From left: Binker Golding, Jihad Darwish, Tee Peters, Sarah Tandy, Jamie Murray, Poppy Daniels (photo: Paul Pace/Ronnie Scott’s Club) All Sarah Tandy has to do to make me happy is sit down at a good piano and play a standard ballad. But she’s an ambitious bandleader and composer, and it was those aspects of her musical journey that were explored at Ronnie Scott’s last night. As she did when her debut album, Infection in the Sentence, came out seven years ago, she brought her quintet to the Frith Street temple to showcase some of the material from its successor, to be released later this year. Now with Poppy Daniels on trumpet, Binker Golding on tenor saxophone, Jihad Darwish on bass and Jamie Murray on drums, the band launched the first set with “Unleash the Beast”, whose introduction quickly gave way to a raging up-tempo blast over what sounded like a modern variation on the structure of Miles Davis’s “Milestones”. Tandy’s opening solo set the tone, chorus after dizzying chorus, like a dancer leaping and pirouetting across a tightrope with no safety net, laying down the challenge for Golding and Daniels to meet. The next new piece, “Aftermath”, began with Darwish switching to bass guitar and using loops and other effects on an unaccompanied introduction before the band settled into a late-night funk groove, like something you might find on one of the better CTI albums. The piece ended with the dying fall of Daniels’ nicely poised solo — no recapitulation of the theme or arranged coda, which is typical of Tandy’s interesting approach to the architecture of her compositions. By contrast, the set ended with the thunder of Murray’s drum improvisation at the conclusion of “Bradbury Street”, from the first album, a witty exercise in staccato syncopation which seem to have tilted over the years in favour of the Second Line rhythms of New Orleans and gave Murray the chance to demonstrate how to employ formidable chops with discretion. After the break, Tandy turned to her electric piano and synthesiser for two new funk-based instrumental pieces, “Princess Peachy” and “Keep Dreaming”. The former featured a Daniels solo in which the trumpeter set aside her liking for extended multi-noted flurries in favour of well-shaped phrases with a tone that reminded me of the young Donald Byrd, while the latter showed Golding at his most trenchant. Then Tandy introduced… [TheTopNews] Read More.
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