HARRY BOLT AND FRIENDS AT THE CUC WINE BAR

Harry Bolt in fine Jazz style at the piano

Jazzmen are definitely getting younger. Harry Bolt and his support musicians are taking this youthful trope to extremes; they all look as if they’ve just wandered out of University. But in experience these players are assured mature solid and very talented.

Harry Bolt first.  He has already raised eyebrows and envy with his assault on worldwide jazz. He was the youngest to do all kinds of gigs, not least taking his band on a world Queen Mary cruises –twice. He has performed at Ronnie Scott’s, worked with Clarke Tracey’s quintet (yes the youngest there) and since his graduation from the Greenwich Trinity Laban Conservatoire just generally dazzled all around.

For the Cambridge International Jazz Festival, Harry collected some marvelous musicians around him. Carrie Dick, who is apparently so ubiquitous, he’s been seen playing at two events at the same time in this Festival. No wonder. Versatile and original on drums his style is important. ‘He’s my new favourite musician ‘ declared one fan after the Harry Bolt concert and he has been fingered as the most important player on the circuit. Saxophone was sublime alongside piano. Duncan Eagles has certainly swooped into that crowded arena with a sax style that can blend or blast at will. He is truly taking the instrument to Sonny Rollins levels. Simon Reed as a bassist is smooth cool and thorough.

Which leaves Harry himself. His playing is fabulous, complex and outstanding. Yet he is an ensemble artist as well, so seamlessly congruent with his co-performers the entire production emerges as dreamily seductive.

Yes, he can do the Gershwin with cool competence but that’s not enough for him. His mentor was the late and great John Taylor who taught Harry not to give up on a song  “ He was always inspirational. I remember coming to see him when I just had blocked on all my composition and one song in particular was going nowhere. He fixed it in minutes ‘

Now a teacher himself, Harry appreciates the value of a leader like that in a musician’s life. He has dedicated the piece to John on his début CD in ‘A Song for Someone’, a fluid sad but warm hearted composition that experiments with its own form before resolving into a harmonic dissonance. Harry played Bernstein’s Somewhere in a newly acquired style picked up on his recent New York trip, and he paid homage to his new influence with “When your lips meet mine’ a solo that stepsaway from the camaraderie of the group into a soulful sublimity..

 A long bosssa nova sequence with the whole gang resumed the ensemble play, a piece by  Perico Sambed with real verve. Corrie Dick made some magic on a highly controlled and well executed drum accompaniment, in fact I had never heard drums played like to the Samba beat. Yet they can all do the classics and took off with a fervent feel-good ‘Caravan’ for a finale. Fabulous playing, and with musical mastery like this it’s almost daunting to think what they will produce next.

Harry Bolt has some wonderfully expansive ideas he is more than a match for.