Each time I drop into Chichester Jazz Club, I don’t know what impresses me the most: the range and overall quality of the performing musicians or the size of the attentive (and healthily diverse) audience, who habitually accord the music the most respectful and enthusiastic attention.
Currently based in London, the elegant, swinging and reflective Hungarian pianist Mátyás Gayer drew a near-full house for his recent and most impressive two-set concert at the club, in the estimable company of seasoned Scott Hamilton associates Dave Green (b) and Steve Brown (d) – the dynamically astute last showing a tasty hand with both sticks and brushes.
If you are aware of a bassist with a more beautifully rounded sound and modern-mainstream ensemble sensitivity than the 82-years young Green, please let me know. After the gig I told Dave that each time I see him play, he looks five years younger. “What are you now – around 35?” I quipped. “Must be the musicians I’m lucky enough to play with!” he joked back.
In that case the combined excellence of Gayer and Brown must have taken yet more years off a player whose consummate musicianship can be enjoyed on any number of top-quality recordings: if you don’t know it, sample, e.g., Green’s wide-ranging and potent trio date Time Will Tell from 2000 with Iain Dixon (ts, cl, bcl) and Gene Calderazzo (d).
Or you could (and should) go straight to Mátyás Gayer’s latest release, the variegated and uniformly excellent Westbourne Park. Recorded in April last year and released on Ubuntu Music, this top-notch trio session features Green and Brown (long friends and associates of Gayer) throughout.
Well received and reviewed, the recording furnished the majority of Gayer’s intelligently programmed Chichester recital, with all the pieces introduced or contextualised by the quietly spoken and charming leader. Respects were paid to his Hungarian background, including a lovely piece suffused in reverie and name-checks for the distinctive figures Siegmund Rosenberg – better known as the emigré Sigmund Romberg of Lover, Come Back To Me and Softly, As In A Morning Sunrise renown – and the composer, ethnomusicologist and philosopher Zoltán Kodály.
Twice a Montreux Jazz Piano Competition finalist, the multi award-winning Gayer is blessed with both superb touch and tone and a refined rhythmic and dynamic awareness: he’s richly versed in classical music and one of many standout pieces at Chichester was his reading of a Chopin nocturne. But he is equally literate in classic, beautifully rendered and swinging jazz of the post-bop era, bringing a freshly cast melodic, harmonic and rhythmic twist to the sort of poetics one associates with, e.g., Tommy Flanagan, Hank Jones or Cedar Walton – hear the delicious Homage To Cedar on Westbourne Park – rather than, say, McCoy Tyner, Herbie Hancock or Andrew Hill.
Opening with a well sprung yet suitably measured Yesterdays, the first set also featured a tribute to pianist Barry Harris as well as patiently turned and enticing Latinate takes on Green Dolphin Street and Ellington’s Solitude. Later, after revealing that it was hearing Benny Golson’s Whisper Not that had turned him onto jazz, Gayer, with his cohorts, delivered an invigorating reading of a further Golson modern standard, the irresistible Along Came Betty.
Four numbers in particular exemplified the overall breadth and depth of the music. Fine readings of both the Chopin piece and the reflective Mister Harris evinced all three trio members’ poised yet flowing command of poetically felt and rendered space and time; while the mellow lope and groove of the title piece of Gayer’s new album (inspired by memories of his early abode in London) and the medium-up clip and bounce of the closing That’s All offered different but complementary takes on the key factor of swing. At times both brought to mind the jaunty drive of Monty Alexander and the simultaneously crisp and milky touch of Oscar Peterson at his exhilarating best.
For any and all such putative comparisons, there can be no doubt that Mátyás Gayer is very much his own man, with a whole bunch of time-tested melodies and moods, fresh ideas and conceptual breadth at his fingertips. I haven’t enjoyed a piano trio gig so much in quite some while: as the final rousing applause from the delighted audience died down, a CJC organiser called out – with understandable passion – “You’ve given us an evening of truly excellent jazz. Thank you!” Precisely so.
Mátyás Gayer Trio at Chichester Jazz Club, 8 November 2024
