Jazz being a music of impulsive departures from the script, album-launching live shows can be more exciting than the recordings they promote. Although this wasn't altogether true on pianist/composer Andrew McCormack's London showcase for his excellent new trio set, First Light, the debit-side was more circumstantial than musical. An ad-hoc band – regular New York drummer Colin Stranahan, astute London bassist Sam Lasserson and, in the second half, the young Finnish trumpeter and composer Verneri Pohjola – had to quickly get its collective head around some complex material, but the principal snag was a table of nonstop talkers whose sustained disrespect for live musicianship is mercifully rare in jazz clubs these days. McCormack's lyrical compositions and incisive swing, along with the emerging cohesiveness of his partners eventually won out.
As a composer, McCormack has an instinct for seductive themes that sound familiar and fresh – as he soon revealed in the catchy postbop sprinter Prospect Park and the graceful Gotham Soul, the latter an ardently lilting theme softly prodded by baroque counterpoint. First Light's title track snapped into boppish overdrive, the pianist's cleanly struck improv lines and driving swing powered with intensifying polyrhythmic ferocity by the excellent Stranahan.
Verneri Pohjola, an impressive newcomer, equally well disposed towards lithe Miles Davis-esque runs and the flutelike vapours of Arve Henriksen, then joined the trio for the second set. McCormack's opener evoked the spacey, porous feel (expressed in melancholy brass calls and billowing piano murmurs) of an ECM session, and Pohjola neatly negotiated the jiglike skip of the ensuing Junket. The trumpeter was earthily powerful on his own composition, an unnamed folk melody, and quietly refined in a gleaming top register on the brooding song Luxor.
