Joel Frahm Trio At Scott's Jazz Club

Joel Frahm Trio
Scott's Jazz Club
Belfast, N. Ireland
April 12, 2024

Another sold-out gig. It is not an uncommon occurrence at Scott's Jazz Club. Yet this was no ordinary occasion for Ballyhackamore's award-winning venue. For starters, the Joel Frahm Trio was in the house. Scott's Jazz Club has attracted plenty of outstanding musicians since opening its doors in 2021, but this felt like a cat-got-the-cream event.

And there was an extra frisson of excitement with the announcement that the gig was being recorded for a future BBC radio broadcast. An unexpected slice of theatricality, laced with comedy, ensued.

Once Frahm, bassist Dan Loomis and drummer Ernesto Cervini took to the stage, club co-founder and emcee Cormac O'Kane requested several samples of crowd cheers and applause, ranging from the ecstatic to the politely appreciative ("cricket applause"), cheers without applause and applause without cheers. Some whoopers had evidently never been anywhere near a cricket match—a minor blot on an otherwise exemplary collective performance.

It was all good fun, but it did underline the often highly mediated nature of live jazz recordings. Think Ellington At Newport (Columbia, 1956), an iconic performance credited with reviving the fortunes of Duke Ellington's orchestra, even though a significant proportion of the music was recorded after the event in the studio, and carefully spliced into the live recording, along with an applause track.

Suspiciously enthusiastic crowd applause is nothing new, of course, with made-to-measure applause available commercially. You can fool some of the people some of the time... and in the music business that is all that matters.

To be fair to the Scott's Jazz Club audience, such shenanigans were unnecessary. For the duration of the Joel Frahm Trio's gig, it applauded when applause was due, cheered and whistled when the solos really hit the spot, and no less importantly, listened attentively throughout. It was no more or less than the music merited.

This trio evolved out of Cervini's Turboprop sextet, releasing its debut, The Bright Side (Anzic Records) in 2021. The guts of the set came from that album, though several new compositions proved that this trio is an ongoing concern. The opener, "Beeline" planted the trio firmly in the post-bop tradition, with fast-walking bass and insistent ride cymbal underpinning a burrowing solo from the leader.

Stylistically, Frahm follows in the footsteps of Sonny Rollins, Joe Henderson and Joe Lovano, possessing a big, warm sound and a deep well of melodic ideas. He also shares Rollins' penchant for quoting musical motifs from a bewildering variety of sources; Novelty pop tunes, nursery rhyme, Michel Legrand, Nino Rota, Herb Alpert, Stevie Wonder, West Side Story and Indiana Jones were all grist to his mill, with nods to Charlie Parker and Thelonious Monk slipped in for good measure.

On "Thinking of Benny" Frahm paid tribute to Benny Golson, one of his early inspirations. Melodically catchy and rhythmically seductive, this was a fittingly elegant testament to one of the great postwar tenor players. In between songs Frahm explained that it had long been an ambition to lead a band that played all originals, and it is one of the trio's strengths that all three musicians contribute compositions.

An infectious Afro-Cuban-flavored bass ostinato colored "The Road," Loomis' tribute to Venezuelan revolutionary Simón Bolívar, with Cervini using his hands in lieu of sticks. The spacious groove invited a slow, smoking solo from Frahm, though the applause—unprompted—came in response to the bassist's lithe intervention. By contrast, Cervini's "The Heist" embraced knottier rhythmic terrain with its sly shifts in meter, though there was space aplenty for Frahm and Loomis to shine.

The lure of time-honored jazz standards proved too much, not just in Frahm's "Kern You Dig It," a handsome contrafact of Jerome Kern's "All The Things You Are," but on a ripping version of "I'm Old Fashioned"—another Kern composition—in the second set. Despite the bop and blues lineage of the music denoting a bridge to the past, the healthy number of new compositions signaled an eye to the future. Three freshly minted numbers, the sensuous ballad "Moonface Lament," the exhilarating "Vesper Flights" and the bluesy swinger "Monkey Detectives"—written on a train a week before—were highlights.

The second set got off to the liveliest of starts with an incendiary Cervini-penned bop number. A fine solo of linear melodicism from Loomis contrasted with a bustling improvisation from the leader peppered with one well known motif after another —fractious but thrilling, nevertheless.

Bass ostinato and brushes ushered in "The Bright Side," with Cervini's switch to sticks propelling the trio into a feisty exploration that resolved meditatively in Jimi Hendrix's "Third Stone from the Sun." Cervini's aptly titled "The Beautiful Mystery" married restless rhythms and brooding saxophone to atmospheric affect. An unaccompanied saxophone intro of Rollins-esque ingenuity bled into "Boo Dip Dip," a high-intensity burner—via a brief pitstop at Lipps Inc.'s "Funkytown"—that rounded out the set.

Nobody needed to ask the audience to whoop it up in response to the Joel Frahm Trio's excellent set; the prolonged cheers and applause at the end were heartfelt. Frahm, however, had more gas in the tank, and in a spontaneous gesture, offered up a quietly beguiling solo rendition of "My One and Only Love."

A little earlier Frahm had paid glowing tribute to Scott's Jazz Club. "This is a very special place. The energy is amazing. As a working jazz musician, places like these are really diamonds," he told the crowd. "They're very, very important for us and I think they are important culturally for the community. Please support this as much as you can because this is what life is all about." And that, much like the music, had the ring of truth. Applause, please.

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