Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *

Jazz still has this wild, perhaps unfounded large target placed upon its broad, rather muscular shoulders, that it is all about the improvisation, or worse the same detractors will then start shouting the odds on how it perhaps placed firmly into the stale arena. This is partly in thanks to the limited knowledge of those who wander in off the streets without at least reading up, even slightly, on the extensive and abundant subject.

It is to those who like it, enjoy it, revel or even glorify in it to the point that all other genres are superfluous, that Jazz is as Jazz does and long may it remain that way, especially when audience’s in Liverpool and beyond its designated, keenly felt borders, are treated to bands such as The Blind Monk Trio as part of the Liverpool International Jazz Festival at the Capstone Theatre.

The Blind Monk Trio were at the Capstone to close the afternoon session of the final day of the festival and as the music reached its blistering crescendo, its climatic reason d’être, the mind of the audience would surely have turned to wondering why the Festival cannot go on for a week.  For there in Liverpool, as crowds who made their way to the Capstone and The Kazimer would surely attest, there is just as much a calling for it as there is any other musical art form in the city that gave modern music to the country.

Blind Monk Trio bring that unseen, almost heroic, sense of anarchy to the proceedings which makes Jazz at times unpredictable. The whole point of its structure is to be unstructured and unbound but still keeping within the framework of purity. Yes, they play beautifully, they bring the rhythmic to the persistent beguiling metre but they also bring a little bit of un-tethered fun to the front door. In songs such as The Moth, that sense of mischief, the bringing about the false end captures the mood and in Tales of the Gripper and The Sun Diver, a wonderfully gestured homage to the power of Iron Maiden as they acknowledged, the music was keenly appreciated more so than events unfolding up the road at Anfield, a testament to the group and their playing ability.

For Blind Monk Trio, a band that has had crowds eating out of their hands in the past, the world really does need them; just a hour in their company is easy to see why. A great act to close the Sunday afternoon at the 2015 Liverpool International Jazz Festival.

Ian D. Hall