The music of Boston-born organist Larry Goldings sparkles with quick-witted changes, but he doesn’t entirely trust change in its wider aspects. An engaging fortysomething with an air of mock bafflement at the 21st century, Goldings has kept his trio with guitarist Peter Bernstein and drummer Bill Stewart going for almost 25 years, mixing Broadway songs with canny originals, dedications to his one-time employer Jim Hall, and the avoidance of every kind of bolt-on modernity. But he never sounds dated or bland, and the proof lies in the way audience murmurings in a busy room gradually fell to silence as his trio’s quiet authority took over.
Goldings’ Subtle Digs opened the show (the music of John Scofield, another Goldings sidekick, seemed present in its shrewd pacing and funkiness), and the trio’s genuflection to Jim Hall this time took the form of Hall’s waltzing arrangement of Richard Rodgers’ With a Song in My Heart – with Bernstein daintily stating the theme, and Goldings taking it on a snaking journey over Stewart’s dancing brushwork. Goldings’ Mr Meagles (from last year’s Ramshackle Serenade) was a deceptively slight melody on a Latin groove, that Bernstein stretched in bluesy directions and Goldings in enigmatic ones, ending up with the spooky hoot of the late Larry Young’s Hammond sound in the coda. Bernstein played the JJ Johnson ballad Lament as a lyrical chordal improvisation (the acoustic tone of his rare Zeidler guitar added a multi-layered magic), and the choppily swinging, Wes Montgomery-like Shepherd’s Pie spurred Bill Stewart into a percussion turmoil like a high-speed drive on a mountain road. He always knew where he was headed, even as the wheels skimmed the edge, which is the story of the Larry Goldings Trio in a nutshell.
• On 21 January. Box office: 0117-922 0117. Venue: The Lantern, Colston Hall, Bristol. On 22 January. Box office: 07751 466 034. Venue: Watermill Jazz, Dorking.
