The 37-year-old Florida pianist Marcus Roberts has an elegant plasticity of line and fragility of articulation that makes him one of the circuit's most gifted keyboard virtuosi. He divides listeners, however, because he's a Marsalis-school classicist who devotes his talents to polishing jazz music's family silver. At the Queen Elizabeth Hall, his trio (with, appropriately, Jason Marsalis on drums and Roland Guerin on bass) devoted the set to the pianist's Duke Ellington suite, written for last year's Centennial.
The performance by the Americans was preceded by British trumpeter Byron Wallen's Indigo, an intense, intricate freebop quartet that played the kind of rugged, improv-driven jazz that the fastidious Roberts and his cohorts wouldn't touch. Wallen has also developed a talent for composition and an appetite for free-jazz methods that were developed before he was born and are generally out of favour with his fusion-oriented generation.
In a densely textured and only occasionally over-solemn set, Wallen brought to mind a fusion of the fragmentary lyricism of late-period Miles Davis and the spiky euphoria of Don Cherry. His contrapuntal improvising with sax man Tony Kofi brought the best from melodies of deceptive innocence (at times they suggested an early music ensemble playing jazz licks), and young drummer Tom Skinner confirmed all the immense polyrhythmic gifts he has been hinting at since his mid-teens.
Roberts's group began In Honour of Duke with soft, airy arpeggios intensifying and fading; the low volume drew attention to the pianist's phrasing, which was personal and original even on the well-travelled idiomatic roads. The first uptempo episode climaxed in a swell of thunderous chords, then shifted into a Roberts favourite, the chiming, jangling stride-piano swinger. Without cloning Ellington's themes directly, he caught the Duke's headlong jubilation at the keyboard, as well as ingeniously sketching in the line between Ellington and Thelonious Monk.
Roland Guerin's slap-bass episodes sounded exhilarating and purposeful, and the clear, precise Jason Marsalis was the ideal drummer for this meticulous music-making. Marsalis explores a very wide range of drum sounds but keeps them clear and distinct, reserving particular tonalities for specific episodes of the music. At times he sounded as if he was playing wood-blocks, sometimes he sustained the beat with snare-accents in one hand and a tambourine in the other, and in intense moments he often engagingly suggested the sound of a giant knitting.
As happened with this trio at Ronnie Scott's last year, the old studiousness is being replaced by an infectious sense of pleasure shared. It's not cutting-edge, but it's not dusty retro either.
