Like music-lovers of all stripes, jazz listeners dream of moments when performers take them to unimagined worlds, but they also find an almost guilty pleasure in the earthbound appeal of virtuosity. The former happens when craft recedes and the music seems to be happening by itself, the latter, when virtuosos make the difficult look effortless. It’s rare for both to happen at the same jazz gig.
But Polish trumpeter Tomasz Stańko managed the first, and irrepressible Italian pianist Stefano Bollani and Brazilian bandolim maestro Hamilton de Holanda the second at the London jazz festival.
Bollani and de Holanda began with a breathless dance, in which the Brazilian’s long lines on his 10-stringed instrument sang like Django Reinhardt’s guitar, while Bollani splashed free-jazz chords and rattled the piano’s woodwork. Bollani’s pumping stride-piano swing evoked a kind of Latin-jazz Fats Waller sound, and the pair’s dazzling empathy was such a hit that their run of encores seemed like a new show.
Stańko’s New York Quartet, moving on with new material after the superb Wisława album last year, created a contrasting soundworld of shadowy slow themes, crystal-clear brass flights and layered percussion – the latter not only from drummer Gerald Cleaver, but also from Cuban pianist David Virelles. Stańko’s patiently weighted lines and a romantic, melancholy tone darkened the free-grooving, mid-60s Miles Davis methods. His trumpet sound on ballads often had the low purr of a flugelhorn, and there were some transfixing unaccompanied passages from Virelles, whose solos were frequently full of dense trills and thundering chords that evoked an African drum ensemble. But Virelles played like a bebopper on a straight-swinging encore, while the polymathic Stańko showed just how deep his jazz roots go.
• The EFG London jazz festival continues until 23 November. Details: EFG London jazz festival.
