REVIEW: Grenoble Jazz Festival, 1995

- Alison Popowicz

The Grenoble Jazz Festival, 1995 version, is finished for another year. The audiences have gone home, the musicians have packed their bags and guitar-cases, the concert halls have been swept clean of the last floating echo and discarded entrance ticket. Even the posters are beginning to peel and fade as the chill, unseasonal rain falls.

Who played at Grenoble? Famous jazzsters such as Helen Merrill, McCoy Tyner, Bobby Hutcherson, Bill Frisell, Joe-Louis Walker, Calvin Russell, Linda Sharrock, Henri Texier, James Blood Ulmer, Martial Solal and Didier Lockwood. Add many many more, well-known and little-known and totally unknown: singers and instrumentalists from the USA, from all over Europe, Africa and Bosnia and the Crimea: some in France just for the festival, some passing through town on their year-long European tours. Something for everybody, all under one big, brassy jazz umbrella - and this year, the umbrella spread wide to cover not only traditional and improvisational jazz, but also including jazz-root blues, and R-and-B, and even folk and rock-and-roll. Definitely, something for everybody. Whatever you like to call it, jazz or otherwise, or just `music'!

During the festival, at first, the town seems the same as every other day of the year: there's the usual number of buskers, all good and bad and indifferent and all expecting to be paid: there's no great ceremony, no fireworks, no shouting-in-the-street apart from the market traders and the schoolkids greeting their friends.

But then you notice the striking, eye-catching posters: the big- band bus parked in the square, and the three sax-playing minstrels who go strolling through the Saturday crowds: the snippets of jazz as you are riding on the tram, the jazz playing in all the bars... and the tired-eyed colleagues who go to every concert they can, from the noon-time jazz in town to the early- evening solo shows and the nine-o'clock big stars right through to the one-o'clock-in-the-morning restaurant for a steak-and-jam- session... it's happening, all right. Not only in the concert halls and theatres, but in the bars and on the streets.

It is impossible to see everyone or hear everything; you have to choose according to your tastes, your locality and your budget. Many concerts are free: the big names who pack the concert halls in the evenings are inevitably more expensive. You can buy an "abonnement" - a ticket that allows entry to a set of concerts - or go as you please. Even if you don't spend a single centime, you can still have an excellent ten days music!

It's hard to know where to start making a choice: the big names or the up-and-comings? Traditional or experimental or something completely different? Guitar or singing or drums or saxophone or kitchen implements or keyboards or everything? And will you have time to take a master class, or visit the two photo exhibitions, and what if someone invites you to a concert `en appartement'? And how-on-earth will you be able to get from Voiron after the concert that starts at 6.30, to Grenoble in time for the concert at 8 o'clock? You just have to try your best.

For me, the acts that linger on were, first-of-all and most-of-all, Calvin Russell, who plays nothing-like-jazz but a rude, Texan, rock'n'roll and raw, haunting, acoustic cowboy-ballads: the Bill Frisell Quintet, a group of magnificent musicians, who, (when they all played the same tune at the same time), produced some of the most beautiful music I've heard in years: Enver Ismailov, the Crimean-Tatar electric-guitarist, with his unique string-tapping method of playing and melodies that draw from the heritage of the entire ex-Soviet-Union: and the unforgettable, irreplaceable, inimitable James `Blood' Ulmer with his Blues Experience, playing heavyweight funk and rap and scaring the living daylights out of all the jazz purists who'd just been listening to Bill Frisell.

I shall wear my "23rd Grenoble Jazz Festival" T-shirt with happy memories - and I'll be looking forward to next year. I've marked it in my diary: take ten days away from the office, and plan to see and listen to everything. Any jazz fan who can escape to Grenoble, France for a few days of some great music should definitely do so.