Kenny Davern, the acerbic and lugubrious Long Island clarinettist, gently mocked the audience for being the dinosaurs of the jazz circuit. "You like songs ?" he asked incredulously. He then proceeded to deliver the classy mainstreamer's best rejoinder: that lyrical pre-bop improvising on old Broadway show tunes may be historically interesting but can't be played with an edge.
Davern makes you forget both how long ago the material he likes was written and that rhythm sections should not sound as comfortably four-square as this any more. He achieves this with phenomenal technique and mesmerisingly beautiful sound, but also provides an unpredictable and wayward improviser's imagination, which sporadically (and with a canny economy) veers away from familiar tracks. Davern is currently touring the UK (one of last week's gigs was also his 65th birthday celebration) and this week played a short season at Pizza Express with Brian Lemon on piano, Dave Green on bass and Allan Ganley on drums.
If a big part of Davern's deceptively easygoing skill is technical, the conceptual element of it is just as crucial. He builds a solo with a composer's foresight, often opening in the gurgly, vibrato- quivering murmur of the early New Orleans clarinettists. He then intensifies it into wails, yearning high notes, sly slurs. Occasionally he will wind pieces up by sidestepping their neat, top-and-tail resolutions and throwing in a banshee whoop instead, followed by a high trill, ending on a couple of spookily irresolute notes like the sinister whistle from a Morricone score.
The audience requested I Found a New Baby, which rattled past like a speeding train and brought an engaging bustle and clatter from Ganley's drums, and Davern unfolded a gracefully balanced solo of soft, smoky notes on a Hoagy Carmichael ballad that also confirmed the rhythmic sophistication and telling reserve of Brian Lemon as an accompanist.
After such an elegant set of variations, Davern typically signed off with a series of preoccupied murmurs and then, out of the blue, three abrupt yelps, like ships talking in the fog. It was a telling dramatic stroke, at the end of an improvisation that had been developed with all of Davern's rare mix of unflappable patience and communicative warmth - and it reminded his admirers of how eclectic his sound palette is. Brian Lemon was at his most poetically astute on the Carmichael feature, and at his most propulsive on the up-tempo follow-up, Lena. This piece also exercised all of the leader's skills, from hurtling but pristine double-time playing, to long, smeary sounds and the dolorous squall of bagpipes. Davern may be a dinosaur, but he is very much alive.
