Dialogue at Wigmore Hall

For 50 minutes at Wigmore Hall last night, the bassist Linda May Han Oh and the tenor saxophonist Melissa Aldana delivered a lesson in how to take the finest material from the past and weave it into something that belongs firmly to the present. The Australian (born in Malaysia, of Chinese heritage) is the current answer to any question about which bassist you would choose to add energy and invention to your contemporary jazz group. The Chilean specialises in an unstoppable flow of creativity, her ideas developed with an unassuming virtuosity that places her at the forefront of the current generation of saxophonists.

They were re-examining material from their new duo album, Beneath Lifted Skies, starting with Sam Rivers’ “Cyclic Episode”, which quickly revealed the nimbleness and intimacy of their musical partnership: lines were wrapped around each other in a constantly evolving double-helix. “I’ll Be Seeing You”, a standard rescued from a flop 1938 musical, enabled Aldana to display the inspiration of Sonny Rollins in her improvising, manifesting a kind of serious playfulness expressed via a lovely middleweight tone and seemingly effortless fluidity of execution, matched by Oh in a solo full of a deep lyricism that also irradiated the bassist’s playing, from a different perspective, on Charles Mingus’s “Duke Ellington’s Sound of Love”. Bebop was taken for a 21st century ride on Bud Powell’s “Hallucinations” and a staggering, jet-propelled “Anthropology”, the unison statements of Charlie Parker’s tune taking the breath away.

It was a wonderful demonstration both of what remains possible with extensions of what we still call modern jazz and of the possibilities inherent in the conventional language of the two instruments. The album is terrific, but this performance stretched the tunes further in all sorts of interesting and compelling ways. This complex, brainy, sometimes witty, fundamentally interactive music created a world of its own, carrying the audience along its unfolding narrative, and it seemed a pity when they chose to disrupt the carefully built dramatic tension by introducing a couple of guest musicians, the altoist Will Vinson and the singer Jo Lawry. Both were excellent, in their ways, but I was glad to have the memory of those spellbinding 50 minutes of intense dialogue to take away with me.

* Beneath Lifted Skies is available via Bandcamp: https://lindamayhanoh.bandcamp.com/album/beneath-lifted-skies