Frøy Aagre, Queen Elizabeth Hall foyer, London, April 30th, 2010

Another quick review for completeness’ sake – and another jazz gig. This is becoming a habit… Anyway, I met up with Mr P at the Queen Elizabeth Hall (Theakston’s for me, Coke for him) and we thought we’d listen in to the free Friday six o’clock show for a while before going our separate ways.

Frøy Aagre is a Norwegian soprano sax player, and very accomplished she is too. And something she has in common with Jim Moray (see last Sunday’s review) is that both of them studied at the Birmingham Conservatoire. Frøy, however, has jazzier fish to fry with her quartet (drums, bass and piano) and is back in the country promoting her new album Cycle Of Silence.

I can’t say I noticed anything particularly Nordic about the music, but it’s certainly at the more European and modern end of the jazz spectrum rather than the older, more African end. Pleasant melodies, rippling rhythms and interesting variations rather than showy solos were the order of the day and I enjoyed it. Then it was off to see some fellow Scandinavians, the 60s free musicians of Träd Gräs Och Stenar at the Luminaire, more of which soon…