EFG London Jazz Festival 2024 round-up review - from Korean noise to Carnatic soul

November can be a month to hunker down for the onset of winter and its weather, and where better to do that than in one of the myriad venues across the capital hosting the annual London Jazz Festival and its hundreds of concerts, from cosy clubs like Ronnie Scott’s and Pizza Express Dean Street to the big stages of the Barbican and South Bank.

This review focuses on a trio of outliers from across the jazz cosmos – new band No Noise from Korea; the return of the propulsive, cinematic, muscular and sinuous grooves of Neil Cowley Trio, with a new album, Entity, after seven years away, and reviving the Noughties sound of new British jazz in the very different world of the Twenties; and a spiritual set of Carnatic singing and gentle, harp-and-piano-inflected world jazz from Indian-American singer and multi-disciplinarian Ganavya, selling out the Union Chapel on the festival’s final Saturday.

Her LJF showcase follows the release of her latest album, Daughter of a Temple, recorded back in 2022 and inspired by and infusing Alice Coltrane with Indian classical forms, and featuring high-flyers of the international jazz scene – US bassist Esperanza Spalding, pianist-composer Vijay Iyer, and the UK’s sax and shakahachi player Shabaka Hutchings among them.

Ganavya (the name means ‘one who was born to spread music’) was born in Queens, New York, and grew up in Tamil Nadu, raised in the Hindu tradition of harikatha, a storytelling blend of music and poetry, before returning to the US and settling in Florida. She made an arresting concert appearance last year, with British soul collective Sault, and subsequently appeared on Later, and played two nights at St Pancras Old Church this spring.

Her set on a windswept, rain-flecked early winter’s night to a sold-out Union Chapel was something of a family affair – halfway through she inveighled her mother, and then her father, to join her to sing on stage, her father with one of his own poems and about Shiva set to a music they had composed and arranged only that day, flying from Dublin to London, and with her mother, a song they’d sing together in Tamil Nadu, on the Southern Indian pilgrimage trail.

Her remarkable vocals ranged from a whisper to a wind-soaring, space-filling projection of pure sound

To open, she performed an A R Rahman song, and told us at length of how she failed to attend a session he’d requested her to join. Her trio comprised harp, piano and double bass, and her remarkable vocals ranged from a whisper to a wind-soaring, space-filling projection of pure sound – a soul sound, an underground river of life running through it – and one that required her step some way from the mic.

And yet she admitted toward the end of the set that she felt she was lacking ‘a couple of registers’ in her voice. Perhaps that feeling of lack was behind the length of her anecdotal asides, which sometimes felt like it grounded the much-anticipated take-off that her voice and music promise.

The previous Tuesday, on a sub-zero night in Hackney and a sold-out, dry-ice choked EartH, LJF audiences applauded the return of the Neil Cowley Trio – the pianist reuniting with extravagantly bearded bassist Rex Horan, drummer Evan Jenkins and leaving behind his neoclassical solo adventures for the propulsive flare and angular cinematic grooves for which the NCT became so popular.

Along with the trio was a busy and brilliant lighting technician, invisible but feeling like a fourth member, with the lighting changing and evolving the mood through each number like it was a drama. While the set featured plenty of music from their comeback album, this summer’s Entity, it was a career retrospective too, reaching back to 2006’s inaugural album Displaced.

They opened with “Marble”, Cowley’s solo piano flowing and changing channels before settling in to a riff that the bass and drums move into and start changing the internal space. The lighting switches from cool blues to hot orange for “Fable” from 2012’s Face of Mount Molehill, Horan’s bass taking up the lead riff over Cowley’s punctuating piano, while “Sparkling” has a Cubist kind of riff cutting through the trio’s propulsive sound, and the new album’s title track a flowing, lyrical, liquid piano sound, with just a touch on the drums and a bass that moves in the shadows.

A freshness and power resides in these stars of Noughties British jazz resurfacing in the weird-as-fuck Twenties

That NCT can sell out a sizeable venue like EartH after seven years away is no mean feat – and a testament, perhaps to the freshness and power that still resides in these stars of Noughties British jazz resurfacing in the weird-as-fuck Twenties.

On the festival’s opening weekend, amid the big opening-night shows The Barbican and Festival Hall, new Korean band No Noise took to the stage of a full house at the Purcell Room. Not bad for a band that has not recorded or released a note of music. The six-piece, coming as the final concert of another excellent festival, K-Music, as well as LJF’s opening weekend, are led by guitarist and multi-instrumentalist Lee Il-woo, the visionary behind brutalist post-rock sensations Jambinai, and Sung Si-Young, on piri (bamboo flute) and taepyeongso (double-reed flute). Hwang Min-Wang delivered some crushing percussive drum patterns, while Kim Ji-hyun played the extraordinary saenghwang, a mouth organ that resembles a pipe organ stuffed into a saxophone, Yoon Ji Hyun was on gayageum, a zither-like instrument, and Lee Na-Rae on daegeum (large bamboo flute).

Together, over eight pieces across a 75-minute set, including "God Bless You", a tender tribute to one of the band members who is being treated for cancer, the Korean ensemble ranges from eerie quietude, the percussive, subterranean notes of the gayageum, the glacial sounds of the saenghwang – a glass harmonica is perhaps the closest western equivalent – and the piri giving way to full-bore sonic attack of massed taepyeongso, a kind of shawm that sounds eerily similar to the peeling, penetrative massed sound of Morocco’s Jajouka. With grunge-like musical architecture, from very quiet to incredibly loud in the blink of an eye, this was extraordinary communal music making, working from charts and improvising their ways through to meet at the end of each piece.

No Noise is good news, and if they do ever make it into a recording studio, I’ll be in line to hear the results.

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