Moody blues at the Cheltenham Jazz Festival, plus May’s best classical, opera and jazz

Cheltenham Jazz Festival ★★★★☆

“Let’s hear some noise for my excellent band!” said saxophonist Soweto Kinch during one of his two filmed sets for Cheltenham Jazz Festival, before introducing the other musicians. There was an inevitable silence. “Well, I can’t hear you, but I can feel you,” he added ironically. It was a vivid reminder that without an audience a jazz gig is only half-alive.

Still, a half-alive Cheltenham Jazz Festival is better than no festival at all. It took place online, across Saturday and Sunday, thanks to the generosity of the dozens of musicians taking part, all of whom played for free. There were no less than 26 acts across the two days of the festival, all filmed in advance and streamed in 20-minute or half-hour sets, each introduced live by broadcaster and journalist Cerys Matthews and jazz singer Gregory Porter. All praise to director Tony Dudley-Evans and his team for pulling it off.

The talent was home-grown, apart from the Argentinian duo of singer-cum-bassist Cande Buasso and pianist Paulo Carrizo, who became a YouTube sensation in 2017 and have just released their debut album on Decca. There was a pleasantly old-fashioned quality to their songs, moodily shot in a book-lined drawing room. The delicate Deja Atrás sounded as if the spirit and even some of the notes of Burt Bacharach’s Walk On By had been filtered through something Latin.

We heard other female singers too, including Ayanna Witter-Johnson, who accompanied herself on cello in stylish versions of Cry Me a River and Misty. At the other end of the expressive scale was Marisha Wallace, the Broadway star of Aladdin and The Book of Mormon, who reminded us that the thrilling sound and ecstatic spirituality of gospel still courses through the art of jazz singing.

The Festival has signed up to the goal, widely shared across the music industry, of achieving gender parity by 2022, and my impression was that female artists outnumbered male by a good margin. On Sunday, there were four sets by female saxophonists, all remarkably different to each other. Maddy Coombs’s elegant versions of standards were miles away from the dark moodiness of Lara Jones’s electronically layered sound-tracks.

A downside for me was the heavy use throughout the weekend of pedal-controlled looping and reverb, which is often used simply to add heft and atmosphere to something very thin – as in the set from Idris Rahman, which made me want to scream. (If I became World Controller of Jazz, I would ban the foot-controlled effects pedal for 10 years.) Only when used sensitively and sparingly, as it was by saxophonist Faye MacCalman, can the technique yield something interesting.

As often happens, the best things about the Festival were not sets as a whole but wonderful moments – as in the two-minute duet between Kinch and tenor-saxophonist Eddie May, filmed at Birmingham Conservatoire. The two instruments seemed locked in an argument in which each side was good-natured and attentive to the other, but still passionately insistent on its ideas – as all good argument should be.

See featured artists at cheltenhamfestivals.com/jazz and hear highlights on The Jazz Show with Jamie Cullum on Radio 2 on April 4 at 9pm