JKL Duo
Paxton House, Scottish Borders 1/6/25
JKL Duo Jacopo Lazzaretti, classical guitar, Kerry Lynch, flute, whistle and bodhran
The JKL Duo, Jacopo Lazzaretti on classical guitar and Kerry Lynch on flute, bodhran and whistle, performed on Sunday June 1st to an enthusiastic and well pleased audience at this free “taster event” for Paxton’s July festival of chamber music in that lovely venue with a good acoustic, the Picture Gallery in Paxton House. This was an event organized by Paxton in association with Live Music Now, Scotland. These free taster events are an excellent lead into the Paxton Festival itself and present an opportunity to engage with a potential audience given that if seats are available people can just come in, stay and listen.
The JKL Duo are just the turn (to use the expression from Working Men’s Clubs of yore) to make this kind of thing work very well indeed. They are consummately professional musicians who are committed to working across a wide repertoire and varied genres. Kerry describes herself as: heavily influenced by Jazz, World and Celtic Music, and loves fusing these genres with that of Classical. That exactly describes what we got on Sunday. They began with tunes drawn from their project of lockdown when they contacted musicians and composers across the world and asked them to construct a piece drawn from the songs and tunes of Robert Burns (available on their CD ‘The International Poet’). We got several of these, all delightful, but I was particularly taken with ‘The Auld Lang Syne Samba’. The session continued with pieces drawn from Italian Film Music (Jacopo is from Rome), again all lovely, and including music from the track of ‘Once Upon a Time in the West’. The session continued with elements drawn from Jazz standards and a longer piece by an Italian composer whose name I didn’t catch who writes for the Flute / Guitar combo. This was a classical element of the kind which is tuneful and plain good – just what a wider audience likes. The hour session overran but nobody complained because we were thoroughly enjoying ourselves. Kerry played not only flute and bodhran, the latter mainly to accompany Jacopo’s guitar, but also gave us a bravura piece of whistle blowing.
Classical music needs to build a wider audience and Live Music Now Scotland is an organization which by encouraging this kind of performance designed to give pleasure is doing exactly what is needed. I am great fan of Raymond Williams but in his three definitions of culture including that of “the ideal - a state or process of human perfection in terms of certain universal values” to my mind he misses “the popular” where the objective of cultural work is to give pleasure. Classical music can do both but sometimes it misses the pleasure giving. The JKL duo are really good at doing both.
On bodhrans when I lived in Belfast in the 1970s the best bodhran maker worked in Sandy Row – the inner city shopping street of working class protestant Belfast but also where to go to get anything really Irish. Its where I bought dulse. But to get a bodhran you had to ask for “a big tambourine with nae jingles”
