Gig Review: Music Spoken Here presents Rob Luft Quartet
The Marr’s Bar, Worcester
Thursday 27 March
Over the last three years, Music Spoken Here has brought some of the finest musicians from the UK to play in Worcester for the first time. Last Thursday was no exception, with the delightfully cheery and distinguished guitarist Rob Luft. What made this gig extra special was, as Rob declared, the ‘world premier’ performance of new music played for the first time in front of a live audience.
The quartet saw the return of ‘friends of the club’ Joe Wright on tenor sax and Corrie Dick on drums, who both appeared with Corrie’s Sun Swells band in November 2023. They were joined by Tom McCredie on bass.
The set opened with ‘One Day In Romentino‘, taken from Rob’s 2020 album ‘Life Is The Dancer’ that started out with a dreamy guitar riff with Joe’s sax meandering through until segueing into a speedy, sparkling guitar feature driven along by a shiftless shuffle from Corrie before Joe breaks loose with an urgent solo some six minutes in!
Next was ‘Beware‘, recorded on Rob’s debut album ‘Riser‘ which again started with spatial, ethereal guitar and sax interplay before settling into a dancing groove evoking simultaneously Celtic and African vibes, with Joe almost ‘vocalising’ through the sax at one point.
The next song was the first ‘world premier’ performance of the evening –‘Komorebi’ (the literal translation from Japanese being ‘sunlight leaking through trees’). This was followed by an arrangement of Duke Ellington’s ‘Come Sunday’. Rob confessed wittily that he’d written the arrangement the day before ‘to cleanse himself’ after playing an ‘unglamorous golf club’ gig earlier in the week.
The first set closed out with ‘Daylight Saving Time‘, the first piece of the evening from his latest Dahab Days album. This was a lively piece that developed into a blistering high life / calypso jam, appropriate for the upcoming weekend when the clocks go forward and we can start to enjoy the lighter evenings once more.
I believe a fair amount of vinyl and CDs were shifted during the interval and rightly so with the first set giving us a taster of most of the albums on offer. The band returned to the stage to open the second set with another new composition, ‘Echoes of Silence‘ followed by the first ever performance of ‘Another Blue World‘, inspired, as recounted by Rob, by Brian Eno’s ‘Another Green World‘ album.
We were then treated to the quartet’s interpretation of an ancient Arabic folk song ‘Lamma Bada Yatathanna‘, which Rob introduced as ‘a complicated dance rhythm infused with a light topping of Tom Waites and perhaps David Gilmour’ and featured Corrie, at one point using a selection of rattly things to brush and tap the head of his floor tom. The quartet wound the set up with a medley of Krzysztof Komeda’s theme from the film ‘Rosemary’s Baby’, going into ‘Berlin‘, the second track of the evening taken from ‘Life Is The Dancer’.
The excited crowd that filled The Marr’s Bar on a Thursday night once again (six in a row now – BIG UP WORCESTER!) clamoured for more as the band regrouped one more time for an encore of ‘As Time Passes’, which Rob had written and recorded with Norwegian bassist Arild Anderson. As always, we got a ton of great footage from the gig and there will be a video to commemorate the event on its way up to our YouTube Channel.