John Rae, the Edinburgh-born drummer now based in New Zealand, has been sending regular bulletins about the latest jazz developments in his new home for some time now.
But Rae, who has been playing music professionally since his mid-teens, is particularly exercised by an imminent new release from a talent he has spoken about before.
“You’ve got to check out Oscar Lavën’s latest album,” says Rae, who brought out a new album of his own, March of the Octopus with pianist Ben Wilcock just a few weeks ago. “It’s called Elegant Calamity and it really is sensational.”
Oscar Lavën is a saxophonist and multi-instrumentalist who made quite an impression on jazz observers in the UK with his Questions in Red album back in 2022.
He’s a major presence in New Zealand – during the recent Wellington Jazz Festival he was working literally round the clock, playing all sorts of jazz styles – and he has also toured internationally with the American pianist John Beasley’s Grammy-nominated big band MONK-estra.
“Music just seems to pour out of Oscar,” says Rae. “He’s as comfortable playing Vivaldi on bassoon as he is playing hot club swing or bebop on clarinet or saxophone. He actually made an album as a bassoonist about ten years ago with his mother, Marion, who is a professional musician and who was quite a star on the New Zealand folk and pop scenes in the 1960s and 1970s.”
Elegant Calamity features a large ensemble that Lavën put together specially to play music he composed as part of his colleague, trumpeter Michael Costelloe’s groundbreaking Jazz Orchestra Composer concert series.
“Oscar being Oscar, this is not a standard big band,” says Rae. “It features clarinet, oboe, bass clarinet and quite unusually, alto and bass saxophones as well as a string trio, three brass players and a five-piece rhythm section.”
Rae has to declare an interest here as he is the ensemble’s drummer but being part of the band gives him a particular insight into the music which he describes as having influences including Charles Mingus, Ennio Morricone and Astor Piazzolla while sounding very much like Oscar Lavën’s own creation.
“Even when you’re concentrating on the parts you get a sense of the music’s personality and when you stand back and listen, you realise just how tremendously exciting it is,” he says. “He really lets the musicians express themselves and the result is utterly exuberant. Oscar described the concert we recorded for the album as ‘joyous’ and I can only agree. Everyone’s excited to see what sort of reaction Elegant Calamity gets when it’s released internationally in January.”
