Hans Koller, the wiry, ardent young German-born jazz musician, is a dynamic presence at the Vortex's Jazz Club's Sunday night all-comers jam sessions. Koller, an angular, asymmetrical pianist in the Thelonious Monk tradition, has been a real find on the UK jazz scene in 2002; he is known as a composer for bigger groups and is likely to attain the stature of his mentor, Mike Gibbs. But the Vortex jam is quite a different showcase for his talents, requiring sharp ears, quick reflexes, patience and awareness of many playing styles.
As is to be expected at a gig that brings together seasoned pros and enthusiastic but variably equipped amateurs, the musical content is uneven. But Koller's trio, which opened the proceedings, provided the most sharply focused and collectively responsive music of the evening.
Though Koller often seemed to have as his main inspirations Monk (for phrasing and timing) and Paul Bley (for plangent, faintly melancholy chords), he was somewhat Jarrett-like in the way he expanded variations on a theme or a motif - and as a stage presence. His body language was eloquent, left shoulder dipping and right elbow rearing up like a batsman fending off fast bowling as he rattled down into the low notes in response to Gene Calderazzo's fizzy drumming or Dave Whitford's quietly animated basslines.
He constantly watched his partners and they baited each other endlessly, the excellent Calderazzo sounding rather like Art Blakey in his sudden eruptions of sound and jolting, time-bending offbeats. The trio veered in and out of a straight groove on Thelonious Monk's Light Blue. They brought quick, murmuring figures out of Whitford on a twisting Lennie Tristano theme and became of one animated mind on Monk's Epistrophy.
A succession of saxophonists and trumpeters followed the Monk mood of the evening (now with the more abstract and ambiguous Paul Clarvis on drums), and, as the evening wore on, the room became almost as full of instrument cases as hopeful musicians. Koller is back at the Vortex jam on January 12 - more power to his elbows.
