Fame is no indicator of quality, but the obscurity of the British saxophonist Tony Woods comes pretty high on the list of injustices on the local music scene. He does almost everything right. He's a fine sax improviser with a special sound, his tunes are original but accessible, contemporary and attractive, and he has a band of very classy partners. Yet, somehow, Woods has remained one of the best-kept secrets on the circuit.
The Tony Woods Project played material from its last two mixed-idiom albums, particularly the atmospheric Lowlands. Woods's father is a squeezebox-player, and the saxophonist has heard plenty of folk music over the years, which has profoundly influenced his writing - occasionally he will adapt a fiddle tune for the sax. But the graceful, silky-toned bassist Andy Hamill and the restless, clamorously polyrhythmic drummer Milo Fell give the band an explicitly jazzy undertow, and the combination of vibraphonist Rob Millett and guitarist Mike Outram sometimes echoed the subtly-coloured funk of the pioneering Gary Burton jazz-rock band of the 1970s. So the folksy element was never fey, and never statically ambient, and the attack of the music changed constantly within the same pieces.
Pieces of diaphanously floating north-Euro jazz (full of vibraphone shimmers and long sax notes) would thus segue into that Gary Burton feel, then into a Woods free-duet with the drums and back to a gypsy dance. Outram would constantly chase Woods' saxophone, catching his rhythmic feeling with choppy chording, or make a fat, lustrous sustained sound against a long, growling sax note. A drifting bass clarinet ballad turned into a superb Outram solo of snaking improvised lines, ending in spacey bubbles of long notes, a hornpipe transformed into a series of cliffhanging open-improv sections, Prayer sounded like a bagpipe lament, and the encore was a fiddle piece for soprano saxophone. You get a lot of music for your money with the Tony Woods Project.
