Bill Frisell at the South Bank

Tonight we caught the last installment of the London Jazz Festival this year: Bill Frisell with his string quartet playing to a packed audience at the Queen Elizabeth Hall, South Bank. It was quite (very)* stupendous though off on a rocky start: with troubles in the sound system, it was difficult to recognize when various pluckings became the first piece rather than noise.

I am not a jazz aficionado and know little about the genre, but I do know what I like and that is not noisy, disjointed jazz. Frisell plays more melodic tunes on the electric guitar, tonight tending towards minimalism with much repetition and 'variations on a theme'. His compositions are very playful and exploit the unusual sound-making aspects of classical stringed instruments. I particularly liked the plucking and strumming of the violin, viola and cello – so unexpected to a classically oriented ear. His pieces aren't as lyrical as, for example Chet Atkins in his "Sails" album, but they are interesting listening and keep you on your toes. At least one of Frisell's pieces drew on a folk song, while an encore piece was an arrangement of "Strawberry Fields Forever", supposedly a tribute to us here in London from Denverite Bill.

If I had two gripes, one is that Bill's electric guitar, which had the potential to overshadow the other strings, almost acted as a underlying support for the tunes. It didn't soar (like 70s rock, my favourite), and the virtuosity attributed to his playing (as done with Béla Fleck) was not really apparent tonight. The second gripe is the structure of the Queen Elizabeth Hall, with the sound desk right in the middle of the seating (photo). So next time, I'll not choose seats in rows AA to about JJ in the middle of the Rear Stalls: even top price tickets give a bad view here.

Still, it was a great night out and the first of the London Jazz Festival I have been able to attend over many years. And the honey nut tarts sold at the Hall kiosk were amazingly close to the taste of pecan pie!

NeWt, the band fronting Bill Frisell, barely visible over the sound desk in the middle of Queen Elizabeth Hall.

* It was only after a year of marking student papers "quite good" that I discovered that meant "not good enough" in British English. Here I use it in the American sense of "very good".