The late Joe Pass, sometime accompanist to Ella Fitzgerald, had a disconcerting tale about playing jazz guitar without an accompaniment. Pass would sit down, take his watch off and put it in front of him, dive deep into the opening piece and play everything he knew and then some. Then he would look at his watch while the audience was applauding - and find that only a couple of minutes had gone by, with more than an hour to go. These thoughts must have flitted through the mind of British guitarist Martin Taylor from time to time during his weekend sets at Soho's Pizza Express: 90-minute concerts with nothing to fall back on but his guitar, three decades' worth of practice and an unaffectedly engaging personality.
From the jazzers' point of view, Taylor is back where he belongs. Recently he has spent a good deal of time exploring the more rock, funk and country-angled aspects of guitar playing in a somewhat smooth-jazzy manner. But his current tour to launch a new CD (Solo, on the p3 label) finds Taylor playing a lot of swing and standards, and, as usual, getting guitar buffs from every genre craning their necks to try to see how he can possibly do it.
Taylor is a song-loving perfectionist, so guitar-improv admirers with a taste for Marc Ribot, Derek Bailey or even Bill Frisell might find his playing sumptuously elegant to a fault. When playing blues and funk, Taylor hardly ever veers into the raw and raucous world of John Scofield. Yet his melodic ideas are playful, witty and often surprising in shape. Often he explores them at driving tempos without dropping a stitch in the remarkable combination of walking basslines, offbeat chords and rimshot-like snaps that he weaves. Among an affectionately delivered repertoire of standards, I'm Old Fashioned was just such a flurry of infectiously slurring chords and tingling harmonics, with the gospelly theme from Barry Norman's old BBC movie roundup developed as a headlong improvisation over a swinging pulse.
The most touchingly eloquent piece was How Are Things in Gloca Morra, a heartfelt dedication to Taylor's father: full of tremors and shimmers in the intonation, and unexpectedly winding up close to abstraction as Taylor detuned the guitar on the resolving notes. The most spectacular was the subsequent fast-jazz swinger, with every nook and cranny of the guitarist's formidable resources explored. It's a party trick, but a good one, and a full house cheered for more.
