White Canvas at the Capstone Theatre (2015), Liverpool. Photograph by Ian D. Hall.

Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 8.5/10

From the planting of a single tiny acorn, White Canvas has flowered, grown and developed a sound that in two short years is so good it practically wears a halo and has no need for repentance for anything it does.

Two years after making their debut as part of the Liverpool International Jazz Festival at the Capstone Theatre, White Canvas returned to the stage inside the acoustically captivating building.  What transpired, what was placed before the audience was music of an intrepid, fearless and enjoyable nature, resolute in undertaking, serious enough to appeal to the purist and yet with the subtle side wink of the cheeky added to give it body and grace.

In a city obsessed with music, Jazz perhaps loses out to other forms of expression, but not by much and in White Canvas, not at all, for the mix of piano, drums, guitar and double bass filter in and out in such harmony that it is actually possible to hear all four instruments being played without that sense of overcrowding, that feeling of the full and shatteringly obese that comes with any band at some point.

The organisers of The Liverpool International Jazz Festival certainly know how to entertain a crowd and in White Canvas, entertainment is of a premium.  It positively radiates like coming in from the cold dismal dank day and finding your chosen loved one has prepared a hot water bottle to place next to your feet and fresh socks to put on, it is as considerate and moving as it should be.

With the band playing tracks such as Tiny Acorns, While I’m Away, The Way Home, the enormously superb Stay Beautiful and the emotionally satisfying In Three For G.D., the four men who make up White Canvas have stuck perfectly to the very long goal they set out and have become a band in which typify the intricate genius which lives in the genre.

A genuinely enjoyable group with one thing on their minds when they get onto the floor of the venue, to make music as accessible as it should be.

Ian D. Hall