Schlippenbach Trio: Warsaw Concert review – enthralling improv from jazz supergroup

The European trio of pianist Alexander von Schlippenbach, saxophonist Evan Parker and drummer Paul Lovens are a unique all-improv group whose balance of conversational spontaneity and personal contrarianism has kept them fresh for more than four decades. Across a 51-minute single track and a short coda, they enthrallingly fuse their jazz enthusiasms (Coltrane’s hurtling virtuosity, muscular lyricism and tonal range in the saxophonist’s case, Thelonious Monk’s chords and jarring swing in Schlippenbach’s) with the more caustic and abstract improv methods of their earlier years. Parker plays tenor sax throughout, the music speeding through intense, police-siren passages prodded by rocking low-end piano hooks. Bagpipe-like solo sax whoops over Lovens’s pattering, chiding percussion, silences broken by dissonant high-register reed sounds; and softly squeezed tenor lyricism amid offbeat drum bangs in the rapturously greeted encore. An enduring jazz-improv supergroup, still in a class of their own.