Matteo Mancuso Turns Islington Assembly Hall Into a Jazz-Fusion Crime Scene
- Alan Bryce
- 11 minutes ago
- 4 min read
Islington Assembly Hall – 14th May 2026
IMAGES / WORDS ALAN BRYCE
You don’t expect to be personally attacked by a guitar on a Thursday night in Islington, but there we were, 14 May 2026, filing into the Assembly Hall like lambs wandering into what would turn out to be a very bluesy slaughterhouse.
I arrived feeling reasonably confident about my understanding of music. That lasted about ten minutes.
Because first up: Jesse Garwood.
And here’s the twist, I’d just seen him a week earlier at the 100 Club on the 8th, opening for Laura Cox, in that gloriously grimy temple of sweat and spilled lager where everything sounds a little bit like it might fall apart at any moment. There, he had the full band: young, loud, charging at the blues like it owed them money. It was all amps, swagger, and “let’s see how far we can push this before someone complains.”
So when he walked out alone at Islington with an acoustic, I had a brief, irrational thought: Oh no, he’s been downsized.
But no. This was deliberate. This was a man choosing to fight with his bare hands.
He walked out, gave a quick nod that might have been a greeting or might have just been him getting comfortable, and started playing, quietly at first, fingerstyle lines that felt almost too delicate for a room that size. You could feel the audience recalibrating in real time. Conversations died. Drinks paused mid-air. Someone somewhere coughed once and then thought better of it.
It was intimate in a way that good support slots rarely are. No theatrics, no grandstanding, just clarity. You could hear the difference between this and the 100 Club set in your bones. Same guitarist, but the volume dialled down meant everything else had to come forward: phrasing, timing, little flickers of personality in the spaces between notes.
And he held the room. Properly held it. Which is impressive, because you could sense the audience buzzing with anticipation for what was coming next. The collective, slightly impatient energy of people who know a guitar prodigy is about to step onstage and rearrange their DNA.
Then Matteo Mancuso did exactly that.
He walked on with Riccardo Oliva and Gianluca Pellerito. No big entrance, a bit of smoke, some flashy lights and three guys who looked suspiciously normal for people about to dismantle the known laws of physics.
And the moment they started playing, it was clear, we were all wildly underprepared.
Mancuso’s guitar tone is one thing on record, but live it’s like someone took every articulate, beautifully phrased solo you’ve ever heard and injected it directly into the bloodstream. And of course, no plectrum. Just fingers. Because apparently, he likes to make life difficult for the rest of the known guitar-playing population.
They moved through a set that included pieces like “Silkroad,” “Spain,” and “The Great Wall”, though at a certain point trying to remember song titles feels like trying to catalogue lightning. Everything blurred into this continuous, absurdly tight flow.
Now, in lesser hands, this kind of virtuosity turns into a kind of musical spreadsheet, impressive but emotionally unavailable. Not here.
Oliva on bass was a menace in the best possible way. Slipping in lines that felt like they were trying to trip Mancuso up, poking at the harmony, refusing to sit quietly in the background like a well-behaved bassist. He’d lock in, then suddenly veer sideways into something melodic and cheeky, like he’d spotted a gap and couldn’t resist.
Pellerito on drums, meanwhile, seemed to exist in some parallel rhythmic dimension. I’m certain he was playing three different grooves at once and just hoping we wouldn’t notice. (We noticed.) His playing had that rare quality where every hit feels both perfectly placed and slightly dangerous, like he might at any moment decide to abandon gravity altogether.
And Mancuso? Mancuso just floated over it all, occasionally diving in to remind everyone that he is, in fact, leading this particular expedition into madness.
There was a moment during “Spain”—and I swear this is true—where he played a run so clean, so fast, so utterly unnecessary (in the best way), that the audience didn’t cheer. They laughed. That sort of stunned, delighted laughter that happens when your brain throws up its hands and says, “Right, I’m out. You deal with this.”
What kept it human, though, was the feel. For all the jaw-dropping technique, there was groove. Funk in the bones. You could nod your head to it, even if you had absolutely no idea what time signature you were nodding in. Mancuso himself barely spoke, just the occasional quiet thank you, like someone slightly embarrassed by the chaos he was unleashing. It made the music feel even more focused, like everything extraneous had been stripped away.
And then the first song of the encore: “The Chicken.” Of course. Because when you’ve spent over an hour bending reality, why not end by absolutely cooking it?
By that point the audience was fully converted, no resistance left, just grins, disbelief, and the occasional person staring at their hands as if reconsidering all their life choices regarding musical ability.
Walking out afterwards, I kept thinking about the arc of the night. Garwood, a week removed from a full-band blues assault at the 100 Club, choosing to open solo, acoustic, pulling the room inward.
Mancuso and his band then taking that stillness and detonating it in technicolour.
It was almost philosophical, if you wanted to get pretentious about it (and after a show like that, you sort of do whether you mean to or not): one act proving you can hold a room with almost nothing, the other proving what happens when you throw absolutely everything at it - and still somehow stay musical, playful, alive.
Or, to put it less politely:
One guy whispered to you very convincingly.
The next three came along and rewired your nervous system.
And honestly, both approaches felt entirely correct.
SETLIST
Solar Wind
Samba Party
The Great Wall (influenced by Havona originally by Weather Report)
Fire and Harmony
Silkroad
Cause We’ve Ended as Lovers (Syreeta cover)
Spain (Chick Corea cover)
L.A. Blues One
Osla Feliz
In The Morning Light
Black Centurion
ENCORE
The Chicken (Jaco Pastorius cover)
Drop D
FOLLOW LAURA COX