REVIEW: Alyn Shipton, The Times - Dec. 19, 2011
Photos: Ben Amure
The expat New Orleans trumpeter turns freezing London into a sizzling club in the heart of the French Quarter
They take Christmas seriously in New Orleans, and for a couple of hours of joyous celebratory music and poetry, the trumpeter Abram Wilson brought the seasonal sounds and sentiments of his home town to his adopted city of London. He was helped by his fellow New Orleanean, the drummer Jason Marsalis, younger brother of Wynton and Branford, whose deft hands conjured up the rhythmic complexity of the Big Easy with fluency and grace.
Stylistically, Wilson’s quartet takes mid-1950s Miles Davis as its starting point. The leader shares Davis’s clean trumpet tone, economical sense of melody and penchant for occasional dramatic upper register forays. The band’s young pianist from Birmingham, Reuben James, rolls together aspects of the playing of Red Garland and Wynton Kelly, but his wry showmanship perhaps owes most to Horace Silver. A telling right-hand phrase is marked for the audience by a raised arm, a half smile or a happy rocking to and fro on the piano stool.
But what took the band firmly into New Orleans territory — and away from the Davis influence — was Marsalis. His playing was a gumbo of complex metres, with a lengthy solo built over a recurring cowbell phrase showing how a plethora of variations could be fashioned round it.
Each piece was an original Wilson composition, inspired by a short poem about aspects of a family Christmas, from the anticipation of presents to lavish Creole food. Some lyrics became songs for the charismatic Jamaican vocalist Myrna Hague. She really came into her own on the encore, a Crescent City re-working of Winter Wonderland, where her singing was joined by the amiable voice of Wilson himself. At its best, the quartet played as one man, Alex Davis’s bass locking onto Marsalis’s bass drum and James’s left hand to create a rollicking platform for Wilson’s fieriest solos.
In a piece called Soul Food they left freezing London far behind. We were transported to a sizzling club in the heart of the French Quarter, swaying to the music and ready for the étouffée and jambalaya of a seasonal feast.
