Ed Jones - the British saxophonist whose career has straddled postbop, free-jazz and the contemporary soul-funk of Incognito and US3 - respects the tradition, but is not afraid to mess with it. With last year's Seven Moments album, he reflected the classic 1960s blues-bop of the bands of the late Lee Morgan and Art Blakey, and also the looser and more mysterious journeys of post-1960s Miles Davis.
Jones is assisted in these endeavours by excellent partners, who liven up what might otherwise have been a conservative jazz approach. At the Vortex, although he was without pianist Jon Gee, Jones delivered a typically punchy yet sensitive programme with regular partners Winston Clifford (drums) and Damon Brown (trumpet), plus newcomer Ben Hazleton on bass.
Without a piano, Brown and Jones were forced to intertwine their lines with even more than their customary urgency, and Clifford and Hazleton had to be right on top of every shift of gear. But if the opening pieces suggested the band was casting around for a revised playing formation, the hesitancy was brief. Over an initially floating, ambiguous pulse from Clifford, the two horns began by cautiously shadowing and tangling with each other on Kick Start. Then the music straightened out into a kind of bleary, updated hard-bop, with Jones in Coltrane-esque mode. Picking up the departing notes of his colleague's solo (a classic hard-bop device) to launch his own, Brown played the first of several gleaming, gracefully shaped improvisations.
Brown is also a fine composer in this style, and his quietly groovy Harold's Souk brought a telling solo from him over Clifford's combination of patient, echoing tom-tom sounds and restless rimshots. The drummer's excellent playing often suggested dense but mobile masses of overlaid rhythms, rather than accretions of beats. Hazleton, meanwhile, looks set to become a significant UK bassist on the evidence of his thoughtful solo development and use of space. When the group's internal motor began to hum. it was in a conversational ensemble piece fronted by the interplay of the trumpet and Jones's resonant bass clarinet.
The second set's Jousting was another engaging Brown score, over a repeating bass vamp, and it brought a careering tenor solo from Jones. Clifford took a drum solo to such tantalisingly low volumes that he was eventually only rubbing his hands together, and Prayer was a haunting ballad invocation over ruminative mallet-work. It might all have been a little more seamless and fluent with the piano stool occupied, but it was still a compelling reworking of older-style jazz, done with commitment and quality.
