The Pizza Express Jazz Club has begun a new Monday-night series called Soho Interpretations featuring local artists' angles on the canons of jazz legends. One of the most widely admired and voraciously-curious of UK jazz stars – pianist and composer Gwilym Simcock – launched the venture and typically chose an unexpected subject. Simcock's big piano influences – Keith Jarrett, Chick Corea and the Englishman John Taylor – might have been his obvious choices, but he went instead for the late bass-guitarist Jaco Pastorius, the short-lived bipolar genius who put his accompanists' instruments in the frontline as both a composer and a mind-blowing player. Much of Pastorius's music has been interpreted by big ensembles and by Weather Report, but Simcock achieved considerable breadth with just the trio of London bassist Laurence Cottle and subtle young drummer James Maddren.
Cottle caught both the vivacity and lightness of Pastorius's bass-guitar sound and its brass-like warmth and penetration as a theme-stating ensemble instrument. Simcock's ingenious arrangements allowed the piano not only to evoke the textures of bigger lineups, but also – on the Joni Mitchell/Pastorius collaboration Jericho – to suggest the cajoling turns and glissandos of Mitchell's voice. Liberty City, a blend of fast grooving and frisky staccato figures, fizzed with the joyousness in much of Pastorius's writing, and Elegant People (from Weather Report's Black Market album) had an Iberian feel that sprang Simcock into fluently-swerving Corea mode, as did the sashaying Young and Fine, which also brought Maddren into busy polyrhythmic conversation with his partners. The gig shook off its initial cool at this point, and Cottle began phrasing in mercurially skipping figures – and Simcock with effortlessly unrepetitive funkiness – on Bright Size Life (from the 1975 Pat Metheny debut album that also revealed Pastorius to a wider world). Simcock's account of Mitchell's Jericho almost stole the set, however, in its softly rocking melancholy, poignant harmonies and patiently spacey basslines. The gig cherished Pastorius's lyricism, when many celebrations of him concentrate on virtuosic hyper-funk.
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