David Murray, the sturdy, box-built, 45-year-old saxophonist from Berkeley is joined in the London Jazz Festival by Sonny Rollins and a tiny handful of others in preserving the massive, statuesque sound of pre-second world war swing players within a contemporary repertoire. It's an effect that creates the remarkable illusion of formidable torsos being the organ-pipe in which music is formed, and the sax being merely the escape route.
You might expect this of Rollins, who was a young man when swing giants such as Coleman Hawkins and Don Byas were in their prime, but in the much younger Murray it's come about through research, heart and an ear for fundamentals over details.
The saxophone giant brought his octet to London to perform the John Coltrane repertoire that features on the new Murray CD, Octet Plays Trane. This is a fine improvising band with a rhythm section of fierce intensity. Its momentum is unflagging and its soloing inventive, but the strongest features are Murray's own tenor and bass clarinet playing and the jaw-dropping agility and counter-melodic vivacity of the ensemble arrangements which all sound like seamlessly interwoven solos of their own. Murray's achievement has been to reflect the onrush of Coltrane's typhoon of a solo approach through a larger group often all playing hell-for-leather at once, but without losing the plot.
The opening Lazy Bird set that mood, with a fast and complex, multi-layered arrangement setting off a powerful Murray tenor solo that grew louder, looser and more slippery in phrasing as it progressed. Lafayette Gilchrist, Murray's Baltimore piano discovery, delivered fascinating kaleidoscopes of the vigorous, the delicately preoccupied and the harmonically ambiguous.
Murray's own playing became more majestically painterly and loose as the gig progressed, his passionate sound at its most urgent on Announcement, from A Love Supreme. Gilchrist exquisitely previewed Naima, like a minimalist George Gershwin with a distant Thelonious Monk playing Well You Needn't in the background, and Murray expanded it with a soliloquy of ruggedly lustrous sounds, impassioned multiphonics, complex phrasing astonishingly extended by circular breathing. One of the outstanding events of the festival.
