GIO with Orphy Robinson Live, or — Good ‘Vibe’-rations?
It’s an old joke to say the success of an improvised free jazz gig can be gauged by how few people walk out before it finishes but Sunday afternoon’s concert (23/6/24) of The Glasgow Improvisers Orchestra with legendary vibraphonist, multi-instrumentalist and composer Orphy Robinson at Glasgow’s St. Lukes demonstrated that not only will a packed audience happily stay but have a blast of a time doing so. Seriously, I’ve heard many strange and weird noises at plenty of free jazz gigs over the years but whooping, cheering and whoo-ing tend not to be some of them, or if they are there they’re usually drowned out by the rasping scrape of all the furious chin-stroking going on.
Yet it was all cheering and whooping by this audience on Sunday and for good reason because this was an extraordinarily exhilarating, dynamic and playful performance. And “playful” is the operative word here as all the six pieces spread across the concert’s two sets were wonderful examples of the playful nature of sound, music and human interaction.
The two most impactful pieces were those based around the music of Robinson’s mentor, trumpeter Harry Beckett, with the rendition of Beckett’s piece ‘Many Pauses’ being particularly ecstatic whilst GIO’s Raymond MacDonald’s newly written piece, which incorporated samples of Beckett’s last performance in Scotland, possessed finely crafted layers of shifting and intertwining lines both live and recorded to remarkable effect.
Composer Ceylan Hay’s piece provided some gorgeous sonic textures, and talking of sonic textures I had no idea that the combination of vibraphone and Theremin would work so incredibly well together.
George Burt managed to steal the limelight as usual (how can the group’s most innocuous looking man playing the orchestra’s quietest instrument — an unamplified classic guitar — always upstage everybody else?) with a piece written on post-it notes handed out to the audience where the musical notation was nothing but quadrilateral polygons, multiple number 1’s, some arrows and the drawing of a happy looking stick-man. As I said — the word here was “playful”.
Robinson himself was, not surprisingly, excellent and the interplay between all the musicians was spot-on, although GIO have been playing together for just over twenty years now and are, quite frankly, one of the best improvising units around. Even so, I hadn’t heard them play with quite this level of energy before.
So with all that being said it’s a shame that BBC Scotland, in an act of cultural self-mutilation, still continues to neglect its home-grown jazz and classical musicians in favour of taps-aff gags and even more tedious football shows instead of championing and supporting an exemplary cultural community that’s on its own front door step.
Scotland may have lost the football on Sunday but this gig demonstrated that its jazz scene is a world-beating success. And that’s really worth celebrating.
