Although the composition of this group is uniformly strong it’s undoubtedly Boston guitarist Joe Morris who sets the tone of the gig. He plays his modestly amplified electric guitar completely free of effects. He plays fast, picking each note cleanly and fluently but so rapidly as to blend those notes into a stippled torrent. The deftness of his precision belies an uncompromisingly steely, single-minded intent. He’s an ideal complement to the evening’s other musicians, whose attack is comparably muscular, their approaches strikingly congruent. Tony Bevan’s slurred vocalizations and brawny R&B-inflected saxophonics give much character to a free style of playing that never strays far from melodic roots. As ever, he alternates judiciously between alto, tenor and baritone. Dominic Lash has a distinctive ability to vary his approach to the double bass, allowing him to contribute in full effect to abrasive passages before moving from sensitively measured, sometimes harshly abrasive bowing, to quiet abstraction when the temperature cools, all the while maintaining a strong undertow. Tony Buck, surely best known as drummer for The Necks, initially seems something of a wildcard presence. His playing seems to emanate from a constant, tightly-coiled tension. Sometimes he clatters around his kit like a child at play using oblong blocks as dampers, and towards the end of the night he builds a martial tension that drives the others on fiercely, but for other passages he’s more reflective, fleshing out the group sound with textural fills and rhythmic implications.

Morris has an undeservedly low profile although he’s been extensively recorded, having so far this year released at least ten recordings, including a date with Matthew Shipp and as a member of David S. Ware?s new quartet. Although he made his reputation as a guitarist Morris is now just as often to be heard on contrabass. At the end of 2008 he recorded with his Bass Quartet what has been perhaps my favourite Jazz album of the year, “High Definition”. I admit I find it rather easier to love Morris’ bass playing on record than it is to warm to his guitar work, much as I admire it. Although similarly clear and uncluttered, his bass playing is also warm and vibrant, whereas his guitar chops are altogether more cerebral, at least when mediated digitally. That being so, the invigorating immediacy of his guitar playing at the Vortex was something of a revelation; at times his instrument took on the tonality of a clarinet, and I heard in his lines allusions to references I hadn’t picked up on from his recordings, such as echoes of Louis Armstrong.

There were few breaks in the night’s performance: one long first set and a second of two halves. Other than solo and duo passages that roamed freely across the myriad possibilities, the first set was mostly memorable for peaks of surpassing ferociousness into which Lash instilled a multi-layered current for Morris to play across, only occasionally allowing himself to go with the flow. To close there was a lovely baritone sax solo and a sax/guitar duet preceding a quieter group passage, for which Buck and Lash combined in textural atmospherics, the whole thing winding down in a pleasantly meandering fashion.

The second set began much faster in abstract and staccato style, with Bevan sounding terrier-like as he worried away at the melody, Morris scrabbling tightly with hard, dry picks, and Buck at his most unconstrained. The third and final number started as raw abstraction, almost atonal and too agitated to settle into the dirge it implied. Lash was in his element, bowing harshly while stretching the bass strings way off the fretboard. Buck seized the moment to instil a rhythmic tension that fed into the others’ playing and built to a thunderous peak, from which Morris released the pressure just a notch by picking more cleanly and at a high pitch on the low strings. This acted to liberate all of the accumulated tension into a soaring passage of exhilarated release. Morris let loose an absolutely magnificent solo followed by another just as astutely judged by Lash, and finally there was a feature for Buck that trampled adroitly over notional jazz/rock demarcation lines. The gig was bought to a close by a bluesy, mid-paced, gradually becalmed passage during which Morris continued to produce an abundance of startling harmonics. Over the next few hours I found it impossible to listen to effects-laden electric guitar music without unconscious disdain.

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