Ashley Wales’ Back In Your Town night continues to provide us with some of the most exciting improvisation to be found anywhere in clubland.  And I mean clubland; the Red Rose, situated on a most unappealing stretch of the Seven Sisters Road to the South West of Finsbury Park has the charm of a decades-old working men’s club.  But look between the multiple TVs tuned to Sky Sports and the chalkboards showing such endearingly precise prices as “Bitter £2.12″, and you will see the walls are festooned with pictures of performers – the room through the back is what you are looking for if you need a bit of free jazz or live comedy to lift your spirits in this part of North London.

As a prelude to the main act, Steve Beresford and Neil Metcalfe performed an excellent piano/flute duet.  The level of listening and the speed of the reactions to each other was extraordinary – whether Beresford would stumble upon a phrase, or Metcalfe chanced upon a melody, the other would take it, bash it around for a bit, and hand it back for further work.  It was probably inevitable given their respective choice of instruments that Beresford would excite most, leaping as he did from the thunderous rumble on the left to the flashes of lightning on the right, nearly falling off his stool as he did so.

Mark Sanders had barely managed to finish his thanks to those involved with the organisation of this tour (you can read a brilliant review over wordsandmusic of the Liverpool gig) when the impatient and cross-looking Gayle burst in with his white alto, leaving Sanders and William Parker tearing after him in chase.  Immediately, intensity levels were extremely high; at times all three musicians had their eyes closed in concentration, as they tried to align their respective cog with the revolutions of this great engine.

Parker was the first to be given a solo, a long (picture the impatient Gayle glowering stage right), fast (I had to check that he in fact has only five fingers on each hand) thing which seemed to be constantly fighting against an urge to develop some funk.  He took a glorious – and much shorter - arco solo later, deft as they come, and bursting with melody.  These were moments to savour – during the ensemble pieces the muscular Parker’s work became at times surprisingly buried amidst the hullabaloo beinig created around him.

Sanders’s moments in the spotlight were disappointingly brief: as I write, I’m listening to his solo record Swallow Chase on Wales’ Treader label, and he is clearly capable of creating sublime extended percussion pieces.  By some distance the youngest man on stage, he played a mostly subservient role, but played it with the utmost quality and consistency – marvellously responsive, switching between the sticks, brushes, and mallets, and using every square centimetre of every surface available to him to produce the fullest array of sounds, but in the most unshowy fashion.   Towards the end of a piece which had kicked off as an Ayler-esque march, Gayle and Parker lured him into a drums versus sax and bass showdown; Sanders fought his corner with aplomb, matching their knotty phrases with is own intricate shapes. 

Gayle’s sax playing was, as you would have expected, incendiary throughout the evening, featuring coruscating Coltrane-like runs into upper registers, all played with a huge, chewy vibrato.  However the quality of his piano playing was an unexpected surprise to me – he would feel his way in before playing with Bley-ish style, humming and singing as he went.  When, at the start of the second piano trio piece, Parker and Sanders led off at brisk pace, a grin broke out for the first time on Gayle’s face, appreciating the challenge he was being set, and responding with relish.  This image was in contrast to the stern, forceful leader we had seen throughout the evening, calling players in, before shutting them out with a blast from his horn.  After the evening faded out with Gayle playing a snatch of Tyner on piano (“Naima”, if I remember correctly, which would be a first), this stony facade was finally shattered by his humble and heartfelt thankyou speech.  As he signed off with “There may be three of us, but we’re a quartet – you are the fourth person”, suddenly he was once more just a thin, gaunt looking old man, and the fourth person showed their appreciation with a huge and massively deserved ovation.

There are more photos at the flickr.