Mike Janisch Quintet / Pizza Express Jazz Club, review

Seeing Mike Janisch play jazz bass is a tonic in itself. Before he took up jazz bass in earnest, Janisch was on a sports scholarship at an American university, hurling himself into the fray of American football. Now he hurls himself into bass playing with the same reckless, muscular abandon. He plays a proper full-sized instrument, not one of those silly-looking short-waisted imitations so many bass players use these days. He doesn’t tickle or stroke the instrument, like so many European players, he masters it, the notes always dead centre in pitch, round in tone, and prefaced with a ’thunk’ that has the force of a drum-stroke.

For the past fifteen years his talents have been a godsend for many fine bandleaders both in the US and in the UK, where he now lives. Now he’s taken the plunge and become a bandleader himself. The line-up wasn’t quite the same as on the debut album. Jochen Rueckert, a German drummer now based in New York, replaced Johnathan Blake, but he proved a more than worthy substitute. The other three were of stellar quality. Jason Palmer is a quiet, intense trumpeter from North Carolina who is as light in tone as Janisch is muscular. He weighs up each phrase mentally before he emerges, so that though the notes themselves emerge in swift volleys, they seem somehow weighty, and never decorative.

There was only one occasion when these fine players seemed to miss the heart of something, and that was in Sammy Fain’s ’Love is a Many-Splendoured Thing’. Perhaps they were embarrassed by the heart-on-sleeve quality of the original. Mostly they played Janisch’s own material, which though often exuberantly angular and rhythmic, can unexpectedly veer towards the tender, as in the number inspired by his ’English rose’. The ’special relationship’ may be rocky at the geo-political level, but in jazz it’s doing just fine.

Telegraph rating: ****