Amazing how fast you can forget the double-bass player is wearing a mouse's head. Maybe it's to do with the compelling magnitude of the instrument itself. Or maybe, in the case of the young British bassist Andy Hamill (who happened to have found a pantomime mouse-head in the Bull's props room and decided to get the feel of it for a tune or two), it's because the effortlessly silky swing of his softly persuasive playing makes everything but the music fade into the background.
Hamill is a quarter of the excellent UK saxophonist/ composer Theo Travis's band, which is currently on a long national tour to promote its new CD Heart of the Sun. Anyone who has already heard that imaginative album might attend the live shows hoping to hear Palle Mikkelborg's slinky electronic trumpet, or the evocative synths draped behind Travis's subtle sax and flute playing. The travelling band, however, is a more stripped-down affair, and more equally mixes the leader's penchant for thoughtfully reworked standards with the new disc's ruminative north-European jazz.
On Sunday, Travis's quartet delivered an absorbing repertoire of strong themes peppered with sharp and characterful soloing. The leader's sound on tenor saxophone is a powerfully personal blend of lyrical swing-sax inflections and postbop energy (at times distantly echoing Andy Sheppard), fitfully mingled with unexpected soul-jazz interventions, such as the glimpses of Ronnie Laws's broad sound that showed up in an uptempo Just One of Those Things. Lulworth Night, a typical piece of smoke-curling Travis rumination, emphasised the saxophonist's originality of melodic line. His control of nuance and inflection - particularly on a single held note - brought constantly changing colours to his slow original That Old Smile.
A fast flute piece with a dancing, boppish theme by Tubby Hayes revealed that Travis can make an instrument that frequently sounds vaporous in a jazz context sound crisp and purposeful. Pianist Phil Peskett delivered some gritty variations on the fierce postbopper The Crow Road, and a fine drummer, Marc Parnell, developed its chattery percussive undercurrents into a remarkable solo of staggered phrasing, bumpy arrhythmic patterns and figures like showers of hailstones. All the signs are that Travis continues to move onward and upward.
• Theo Travis is at the London Hotel, Teignmouth (01626 879024), tomorrow, then tours.
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31.08.2001: Theo Travis
