The announcement of a new trio with Alec Dankworth on bass, Phil Robson on guitar and Julian Arguelles on saxes means something highly musical is as good as inevitable. The three, under Dankworth's leadership, proved the point when they launched their first CD, If You're Passing By, on Monday night.
Loose Tubes founder Arguelles is a gifted composer and improviser who never blusters, and consistently finds devious routes to a destination. Robson can hold his head up on any jazz stage in the world. Dankworth is a bassist of classically elegant stability, with a big sound, sure beat, thoughtful spontaneity and awareness of his surroundings.
Drumless trios can make hardcore groovers disconsolately mutter "jazz chamber music" to themselves, but though the Dankworth trio certainly played quietly, it lacked nothing in momentum. The band opened with a breezy Abdullah Ibrahim song, the melody delivered by Arguelles maintaining a sound of flute-like fragility at the top end of the tenor sax's range. Dave Brubeck's The Duke kept the easygoing feel, with Dankworth's loose and vibrant walk leaning on the pulse beneath it, and opening out into a shrewdly paced solo. Arguelles followed at an animated purr before Robson flickered over the harmony in effortless double time, his playing demonstrating its usual silky fluency.
A poignant soprano-sax melody over Robson's racing, Metheny-like rhythm introduced the album's title track, and the guitarist sustained the Metheny lyricism in the tone and phrasing of his solo. A Dankworth original (dedicated to Benjamin Britten, Ray Brown and Shakespeare) developed as a smoky, 1950s Cool School reverie, with an accelerating Robson improvisation expanding over haunting long notes from the sax.Miles Davis's Solar was a relay race of swapped breaks with the tune played only at the end.
No revolution in progress of course, and not a contemporary-sounding band either (no club-grooves, plugged effects, little funk, lots of boppish linear improv) but musical in almost every astutely chosen sound it makes.
