The word about the recent visit of veteran American bandleader Andrew Hill was that he was the best jazz pianist-composer you'd never heard of - and much the same might be said about John Law.
Law is a distantly Monkish player of immense tenacity and character, and in the clarity and bite of his playing there is an avoidance of cliche and restless freshness of phrasing that is closer to the questing spirit of jazz than the work of many of his more illustrious contemporaries. Jazzthetik magazine opined of Law that "when he records for ECM he'll become a star". Listening to him at the Vortex, it was hard to disagree.
Law was accompanied by a special international band including the excellent German bass clarinettist Michel Pilz, an imaginative free-jazz performer whose work on the gutturally expressive instrument is reminiscent of Eric Dolphy and at times early John Surman. The front line (if it means anything to isolate one, in such a spontaneously integrated group as this) was completed by British soprano sax player Jon Lloyd, whose bright and brittle legato lines were an effective contrast to Pilz's patient and often dramatic investigations of the bass clarinet's rich inner sonorities. Bassist Christian Ramond and drummer Klaus Kugel sustained a simmering undertow beneath them and occasionally broke out into odysseys of their own.
Law is as interesting an ensemble pianist as he is a soloist, and his quiet sustaining and remoulding of a surging repeated piano theme - under Christian Ramond's fast bowing and Pilz's yelping reed sound early in the opening set - made you crane to catch his responsiveness to the melee around him.
Like Han Bennink and Paul Lovens, Klaus Kugel revealed himself to be the kind of free drummer who irresistably swings, but his playing under a slow and dramatically dirgey Coltranesque theme also subtly deployed rumbling tom-toms and hissing cymbals.
Pilz hit on some of the most compelling moments with a mixture of slow, fluffy exhalations, reverberating low crackles and occasional soaring ascents against Law's quietly trilling piano. But the band dismissed all received wisdom that free jazz doesn't groove as it grew increasingly animated over Law's spiky composition, Motivation, a repeating short, rising figure with a treacherous arrhythmic resolution every third time around. The leader's own solo sounded like several pianists of different sensibilities all taking a crack at it. If ever anyone deserved to win a Talent Deserving of Wider Recognition Poll, it's him.
