Ingrid Jensen/Jon Wikan at Side-On, 6 February 2004

I have a very nice Enja recording of trumpeter Ingrid Jensen from 1999.

It has engaging tunes, bright punching trumpet lines, very fine playing from Gary Thomas on tenor and flute amongst other sparkling contributions, and a wonderful rhythmic lift – which is not surprising: the drummer is Victor Lewis, whose composition Seventh Avenue opens the disc brilliantly with a high, light fanfare and fleet running phrases. The Chicago-based writer Terry Martin told me he was less impressed with her appearance as a sidewoman on someone else’s album. I’ll avoid that one.

SIMA took advantage of Jensen’s appearance in Australia at the Perth Festival with her drumming partner Jon Wikan and slotted her in at the Side-On for one of those nights when the place really felt like a top-line jazz club (which it often does, but not always: something which has more to do with the audience than the high level of local music usually heard there).

I certainly had it mind to hear Jensen, but this was clinched when drummer Simon Barker buttonholed me about ‘this great drummer’ (Wikan) and added that I would be very excited by Jensen’s in person sound and attack.

The late multi-instrumentalist John Sangster once remarked that even if you had given the trumpet up (too hard, teeth trouble, whatever), you would still always go to hear someone play the glorious and sometimes heartbreaking instrument. I liked what little I had heard of Jensen on record. In person her drive and intensity set me back in my seat.

A powerful brass sound is always good, but one looks for that something else in the sound to sustain a night’s music, and that something was immediately apparent. Jensen’s sound is powerfully projected, but it is not a big, bellying sound. Her trumpet tone is relatively lean. That’s okay: it’s distinctive and it cuts emotionally. It should not be inferred from my spontaneous rave earlier on this web site that I set the presence of someone on stage at nought. Jensen looked as if she meant business – the way Freddie Hubbard did when he played here at Sydney’s Basement all those years ago (with the great Victor Lewis). The trumpet, like the rock guitar, is a dramatic instrument. Jensen’s lithe intent stance heightened that as she came blazing in with a kind of half-volley effect off the wonderful drumming of Wikan. She had our attention. The audience was onto everything she did from start to finish.

But the power and excitement was heightened by interludes where she moved right up on the microphone to produce big soft notes, sustained or bubbling rapidly. The power, unleashed from a little further back, cut the air, cut into your emotions; the soft amplified passages seemed to come right up close to you until you felt you could touch them. At softer volume her sound was wider. The drama of sustained notes which made time stand still was beautifully exploited, particularly on the flugel horn. Single notes were moved subtly in the air. An arrangement by Jensen of What’s New, one of the great tunes of all time, took advantage of the song’s unusal construction (no middle section, just the first eight repeated dramatically a fourth higher) to deepen the tune’s mystery with a rather modal feeling. This was one of three fascinatingballad arragements, including one by her sixteen year old sister and one by saxophonist Dick Oatts.

Now this was in no way a display for trumpet and flugelhorn, and the superb band feeling (if understandably a little rough occasionally in detail, given the time changes that sprang up unexpectedly in some of the arrangements) should also be credited to considerable degree to locals Sean Wayland on piano and Brett Hirst on bass. Grooving solidly from the beginning, Hirst’s expressive subtlety and range became more and more apparent as the night developed. Wayland was a bulwark. He develops solos thematically, often working in the middle regions of the piano (a distant echo of Barry Harris perhaps) rather than running all over it, and delineating the harmony with an understated low chord and a beautifully placed note or two in the treble, suggesting an arpeggio at precisely those points where you might feel a subtle signpost might be welcome.

If you are in Birdland, I would suggest that you ask to hear some of the fine trio recording Lurline that he made in New York. Students of the Sydney coastline will appreciate the shot of Lurline Bay between Maroubra and Coogee on the cover (Sean, a surfer of course, looks down from the cliffs as someone rides the break that appears intermittently beyond the rock shelf).