Mercury nominated this year it’s not often stride piano shares the limelight. A bigger stage than Parkway venue the Green Note provides (actually there wasn’t even a stage) awaits. For now on this occasion last night, and no strangers to the venue, it’s just about impossible to find a more intimate space on the London gigging scene than the Green Note’s basement bar, the smaller of the north-of-the-river spot’s two spaces.
Down a steep set of stairs there was room for the sold out room of oh about 25 max – quite a few of whom were standing – to squeeze in. If the venue possessed chandeliers rather than a few naked light bulbs we would have all been swinging from them easily enough.
Dusk had just fallen.
There were two sets, the tradtastic evening included lively material such as ‘Hamstrings & Hurricanes,’ the title track of the Mercury nominated Edition Records release.
There was a bit of rapport with the audience. Welshman Joe Webb joshed with one member sat at the bar and it was good to see the great music promoter and producer David Jones among the audience checking the band out. Webb mentioned that one of his own heroes is James P. Johnson (1894-1955) and a piece dedicated to the stride jazz icon who was known for such work as ‘Carolina Shout’ figured. It was called ‘James P.’
Webb has a dazzling technique which isn’t too flashy but is instead totally at ease with the demanding trad jazz idiom here relayed on an unamplified occasion playing a very lived-in upright. There wasn’t a need for microphones, grandiosity or standing upon ceremony. It took me back a bit to going down to Kansas Smitty’s in Hackney some years ago, another simpatico spot, now shuttered. And there was a fluency in the group play ably elaborated upon by double bassist Will Sach whose surname – pronunciation fans – Webb enunciated as “sash.”
While hardly a banger one of the sesh’s pieces in the mash – ‘Like Sach’ – was dedicated to Will. Far better was the amiable treatment of the Lennie Tristano piece ‘Two Not One’ that Webb explained is a contrafact (a new melody run over existing chord changes) of in this case ‘I Can’t Believe You’re in Love With Me,’ a song Earl Hines, another antique kindred spirit aligned to the vintage Webb approach, interpreted.
Other treatments that resonated included the version of ‘Pitter Panther Patter’ drawing on Duke Ellington and Jimmy Blanton (the latter often credited as the inventor of the whole notion of the “walking bass” in jazz).
The laidback unsuited and unbooted trio – all purply clad in T shirts or short sleeve polo – also dug agreeably into a delicately gauged turn the lamp down low treatment of Cole Porter’s ‘You Do Something to Me’ which goes back to the 1920s and was sung famously much later by Marlene Dietrich. They do.
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