REVIEW:

Justin Quinn’s Bakehouse

The F-IRE collective, a loose collection of many of the new jazz talents in Britain, has been consistently putting together bands of remarkable diversity. As one of the founder members guitarist Justin Quinn has some of the best in his group Bakehouse including Carlos Lopez Real and Tom Arthurs (who unfortunately could not make this gig as he had bigger fish to talk to at the BBC jazz awards ceremony).

Although the name Bakehouse is apparently from a house rather than a place for making bread it is nevertheless descriptive to say the music started with a lot of slow cooking before anything came hot and bubbling out of the oven. All the music was by Quinn himself and often started with loose discreet notes and chords from guitar that were barely distinguishable as melody but nevertheless laid down a harmonic base, frequently of unusual construction, upon which Quinn and Lopez Real on alto sax could begin to do some musical cooking. The result was more subtle and discreet than one would expect in which notes and phrases floated over a tighter groove from bass and drums. Armed with an array of effects Quinn was able to alter the colour of a piece quite suddenly through dramatic changes of sound and a simultaneous change of attack. Through the evening he moved from gentle blurred chords to shades of Hendrix and even the simulation of the sitar. Lopez Real in contrast tended to take the harmonics more by the scruff of the neck and turn up the heat so the slow cooking laid down by Quinn began to spit a bit more. Lopez Real has the technique and temperament to make the most of Quinn’s arrangements while Quinn himself was just as likely to touch out a few chords than rip into a solo line. The result was music that was both quieter and more ethereal than expected but also music that had more depth of harmony and alterations in tone and colour than is often the case. This very much compensated for the periods of ‘slow cooking’. There was also some sparkling percussion work from Gary Husband who was standing in for Martin France.

© Paul Medley