REVIEWS

A selection of reviews by Irish Timescritics

Buffalo Collision

Sugar Club, Dublin

On paper, this was a mouth-watering gig, thanks to Buffalo Collision’s unusual and formidable line-up. Pianist Ethan Iverson is one of the most exciting players in jazz, building layer upon layer of texture with a fluidity and intelligence that can light up a venue. Dave King is one of the best live drummers in music, his tight technique and razor-sharp chops brewing a subtle storm behind the kit that rolls out into the crowd like thunder. Saxophonist Tim Berne is regarded as one of the finest improvisers to come out of the downtown New York scene. Cellist Hank Roberts is more than the sum of his parts, playing in a frenetic, furious style that flashes elements of classical, rock and roots in blistering succession.

As a unit, Buffalo Collision are less than seamless. The dynamic between King and Iverson appears to be the strongest beam in the band; unsurprising, given that their day job is playing together in the superlative Bad Plus. Berne and Roberts are more given to free exploration, and it’s a combination that frequently sets sparks flying.

The tight compositions on Bad Plus’s records typically set fairly strict musical boundaries, with the band roaming freely within them. Berne and Roberts are much more autonomous in their approach, though, and this translates into terrific, intelligent live playing, which builds gradual dynamics to thrilling conclusions.

There is an inherently dark, disconcerting aspect to Buffalo Collision. The music, while not sombre, is so tense that it threatens to make the audience break out in a sweat, particularly when Roberts is ratcheting up the apprehension with every pluck of the bow or swooping note.

Berne seems content to circle songs before carving out a niche and cracking open the music’s craggy centre. It is King, though, who rules this shadowland, whether keeping time with single notes as subtle as a heartbeat, building up furious solos with his tight style, stabbing out at the kit with well-placed percussive punches, or yelling and leaping from his stool to beat another bar from his toms. King drove this show with terrific percussive propulsion, while reeling the tracks in when they threatened to stray into choppy, chaotic waters.

Buffalo Collision don't have the accessibility of Bad Plus or the intimidating air of much modern free jazz. This is intriguing, intelligent and, perhaps most importantly, passionate music that pushes its boundaries and makes no compromises. LAURENCE MACKIN

Judy Collins

Whelan’s, Dublin

Her voice betrays scant traces of her seven decades, and as the night wore on, it was as if it stripped layers of age from every punter in the audience. Judy Collins met with a thunderous reception for her first Irish appearance in years, and she responded with a performance drenched in good humour, wisdom, old-fashioned courtesy and no small amount of political passion. The woman who inspired Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young’s Suite: Judy Blue Eyes still possesses that steely gaze which captivates anyone in her eyeline.

It’s fitting that Collins’s return coincides with a new political era in her home country, and the moment isn’t lost on her. Her lifelong commitment to social justice issues sits easily – and lightly – with her folk repertoire, but there’s no doubting the singer’s relief at finding herself governed by someone who might share her own political perspective.

She opened with a loose-fitting rendition of Joni Mitchell’s Both Sides Now and then ricocheted headlong through a set-list that swung from Harry Chapin’s Cat’s in the Cradle (“Bet he’s in heaven now, dreaming up a rhyme for indictment!”) to Lark in the Morning, to The Kerry Dances and My Funny Valentine.

Collins undoubtedly shored up her background in Irish folk song (who would have thought Whelan’s could vibrate to an a capella rendition of The Gypsy Rover?), but the sheer breadth of her intellect and depth of interpretation, not to mention her crystalline voice, were more than enough to compensate for her Irish romanticism.

Nothing could have prepared her rapt audience for the sheer glistening directness of Collins’s voice. Initially a touch croaky in the upper registers, it soared skywards once she’d warmed up. She chattily ambled her way through stories of landmine desecration (Do You Dream of Peace?), then moved on to a rattling reading of City of New Orleans and a sublime version of Steven Sondheim’s Send in the Clowns.

Collins's music is meditative, cerebral and breathtakingly warm-hearted. She closed with Amazing Grace, a perfect meditation on how our world can change for the better – yes it can. SIOBHÁN LONG

Redmond O’Toole (guitar)

NCH, Dublin

People have long worked at making standard instruments better and sometimes bigger. Bösendorfer and Petrof added extra low notes to their pianos. In Germany, Klavins turned the instrument through 90 degrees for a 12-foot high piano with the player perched on a balcony like an organist (a 13-foot piano has since been mooted). And most of the instruments of the orchestra are continuously, if less obviously, being developed.

Redmond O’Toole, who here gave this year’s Rising Star recital, plays an eight-stringed guitar, held vertically like a cello and placed (via a spike) on a special resonating chamber.

In the main auditorium of the National Concert Hall, it still needed to be amplified (the extra resonance is more a matter of colour than volume), and O’Toole has only one piece in his repertoire that was specially composed for the instrument, an Homage to Leo Brouwer, by his friend and fellow guitarist, Brian Bolger.

By the standards of the other Bolger pieces I’ve heard, the Homage is a mild-mannered work, genuflecting to the strumming and rippling capabilities of the guitar, with a nod to minimalism and occasional gestures of explosive violence. Yet his was in many ways the most striking work of the evening, exploring the full richness of the eight-note chords that are beyond the reach of the conventional guitar, and highlighting the extra low reach of O’Toole’s unusual instrument.

As in most guitar recitals, arrangements abounded. Sonatas by Scarlatti (K380) and Haydn (Hob XVI: 43) rather fell between stools, losing somewhat from the keyboard originals without gaining enough in compensation from the world of the guitar.

The evening’s unevennesses of line and moments of patchiness – as if the sound was being subjected to fading from an unfelt wind – were at their most pronounced in these works. A Prelude, Fugue and Allegro by Bach, with the lute as part of the original conception, fared better, with O’Toole showing a particularly persuasive dreaminess in the Prelude.

Original guitar works are arrangements, too, in the context of O'Toole's instrument. He placed the most successful of these at the end of each half: Rodrigo's atmospheric Invocación y danza (which he introduced with the skills of a true raconteur), and Walton's Five Bagatelles, which he presented convincingly as miniatures of real, meaty substance. MICHAEL DERVAN