"That was a surprise," murmured Jacques Loussier, the gnomic 68-year-old French pianist, after a five-minute double-bass soliloquy on a Bach chorale - from his nimble colleague Benoit Dunoyer De Segonzac - had embraced softly-stepping baroque prances, a blues guitarist's rugged chordwork, starburst harmonics and a diversion into Blue Monk. Since Dunoyer de Segonzac sets off these fireworks at least twice in any Loussier concert, the leader's surprise was perhaps a shade coy.
Loussier's latest from the studio is a set of Beethoven variations, but the music he takes on the road pays close attention to the formula that first made his reputation. The pin-sharp acoustic and intimate atmosphere of Bury's tiny and exquisite Georgian theatre suited the Loussier trio well, from the fine detail of its ensemble sound to its music's nostalgia for elegance and symmetry in an artform often at its best when ruthlessly testing both.
As Loussier approaches his 70s in an era of now routine genre-jumping, he may finally get the credit he deserves from the jazz world for broadening the repertoire with material that at the time was thought too Euro-cerebral or too sanctified to touch.
The opening Bach Prelude in C Major exhibited the pianist's favourite alternations of dreaming and sprinting, but now has a much stronger improvised contrapuntal role for Dunoyet de Segonzac. The Gavotte in D Major now has a funk intro, and close to a country-music jangle. Loussier threw I Hear Music into an initially rumbling, low-notes break over Andre Arpino's hissing brushwork on the Chorale in E Flat Major, and trilled ecstatically behind his busy, hustling partners on the Italian Concerto. The second half's staccato account of Vivaldi's Spring developed in exchanges between the piano and bass, and soft, barely-struck sounds. Through the evening, the Loussier pattern of restless dynamic and rhythmic leaps reinforces its formulaic qualities - but the slowest and most considered meditations with this sympathetic band were most often the places where the poet inside Jacques Loussier peered cautiously out.
