Compelling constellation
Bravura, magisterial, playing from English saxophonist Iain Ballamy, a doyen of the Frome scene these days in Somerset and an active teacher in Cardiff, far from home encountered here by the Danube in a small jazz club in Budapest on this quartet recording.
Ballamy, 61, is originally from Guildford in Surrey and was in Loose Tubes, the seminal 1980s big band. The bass player here is also from England, of Italian/Russian lineage and famous classical musician parents – Misha Mullov-Abbado, whose lost river referring album Effra was issued earlier this year. As for the Hungarians who make up half the band the style of the piano player Daniel Szabo makes me think stylistically of Huw Warren a bit, a pianist with whom Ballamy has worked in the company of the great folk singer June Tabor whose recording Quercus issued by ECM more than a decade ago is essential.
Szabo’s own albums include Contribution featuring US tenor great Chris Potter issued by Hungarian label BMC in 2010.
Let’s choose not to stew over this tremendous roast beef of old England meets tasty goulash of a mash-up in terms of personnel too much. But no one makes a hash of it, always a possibility in a live setting, it’s worth pointing out. The No Blues on the Danube band is completed by another Hungarian, drummer, Marton Juhasz whose own album Metropolis came out this year. Danger and the tingle of live performance feed in to the frisson gleaned from extended and repeated listening it seems.
Szabo opens ‘Trane Psalm’ again like the Welsh wiz Warren might. Ballamy’s tone is breathy and communicative. (Trace a line back to George Coleman if wishing to sleuth a main tributary towards the source of the “Balloon Man” sound. Because Ballamy certainly at one point was influenced by the Seven Steps to Heaven Milesian.) And in his turn Ballamy’s pre-Food style is influential on a new wave of English jazzers, particularly on the fine tenorist Trish Clowes that is screamingly obvious in the Shrewsbury player’s early Basho period first flowerings.
Ballamy’s last record – he doesn’t make many nowadays, although that is gradually changing – was a must hear collaboration with the singer Ian Shaw and pianist Jamie Safir called What’s New? You get the same balladic resource Ballamy knows so much about on this Budapest record too particularly on the standout piece ‘Strawberries for Two’ where there are fleeting intimations of the melody of Jimmy Van Heusen’s ‘It Could Happen To You’ around the 1 minute 20 second mark. Ballamy had a piece called ‘Strawberries’ on a very hard to find album of Dave McKean’s called Luna.
There’s talk about another new album from Ballamy to come out on Babel. But this Péter Pallai produced live album which has fine sonics incidentally gets in there first. Fair play. Recorded at the Budapest Jazz Club in November last year it is comprised of Ballamy and Szabo pieces plus a version of Monk’s much beloved ”Round Midnight.’
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