Freely improvised jazz music is supposed to be a practice that only settles into a pulse for long enough to realise it ought to be heading somewhere else. So you might not expect to find audiences nodding their heads in time to it. But the evolution of a radically distinctive European jazz not based on tunes or swing has resulted in eloquent new forms of ... tunes and swing. Evan Parker, the British jazz revolutionary who started rewriting the sax-vocabulary book nearly 40 years ago, has played a crucial role in this evolution.
Parker packed the Progress Bar on Thursday, performing with the dramatically resourceful double-bassist John Edwards and drummer Tony Marsh - a man who powers the swoops, crash-stops and zig-zags of free rhythm with an idiosyncratically rocking, trancelike groove. The group played a series of shorter improvisations in the first half, and a sustained 45-minute odyssey in the second that brought listeners to their feet.
Sometimes the music twanged, snapped and sighed with free-improv's characteristic alternations of spikiness and tranquillity - Edwards dragging his bass-strings way off the fingerboard to bend notes, rubbing them with his knuckles to release a soft purr, or bowing the edges of the soundbox to make a fraught, scampering sound. Marsh maintained his own more brittle version of the late Elvin Jones's mysterious mix of a pulsing heartbeat and scattered, sometimes contradictory patterns.
Concentrating on tenor sax in a trio, Parker often sounds closer to his earliest John Coltrane roots, his gruff, split-note figures and explosive chords having more forward motion than the static, abstract-ambient feel of his unaccompanied work. His long, rising runs coloured by constant tone-changes, snorting exclamatory sounds, full-on double-time playing (like bebop, but with raw sound instead of scales) and unexpectedly tender long notes were like free-jazz equivalents of Sonny Rollins soliloquies. Parker's choices have led him to fill rooms rather than concert halls, but he is a saxophone colossus just the same.
