by Jon Turney

And so to another sort of re-creation. The final date in St G’s short sequence of John Coltrane themed gigs featured Denys Baptiste’s quartet tackling A Love Supreme. That is a brave thing to do, if only because it is on everyone’s list of top albums in jazz history – though it happens reasonably often: Branford Marsalis is the last touring performance I can recall, David Murray has done some, and so on.

Baptiste gave us a game of two halves. First set was selections from his own new recording. These were uniformly excellent, even though the decision to play acoustically – as folk often do at this venue – produced a few sound problems. It needs musicians who haven’t forgotten how to do that, and it seemed as if the drummer had for a while. He drowned out everyone else in the first number, and occasionally throughout when he mistook volume for intensity, as drummers will.

It’s a great band, though, with Gary Crosby on bass and the phenomenal Andrew McCormack on piano. And the pieces were plenty varied. The opener, suffering from the drumming, was a pretty straight Coltrane-style blow, but there were affecting ballads, a bluesy tune dedicated to the Large Hadron Collider (a man of broad interests, Denys) and a somewhat Rollins-like Dance of the Maquiritari, inspired by the composer’s discovery that he had a Venezuelan great grandmother. That was the set closer, and the most convincing and uninhibited effort of the first half. Guess they were getting warmed up for the demands of the second.

An ascent to the gallery improved the sound – especially the crucial piano – for the second half, which gave us the four movements of Coltrane’s suite without pause (or chanting at the end of part 1). The focus is on the tenor, of course, and Baptiste rose to the occasion splendidly, showing the Coltrane influence strongly but still sounding like himself – a slightly lighter tone, a little more relaxed in the up-tempo passages, a fine, meditative approach to the slow parts. McCormack was blindingly good throughout, Crosby handled the vital bass parts with aplomb and the drumming was fluid and propulsive at the same time. As a tribute to a fine original, it worked beautifully, and was the right choice to finish this mini-series, I reckon.

It was probably the right way to finish the gig, too – as Baptiste said, how could you follow. But he came up with a good-humoured encore,Bye, Bye Blackbird, which evoked a charming solo from the pianist, played almost entirely with the right hand, and sent the audience away with a different mood without undermining what had gone before. You wouldn’t want jazz which is so set on honouring the ancestors all the time, but done as well as this it has plenty going for it.

Mainly jazz in Bristol