Jazz festivals that simply waylay celebrities on their continent-hopping rounds aren't too hard to come by. Jazz festivals with a unique character are something else. Bath's annual European contemporary jazz weekend, which concentrates on new music, genre-splicings and a mix of familiar and unfamiliar Europeans, is always one of the latter.
Saturday's opening concert was a typical booking, featuring an African hand-drummer alongside a Brazil-born, Senegal-raised, Swiss-resident pianist. The latter was Malcolm Braff, a powerful and sonorous player who echoed Duke Ellington and often Abdullah Ibrahim - but an Ibrahim of earlier years, when a rocking left hand delivered insistent train-rhythm rumbles, topped with joyous voice-like harmonies. A long unaccompanied meditation of sinewy phrasing over minimal chord movements at the close made a solo Braff concert seem a very attractive option.
Another gifted pianist, the Briton John Taylor, appeared in a chamber-improv gig with Rabih Abou-Khalil's Italian clarinettist Gabriele Mirabassi, the German trombonist Henning Berg, and a rather exasperating vibes-like computer called Tango. Mirabassi's solos were miniature gems of tonal variety and discreet note-bending; they displayed fleetness of thought and avoided repetition. But all three players in this rather muted set were at their most inventive on the two pieces that the talkative Tango sat out. The best chamber-improv of the day came later on, in a stunning acoustic duet setting the contemporary classical vocabularies of Swiss pianist Sylvie Courvoisier against the American violin phenomenon Mark Feldman.
Belfast-based Brian Irvine's band, with the formidable sharp-end saxophonist Paul Dunmall as principal soloist, provided the popular hit of the afternoon. Irvine is not dissimilar to Django Bates, though his irrepressible on-stage clowning involves a little more discipline; his work is a kind of animated musical experience, full of frenetic time-changes, fearsome collisions and instant recoveries, wild excesses and tender reveries. In a long set bristling with surprises, Irvine battered Fly Me to the Moon and That's Amore into barely recognisable pulps, had his string section play exquisite sliding harmonies against tolling-bell piano on the valedictory Song for Jamie, and conducted The Art of Wandering by leaping in the air, the band playing chords when he landed. At the end, Irvine took a picture of the audience waving and cheering to show his mum.
