Ray Comiskey reviews L'Orchestre de Contrabasses/Catapult Dance Company at Meeting House Square in Dublin
L'Orchestre de Contrabasses/Catapult Dance Company
Meeting House Square
The late poet and sometime Daily Telegraph jazz critic, Philip Larkin, loathed bass soli with a passion comparable to his hatred of John Coltrane ("his death", he wrote in 1967, "leaves in jazz a vast, a blessed, silence").
Quite what the silver-tongued curmudgeon would make of six double basses on stage simultaneously, as the ESB Dublin Jazz Festival continued with a concert in Meeting House Square, is hardly open to doubt.
And the fact that this Parisian sextet received a standing ovation at the end would probably have induced in this jazz Luddite another Telegraph diatribe and what the French call une crise d'apoplexie.
To be honest, however - and notwithstanding the sextet's reception at the concert's conclusion - this was a somewhat underwhelming event.
The players - Christiane Gentet, Xavier Lugue, Olivier Moret, Etienne Roumanet, Yves Torchinsky and Jean Phillippe Viret - are all highly capable, admirably flexible and accomplished musicians, and they spread their musical interests over everything from jazz, to echoes of folk, classical and dance; one piece brilliantly and wittily captured an evocation of seashore sounds.
The writing is clever; rhythmic, contrapuntal and harmonic devices are deployed with a sense of contrast and variety, even drama on occasion. And the programme was leavened with visual and aural humour much appreciated by the audience. Yet while acknowledging that it is done well, to these ears it seemed essentially a challenge met simply because it was there.
The musical results emerged as rather bloodless and self-regarding and the humour more fey than zestful.
The admirable skill and effort to make as much of the instruments potential as possible didn't compensate for this; it takes someone like Dave Holland to show what the bass can do in the hands of a master. So, suitably diluted and taken with a large dose of salt, maybe Larkin did have a small point after all.
The Catapult Dance Company - Rebecca Walter, Katherine O'Malley and Julie Lockett - opened the concert with performances based on recordings by the great bop pianist, Bud Powell. But the pieces chosen, which included Tempus Fugit, Hallucinations and Celia, contained two of Powell's almost impossibly faster performances.
Given the unforgiving intensity of Powell's playing and its sheer rhythmic drive, it was difficult to see any connection between the dancing and the music. Possibly, the intention was to echo the angularities and jagged surprises Powell also filled his finest music with, but the response seemed conceptually under-nourished and in need of further exploration in the rehearsal studio.
