With his torrential mane, lean frame and passionately quivering limbs, the Kansas-born altoist Bobby Watson looks like a thoroughbred steeplechaser. Appropriately, his mix of Charlie Parker's headlong lyricism, Johnny Hodges' beseeching romantic blandishments and Stevie Wonder's funkiness is all about leaping the obstacles of life.
Watson has been coming here since the late 70s, when he was musical director of a forceful line-up of Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers. He may be more grizzled and less mercurially quick than he was when his remarkable fluency first struck the jazz world, but his sound is magnificent. An R&B player's stomping drive consistently underpins the intricacies of his improvisations.
For his week in London, Watson is also in very congenial company. Bassist Curtis Lundy and drummer Victor Lewis are long-time partners, and in John Hicks Watson has a pianist of much the same alacrity of thought and execution as himself.
Watson attractively spliced the abstract and the inviting from the start. The initially Coltrane-inspired River Jordan, an intense lament over a two-chord piano vamp, turned out to have something close to a fusion groove as its middle section.
Lundy's seamlessly murmuring bassline and Lewis's bumpy-road drumming lifted Watson into spaces he filled with double-time soliloquies and bluesy phrasing. The unaccompanied circular-breathing display that then followed showcased all the saxophonist's formidable technique.
Watson has an explosive stockpile of pyrotechnical effects always close to ignition, but he is also a master of texture. He will impart a rich variety of tone colours to a single repeated warbling sound, or recycle a shapely phrase with barely perceptible shifts of nuance. On Curtis Lundy's ballad Nobody Needs to Know, his swoony Johnny Hodges-style sigh seemed to fill the whole room.
The band was as attentively reflective on this piece as it had been unwaveringly fearless on its demanding predecessors. Here were individual and collective skills in a fine balance.
Bobby Watson's group is playing at Ronnie Scott's until Saturday. Box office: 020-7439 0747.
