Irish Times reviewers run the rule over Stefan Harris Quartet at Vicar Street, Dublin and Our 12th Christmas Show at the Vanguard Gallery in Cork
Stefon Harris Quartet
Vicar Street, Dublin
He concert at Vicar Street, featuring vibes and marimba player Stefon Harris with his quartet, was the final one in the ESB/Note Productions autumn jazz series. It brought their year's programme to a lively and occasionally memorable conclusion.
Apart from the leader, the quartet featured some high-calibre musicians in pianist Xavier Davis, who made such a good impression a few weeks ago with the Tom Harrell Quintet at the Improvised Music Company's Project Weekender, and bassist Tarus Mateen, a vital component in pianist Jason Moran's fine trio at the Guinness Cork Jazz Festival this year. Drummer Kim Thompson, playing only her third concert with the quartet, also revealed great skill, despite an inclination to dot every "i" and cross every "t".
In the band's favour, too, was the fact that this was a group which, though working from a basis in structure, seemed willing to explore avenues that presented themselves and let the music take it down them. In its shifts of textures, time, contrast and dynamics the music had a sense of discovery about it and a constant feeling of surprise, and if its discursiveness was sometimes at the expense of form, the results whenever it achieved a balance between all these elements were superb.
This was epitomised by Rebirth, a beautiful piece of music by Harris, part of a suite he wrote for his next Blue Note album. Lyrical, with the most savoury of changes and delicately nuanced playing, it was equalled only by Harris's affectingly valedictory Epilogue For Milt, written to mark the death of another great vibes player, Milt Jackson.
Harris, however, is his own man; there are no signs of any influence by Jackson, Gary Burton or any other previous notables on the instrument. He also seems to think compositionally, not alone as a soloist, but also, more importantly perhaps, in responding to the overall direction of the group's collective playing. With Harris and Davis tossing ideas back and forth, there was freshness and invention in what they did with Summertime, and in the way the venerable Bye Bye Blackbird surfaced in the second set to be brilliantly deconstructed. And, in both cases, with a sure sense of fun and how far the musicians could take it without losing the shape of the particular performance.
Ray Comiskey
Our 12th Christmas Show
Vangard Gallery, Cork
This year's Christmas show at the Vangard has contributions from 12 artists, many of whom have held solo exhibitions at the gallery in recent years. This collection of both emerging and established names has yielded a compelling interaction of artworks.
The most recent artist to have held a solo exhibition in the gallery is Colin Crotty, surely one of the country's most exciting emerging young artists. A painter's painter, he establishes complex, seductive surfaces, which suggest landscape settings. The energy of his surfaces finds an ally in Martin Finnin, whose ever-increasing vocabulary of abstract shapes and vibrant colour has a similar intensity and presence.
In contrast, Simon English's contribution has a stillness and tranquillity to it, as an uncomplicated relationship between land and sky is punctuated only by a discreet pale sun or glowing moon. In John Philip Murray's head studies we see a similar economy, with the facial features across the series progressively becoming diminished so that the identity of the figure is purposely denied to the viewer.
Michael Canning's Permanent Impermanent has a magical quality not unlike the artwork designs for the 4AD music label. His study of lace drapery in a pensive monochrome is full of mystery and drama. Jim Savage's charcoal drawing, Big Fern, has similar intricacies with an expressive line used to render organic form.
Two sculptors are included in the line-up. Sarah Flaherty's curious bronze forms are both seductive and threatening, typified by the union between weapon-like spikes and the decorative motif of cast nipples. The physical centrepiece is Michael Quannes's Buoyed, rendered in his preferred medium of limestone. Here, a male figure and an unidentifiable animal are unified in a striking hybridisation.
Runs until January 25th. It closes for Christmas tomorrow
Mark Ewart
