If some jazz clubs continue the eternal struggle to survive, there’s always a musician or a band to bolster their staying power. Black Mountain Jazz in Abergavenny has no such problem, but at this gig it hosted the sort of musicians who would give more precarious venues a lift. Enter the Jon Lloyd European Quartet with drummer Alex Goodyear before a full house.
For BMJ and Wales, Goodyear – an alumnus of Paula Gardiner’s celebrated jazz course at the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama – is a local lad making good as his reputation scampers through the UK. A member of Lloyd’s quartet, he alerted its leader to BMW’s Melville Theatre venue and all it offers, not least the technology and the club’s warmth of reception.
Lloyd must have felt that the quartet in its guise at this appearance was fully achieved. Goodyear blurred the distinction between percussionist and drummer, his kit supplemented with extra skins and tuning and himself in command of his resources, at one point standing to rustle his brushes – there’s probably a technical term for it – and at other times playing with the palms of his hands and elbows as well as employing both felt-head sticks and traditional ones, and brushes while seated. He stroked the cymbals almost in passing, adding shimmer as a painter might. It was a joy to watch – and to listen to.
It’s worth illuminating Goodyear first, because at this tour date to promote the quartet’s Earth Songs album on the Ubuntu label his part in the proceedings, which Lloyd good-humouredly warned would not be immediate post-Parker bop, required from him something more than the familiar rat-a-tat protocols.
Saxophonist Lloyd’s explanation of the term “European” to describe his latest venture was not so much an allusion to the Norwegian etherealism of a Jan Garbarek, though there were similarities, as an indication that it’s not American. Apart from being in thrall to Django Reinhardt, Americans have rarely admitted European influences; the traffic has always been one-way. In any case, the quartet’s varied exemplars, apparent in charts from Earth Songs such as Flux, The Heron and Cinq Feuilles, ranged from Eastern mysticism and Coltrane-Henderson intensity on Lloyd’s part as tenor and soprano saxophonist, to Tyneresque chiming and far-reaching European classicism and chromaticism from pianist John Law, in whose playing American models emerged briefly but unmistakably from darkness into shadow.
In this integrated sound, the strength of Nick Pini’s uncomplicated bass lines was central and never smothered by Goodyear’s activity to his left or upstaged by the other two.
There were a couple of charts from the recent Law-Lloyd duo album Naissance, to which Pini’s and Goodyear’s contributions were not passengers but new ingredients. The quartet’s sound, however, emerged from the mutual understanding and anticipation shared by piano and saxophone, which in one’s more charitable moments might have been described as miraculous. Pini and Goodyear picked up on the telepathy too.
Lacking swifter harmonic track-markers and committed to modal-like progress, the tunes could have been too held-back and hypnotic for some, especially when encouraged by Law’s ostinati and Goodyear’s tom-tom drumming; but there were compensations in keyboard crescendi (if not climaxes) and in Lloyd’s frequent journeying from simplicity of utterance to introspective tension and vigour – and back again: those Lloyd-Law charts generated their own internal dynamics and were all of a piece, ending when and where they were destined to end. Just as Goodyear merged percussion and drumming, so the quartet concealed the joins between notation and improvisation. It’s what jazz musicians do.
***
Jon Lloyd European Quartet at Melville Centre for the Arts, Abergavenny, 28 July 2024. Jon Lloyd (ts, ss); John Law (p); Nick Pini (b); Alex Goodyear (d).
