Kansas Smitty’s Plunderphonia review – eclectic jazz updates

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Giacomo Smith’s band takes classics by Jelly Roll Morton, Bix Beiderbecke and others on a spin through the 21st century

Jazz of the past filtered through 21st-century ears: that’s the nearest I can get to explaining what makes Kansas Smitty’s music unique. The band, under its American leader Giacomo Smith, has always managed to bring it off with that mixture of seriousness and levity that goes down well with British audiences. Now, apart from the bass player and Smith himself, it’s a new band and a new set of ears, attuned to hip-hop.

For them Smith has devised a set of pieces based on samples taken from works by Jelly Roll Morton, Bix Beiderbecke and others – including Maurice Ravel! With some, such as opening track High Society, the samples are so obscure that there’s no apparent connection with the original, which seems rather pointless. Others, for instance Morton’s New Orleans Bump, work beautifully. This has a real character of its own, more subdued and mysterious than the original. I’d say the balance between these two extremes is about 50/50. I hope the band aren’t turning all arty on us. But Water Dance (from Ravel’s Jeux d’Eau) makes a great job of the tricklings and splashings.