Rail excursion

Not often do I begin a review with a recommendation for the venue’s catering. In fact never, until now. But the Jazz Café POSK, situated in London’s Polish cultural centre on King Street in Hammersmith, extends a hospitality that includes its restaurant, where before last night’s gig by the Wobbly Rail Five I had a plate of herring with potato salad and a large slice of apple pie with cinnamon — all delicious — and came out with change from 15 quid.

In his days as a college radio DJ, Lou Reed titled his programme Excursion on a Wobbly Rail, after a tune on Cecil Taylor’s 1959 LP Looking Ahead. Ten years ago Wobbly Rail Five became the name of an occasional quintet fronted by the British saxophonists and long-time associates Chris Biscoe and Pete Hurt, with Liam Noble on piano and Steve Watts on bass. When they made an album in 2016, it was with Jon Scott on drums. Last night at POSK the drums were in the hands of Sophie Alloway.

It’s an interesting little group, playing quite intricate compositions that require sheet music and fairly intense concentration, occupying a part of the jazz spectrum also inhabited by Thelonious Monk and Herbie Nichols. Last night’s repertoire, based on the album, included Monk’s “Played Twice” (arranged for two sopranos, as if in homage to the group the late Steve Lacy once led with a second soprano, Steve Potts), along with pieces by Biscoe, Hurt and Noble, most of them including a nod to the high priest of bebop somewhere in their contours.

Noble is particularly good at that kind of thing, and his solos were notable for the strength of their angular architecture. Alloway responded brilliantly to the challenge of providing the detailed arrangements with the sort of cues and punctuations more normally required in a big band than a small combo, while retaining the intimacy of the conversation, swinging beautifully along with Watts and adding particularly effective cymbal textures.

Irregularly assembled, the band sounded a little stiff to start with but eventually eased into the evening in front of a smallish but enthusiastic audience, the horns warning up with Biscoe’s liquid soprano on Hurt’s woozy ballad “Lost for Words” and Hurt’s tenor digging into the contours of Noble’s “Ask Your Mother”, which bopped along like a soul-jazz tune with a dash of bitters.

A good gig, then, in one of London’s most welcoming jazz venues. And now that they’ve reassembled after a long hiatus, one hopes that the Wobbly Rail Five will get the chance to continue their journey.

* Jazz Café POSK’s future programme can be found at http://www.jazzcafeposk.org. There’s a Wobbly Rail Five page on Chris Biscoe’s website: http://www.chrisbiscoe.co.uk