The uncharitable might observe that you can tell something about the age and dispositions of the Wigmore Hall's core audience from its gents' lavatories - where most venues exhibit a condom-vending machine, the Wigmore's dispenses Anadin and indigestion tablets. Yet Julian Joseph, one of this country's best jazz pianists, believes that the Wigmore's regulars offer another listenership.
Joseph tests this theory every year with a spring season of chamber-jazz recitals featuring star guests at the Wigmore, and the 2001 version began this week with the pianist's trio and the powerful American tenor saxophonist Gary Thomas.
Joseph sensibly eschews drummers in a venue built for delicate brush strokes, and performed with his sharp and sensitive regular partners Orlando Le Fleming (bass) and Adam Salkeld (guitar). He also seemed in a provocative mood, and his unbroken streams of suggestive counter-melody and occasionally oddly-voiced chords behind his partners forced them to probe for other melodic ways out.
Joseph and Thomas were both in freewheeling form, in conversation with each other and separately. In recent years the pianist's straightahead playing has developed an unquenchable vivacity on swingers. He also delivers rich, spontaneously-generated arrangements behind other soloists on the fly, like the busy, jangling lines chattering away behind Thomas's dark tenor phrasing on Invitation, and the oppositional chording he threw at Le Fleming's solo on You Stepped Out of A Dream.
Thomas is devastating at fast tempos, low-flying lines skimming and skidding across the harmonies, the beginnings of phrases almost venomously spat out. Yet he could reduce all this firepower to dolorous puffs of air and the restrained motif-juggling of a whirring repeated phrase or an unbearably suspended coda on a ballad such as Billy Strayhorn's Chelsea Bridge, responding to Joseph's delicately trickling runs behind him.
Sonny Rollins's Strode Road, with its succession of unison declarations of the minimalist theme by all the players, revealed the Rollins-like grittiness in Thomas's tone.
• Des'ree is the Joseph trio's guest at the Wigmore Hall (020-7935 2141) on Monday.
