Review: Ralph Alessi/Jim Hart

Pizza Express, Soho, London – July 21, 2010

Perpetuating a time-honoured tradition, bass player Michael Janisch has recently been very busy hand-picking the cream of Europe’s young jazz talent to play alongside a string of different visiting US-based musicians. In the past year alone, The JazzMann has caught Janisch playing with three different European/American collaborations featuring luminaries such as Clarence Penn and Joel Frahm. This time, he assembled a stellar young British rhythm section (Jim Hart on vibraphone, Dave Smith on drums plus Janisch himself on double bass) to play alongside trumpeter Ralph Alessi, a stalwart of the New York scene, for a number of UK dates.

In contrast to the show-boating and posturing favoured by some of his fellow US trumpeters, Alessi’s presence on stage was strikingly unaffected, his horn held rigidly to his mouth and his eyes set impassively straight ahead. Yet this belied some rather remarkable risk-taking in his finely wrought improvisations. On Hart’s composition ?Passwords’, Alessi grappled with the fiendishly tricky time signature in the opening section of his solo, patiently weaving his phrases into the spaces left by the stop-start accompaniment from the rhythm section. His apparent comfort in this kind of setting is perhaps not surprising, given his previous tenure with Steve Coleman’s band. Throughout the rest of the set, he carried on in a similar vein with a number of eloquent contributions, demonstrating why the likes of Tim Berne, Don Byron and Uri Caine have his number on speed-dial for sideman work.

Hart, Smith and Janisch easily held their own in this distinguished company, showing themselves to be much more than a pick-up rhythm section. Given equal soloing space to Alessi, Hart fearlessly launched into his improvisations, which were refreshingly free of cliché and offered a tantalising glimpse into his creative process as he considered how to work each new motive into a coherent narrative. During a collective free improvised passage on ?Dark Moon’, he elicited some wonderful sounds from his instrument, at one point applying two bows to make it sound like a glass harmonica. Smith’s playing was excellent throughout. His earthy, polyrhythmic grooves and his timbre brought to mind Jeff Ballard, while the occasional perfectly judged thunder crack on snare or toms (notably on opener ?Dog Waking’) often agitated the soloists into a new trajectory. Janisch linked up well with Smith and was clearly relishing every minute with him on the bandstand.

Presumably there was limited time for rehearsal available ahead of this tour, and while the musicians all navigated the difficult original themes flawlessly, there was a slightly clinical feel to the playing at just a few points, as if they hadn’t yet all gotten fully inside the material. Indeed, it was two standards?Thelonious Monk’s ?Bye-Ya’ and a heavily cloaked version of Dave Brubeck’s ?In Your Own Sweet Way’?that provided some of the evening’s high-points as the group’s long-standing familiarity with these pieces allowed a little more stretching out. And superb player though Alessi is, I occasionally got the impression that his talents serve him better as a team player rather than a leader. Nevertheless, this was a gig that rewarded those listening closely enough with some exquisite moments, on a par with the finest post-bop around today.