Since he fell in love with an old style when he was a young man, and spent the next 30 years working at ways to keep the relationship fresh, Scott Hamilton was always a player who was going to age well. The dapper American tenor saxophonist is making one of his seasonal trips to the UK, working with the regular local group (pianist John Pearce, bassist Dave Green, drummer Steve Brown) that understands his relaxed perfectionism inside out. A brilliant improviser, Hamilton is traditional but never retro.
Hamilton specialises in the song-form, and suggests that if he were a songwriter himself, he'd never run out of new melodies. Visiting standards by Matt Dennis and Irving Berlin in his first set, he elegantly demonstrated some favourite devices - sidling up to an assertive phrase with insinuating murmurs and half-blown sounds, sliding on and off the beat, changing the tone-colour of a sustained note, inserting fluttery trills into runs where the space for such embroidery doesn't seem to exist. The saxophonist's beautiful tone (a Lester Youngian aspect of his playing that has matured in the manner of old wine over the years) breathed new life into the Glenn Miller classic Serenade in Blue - his unerring sense of narrative development leading him to devote the opening episodes to softly polishing the melody, and the choruses, after John Pearce's shapely piano break, to a stream of ever-bolder variations of his own.
Hamilton was either unhappy with his reeds throughout the second set, or changed them to suit the timbres of the tunes, but his inventiveness never faltered and he began segueing eagerly from one song to the next as if he could hardly wait. Steve Brown's increasingly sympathetic echoing of Hamilton's accents and phrase-shapes suggested he was privy to his leader's brainwaves; Brown and bassist Green were placing their contributions right in Hamilton's footsteps by the later stages. Some fast blues and a couple of bebop classics accelerated the saxophonist from a canter to a gallop, but he was never going to be flustered into putting a sound any place but exactly where he wanted it.
