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| © Kate Wright |
James Pearson (piano); Lizzie Ball (violin); Pete Long
(sax, clarinet); Tom Dunnett (trombone); Jimmy T. Turner (vibes); Sam Burgess
(bass); Matt Skelton (drums)
There’s a delicious irony in walking into the new Upstairs at Ronnie’s and realising that the ghost of Ronnie himself is alive and well - sitting at the grand piano in the shape of James Pearson.
In the absence of the great club founder and raconteur, Pearson has quietly picked up the mantle as storyteller-in-chief. Long before the first clarinet swoop of Rhapsody in Blue, he’s already taken the packed room on a guided tour through Aeolian Hall, Parisian car horns and grumpy viola sections - the sort of witty, historically literate patter Ronnie would have relished. Pearson has form as a “world-class pianist, composer and raconteur extraordinaire”, as one recent festival billed him, and that combination of easy humour and deep scholarship is exactly what stitches this new classical strand together.
Tonight’s show - the opening salvo of Ronnie Scott’s Classical All Stars - is ostensibly a Gershwin-and-friends celebration. In reality it’s a lovingly plotted road movie through a whole tangle of genres: symphonic Gershwin and Broadway swing, Mexican romanticism, Heifetz showpieces, Bernstein on the booze. At the heart of it all are Pearson and Lizzie Ball, co-director of the new series and long-established as one of the UK’s most persuasive jazz-classical crossover violinists.
Ball’s playing has that rare mix of conservatoire polish and back-room bite: a supple, singing sound on top, a faint rasp of bow hair when the music needs grit, phrasing that can turn on a sixpence from bel canto legato to something far more feline and knowing. In the Heifetz arrangements from Porgy and Bess, she floats Bess, You Is My Woman Now in long, unbroken arcs, the vibrato dialled back just enough to let Gershwin’s harmony do the talking. In Ponce’s Estrellita she leans into the line with a gently vocal portamento - star-of-love indeed - without ever tipping into the schmaltz that lesser players can’t resist.
Pearson, for his part, is in that now-familiar mode where you feel he’s carrying the entire history of jazz piano around in his back pocket. Reviews of his other projects regularly marvel at his “full-on brilliance” and “ironclad technique”, and you hear exactly why in this setting: rolled-up-sleeves stride one moment, glassy Debussy-like colour the next, then a sly Erroll Garner grin in a left-hand riff that suddenly appears under Gershwin.
Crucially, this isn’t just a masterclass in performance, it’s a masterclass in arrangement. Pearson has taken scores written for 80-piece orchestra - An American in Paris, Rhapsody in Blue, West Side Story - and miniaturised them for a seven-piece band without losing any of the swagger. Lines are constantly being re-assigned: a horn stab reborn as a clarinet smear from Pete Long; a trombone choir re-imagined as close voicings across vibes and piano; string choirs distilled down to Ball’s single, singing violin line with rhythm section shimmer underneath. It’s deft, transparent writing that lets the musicians breathe, and it turns what could have been a polite classical “reduction” into something that feels alive and improvised.
If Pearson’s arrangements are the architecture, his anecdotes are the soft furnishings. The tale of Paul Whiteman tricking Gershwin into writing Rhapsody in Blue by simply advertising the concert; the Savoy Hotel stage rising out of the floor; the story of Leonard Bernstein, three whiskies in, raging about violas at the Barbican and inadvertently costing Pearson his bar job - all of it delivered with the sort of timing stand-ups would kill for. This is the old Ronnie Scott alchemy: laughter lowering the guard, so that when the band finally hits the big Rhapsody theme, the whole room is ready to feel it rather than just applaud it.
The ensemble around them is a hand-picked dream team: Matt Skelton crisp and buoyant at the drums, Sam Burgess laying down a bass sound you could park a Cadillac on, Jimmy T. Turner’s vibraphone adding a halo of light around some of the darker chords. On trombone, Tom Dunnett shifts from Bernstein brass to buttery ballad playing; on clarinet and saxes, Pete Long steals the spotlight more than once, particularly in a roaring, tongue-twisting Lady Be Good that could happily have gone on all night.
All of this unfolds in the newly rebuilt Upstairs at Ronnie’s, which, for those who remember the old T-shaped room and slightly ramshackle charm, is almost unrecognisable. The space has been completely transformed into a 140-seat, state-of-the-art auditorium: autumnal golds, curved ceiling, cabaret tables, and a Yamaha grand gleaming centre-stage. Recent reports have talked about the management’s “audacious goal” of creating the greatest small live-music venue in the world; on tonight’s evidence, you’d say they’re not being remotely fanciful.
The sound and lighting are a quiet revelation. Ronnie’s has always been about intimacy, but here the engineering has clearly been designed to give the illusion that the sound is coming straight from the instrument in front of you. No sense of PA “throw”; just a natural bloom around each player, a soft halo of light catching bell keys, bow hair, cymbal edges. When Ball turns slightly upstage in Estrellita, her line still arrives like its being whispered directly into your ear. When Pearson digs into those big Rhapsody cadenzas, the piano feels three-dimensional, every register distinct yet glued together.
By the time we reach the closing West Side Story Suite - a whistle-stop tour through jets, sharks, mambo and Somewhere - the place has the energy of a late-show Friday, even though this is a Monday classical night. It’s a sizeable chunk of Bernstein, distilled into just enough time to get you home at a civilised hour, but nobody seems in a hurry to leave. The applause at the end is long, loud and utterly genuine; you can feel that collective sense of having been present at the start of something.
This inaugural outing of Ronnie Scott’s Classical All Stars does exactly what it promises: it proves that classical music belongs in a club as much as any burning quintet, and that Gershwin, Bernstein, Ponce and friends sit very happily alongside the ghosts of Trane and Blakey that still haunt the bricks.
A packed house, immaculate sound, a beautifully reimagined room and two directors at the top of their game - Pearson the pianist-storyteller, Ball the genre-bending violinist-producer - suggest that Monday nights Upstairs are about to become the hottest ticket in town. Glenn Wright
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