Published date: 26-02-2026
With the first stirrings of spring in the air this weekend [22nd February], Acoustic Triangle arrived bang on time to inject foot-tapping grooves into the step of Shrewsbury’s bewintered jazz hounds. These three pillars of the jazz world chose to play the Maidment auditorium as their only live gig of their 25th anniversary year, and, with a set of truly molten musicianship which singed away the cobwebs with the marvellous power of an acetylene blowtorch, you can understand why they may need to conserve the energy.
The sold-out crowd lapped up their inimitable crossover blend that saw contemporary composition, improv and standards conjured with consummate skill, infectious feeling and questing spirit. No musical stone was left unturned, it seemed. Their opening riff found its origin in medieval Breton folk, for example, and flowered into multi-various life through the visionary cultivation of maxi-instrumentalist Tim Garland. The flashing interplay between him, Gwilym Simcock on piano, and Malcolm Creese on bass, continued in the next piece where Cole Porter’s ‘All of you’ underwent a transformation that swooped the entire gamut from velvet intimacy to volt-rich musical lightning – and without any amplification whatsoever. They don’t go there, by the way. These guys don’t need to. They closed off the first half in contemplative mood with an exquisite all-through pairing of an extract from pianoman Simcock’s ‘All Along’ trilogy with ‘Everyone’s song but my own’ by the late, great Kenny Wheeler where gorgeous Finzi-esque elegiac spirit lurked and swelled and finally, as Garland teamed his smoky-sweet sound directly into the Steinway D, the sympathetic harmonies of the undampened piano strings produced the keening call-and-answer of a restless ghost disappearing into cavernous depths. Musical moments like this – this kind of warlock magic that slows the heart and robs the breath – is the reason for which live music exists.
The second half celebrated the trio’s continuing quest for triumphant musical curiosity, among other things, with the appearance of a rare mezzo saxophone (one of only 20 on the planet) that Garland wielded in Shorter’s ‘Footprints’ like the wonder of the world it is, before switching back to the soprano sax for its searching serenade sound in ‘Rosa Ballerina’. Irving Berlin segued effortlessly into the more contemporary realm of whacked-out-there-ness with ‘Coffee Time’ by John Taylor where virtuosic machine-gun piano pinged off its gathering walls of caffeine-enriched sound with faultless ricochet and collapsed finally into the finely judged comedy of Creese sull ponticello fumblings, ‘feeling the pulse of the fat lady / Or sawing her in half’ (to quote the poet John Fuller’s tribute to the double bass). As an encore, a mystic, heartfelt rendition of ‘Blue and Green from the seminal ‘Some Kind of Blue’ album delivered further opportunity to muse on this poem: ‘But close your eyes and it is sunset / At the edge of the world’. 25 years on, Acoustic Triangle are still there, without doubt, right on the edge.
James Fraser-Andrews
