Paul Edis Sextet, the Pizza, Soho ***

A big week for pianist Paul Edis with the release of his new Lateralize album with the fabulous Jo Harrop When Winter Turns to Spring from which the sumptuous 'Winter Love Affair' ('One Day Soon') is already picking up airplay on BBC Radio 2. …

Published: 6 Dec 2022. Updated: 16 months.

A big week for pianist Paul Edis with the release of his new Lateralize album with the fabulous Jo Harrop When Winter Turns to Spring from which the sumptuous 'Winter Love Affair' ('One Day Soon') is already picking up airplay on BBC Radio 2.

Here, with a well attended rescheduled Soho date postponed from the summer, with his sextet - the first set of last night's show featured a generous selection of Edis tunes from his 2014 album Mr Hipster. Painting a picture of sprawling family of in-laws 'The Timothys' with its hymn like beginning, the Don Quixote inspired 'Don Errant' featuring the flute playing of tenorist Vasilis Xenopoulos (familiar from Nigel Price's roogalating Live at the Crypt), 'Eastern' and Edis' melancholy laden ballad 'Missing You' written for his wife all found a place.

Hailing from Chester-Le-Street in County Durham - sharing the same home town as Harrop - Edis relocated to London around Lockdown time and after the enforced hiatus in performing has flourished since both on record and live becoming a staple part of the burgeoning Hampstead Jazz Club scene championed at the Duke of Hamilton by Mayank Patel and Jonathan Wingate.

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With Paul, who has a prodigious modern-mainstream technique grounded in the terrain that lands between Oscar Peterson and Ahmad Jamal and who has a natural and friendly demeanour when speaking to the audience and an easy warmth in his presentation, was very fine hard bop trumpeter and flugel player Freddie Gavita, tenorist/flautist, the aforementioned Xenopoulos, excellent trombonist Rory Ingham, double bassist Adam King who is also on When Winter Turns to Spring and drummer Joel Barford reading from sheet music on a stand by the kit stylistically a little like James Maddren. The very strong horn section allied with Edis' spirited runs and accented flourishes set the evening up in a suitable feelgood manner fitting for this season of goodwill.

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FURTHER READING

Paul Edis, photo: Twitter. Dean Street Pizza Express Jazz Club exterior club illuminated sign and the Soho street scene just before showtime - photos: marlbank

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Petra Haller, Meg Morley, Loz Speyer, Live at St Mary's ***1/2

A highly unusual live album of improvisation that works most meaningfully in that the spontaneous composition coheres structurally, emotionally and above all this there is a weight to the outcome. The elements are crisply enough captured - there …

Published: 5 Dec 2022. Updated: 16 months.

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A highly unusual live album of improvisation that works most meaningfully in that the spontaneous composition coheres structurally, emotionally and above all this there is a weight to the outcome. The elements are crisply enough captured - there are no real issues with the mix apart from the sometimes muddy piano sound - if Live at St Mary's obtains a CD release, which hopefully it will need to, a fresh mastering might garner brighter fidelity in places. The tap dance of Petra Haller that proved convincing at Azalea in the summertime here for the first time in a trio with free-jazz pianist Meg Morley and the free-jazz and AfroCuba influenced trumpeter and flugel player Loz Speyer recording in a Putney church in September. Petra's feet act as percussion so think of her as a drummer playing on a practice pad rather than a drum with the snare off, the clash of brittle shoe polymer and board together creates its own piquant series of resonances and sometimes you'd swear it's even castanets at play such is Petra's nimble footwork. Morley is frequently serene, even pointillistic. Speyer, a player who should be far better known and celebrated, is an enjoyably plangent pleasure especially on the flugel, stark but also passionate. Moving in places it's a collaboration that harnesses a sense of in-the-moment reaction to distilled expression stored in a collective imagination that unveils itself naturally. The highlight is the three autonomous independent lines explored on 'The Three of Us' where to use a significant Weather Report remark Joe Zawinul is attributed to have made however much this lands in a completely different idiom - ''No one solos, everyone solos.''

FURTHER READING:

Meg Morley, top left, Loz Speyer, Petra Haller, photo: from the cover art