Saxophonist Iain Ballamy, along with a new quartet (Gareth Williams on piano, Orlando LeFleming on bass and Martin France on drums), premiered his new work, Anorak, this week. He announced that all the pieces had an Anorak name and a real name, but, as always with Ballamy, the music expressed a different resonance to the throwaway presentation.
Despite the surreal and deconstructive approach he has often shared with his old partner Django Bates, and his bold minglings of free-improvisation, trip-hop, and spacey Euro-jazz, Ballamy has a profound affection for the song-forms on which jazz has travelled for decades.
But this was no canter through the standards book. His delicate control of tone and subtle improvisation were heard at their most sophisticated here, with a repertoire devoted to the jazz solo rather than to the collective soundscape-painting of recent Ballamy projects. The music entwined the dominant strands of the leader's special character as a composer and player.
A Loose Tubes feel, that fondness for vaudevillian, circus-like rhythms, surfaced in the fast, mixed-tempo opener, Ballamy's fluid soprano solo after the circuitous theme being echoed and developed by Williams, an excellent, McCoy Tyner-like pianist.
Williams then, somewhat reluctantly, revealed an unexpectedly light and lyrical vocal talent in singing Shakespeare's lines to Come Away Death, with Ballamy on tenor sax spinning smoky counter-melodies around him. The saxophonist developed his reflections on these pieces into a warm-toned and eloquent tenor solo with passing Spanish harmonies, the sound contrasting tellingly with Williams's voice.
A curling postbop melody and occasional punchy riffs characterised The Latin Number (the non-Anorak title was Not in the Mood); the ballad Lavender Eyes distilled Ballamy's ability to cherish the implications of the smallest sound. The jazzy drive of Re-Cedar, catching the flavour of a hard-bop band without mimicking one, confirmed how much Ballamy's early inspirations still matter to him.
· At the Cheltenham festival (01242 227979) tomorrow.
