I’ve heard Sarah Tandy live a number of times, the last time when the pianist was a member of Camilla George’s band at a gig in Camden at the Jazz Cafe in 2021. She’s very listenable and makes her mark even when the stage is crammed full of instruments and her role is more subsidiary. Artistically she grows, shifts and changes. So catching up you never know quite what to expect.
where Tandy once spent fruitful creative time in residence.
I had liked her earlier album Infection in the Sentence which came out a few years earlier. It’s more straightahead than this new one and had people like Binker Golding of Dem Ones renown on it. This new one from the 40-something is very different. It begins with a sort of disco jazz fusion direction and there are vocals and rap some of which work (‘Pressure’ a grime banger with Kweku Sackey, the Ghana born UK rapper known as K. O. G. and opener ‘My Motion’ with David Ijishakin who goes under the name of Akin Soul), some not as much (‘You Need to Heal’).
Soul singer Kyra Vidal’s vocal and harmonising on ‘Imagine’ is the jazziest of all these. Kyra had an EP out about 3 years ago called As Things Grow and is on jazztronica outfit Blue Lab Beats track ‘Rice and Peas.’
Later on tracks like ‘Unleash the Beast’ which has – there’s a hint in the title – ferocious sax plus some bravura piano soloing, it’s far more jazz in a kind of wild Hiromi like dash which is quite stimulating and certainly Tandy has chops to burn. She’s up there in that regard with Nikki Yeoh whose style is a little similar at times although Nikki is probably more Chick Corea and George Duke influenced. If you like Renato Paris you may also like what Tandy does.
A classically trained pianist, Tandy who hails from West London achieved great things by competing in the ultra competitive BBC Young Musician of the Year keyboard finals in 2002, her jazz journey has also included work with Jazz Jamaica. She also studied English literature at Cambridge university and is influenced by people like Robert Glasper – you can hear that most overtly in her comping on the ‘You Need to Heal’ track.
Her work as a sideman includes appearances on Camilla George’s Isang and The People Could Fly, as well as Cassie Kinoshi’s Seed album Driftglass that was Mercury nominated in 2019. The following year she received the Parliamentary Jazz Award for Best Instrumentalist. I also remember hearing her at Dalston spot Servant Jazz Quarters now known as SJQ playing in an orthodox trio situation she led and where she was in residence for quite a while.
Delicious Capricious is very different to what she was doing in those days.
The laidback ‘Fragments’ I think is the best track closely followed by ‘Wayward Flames’. The piano lines on the silky former are beautifully voiced & the chord progessions Glasperian deft and adroit. Contrastive bravura rough and ready trumpet on the latter coagulates that works well in context.
Overall Delicious Capricious is quite nu jazzy. But don’t hold that against it as it is far more heterodox and multi-faceted than just a case of hazy vamps and samey chord progressions that you often find in that mini sub genre. I’d go for the tracks that are instrumentals – the dazzling ‘Keep Dreaming’ is very more-ish – rather than the ones with vocals although these are OK with ‘My Motion’ easily the one to press repeat over that bit more.
