For a man who spends most of his playing life filling stadia with sound, Charlie Watts is pretty discreet in pursuing his own musical passion. Normally a famously taciturn individual, he can wax lyrical when it comes to enthusing about Kenny Clarke's or Billy Higgins' ride-cymbal beat. However, his tight but undemonstrative playing with his own jazz bands is so subdued as to be virtually non-existent.
Over the past decade, Watts has led a variety of expertly staffed jazz groups, mostly specialising in bebop-influenced classics of the 1940s and 1950s. But, for all his devotion to a particular jazz niche, he is no control freak who insists on it all sounding just like the record. As the tentet he's leading confirms, Watts is not only happy to let his improvisers do it their way (sometimes on their own tunes), but he even mingles straightahead players with the raw power and labyrinthine sonic investigations of the free-improv saxophonist Evan Parker.
Adding percussionist and singer Luis Jardim to the band to put some colour into the cheeks of the Latin-American ventures, Watts softly padded through a menu of reliable material, including Duke Ellington's Main Stem, Thelonious Monk's Epistrophy and Gil Fuller's Tin Tin Deo. The Monk feature brought a crisp and penetrative bass solo from Dave Green. Then the abstractly whooping soprano saxophone of Evan Parker appeared, delivering a fiercely unfamiliar recipe before soft harmonies from the rest of the band rose up to cushion it.
Gerard Presencer and Henry Lowther made telling contrasts on trumpet, the former broader and wilder in conception, the latter imaginatively developing bop harmonies. They were both exquisite. Presencer's soaring lines curved across the ensemble's mellow support on his own Anthony's Dice.
Saxophonist Peter King was first stealthy then skimmingly loose on Tin Tin Deo, and trombonist Mark Nightingale defied his instrument's laggardliness with precise, staccato figures delivered with remarkable purity. Not a revolutionary combination, but an attractive jazz sampler for Watts's more usual admirers.
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