Though frontiers don’t mean much to Damon Brown (his current band features two A-list Americans, a US-based Scot and a German jazz professor from Seoul, while he himself divides his life between the UK, Europe and South Korea), it’s plain from the first snappy, bebop-driven choruses of any Brown band that world music in the culture-splicing sense is not on the agenda. The Manchester-born trumpeter is a classy orthodox jazz musician to the core, whose power lies in the skill with which he develops the 1960s hard-bop style that characterised so much of Blue Note Records’ output. But his talent and dedication regularly attract exciting recruits, who bring an urgent freshness that banishes nostalgia from his performances. The latest is the brilliant former Herbie Hancock drummer Billy Hart, who played with such ferocious eagerness on the quintet’s London visit that his 74 years were hard to credit.
Monday’s show opened with a bebop burn-up (Steve Grossman’s Blues for Somebody Else), and Hart attacking the accents with such venom that even Brown’s sparkling trumpet sound and saxophonist Jesse Davis’s sermonising earthiness were all but eclipsed. Then Hart settled to a sleek cymbal beat and bassist Martin Zenker to an imperious walk as an invitation to the others. Davis’s mix of nimble lines and voicelike slurs, Brown’s flaring, early-jazz directness and pianist Paul Kirby’s pithy lyricism steered the piece through to exuberant back-and-forth exchanges in the finale – with Hart’s choppy, rumbling or splashily metallic contributions different every time. Brown’s original Kit Kat – a graceful blend of taut bop phrasing and lyricism – coaxed a swelling trumpet-sax melody out of a prodding piano hook, and the trumpeter improvised a passage of clear-toned lines over Hart’s now discreetly pattering brushwork. The trumpeter’s imaginative phrasing and rounded sound and Jesse Davis’s blues power beautifully reworked Stars Fell on Alabama, and a gentle Brown original with a 5/4 sway opened over a haunting flutter of cymbals from Hart. Within its own small world, it was a world-class act.
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