For admirers of improvisation who don't spend every minute fretting over when the tune is going to start, free jazz is an endlessly fascinating phenomenon for its establishing of musical shapes peculiar to the occasion, the place and the players.
The two disgruntled blokes demanding their money back in the early stages of this gig from percussionist Eddie Prevost would not have agreed. Over the past 30 years a shocked response from a small proportion of the audience has always been standard at total-improv gigs. In other words, the neoclassical movement in jazz, with its adulation of tunes, straight swing and standard repertoire, has not made the circumstances for spontaneous music-making any worse. Instead, the indications are that a new audience is emerging from the further shores of contemporary classical music, experimental electronics, sampling and decks-playing.
Prevost, one of the most skilful and musical of European free-improvising drummers, was playing this rare gig with the formidable double-bassist John Edwards. Three student musicians - Nathaniel Catchpole on tenor, Jamie Coleman on trumpet, and Alex James on piano in the second half - completed the line-up. Coleman is a Leeds jazz course graduate, Catchpole a former Berklee student. On this gig, though, they were inexperienced improvisers. They initially tucked in behind Prevost's fluttering snare patterns and feathery cymbal work, or leaned against Edwards's rich low notes and darting runs, and contented themselves with fragments of Evan Parkerish split-notes, or hesitant, sputtering trumpet figures. It felt like a virtuoso display by a brilliant improv rhythm section, with a scattering of textural effects overlaying it.
In the second set, however, resourceful pianist James's under-the-lid pluckings and mercurially busy arpeggios seemed to provide a connective tissue that allowed Prevost and Edwards to fall back, and Catchpole and Coleman to play longer lines in closer harmony with each other. The music swelled in confidence, and sounded in patches like a meeting of hearts and minds. The future of Prevost's young proteges will be interesting to follow, particularly James's.
