Edinburgh Jazz Festival
Emmet Cohen Trio
Festival Theatre Studio
Rob Adams
four stars
EMMET Cohen arrived on the jazz scene a generation or two too late to join Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers but the Miami-born pianist is just the kind of youthful talent that Blakey thrived on having alongside him. Cohen also has the jazz message and is a fine evangelist for the music, having its history on the tip of his tongue as well as in his very accomplished fingers.
His concert on Tuesday was one of a number he’s involved in this festival and in a young professorial way he took his subject as the piano greats and imparted informed observations ahead of pieces illustrating the legacies of such masters as Nat King Cole, Bud Powell, Thelonious Monk, and the undersung Cedar Walton.
In Cohen’s eyes, jazz is street music and his playing, though virtuosic, is very clear, direct and communicative. He swung Bud-hard on Powell’s Celia, played cultured blues on Walton’s Hindsight and took Monk’s Round Midnight into a compendium of dance metres, all the time working closely with and testing the fortunately highly tuned anticipatory skills of his superb drummer, Bryan Carter and Glasgow-born, now New York-based double bassist, Aidan O’Donnell.
This year’s festival cover star, Carter also sang The Nearness of You beautifully and with great soulful poise in a detour between Cohen showcasing his own compositional talent on Distant Hallow, on which his right hand improvised melodically while his left dampened and plucked the strings effectively, and celebrating Fats Waller with a slightly over-extended medley that nonetheless underlined again this still only twentysomething musician’s grasp of where jazz has been and where it might be going.
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