Written by Glasgow’s internationally regarded winter festival of folk and roots music, Celtic Connections is getting a significant injection of jazz this year.
Pianists Tigran Hamasyan, Zoe Rahman, Kit Downes and Kit Downes, Snarky Puppy offshoot Bokante, and saxophonist Paul Towndrow are all among the jazz musicians scheduled to appear at the festival, which runs from Thursday 17th January to Sunday 3rd February.
Previous years have seen jazz musicians including saxophonist Tommy Smith, pianist Leo Blanco and drummer Alyn Cosker giving concerts during the festival but this year is the most sustained presence that jazz has had since Celtic Connections was founded in 1994.
Tigran Hamasyan brings a special guest, Norwegian trumpeter Arve Henriksen, to Glasgow Royal Concert Hall on Sunday 27th January. Zoe Rahman’s trio will be working with leading young Scottish folk group Snuffbox ahead of a collaborative concert at the same venue on Friday 1st February. Kit Downes continues his partnership with Lau fiddler Aidan O’Rourke at the Tron Theatre on Saturday 19th January.
Bokante, the band led by Snarky Puppy bassist Michael League and comprising musicians from four continents, plays Queen Margaret Union on Saturday 2nd February and Paul Towndrow presents his epic Deepening the River, featuring a jazz big band augmented by Scottish traditional musicians and Indian percussion, at Glasgow Royal Concert Hall on Friday 18th January.
A new collaboration between Dutch and Scottish musician will also be giving its first public performance during the festival. LoLanders, which is co-led by Dutch violist Oene van Geel and Scottish multi-instrumentalist Fraser Fifield, is the latest instalment of the Going Dutch project, which is continuing to promote jazz musicians from the Netherlands across the UK and Ireland throughout 2019. Dutch bass guitar-percussion team Mark Haanstra and Udo Demandt, Scottish guitarist Graeme Stephen and Glasgow-based tablas master Hardeep Deerhe complete a line-up that will go on to appear in Amsterdam, Sheffield, Bath, Newcastle and other venues still be arranged later this year. Their concert at Glasgow Royal Concert Hall on Tuesday, 22nd January will be opened by pianist and BBC Young Jazz Musician 2018 finalist Fergus McCreadie’s trio.
Celtic Connections also features drummer Tom Bancroft’s new group, In Common (City Halls, 26th January) and supports a programme at Glasgow’s recently opened jazz club, the Blue Arrow, which includes Belgian trumpeter Jean-Paul Estiévenart’s trio, Young Scottish Jazz Musician of the Year 2017, bassist David Bowden’s group Mezcla, and a jazz re-imagining of Radiohead’s music, Like a Cat Tied to a Stick.
For more info/TIX: Glasgow Life
Writer: Rob Adams
Photo credits: Artur Kraft, courtesy of Glasgow Life – and (c) info: all rights go to original recording artist/owner/photographer(s).
Last modified: January 17, 2019
