The multicultural Drum arts centre in Birmingham's Aston district is the perfect venue for Courtney Pine and his mission to bring Brit-jazz out of the shadows and closer to the mainstream. After a blast of Pine's polyglot polyrhythms, audiences can find themselves speaking in new tongues.
The atmosphere inside is feverish and intense. People are standing on chairs, screaming and punching the air. Some are wiggling their hips as if at the Reggae Sunsplash in Jamaica. As Pine stands at the microphone and claps his hands above his head, the floor starts to bounce up and down like the Forth Bridge in an earthquake. A rock star would be delighted with the reaction, though he'd be surprised to find his audience was 95% black.
And I thought this was supposed to be jazz, where the cognoscenti pay homage to the artists' daunting mastery of advanced harmonic theory and chord substitutions. Not that Pine can't play a harmolodic scale with the best of them, but he's been fighting this particular war ever since he was a teenager. For some, "jazz" will always mean Miles Davis, John Coltrane and Charlie Mingus, but that was 40 years ago. Pine has already absorbed the post-war greats of American jazz. Now, he's squaring up to the tougher task of forging a modern - and authentically British - musical idiom.
I'm not convinced by the directions Pine pursues on his new CD, Back in the Day: I don't follow how respectful Joan Armatrading cover versions or extracts from Curtis Mayfield's soul catalogue square with Courtney's aim of developing a language that will reach a younger audience. But Pine seems to find all the justification he needs when he gets in front of a live audience and starts blowing the house apart. His band, dressed in a carnival of patterns and colours, erupts with thunderous expertise and joie de vivre. Cross-rhythms dart and surge.
Pine himself is a walking encyclopedia of advanced saxophony, ripping out fiery Coltrane-esque note clusters and plumbing the tenor's bass register like a musical Jacques Cousteau. At the climax of the set Pine stood, arms outstretched, sustaining an absurdly long note through a feat of circular breathing. For a finale, he played an unaccompanied rendition of Bob Marley's Redemption Song, the audience quickly picking up the chorus. Then, with a symbolic flourish, he whipped off his beret and shook out the braided locks beneath. He may be pure musician, but there's an increasingly confident showman in there, too.
Courtney Pine plays the Fleece and Firkin, Bristol (0117-945 0996), on Thursday, then tours.
