Keith Tippett is rarely heard in his homeland these days, even though in the 1970s the British pianist nearly found the kind of crossover status Courtney Pine enjoys today. So seeing this complex, serious, passionate performer in the Jazz Cafe, a venue that normally obliges musicians to play louder than the roar of exuberant socialising, is an event that belongs in the hen's teeth bracket. But with Tippett the roar was for his playing, not in spite of it.
The eclecticism and idiomatic minglings of recent times are seen as unique, but Tippett has said that the same stimulating environment existed 40 years ago when his distinctive muse was forming. "Coltrane, Ayler, Shepp, Penderecki, Stockhausen, Nono, the Beatles and the Rolling Stones" is how he describes the soundscape he grew up with. He might have added Cecil Taylor, a pianist who is still audible in his dense and jagged runs, tightly clustered chords and percussiveness.
Tippett's tour showcases the evolution of all that musical breadth, being a double-header for his powerful free-jazz ensemble Mujician, and his European classical side as represented by Linuckea, the delicate semi-improvising ensemble with a string quartet.
Mujician was a man short on the London leg of the tour - the thunderous bass virtuoso Paul Rogers. But they are such a compatible improvising ensemble that even as a trio - with the sinewy and urgent Tony Levin on drums and the forceful post-Coltraneist Paul Dunmall on saxes - their energies are unabated.
Linuckea played its original 1995 commission by the Kreutzer String Quartet. The project is in the fore- front of those contemporary ensembles now joining improvisors and notation players in genuine interaction rather than simply pitching jazz against non-jazz textures. The string players engage with it with energy and intelligence, audible in the vivacious shimmer of slow passages against Tippett's dramatic chording and crescendos, and the harmonic density of high-register undulations against the pianist's zigzagging runs.
Tippett is a master of contrast: rugged free-jazzy episodes will be abruptly replaced by clattering loops of sound, or lightly insistent figures like running footsteps will be set against dancing string themes, Hungarian cafe music at warp speed. It was something to witness the Jazz Cafe hushed by this.
Keith Tippett plays the Wardrobe, Leeds (0113-383 8800), on Wednesday, then tours.
