The Barbican jazz programme has offered an artist-in-residency to a legend: the former Art Blakey, Miles Davis and Weather Report saxophonist Wayne Shorter. Shorter's music is at the Barbican and adjoining St Luke's church for four nights this week, in a variety of incarnations involving him, his regular band and a number of local admirers.
A sharp edition of Britain's young workshop band Tomorrow's Warriors played the first half. It delivered three Shorter classics from his early-'60s days, plus some originals that were unfazed by the comparison. The Warriors paid imaginative tribute to Shorter's approach on classics like Adam's Apple and One By One; and the very promising young saxophonist Nathaniel Facey displayed a Shorter-like distinctiveness in his patiently lateral solo development and remarkably penetrating purity on long sounds. Trumpeter Jay Phelps, an accomplished Wynton Marsalis admirer, ran through an impressive repertoire of half-valve sounds, speech-like figures and cackling runs on an original reworking of New Orleans funeral music, and pianist Gwilym Watkins's Magnolia shook him into a swell of McCoy Tyner-like chords and ringing repeated phrases. But perhaps unsurprisingly, with Shorter in the wings, the band sounded a little overawed and underpowered at times.
The French piano virtuoso Martial Solal then arrived for a completely improvised second half, in conversation with Shorter himself on soprano sax. Since Solal can play anything he can think of in the instant it occurs to him, and lately Shorter's improvising muse has sounded as free as it's ever been, the element of risk was clearly going to be nothing but positive.
There was a nagging anxiety at the outset that Solal would answer every slur, slide and soft whoop from Shorter's soprano with a flood of notes - but as the duet developed, the pianist increasingly allowed Shorter's poignant and faintly melancholy lines to find their way unaided. Occasionally Solal would play something like a vamp, which Shorter would briefly lock in to, then edge away (musically and physically) from the piano and begin playing at a pensive tangent to it. Playing flat out in improvised counterpoint the two often sounded driven by one mind in the later stages - particularly on the encore. Spontaneous music of uncanny ingenuity.
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