Review: Marlow Jazz Club's Valentine Review (From Bucks Free Press)

Review: Marlow Jazz Club's Valentine Review

2:19pm Monday 20th February 2012 in Freetime By Ian Berrido

It was all aboard for a romantic trip across America on the Valentine’s Day Jazz Express at Marlow Jazz Club on Tuesday, setting out from the Atlantic East Coast (with tunes by Charlie Parker and Duke Ellington) and reaching the Pacific West Coast (with compositions by Gerry Mulligan), along with various stops on the way, including a diversion into New Orleans.

Our guides for this hearts and flowers trip were two of the most highly rated jazz musicians on the scene today, saxophonist Derek Nash and trumpet player Martin Shaw. Between them they treated us to a champagne cocktail of jazz pieces, all beautifully played and highly appropriate for the evening.

The opening number ‘I Love You’ set the tone from the word go, with rich, warm solos from Derek and Martin, plus great solo contributions from the supporting trio: Frank Toms (piano), Malcolm Preece (bass) and Dennis Smith (drums). Derek and Martin have an obvious empathy in their playing, not only in the ensemble passages on numbers such as diverse as ‘Secret Love’ and Ellington’s ‘Caravan’, but also in supporting each other in their improvisations. The most obvious number for the evening, ‘My Funny Valentine’, was a showstopper, with some fine counterpoint work that would have warmed the heart of J.S. Bach himself.

All evening both players continually changed instruments to create different musical effects, Derek, when not on tenor sax, switching to on his rare Grafton acrylic alto for the upbeat ‘The Way You Look Tonight’ and the Charlie Parker tune ‘Scrapple for the Apple’; Martin sometimes on trumpet (for Perdido) and on flugelhorn for the Gerry Mulligan classic ‘Five Brothers’, where he took the Art Farmer role to Derek’s Gerry Mulligan, on baritone.

We had a funky diversion to New Orleans with Derek’s composition ‘Voodoo Rex’, inspired by that city, and when, at 11pm we finally reached our destination, there wasn’t a heart in the Valentine’s Day audience that hadn’t been won over by these two great players.