Neither of the American jazz heavyweights Brad Mehldau or Chris Potter played A Foggy Day in London Town on Monday. But bad weather on the continent meant that pianist Mehldau, billed as the headliner, had to open the London jazz festival show in place of Potter, whose band - including the superb drummer Bill Stewart - was still in transit.
And so Potter - one of the most accomplished of today's saxophonists, was restricted to playing for little more than 45 minutes late in the evening. Coming after Mehldau's intense monotone, this short burst of Potter's meticulous yet ardent post-Coltraneisms provided a welcome glimpse of a quite different emotional landscape - even if his improvising runs ahead of the quality of his compositions by some distance.
Mehldau's trio performance ostensibly followed the steady line of development that he, bassist Larry Grenadier and drummer Jorge Rossy have been exploring since they got together in 1995. But this gig was a more varied and purposeful affair than the pianist's somewhat subdued performance at the Barbican earlier this year.
The fascinating thing about Mehldau is the way he manages to stay independent of the usual practices of the jazz tradition, while astutely deploying its phrasing and some of its repertoire. His group constantly ducks in and out of the common refuges of swing, spending much of the rest of its time in a free pulse that allows the pianist almost as much latitude as if he were playing unaccompanied.
He dislikes grandstanding effects or big climaxes, and often starts in a casually preoccupied manner, as if sitting down to an unscheduled practice. He opened with two originals, a waltz and a slow-building swinger. The restless, twisting parallel world of his remarkable left-hand counter-melodies steadily grew around the music. A yearning and quietly impassioned bolero borrowed from Charlie Haden's Nocturne album swelled into a typically irresistible Mehldau rhapsody of clustered double-time playing and clamouring voices, while Harold Arlen's Get Happy was a staccato remake of the original.
Mehldau's unaccompanied section on this last piece was a tour de force. On Harry Mancini's Dreamsville he dipped into the well of his classical knowledge. And the inflamed encore answered the reservations of doubters who think Mehldau plays too much in his head. The only downside of the show was the unavoidable brevity of Potter's contribution.
