Gareth Lockrane Quintet
(Ladbroke Corridor. 12 April 2024. Assessment by Jake Werth)

Who dares say sure to taking part in in Gareth Lockrane’s band? Simply to be requested might be one of many largest compliments {that a} musician can obtain in British jazz. Solely our perfect can bodily reproduce Lockrane’s monstrous repertoire stay, and fortunately, on Friday evening at Ladbroke Corridor, Nadim Teimoori (tenor sax), Jim Watson (piano), Freddie Jensen (bass) and Steve Brown (drums) had accepted this fearsome problem.

At first, the flautist’s compositional choices seem like paradoxically accessible but musically dense, melodically and harmonically blistering hard-bop roasts, soulful blues grooves that would go away anybody with a neck damage, and aching, cinematic ballads that sit in their very own class of compositional brilliance. And but there’s a lot extra to his tunes, musically talking, than these glib summaries can convey. There’s a driving, stressed, forward-motion dwelling in every passage of each piece, together with these at slower tempos. This displays Gareth the person – he’s famend for his round the clock, boundless vitality and infectious enthusiasm for the music. Nothing is wasted. Nothing is static. His compositions mirror his improvisations – they’re direct, concise, punchy statements of reality relatively than opinion. There’s completely nothing equivocating or insecure about them, and but they’re under no circumstances closed-minded or burdened with hackneyed cliché – use of conference is even handed, serving an general sense of originality, relatively than undermining it. Each hook, each elegant, subterraneous countermelody, each menacing vamp, helps the telling of a transparent and convincing story, about which Lockrane, as composer, appears sure.

This distinguished sense of plot is becoming, given Lockrane’s background in movie composition, however maybe the extent to which it underpins the breadth of his compositional attraction is modest. He attracts in his viewers with one thing solely the best composers can create and maintain all through a bit – narrative. The long-form ballad ‘We’ll By no means Meet Once more’ conveys conflicting heartbreak, craving, bliss, hope and loss, by an extremely wealthy harmonic palette that makes significant use of contrasts between darkish, melodic-minor-derived tonal centres, and satisfying sus chords that yield to shiny, euphoric lydian resolutions.

However as theoretically admirable as his work is, that’s clearly not what it’s about. There may be honesty, humility and dedication written throughout a gritty, bluesy waltz like ‘Put The Cat Out’. Equally, tonight’s world premiere of ‘Propulsion’, a blindingly quick, complicated and definitely-terrifying-to-perform up-tempo swinger, sums up Gareth’s formidable, incessant musicianship. He admits he has tweaked the brand new tune’s contents on the morning of the gig. That’s him – all the time modifying, by no means absolutely happy, perfecting decades-old tunes, while frequently producing recent materials. Certainly one of Lockrane’s long-time collaborators and friends, the inimitable jazz guitarist Phil Robson, as soon as expressed to me his admiration for the ‘assault’ Gareth achieves on the form of the flute be aware. It’s pointed, angular, piercing, it could reduce by noise or give the listener a jolt. The identical is true of his straight-talking, no-nonsense compositions, which aren’t simply refreshing, their readability is what these deeply unsure instances want.

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