The names of active British jazz pianists with reputations for making a difference are unlikely to trip off most people’s tongues, but insiders might well count off Gwilym Simcock, Kit Downes, Liam Noble, Nikki Iles, Alexander Hawkins, Julian Joseph or Elliot Galvin before they’d get to Barry Green. Yet Green, who’s a busy player, record label proprietor and a piano prof at the Guildhall school, is a musician of discreet class with a distinctively artful appetite for the slow burn, widely appreciated by his fellow performers. Hence the presence of saxophonist Chris Cheek and drummer Gerald Cleaver, two much admired originals from the New York scene, on Green’s latest album and current European tour.
Cheek worked for years with the late drummer and composer Paul Motian, and the conversational methods Motian encouraged were often audible in the rhythmic flexibility of Cheek and Cleaver together, and the left-field lyricism of all three on the fly.
Green’s dreamily free-floating title track from the trio’s Great News album established the night’s prevailing character – a mix of Cheek’s deep, warbly tenor sax sound and unorthodox ideas, Cleaver’s implying of disguised grooves, and Green’s mobile countermelodies, the latter an unobtrusively stabilising undertow in the absence of a bass.
Motian’s The Owl of Cranston opened on quiet owl hoots from Cheek against Cleaver’s hi-hat hisses and soft bass-drum booms, and occasionally strayed into eerie sustained-note exhalations over Green’s logical, steadily building lines. The late Richie Powell’s Gertrude’s Bounce was delightfully mercurial, discreetly eccentric bebop, while Green’s rather unfairly titled romantic ballad Stubblerash and tightly crafted Probably Not explored his fondness for softly struck left-hand overtures and astutely paced enrichment.
A headlong solo piano account of the late John Taylor’s rhythm-switching Clapperclowe was a technical marvel, and the band brought cheers from the house for their effortless segue from a spooky Leslie Bricusse ballad from Willy Wonka to a hooting knees-up on Ornette Coleman’s Happy House. It was the kind of jazz gig that makes purists and passersby smile the same smile.
• Barry Green, Chris Cheek and Gerald Cleaver play Scarborough international jazz festival on 27 September.
