Love Supreme Festival
Glynd, East Sussex

THE modern music festival can descend into an exercise in highly commercial nostalgia for old rockers and their fans. But some old acts are like rare gems that deserve new audiences.

On the Glynde estate in Sussex, hundreds gathered in fevered excitement in a huge tent as Ethiopian jazz legend Mulatu Astatke in a warm, soft voice introduced his next song, Freedom.

With his international band of top-flight musicians (trumpet, sax, cello, conga player, flute, double bass and drummer), what followed lifted that lucky audience into a state of mesmerised transcendence.

Every song — with Mulatu on vibraphone and percussion — reached a place of musical worship, notwithstanding the initially low volume of Mulatu’s vibraphone that sparked a mini-protest as dozens of people pointed upwards to raise the sound levels.

If you were looking for your money’s worth of magical sublimation with a gentle legend, this was it.

For those who fear that a festival with a jazz vibe is aimed strictly at the middle aged, the electrifying performance by London rapper Little Sims on Saturday night was a suitably brilliant riposte, as she performed hits such as last year’s Introvert and Gorilla with blistering energy, producing an ecstatic response from the multigenerational crowd.

There was a satisfying mix of popular main stagers from Sunday night’s gloriously camp send-off from Grace Jones, to Candi Staton and Shalamar, each feeding the appetite for ’80s nostalgia during the summer festival season, not least Glastonbury.

Counting the hundreds of years of performance experience on stage with the Californian funk legends Tower of Power on Sunday afternoon, still led by founder Emilio Castillo, they still delivered the splendidly tight funk licks for which they are famous, like the ever-relevant stomper There is Only So Much Oil in the Ground.

What about the jazz, you say?

It was there on the second and third stages, with a mix of supreme musicianship and crowd-pleasing performances, such as the sublime Afro-fusion of Yussef Dayes, a south London drummer of such virtuoso skill that he almost didn’t need his superb keyboardist Elijah Fox and saxophonist Malik Venna to wow the crowd. 

This event feels laid back and friendly — the crowd spanned the generations from teens to oldies, and was also diverse, in contrast to the all white masses at Worthy Farm last month.

A personal favourite had to be Sunday night headliner Thundercat, dressed in a tremendous kimono-kilt number, he channelled the gods of jazz, funk and disco with a kind of demented, gleeful genius on his bodilicious bass guitar, complemented by his uniquely soaring vocal style.

If Prince, George Clinton, Maurice White and Stevie Wonder had a child, this is he — and the enthused young crowd proved that the new generation can handle this kind of off-the-wall, psychedelic funk-rock as they sing along to the irresistible chorus lines.

If there was a downer, it was the presence on a politics stage of Rafael Behr, Guardian columnist of the five-year confected complaint that Jeremy Corbyn presented the greatest threat to life on earth since the asteroid killed the dinosaurs 65 million years ago, and even gave him a heart attack.

His presence, plus the fact that I was unable to go and heckle him for being a world-class centrist killjoy.