The opening night of Robert Wyatt's Meltdown 2001 endorsed the helmsman's desire for "a fresh look at the supposedly familiar and a search for meaning in unexpected places".
As far as the familiar goes, the occasional duo partnership of British multi-reed player John Surman and the American drummer Jack DeJohnette goes back 20 fruitful years. For London Brass, the classical wind ensemble, familiarity lay in the sonorous and elegantly-arranged 17th- century plainsong feature they played early in the show.
But there familiarity ended, and the gig was unquestionably a fresh look at the possibilities of putting these quite different persuasions together. DeJohnette's composition Suite For a Better World came in the first half, and Surman's extended feature That's Right (inspired by the 1948 United Nations Human Rights declaration - there was a generally uplifting tone to the proceedings all night) in the second. The latter was a Radio 3 commission for last year's Norwich festival. The two suites followed London Brass's eclectic display of 17th- century music and trombonist Richard Edwards's riffy, contrapuntal horn feature You Asked For It.
Suite For a Better World began as a typically fluid and mutually-attentive dialogue between Surman and DeJohnette. The latter flicked cymbal-rims, playing fragmentary but highly melodic scampers of sound across the kit. Surman ducked and dived around him, first on bass clarinet and then on baritone sax. After an uptempo, Flight-of-the-Bumble-Bee episode ending in a high baritone squall, the piece settled into a drum tattoo under pulsating brass chords. It was like a passage of Gil Evans's arrangement of Sketches of Spain - into which trumpeter John Barclay also threaded a subtle and gracefully understated solo.
DeJohnette's piece established absorbing interaction between the two principal improvisors against the luxurious brass backdrop, even if its compositional materials didn't raise many eyebrows. Surman's extended piece, That's Right, was more structurally ambitious, beginning with a flurry of intricate, glittering brass lines into which the saxophonist brought a typically warm and folksy opening melody.
The show's centrepiece took in a passage of free improvising (with a spontaneous-sounding French horn part shadowing it), more shapely ensemble phases, some Rollins-like calypso featuring Surman's forceful baritone and a generally deft handling of the multi-cultural implications of the music's theme. All in all, a fitting overture for the leftfield jazz fan Wyatt's edition of Meltdown.
