For a man with such a laid-back presence he makes Clint Eastwood look like Graham Norton, Andy Sheppard certainly keeps on demonstrating the benefits of what seems to be camouflaged hard work. Though the saxophonist is one of the most internationally celebrated British jazz performers to have appeared in the past 20 years, fame has not distracted or fatigued Sheppard, and he has kept evolving musically. Moreover, since the mid 1990s he has refined a mix of free-jazz bellicosity, elegant linear lyricism and Jan Garbarek-inspired concern for delicate nuance that has made his playing more expressive now than at any time in his career.
Sheppard played four shows on two nights at the Pizza Express at the weekend, in the company of an old sidekick, the guitarist John Parricelli. Given Sheppard's move toward funkier grooves and cut-and-paste technical effects on his largely unaccompanied last album, it might have seemed as if such an intimate setting would be an ideal showcase for that material. But once again, Sheppard made a different move. Over a long set on Saturday, he and Parricelli did touch on some of the electronic effects of Sheppard's recent output, perhaps for variety's sake, but the music was driven by improvisation and full of quirky turns.
The saxophonist's composing has become increasingly influenced by song lately, rather than the byzantine intricacies of jazz melody, and the two musicians began with an airy Jobim dance, tremulous soprano-sax sounds edging up to the melody and shyly recoiling from it over the whisper of the guitar chords. Sheppard then kicked in a sonorous, echo-generating effect on the soprano on a faster theme that developed into impulsive, flickering double-time. Parricelli's ethereal, Latin-influenced original Alba gave way to a Sheppard favourite, Looking for Ornette, a tenor-sax blast that sounded on this outing like a combination of free-jazz, Celtic music and thumping funk.
Out of a slow, bluesy guitar introduction came Charles Mingus's Goodbye Pork Pie Hat, Sheppard hinting at David Sanborn's soul-phrasing in a long tenor solo that became an explosive highlight of the show. A circular breathing soprano reverie, a sidestep into a samba and a punchy John Scofield fusion charge wound up what sounded distinctly like the prototype of a Sheppard album to come.
