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1993: Rebirth Brass Band
Some might have considered that the Serious/Speakout operation, as it then was, had bitten off an indigestible mouthful when it launched the London jazz festival (as a three-borough, multi-venue event built on the foundations of the old Camden jazz festival) in 1993, but they began with a confident shout that has reverberated through the decades since. At Islington's Union Chapel in May that year, the young Rebirth Brass Band from New Orleans played the opening night (alongside British soul, jazz and blues legend Carol Grimes) as if it was a resounding finale, and in their combination of roots jazz, Headhunters funk, pop and reggae, they were the perfect harbingers of the idiomatically freewheeling and inclusive LJF yet to come. That year's festival, embracing Nitin Sawhney, Stan Tracey, Anthony Braxton, and a Shape of Jazz To Come crossover event at the Forum, were early indications of the process under way.
1994: Clusone Trio
Chick Corea, Jack DeJohnette and Joshua Redman were among the stars of the second London jazz festival, but just how firmly this new event's roots were planted on both sides of the Atlantic - as opposed to plenty of glitzy earlier UK jazz festivals, which mainly staged globetrotting American tours – was symbolised by Britain's Django Bates with Delightful Precipice, and Holland's Clusone Trio. The group comprised virtuosic drums eccentric Han Bennink and classically trained but surreally unpredictable cellist Ernst Reyseger, with Netherlands-resident American saxophonist Michael Moore. Their laterally lyrical set that year spliced quiet bop, strutting calypso, Bennink's mixture of drum virtuosity and circus pratfalling (he drummed on his kit, on the floor and on his teeth), and some delectably soft and impressionistic free-playing, as if they were some kind of wackily cool free-improvising Jimmy Giuffre group. The winds of jazz tastes were changing direction, and the Clusone Trio were the embodiment of it. Here they are in the first flush of their 10-year game with jazz, in 1990.
1995: Art Ensemble of Chicago
By the time it came to the 1995 LJF, the Art Ensemble of Chicago was the longest-living big-time free-improvising band in the business, joining African-American musical traditions with exhilarating blasts of pop, gospel and blues. An even more startling chemistry this show revealed was the enthusiasm of the jazz-loving chancellor of the exchequer of the day, Ken Clarke - who reportedly went backstage after the 150-minute straight-through show for animatedly detailed discussions on free-jazz with the band members. The AEC showed that free-improvised jazz could be joyous, swinging and theatrical, as agile as a bebop group, as raunchy as a blues band – or as sonorous as a drum-choir – they brought a raft of Senegalese drummers into this gig to emphasise that effect. This was also the year the LJF started to expand, spreading over town with gigs at Watermans, the ICA, Shepherds Bush Empire, Blackheath and elsewhere.
1996: Mike Westbrook's Bar Utopia
After the emergence of his creative and original big band in the late 1960s, British composer Mike Westbrook was heralded as one of a handful of UK jazz musicians staking out ground not necessarily already cultivated by Americans. Westbrook and his vocalist/composer wife Kate began applying jazz methods to European music-theatre, cabaret, brass-band music, settings for poetry and opera, and a lot more. For this year's festival, they presented what they called the Orchestra of Smith's Academy (a private joke about Smith's Hotel in Glasgow, where Mike Westbrook had apparently had a eureka-moment while composing) on a rich repertoire reprising landmark originals like The Cortege, a casually dissonant arrangement of It Don't Mean A Thing if it Ain't Got That Swing, and then Bar Utopia – containing some of the most jubilant and open-handed Westbrook music in years, full of typically slithery, jostling themes, lots of uncluttered blues and bebop, riffs that reverberated like Hit The Road Jack, and a big, thumping trad-band finish.
1997: Charles Lloyd
Charles Lloyd Photograph: David Redfern/Redferns
The LJF became the Oris London jazz festival (the first time one of its sponsors shared the title), was up to 130-odd gigs, and now embracing with equal ambition and enthusiasm African-American legends like McCoy Tyner and Charles Lloyd, newer stars from the same roots like Roy Hargrove, Fred Hersch and Danilo Perez, and many of the cultural energies aglow in London – from India, the Caribbean and Africa. The severe deconstructivist scrutinies of legendary British noise/improv group AMM even shared 1997's broad programme. But the comeback of American saxophonist Charles Lloyd (an early jazz-fusion hero from the 1960s who had discovered the then unknown Keith Jarrett) was one of that festival's most memorable events. Lloyd appeared with a superb group including Swedish pianist Bobo Stenson and drummer Billy Hart, played material from his new Canto recording for ECM, and revealed in his autumnal years that his control of nuance on a tenor saxophone, the implication of melodic movement with the merest whispers and sighs, was a whole new force to be reckoned with in contemporary jazz.
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