International acclaim for the UK's jazz musicians hasn't occurred for a long time - the watershed was probably when John McLaughlin and Dave Holland were swept to the US by Miles Davis in the late 60s, but in the earlier postwar years a local Charlie Parker could have emerged and hardly anyone outside Soho would have noticed.
The formidable pianist Stan Tracey and the Scottish saxophonist Bobby Wellins - together again over the weekend in a now rare collaboration - were briefly exceptions, when the tone-poem Starless and Bible Black on Tracey's 1964 Under Milk Wood suite was recognised as world-class atmospheric jazz.
Both Wellins and Tracey can make as much with very little out of disguised mid-tempo blues as anybody in the business. The saxophonist will edge his way into it as if descending a staircase in the dark, with hesitant, anxious hoots and fragmentary phrases, while Tracey fitfully nudges him with a chord, as if extending a hand to his elbow. Then Wellins gathers momentum with sly, semi-apologetic squirts of sound, briefly sunny bursts of swing as if the light has come on and gone off again, then grumpy mutters as if steadying himself for the next descent.
Wellins's method is so understated and patiently paced that some sections of a noisy audience seemed barely aware when he started and finished. Tracey's more rugged mix of hard-struck chords and hopping runs cut more sharply through, and his trio members support him with immense empathy.
Bassist Andy Cleyndert achieved this with elegant phrasing and penetrative sound, while drummer Clark Tracey called on an assortment of ringing cymbal patterns, sudden train-rhythm hi-hat figures abruptly unleashed by his father out of clunky rockfalls of chords.
The younger Tracey's showcase was an urgent mallets solo on Comme d'Habitude (a reworking of My Way), and Bobby Wellins and Tracey senior most affectingly revisited old haunts on Angel Eyes, a delicate tapestry of buoyant chords and floating, smoky long notes. Without the rhythm section to lean his reflections on, Wellins sounded again like the tenor-sax poet of old.
