The “Made in the UK” series continued to captivate on Monday
night with the American debut of Dinosaur, led by trumpeter and composer
Laura Jurd. The band — which includes the members of the Elliot
Galvin Trio — makes spacey jazz that sounds wonderfully imaginative and
restless, yet always feels in control. The quartet can play things delicate and
ruminative, or bold and on full blast.
In fact, Jurd’s music seemed to
allow keyboardist Elliot Galvin, electric bassist Conor
Chaplin, and drummer Corrie Dick to get the lead out in a way the music didn’t
just the night before. It’s truly incredible the difference one person can
make. The three musicians each simply seemed less inhibited and more at ease.
This all makes sense, when you consider that the performances at the XRIJF mark
the first concerts in the US for all four musicians on stage.
Dinosaur bookended its first set of
the evening the same way it does on its album “Together, As One.” The band began with “Awakening,” which indeed, sounded like a busy city just
waking up to the day as the sunshine starts to stream. Chaplin set up the
groove with a constant, killer bass ostinato, while Dick’s expressive painting
with percussion kept up the mid-tempo momentum. With Galvin laying down the
harmonic context, Jurd was a paragon of cool, her
regal trumpet sound serving both as a serenade and a clarion call to life. The
set came to a close with “Interlude,” a calming — if somewhat anticlimactic — tune
loaded with ethereality.
The next show I caught could not have been more different
than that of Dinosaur, but it was no less enjoyable. Nashville-based singer-songwriter Lera Lynn has a voice to get lost in.
With appealing earnestness, it somehow sounds like moonlight — bright yet ever
so dusky. Flanked by guitarists at Anthology, Lynn played a set of NPR-friendly
folk and country songs that managed to be both hopeful and forlorn, with just
the right amount of twang.
Some of the concert’s best moments were the darkest — including
the haunting “My Least
Favorite Life,” from the soundtrack for HBO’s hit series “True Detective.”
Elsewhere, an undeniably catchy and forbidding guitar riff dominated the
ominous “What You Done,” which sounded like it was straight out of a Western. That said, my favorite
song of the evening happened to be the last one, when Lynn turned Johnny Cash’s
“Ring of Fire” into a minor-key ballad, reframing the lyrics as a cautionary
tale. The devil-may-care attitude of the original, with its jaunty, up-tempo
character, was gone. The newer, more tragic version in its place sounded fresh,
and somehow more appropriately paired with the words.
Tuesday night, I’m looking forward to the return of trumpeter
Mario Rom and his trio Interzone to the festival,
at The Little Theatre, as well as a performance by Ole Mathisen
at Lutheran Church of the Reformation.
This article appears in Jun 21-27, 2017.
