Sarah Tandy at Ronnie Scott’s
All Sarah Tandy has to do to make me happy is sit down at a good piano and play a standard ballad. But she’s an ambitious bandleader and composer, and it was those aspects of her musical journey that were explored at Ronnie Scott’s last night. As she did when her debut album, Infection in the Sentence, came out seven years ago, she brought her quintet to the Frith Street temple to showcase some of the material from its successor, to be released later this year.
Now with Poppy Daniels on trumpet, Binker Golding on tenor saxophone, Jihad Darwish on bass and Jamie Murray on drums, the band launched the first set with “Unleash the Beast”, whose introduction quickly gave way to a raging up-tempo blast over what sounded like a modern variation on the structure of Miles Davis’s “Milestones”. Tandy’s opening solo set the tone, chorus after dizzying chorus, like a dancer leaping and pirouetting across a tightrope with no safety net, laying down the challenge for Golding and Daniels to meet.
The next new piece, “Aftermath”, began with Darwish switching to bass guitar and using loops and other effects on an unaccompanied introduction before the band settled into a late-night funk groove, like something you might find on one of the better CTI albums. The piece ended with the dying fall of Daniels’ nicely poised solo — no recapitulation of the theme or arranged coda, which is typical of Tandy’s interesting approach to the architecture of her compositions.
By contrast, the set ended with the thunder of Murray’s drum improvisation at the conclusion of “Bradbury Street”, from the first album, a witty exercise in staccato syncopation which seem to have tilted over the years in favour of the Second Line rhythms of New Orleans and gave Murray the chance to demonstrate how to employ formidable chops with discretion.
After the break, Tandy turned to her electric piano and synthesiser for two new funk-based instrumental pieces, “Princess Peachy” and “Keep Dreaming”. The former featured a Daniels solo in which the trumpeter set aside her liking for extended multi-noted flurries in favour of well-shaped phrases with a tone that reminded me of the young Donald Byrd, while the latter showed Golding at his most trenchant. Then Tandy introduced an MC, the good-natured Tee Peters, who rapped with impressive flow over compositions called “You Need to Heal” and “Rematch”, the latter apparently inspired — to the delight of at least a portion of the audience — by Arsenal FC’s recent exploits.
Tandy likes to have fun making and sharing music. To close the evening, she announced that they were going to play some jazz. Not, she added, that everything they’d already played hadn’t been jazz. But you could see what she meant as soon as she launched into a gloriously unfettered stride-piano introduction to “On the Sunny Side of the Street”, kicking the band into one last burst of high-energy two-beat action, with Golding front and centre.
On the night of a Tube strike, it was good to see the main room at Ronnie’s packed full for this young London-based band. Full, that is, not just of patrons but of attention and enthusiasm, of response to the nuances as well as to the roof-raising bits, with enough of both elements to satisfy just about everyone.
* Sarah Tandy’s new album, titled Delicious Capricious, will be released in the autumn, distributed via Kartel.
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