Royal Birmingham Conservatoire with students from Siena and Hamburg at Parabola Arts Centre, 4 May.

Review by Peter Slavid.

One of the regular highlights of the Cheltenham programme is this project, where students from the Birmingham Conservatoire are joined by students from overseas. This year, those students came from Siena and Hamburg.

Several of the participants in this project over the years have gone on to great things. The overseas contribution has been slimmed down a bit from previous years, but I’m sure we saw some stars in the making.

The students were formed into three quintets, and rather than band names, were given numbers by the order in which they appeared. All of the students got an opportunity to solo, and all did so creditably.

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Group 1 was my favourite of the three, featuring delightful interplay between the trombone and alto sax. It’s a slightly unusual combination, but it worked really well. The compositions weren’t credited, but I thought they were particularly interesting in this group.

Parabola Quintet 1

Trombone: Will Pethick (Hamburg)
Sax: Nathan Evans
Double Bass: Francesco Bordignon (Siena)
Drums: Yiu Lam
Piano: Julianne Deil

Group 2 gave us a rather more conventional bebop performance, although there were some interesting effects from the guitarist, whose solo was one of the highlights. There was also an unusual love song from the bass player who vocalised along with the bass.

Parabola Quintet 2

Trumpet: Christian Kiely-Charalambous
Trombone: Henry Hansen
Bass/vocal: Lennart Meyer (Hamburg)
Guitar: Edoardo Ferri (Siena)
Drums: Wilfred Mckenzie 

Group 3 concentrated on tunes from, amongst others, Joe Henderson and Lee Morgan. This was a polished and professional band full of fine musicians. 

Parabola Quintet 3 

Vocal: Giuditta Franco (Siena)
Sax: Reuben-James Gilbert
Bass: Macy Wright
Drums: Dominic Johnson 
Guitar: Oliver Canham 

The overall impression from these three bands was one of high quality musicianship. If I have a criticism it is only that the music was all a bit conventional, with very little risk taking, although I do understand the complexity of putting together these projects across national boundaries. However, I suspect that many of these musicians go out and play in Afrobeat or improv bands, and it would be great to see just a bit of that in future years.

Birmingham Conservatoire and Cheltenham Jazz deserve big congratulations for their continued support of this excellent project, and the large enthusiastic audience would roundly endorse that.