natalie Williams' vocal is with-it, studied and refined, setting an expectant scene for Kyle Eastwood. He is a renowned movie (most recently Gran Torino) soundtrack composer but now he returns here to the most famous jazz club in the world to play us his new album Metropolitain, recorded in a back street Paris studio, co-produced by Erin Davis, son of the maestro, Miles Davis.

Kyle's band tonight is Graeme Blevins (tenor and soprano saxes), Martyn Kaine (drums), Andrew McCormack (piano and keyboards), Graham Flowers ("Bird" trumpet), and Kyle himself on electric and acoustic (double) bass guitar.

On a gorgeous West-End London, evening we rub shoulders with the usual smattering of curious jazz tourists and we nod to the cognoscenti, out in force - they know there's something afoot tonight. There's an eager hush in this legendary room as the new album's title track Metropolitain reveals itself, starting from (and returning to) a circular (á la Tubular Bells) piano motif of free-flowing edgy urban jazz, ambient in feel but with massive, funky cohones. A substantially new form of cross-over hybrid music rather than the "nu-jazz" label that's been lazily thrown at it, there's space in the composition, and tension in the super-energised interaction of the powerful, elegant playing.

Samba de Paris is a latin-hued, sepia-tinted, corners-creased postcard from the leafy boulevards and the bohemian alleys of Paris (the spiritual home of this music), a latin-quarter revelation for those with smarts enough to get hip - it's close cousin, Rue de Perdue, might be a doomed Autumn love affair imagined through scrunched-up eyes, gazing at the low-setting sun as the withered leaves drop from the Champs Elysees trees.

Marrakesh overtures with double-bass played with a bow and with piano strings plucked, a disturbing soundscape that develops, delicate and blissed-out, into an evocation of eternal, shimmering Moroccan days - a tantalising glimpse of places unknown but, at this instant, spookily familiar, a moment you somehow knew would come one day, that you've been waiting for. It's an other-worldly, spellbinding, avant-garde wonder - so roll over Stockhausen, and tell Jack Bruce the news.

The evening and the musique, each second a quiet pleasure, slowly unfold a vista without limits, frontiers or constraints where Kyle doesn't allow his mastery of the bass guitar as an articulate lead instrument, or his leadership of the band, to overpower the team - exemplary individual and ensemble playing throughout is tight and seamless, pace doesn't falter. This freedom and these chains, this thrilling, responsible free-flying improv, sees these guys never losing the plot, knowing where they started from, where they are (kind of), and where they're going to finish.

Horizons just keep stretching, with how-low-can-go deep thixatropic bass straight from skanky Jamaican dub platters; a funky Fela Kuti threatening edginess in the weirdest freakiest hot steamy, blood and guts and sex and speed communiqué, a movie begging to be written - the script, the screen treatment, the locale, are all already here. Trading instrumental licks, an extended version of Bob Haggart's 1938 Big Noise from Winnetka is an abandoned, join-in hoot (you're whistling that riff, admit it!), Straight No Chaser, Thelonius Monk's 1951 Blue Note classic and his most covered track, is performed true to the DNA of the original manifesto, whilst grooving on the repeated play of Monk's single idea, each stanza with its own treatment and ending.

So - don't give me that privileged kid bullshit (have you worked out yet who Kyle's pop is?) - this guy has a special talent. All night (I lose count) I hear myself saying "wow!"(quietly of course, this is Ronnie Scott's after all) as each number finishes. Discordant blue-note has predominated, striking a downbeat minor chord connection somewhere deep inside us - having unblinkingly declared the post-bebop Birth of Cool in 1950, Brother Miles is surely sagely pleased that his baby is growing up so well in the care of guys like Kyle Eastwood.

Peter Innes