Mose Allison said he didn't mind being told he was hitting 70 as long as 70 didn't hit back, and the same almost certainly goes for the Syracuse-born singer Mark Murphy, who passed that milestone in March. Murphy has been successfully disguising himself as a middle-aged playboy for years.
Murphy is a master of all kinds of disguises. He can sell a conservative audience the idea that he is a Sinatra-like crooner, and then make the listeners spill their drinks by careering off into frantic vocal improvisations that get close to John Coltrane sax lines. At Pizza on the Park, in improvisatory freefall over a flat-out bebop theme, he suddenly muddled the lyrics and skidded off the melody, complained that the right side and the left side of his brain weren't relating, then whirled back into the tune again. Even Murphy's mistakes are more interesting than most postbop technicians' faultless expositions.
The singer launched straight into a tortuous uptempo favourite, Freddie Hubbard's Red Clay - an intricate melody that was quickly transformed into a slew of startled yelps as if he has opened the fridge to find a head in it. I Guess I'll Hang My Tears Out To Dry, by contrast, featured Murphy the astonishingly youthful-sounding romantic, the held notes as knowingly graceful as Sinatra's. Oliver Nelson's Stolen Moments, a lazily swinging theme, was ripped to shreds and reassembled, and the singer confirmed his openness as an ensemble player with the exquisitely spaced falsetto hoots he spliced into contributions from Andy Hamill's high-register bass-playing and Mark Fletcher's drumming. The ballad original I Didn't Know You Then was exquisite, and though a fast Jobim adventure tested Murphy's vocal athleticism beyond breaking point, it took little away from this unique artist's vivacity. He called Larry's Room at the Pizza on The Park "one of the penultimate rooms for vocal improvising". Did he mean the best you could get on this planet before launching a new career in the jazz clubs of the afterlife? There won't be anything cosy about eternity if he's right.
· At the Royal Northern College of Music, Manchester, tonight. Box office: 0161-907 5278.
