This great 56-year-old French double-bassist has the visage of a bearded buddha and a CV that includes partnerships with everyone from the late Dexter Gordon to Don Cherry and Louis Sclavis. Texier believes that a jazz bassist needs to soak up the music's entire 100-year history, from New Orleans to free improv. Then, having absorbed all those clamouring voices, evolve a sound and a style within it that's uniquely their own. And with one of the longest and most illustrious careers in European jazz, that's exactly what he's been doing.
For a three-night mini-season, he is joined by watchful, responsive drummer Tony Rabeson and his son Sébastien on reeds. Tonight's show was split between the north African-influenced numbers on his latest CD Remparts d'Argile (Texier grew up in the north African districts of Paris in the 1950s) and a selection of modern originals, operating in ensemble territory that had echoes of Ornette Coleman.
Remparts d'Argile - one of the standout jazz discs of 2001, released here in February - is Texier's musical response to an originally scoreless and virtually dialogue-free 1970 movie about life in a Berber village, made 30 years ago by his friend Jean-Louis Bertucelli. An extraordinary exploration of the sonic potential of an acoustic jazz trio, the music simmers with minimalist bass-clarinet laments over heaving double-bass drones. Military tattoos dissolve into quicksilver free-jazz exchanges, and freebop alto-sax lines stretch elegant lyricism further and further into abstraction.
But the Texier Trio need no guiding narrative to sound so exuberantly purposeful. The effect is built into Texier's varied, counter-melodic playing (he was originally a pianist) and the one-touch understanding between the members. In his urgent brushwork and tonal variety Rabeson recalls the late British drummer John Stevens, and constantly eases the trio between whooping free-jazz charges and softly loping swing. The latter is underpinned by Texier's pin-sharp intonation and indolently plucked, behind-the-beat walking pulse. Sebastien Texier's mercurial alto sax and clarinet were incandescent in the Ornettish Mr Freeman, and coaxingly lyrical in the folk-dance lilt of the Rabeson original Cap Esperance, over Texier's distant, Charlie Haden-ish, low-register roar.
No fusion, no backbeats, no standards - but once you're there, it certainly doesn't seem as if there's anything missing.
• Last performance tonight. Box office: 020-7439 8722.
