One arrives at the Cheltenham Jazz Festival with high expectations, as one should when within its streets stroll the likes of Denys Baptiste, Esbjorn Svensson and, er, Bill Wyman, this year’s sugar on the jazz pill, something before the weekend when the real music starts. And there’s a thrill of near intimacy when a few tables away at breakfast sits Michael Brecker. Now that’s something to tell the grandchildren – I didn’t just see Brecker in concert; I watched him butter a croissant at 10am. Yup, Michael and I, we have partaken of that mystical early morning rite, the breaking of the Danish and the savouring of the espresso. Actually, it wasn’t that early. Five minutes before breakfast at the Kandinsky Hotel ended a rush of guests arrived, all bed-head hair and caffeine-fix urgency. Jazz musicians are not early birds.

Far greater though, than sharing that experience with the great saxophonist, was the opportunity to witness that most thrilling of events: a set by an unknown artist who emerges fully-formed and ready to blow his contemporaries off stage.

One of the Festival’s Jerwood Foundation – supported Rising Stars, Bryan Corbett is not, strictly speaking, unknown. Certainly in Birmingham, where he is the music manager at Ty’s, Jazz & Spice, he has a name. To the wider world, though, it’s not one that rings too many bells yet. A trumpeter and flugelhornist with a warm, lyrical tone, a formidable technique and, in the higher registers, a semi-plastic stridency reminiscent of Freddie Hubbard, Corbett deserves to stride the national stage. It is not overstating it to say that following Guy Barker and Gerard Presencer, our next trumpet star has arrived.
Hubbard was sometimes criticised for not holding back, socking it to the audience right from the beginning of his solos. Corbett didn’t hold back either, with some rapid repeated notes and fast runs in Joey Calderazzo’s “Midnight Voyage”. Good for him. There’s a place for subtlety, and that turned out to be “My Funny Valentine” as a duet with his guitarist. Nicely timed, with plenty of space, Corbett produced some rasping, accented upward runs right out of the Miles Davis bag before the number pulled out of first and into second as a gentle bossa.

What a relief, too, to find a bandleader who acts like one. There are too many British players who shy from the attention that accompanies being on stage. Like rabbits under the glare of traffic they blink away nervously, mumbling into the microphone, almost apologetic that the spotlight in on them. Often accompanying this is an unjustified pride in second-rate playing, an insecure half-grin the outer garment for an overweening arrogance based on the delusion that their weedy solos have merit. Where such wrongheaded faith in their abilities comes from is a mystery, although it could be the uncritical backslapping common in a particular section of the jazz world, or worse from a snobbish supposition that making music with all the impact of a knitting pattern is a passport to artistic credibility. They shun the muscularity that has sustained the American mainstream out of a perverse and self-defeating desire to be different. They don’t realise that they are six-stone weaklings on the beach only because the majority of those who could (and should) kick sand in their faces are on the other side of the Atlantic.

Corbett is different. He acts like he’s meant to be there. He possesses a laconic assurance born from the self-knowledge that he will deliver. His band, which with Rhodes and guitar has echoes of the semi-electric line-ups Creed Taylor assembled in the 1970s, has a confident approach, they swing well, and sound like the believe in themselves. It’s muscular, but this is lean meat, not steroid-pumped bulk. It’s rare to be so excited by a player whose legend has yet to reach beyond his own lunch break. So : remember the name of Bryan Corbett. If there is any justice in the world, he is at the beginning of a brilliant career.

BRING IT ON! (from ‘The Independent’ (ArtsEtc. 28th December 2003)).
‘Jazz’ - Sholto Byrnes

Talent to watch: sooner or later the Birmingham-based trumpeter Bryan Corbett is going to burst onto the national scene and blow everyone away. Equally adept at hard bop and dance grooves, only a season ticket to London stands in his way.