Swing with the Spirit

St Mary’s Metropolitan Cathedral, Edinburgh - 12/08/24

 St Mary’s Schola Cantorum; Michael Ferguson, music director, Richard Michael, piano, composer, Mario Caribé,  bass, Tom Gordon, drums, Ben Shankland, piano.

Choral composer and former King’s Singers tenor Bob Chilcott’s ‘A Little Jazz Mass’ opened the first concert in the week-long Edinburgh Festival of Sacred Arts series at the city’s landmark Catholic Cathedral on a suitably sunny evening.

Accompanied by the accomplished Scottish jazz trio of Richard Michael (piano), Mario Caribé (bass) and Tom Gordon (drums), the Cathedral’s own Schola Cantorum – not to be confused with the Venezuelan chorus currently wowing Edinburgh International Festival – were put through their paces in a genre less familiar to them than the established church music repertoire which they perform on a weekly basis.

Clearly enjoying themselves, the six women and five men, conducted by St Mary’s musical director Michael Ferguson, discharged their responsibilities with diligence and obvious enjoyment. The Chilcott Mass has been widely performed in recent years. It has plenty of bounce and popular appeal, plus some more poignant moments – like the beautiful, almost melancholic Sanctus, and a piano introduction to the Agnus Dei which leans towards denser blues chords.

 ‘A Little Mass’ references a range of earlier jazz styles, but sometimes sacrifices the meaning of the text in its eagerness to swing. The opening Kyrie, which feels a little light to the confessional mode, is the obvious example. Later the Schola Cantorum were stretched a little further with Richard Michael’s own compositions: a joyous, multi-layered Jubilate Deo and his riff-inflected, three-part Te Deum, both well-received. 

 Richard Michael is a leading Scottish jazz pianist and educator, and he narrated this concert with engaging and informative good humour. After the Chilcott Mass, Ben Shankland, last year’s BBC Radio Scotland Jazz Musician of the Year, provided a fine rendition of the Duke Ellington standard, ‘Come Sunday’. But the highlight of the whole evening for me was Shankland’s own composition, ‘Gratitude’, with its shifting sense of longing, meditation and sunset. Thoughtful, tender and absolutely gorgeous.

 The two soloists then duetted gleefully at the same piano, improvising on and around George Gershwin’s 1937 tune ‘They Can’t Take That Away From Me’. They artfully wove in hints of stride, ascending scaled movements, and the odd entertaining musical quotation (most obviously Henry Mancini’s ‘The Pink Panther’).

 A four-part jazz trio set followed after the interval and Michael’s Jubilate Deo. The ‘One for the Birds’ medley tested the audience with neatly-spun references to four well-known musical feathered friends (Lennon and McCartney’s ‘Blackbird’, Vaughan Williams’ ‘The Lark Ascending’, Walter Kent’s ‘(There’ll Be Bluebirds Over) The White Cliffs of Dover’, and Harry Woods’ ‘When the Red, Red Robin’ – the latter happening to be the first song I ever heard and sung as a young child).

 A short celebration of Duke Ellington began with the exquisite ‘A Single Petal of a Rose’ and ‘Sunset and the Mockingbird’ (both from ‘The Queen’s Suite’, only released posthumously, having originally been written privately for Elizabeth II) illustrated his subtlety and textural sophistication. ‘Don’t Get Around Much More’ and the ubiquitous and definitive ‘It Don’t Mean a Thing If It Ain’t Got That Swing’ were the more evident crowd pleasers. Last up was a jazzed up ‘For All the Saints’ (Vaughan Williams again) which was fun, but somewhat lost on the majesty of the original for me.

Another highlight was ‘The Northern Lights of Old Aberdeen’, in memory of the renowned Scottish broadcaster, author, impresario and Doric columnist Robbie Shepherd, who died almost exactly a year ago at the age of 87. This was cleverly segued out of ‘I Left My Heart in San Francisco’ (George Cory, 1953) in celebration of Tony Bennett. 

 Overall, a thoroughly enjoyable and well-curated musical evening which demonstrated the abiding appeal of classic era jazz and its ability to cross over into sacred as well as secular spaces, and to bring the two together.     

* ‘The Edinburgh Festival of Sacred Arts runs until 17 August on the Fringe. https://www.edinburghsacredartsfestival.org