British alto saxophonist Soweto Kinch has attracted much attention over the past couple of years for his powerful playing with bands such as Jazz Jamaica and Tomorrow's Warriors. But tonight, the focus is on his newer role as bandleader and composer. His pieces are complex and intense, making the most of the players: Femi Temowo (guitar), Michael Olatuja (double bass) and Troy Miller (drums). Abram Wilson (trumpet and vocals) joins them for part of the second set.
They have the airy, spacious sound of late-1950s, early-1960s jazz, overlaid with a more contemporary, nervous edge: the band swings, but is rarely relaxed. Numbers such as Doxology and Spokes and Pedals make the most of the audio palette, with tightly arranged ensemble passages and carefully paced solos.
Conversations with the Unseen, the title track from his new Dune album, is a tough ballad, meditative and agitated by turn. Temoso's guitar has the clear, transparent sound of Ray Crawford or Phil Lee; Kinch's sideways approach occasionally recalls that of Eric Dolphy or Joe Harriott. The ambitious trio piece Snakehips is packed with compositional details - rhythmic transitions, sentimental changes (anachronistic but nice) - in tribute to Ken "Snakehips" Johnson, the 1930s swing bandleader. And there is a touch of Mingus's 1950s reinvention of the jazz tradition on his Candid album, the one where he instructs an imaginary studio audience to stay quiet and concentrate on the music. Kinch does something similar in rhyme: his opening rap on Intro tells us to keep "loud talk to a bare minimum".
Olatuja and Miller support Temoso's angular vamps with a stuttering acoustic drum-and-bass matrix, a genuinely original feel. The set ends with What If, in which Kinch imagines a world constructed according to jazz rules: "Office culture would be a slow-mo, with regular breaks to listen to bass solos."
The fantasy runs appealingly wild, conjuring up an alternative universe in which fat cats and impoverished DJs live in sub-standard housing, complaining about all the money that jazz musicians make. "What if jazz could solve world wars / and swinging on the two and four was a government law," he says, while everybody chants: "Jazz planet, jazz planet."
It's funny, but he's serious. And I suspect that it is within this jazz-rap hybrid - both a shock to the system and a welcome experiment - that Kinch will develop a truly contemporary voice.
