When the classic-jazz archaeology movement got going in the 80s, droves of dewy teenagers started practising swing-sax licks. The upswing produced a lot of hopefuls who have been and gone, and a good many big talents who are cherishing and transforming the music too. But what you mostly don't get, is the authentic, in-your-face, idiosyncratic live sound of jazz musicians who matured in a time and place a very long way away, and who really do sound different to all their younger disciples.
That's the enduring appeal of the Roots band, that rugged four-sax ensemble of beefy swingers who have devoted themselves for most of the past decade to preserving as authentic-sounding a version of jazz saxophone history as is technically and humanly possible today. And even though Monday night's opening performance on their current Ronnie Scott's season had the former Max Roach tenorist Odean Pope substituted for Chico Freeman (the player who usually represents the Coltrane legacy) and Britain's Peter King deputising for altoist Arthur Blythe, the full force of the band's imposing presence asserted.
The Roots repertory spans 30s swing up to pre-free John Coltrane. They played the big band classic Lester Leaps In; the urbane veteran Benny Golson's slippery phrasing and gurgly, dolorous sound paid appropriate tribute to Lester Young's utterly personal signature not by mimicking it, but by unfurling his own.
On an original dedicated to the clamour of a Saturday night in Harlem, the whole band took on the dark, gospelly fervour of a Charles Mingus group, with pianist Kirk Lightsey's piano ringing through like a firebell. Nathan Davis, a broad-beamed man with a sax sound like stampeding cattle and an oblique manner of phrasing, raised the roof on this feature, the climax a wail of manic warbles and trills.
Peter King, the member of the line-up with the closest hook to Charlie Parker's methods, hurled in several headlong alto solos with the aplomb of a permanent member rather than a late substitute. The lazily muscular purr of the horns when playing an ensemble part behind a soloist makes Roots sound a much bigger outfit than it is. Not history in the making, but history pretty close to the way it was made.
• Until Saturday. Box office: 0171-439 0747.
