On Monday evening I headed to the Wigmore Hall, the Mecca of classical chamber music, for something out of their – and my – usual lane. Australian-American jazz bassist Linda May Han Oh and tenor saxophonist Melissa Aldana presented a pared-down set of duets of standards, mainly taken from their recent album Beneath Lifted Skies, which showed the virtues of working on a small canvas and gave more ammunition to the “less is more” cause.
Han Oh attracted a different crowd, younger, hipper and happy to clap solos while the music continued – I could feel the Hall itself wince. We were treated to a virtuoso performance from Han Oh, whose solos often took on a freewheeling, manic energy, but who could also provide a solid groove as the basis for Aldana’s (pictured below by Eduardo Pavez Goye) fluttering improvisations. As a very limited bassist myself, I have always been fascinated by the sound of the instrument, and its role at the foundation of musical structures of all sorts. So it was a treat for me to hear the bass foregrounded for once, and to revel in Han Oh’s joyful flights of fancy.
One quibble is that Han Oh is a better bassist than she is enunciator, so I didn’t catch the titles of all the songs. This included the opening pair, segued together, moving from an athletic Han Oh bassline in contest with Aldana’s weightless flourishes into a second half of sultry and breathy melodies. I liked the way Han Oh would often supply both bass and middle-ground – compensating for the absence of a harmony instrument – which often left her flying around her instrument with balletic facility. This multi-valent approach worked best in the high-spirited take on Bud Powell’s “Hallucination” (one title I did catch), and “Duke Ellington’s Sound of Love” by Charles Mingus, which was more introspective and nocturnal, inspiring in a couple of people around me that look that is midway between fascination and torpor.
Later in the set Han Oh and Aldana were joined by alto saxophonist Will Vinson, who played delightfully blustery lines with a genial grace, and whose face progressively went the same colour as his cardigan, and singer Jo Lawry. She added a different colour to proceedings, she and Han Oh gave a touching performance of the latter’s original composition “Optical Illusions”, written, as a mother, “wishing for all children to be allowed to be children”. It was absorbing, and followed up with a tutti finale, whose title I didn’t catch, in which Lawrey’s chromatic lines danced and flew.
