With a trumpet, an electric guitar and the firepower of one of contemporary jazz’s most exhilarating drummers – Brian Blade – in his quintet, Wolfgang Muthspiel has plenty of turn-it-up-to-11 potential on tap. The Austrian guitarist has, however, preferred nuances to bravado since he was first saluted as the European John Scofield in the early 90s. He played Ronnie Scott’s with the music from his new quintet’s Rising Grace album, with Brad Mehldau’s piano role imaginatively taken up by local hero Gwilym Simcock, and bassist Scott Colley substituting for the album’s Larry Grenadier.
The gig was often low-key, but the music’s finespun lyricism kept Sunday’s full house rapt. Triad Song, originally a student chord exercise, showed not a hint of the scholarly as Muthspiel’s and Simcock’s guitar and piano vamp swayed under sighs and soft squeals from Ambrose Akinmusire’s trumpet, and the leader unrolled warmly melodic guitar figures and supple sprints. Boogaloo turned from bluesy bass slurs into a probing rhythmic mix that suggested the mid-60s Miles Davis quintet playing Kurt Weill. Flamenco strumming and glowing chords from Muthspiel’s acoustic 12-string prefaced trumpet trances of pining curved notes and short Miles-like ascents, while funky 60s soul-bop vignettes were fragmented by a contemporary rhythmic restlessness. Simcock constantly engaged with the grinning Blade, his clipped, tantalisingly hanging piano figures pushing the drummer’s scurrying patterns toward whiplashed exclamations.
It was a show of meticulous but always inviting sophistication – familiar and joltingly different at once, like encountering a well-known face in an unexpected place.
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