Jazz-ethnic fusions are all the rage now, but French bassist Henri Texier was making them long before the term was ever thought of.
He spent his Fifties childhood in north-African districts of Paris, and his music is full of the mad gaiety of Middle Eastern weddings, and the sadness of Eastern laments.
I was expecting to catch that flavour the moment he and his trio of clarinetist Sébastian Texier and drummer Louis Moutin began their Kings Place gig. In fact we were offered the straightest piece of mid-tempo swing we’re likely to hear in the festival.
This was a reminder of the other important fact about Texier. Having played with many of the American greats during his decades at Parisian clubs, all jazz history lives inside him, and is all equally alive. At this gig he seemed like a wise, grizzled Buddhist monk in a woolly hat and incongruous bright red trousers, playing with a lovely fruity sound, and none of that technical flashiness you often find in younger players.
One thing that makes Texier’s playing instantly recognisable is the tender vocal slides between notes. Whether these sound operatic or Eastern depends on the context, and these varied with amusing and disconcerting speed – especially after the interval, when the trio were joined by five more players to make up the “Texier London Octet”. Ranged in a line at the front in their tight suits, the four reed players and violist at times unleashed a wild polyphony of independent lines. It was like a joyous recreation of the front line of a Twenties band such as the Hot Fives, but with a flavour of something wonderfully exotic – a Corsican square, a North African party – thrown in. At other times all five would hurl out a furiously compressed folk melody of just a handful of notes, the violist adding throaty decorations like the lachrymose fiddlers of Arab pop orchestras.
Thus far I’ve barely scratched the surface of the evening’s variety. At one point we even had an Ornette Coleman-like free fantasy, vibes player Benjamin Flament and Moutin in seething dialogue, with Texier summoning a Charlie Haden-like bowed frenzy. The final number was a tragi-comic slow triple-time number, sounding like a New Orleans funeral march cross-bred with a waltz.
Not all the twists and turns and odd juxtapositions seemed convincing, but on the whole the gig’s generosity and gentle humour were a delight.