With his air of a mild-mannered country parson faintly irritated by his flock, Michael Garrick is not your regular contemporary jazz bandleader. But since the late 1950s - this South Bank concert was his 70th birthday show - Garrick has had a significant impact on this country's jazz, as a pianist, educator and Ellington-influenced composer.
Garrick's rarely exhibited big band contains some faces youthful enough to be thrown out of an off licence. On Monday the musicians were occasionally tentative in the face of the leader's demanding, melody-packed and rhythmically restless scores. But the band grew in confidence and bravura, particularly in an adventurous second half. Soloists including saxophonists Matt Wates and Martin Hathaway and trumpeters Gabriel Garrick and Steve Waterman took the bull by the horns with some skydiving, free-form improvised conversations across the sections.
Garrick's uptempo First Born, skidding between straightahead time and a jangling Latin dance feel, established the compositional credentials that originally put him on the map. A regular Garrick associate, the lively and accomplished young singer Anita Wardell, then arrived to deliver the first of a series of coolly unfussy and revealing performances.
The leader elected to read his own poetic ruminations (Garrick was a key figure in the 1960s poetry and jazz movement) on Peter Pan, though the playful sax and brass melodies and delicately animated waltz tempo of the score that followed caught the spirit rather better. More illuminating was the Caribbean trumpeter Shake Keane's poem Angel Horn, a triumph of the first half in both words and music.
One of Garrick's crowning career moments was his Jazz Praises performance on the St Paul's Cathedral organ in 1968, and a recording of that volcanic sound opened the second set. A vaporous Duke Ellington ballad and a punchy blues dedication to Ben Webster preceded the 11th-hour arrival of the 77-year-old British saxophonist Don Rendell, an old Garrick associate and one of the most passionately personal saxophone voices the UK has ever raised. Echoing John Coltrane's keening soprano sax sound, Rendell introduced the broodingly beautiful Dusk Fire, one of the leader's most enduring compositions. It was a fitting birthday present.
