Music / Jazz
Vein featuring Dave Liebman, St George’s
In the rituals of St George’s the lights go down and musicians emerge from a door at the back of the stage. Tonight’s band shambled on from the floor at the front, however, where they were still amiably wrangling about arrangements. Like a classical ensemble they took their seats and pianist Michael Arbenz – his incongruous peaked cap suggesting he’d been fitting exhausts all day – launched into a semi-romantic classical prelude full of rococo flourishes.
So far, so formal, but things didn’t stay that way once saxophonist Dave Liebman had lulled his way in on soprano, gradually stoking things into an outpouring of ultra-bop frenzy, surfing the hall’s acoustics to outblow piano and drums before suddenly deflating to make way for a crisply precise blues fuelled bass solo. The tune was a classic – ‘Stella By Starlight’ – but you might not have recognised it, and the contrasts and swerves of this arrangement were a statement of things to come.
The obvious tension between the European trio and the Stateside veteran was part of the fun, but Liebman was himself a wonderfully contradictory character capable of blowing sweetness at a firestorm or tearing into a tranquil moment if he felt like it. When not playing, his fingers flexed and flowed as if stroking the sound in the air, but once he picked up his sax you felt his control over the highly skilled musicians around him.
It wasn’t all big and blustery, though. One high point was a piano/sax duet for I Loves You Porgy, Liebman’s throaty tenor emulating a passionate vocal throughout, and Black Tortoise draped a soulful film noir vamp around a sinuous bass solo from Thomas Lähns that oozed with the delicacy of his touch. Things rounded off with Lemuria, a fairly dirty funk deconstruction complete with Shorter-esque soprano soarings. Despite the contrasts – maybe because of them – this was a tight ensemble that read itself perfectly, resisting the pull of the obvious in favour of surprises. It was a democratic sound, too, yet inevitably Dave Liebman emerged as first among equals.
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