Virtuoso player/leaders Don Byron and Dave Holland arrived in town with programmes distinctively different from their live work of recent years. Holland, the gifted expat British double-bassist and composer, brought a big band for the first time, instead of one of his subtle and agile small groups. Byron, the New York clarinetist who has included 1930s swing makeovers, 1970s funk, classical music and klezmer in his output, turned up with a more or less straight-ahead contemporary jazz quartet.
Don Byron's Ivey Divey Quartet, which played the first half, featured three resourceful partners in pianist George Colligan, bassist Lonnie Plaxico and drummer Billy Hart. On clarinet, Byron opened with a long solo of elliptical fast bebop over the deft clip of Hart's cymbals, his phrasing absorbingly mingling mainstream swing figures, mercurial bop conundrums, and a brittle, post-Coltrane tonality that sometimes ascended to multiphonic wails. Giant Steps was a clarinet solo of gliding long phrases followed by a tumult of short, startled patterns, chordal splashes and sweeping declamations from Colligan. All Blues was played fast but with the same wayward originality on tenor sax, and a long exploration of Miles Davis's and Wayne Shorter's In a Silent Way was a real reappraisal that still retained the haunting undertow of the original.
Dave Holland's Big Band then played a drum-tight, structurally audacious set, opening and closing with episodes from 2001's Monterey Suite. Mark Turner, a contemporary saxophonist who avoids bombast and cliches and has his own patient turn of phrase, played a fine tenor solo on the opener. Trombonist Josh Roseman did the same with relaxed slurs, pauses and growls on Last Minute Man. Holland's big-band writing kept shifting the dominant roles, the jostling Triple Dance being one of the most dazzling examples - fruitfully explored by the rhythmically pin-sharp trumpeter Alex Sipiagin and the soulful saxist Antonio Hart. Holland played a bass intro in firework bursts of notes and steadying purrs to open Free For All, a feature for vibraphonist Steve Nelson - who, as usual, had been gracefully stitching the harmonic underpinnings of the music together all night.
