Kenny Barron Trio, Ronnie Scott's review - a master of the cool

Kenny Barron, revered as the best jazz pianist around, is a perfect gentleman and a master of “cool” – a quality once described in great depth by the American Africanist Robert Farris Thompson, in an article originally published in African Arts in 1973.

The term has today lost most of its original meaning. It evokes the ability to be totally present without showing off, to do more with less, and to evoke a kind of spiritual purity and healing. In Yoruba culture, as the New York priest John Mason once told me, the cool is the domain of the god Obatala, the one who tempers with judgment rather fires up with flames.

Kenny Barron, playing at Ronnie Scott’s last Friday, brought to improvisation a mixture of intelligence and creativity in which excess has no place. Even though many of the technically astounding runs he produced sparkle, and he left his audience gasping for breath, their hearts lifted, he did it with an ease and a grace that has only matured with age.

Barron’s gentlemanly quality is also reflected in a generosity of spirit: here’s a pianist who will reference others, such as Hank Jones, Thelonious Monk and Bud Powell, not as an exercise in name-dropping but because of the respect he holds for the elders of his time, role models in terms of invention, and the soil from which his unclassifiable style has grown. He carries the spirit of his ancestors within him, which is why his music has such wide and profound appeal. His playing is at once familiar, and yet never constrained by tradition. He is at much at home going off-piste with a close to atonal phrase, as he is teasing the sentimental essence out of a standard.

Taking a solo in jazz, I was once told by the Cameroonian sax-player Manu Dibango, is like telling a story, or preaching. The player must take the listener along, with style but no gimmickry, making the adventure that unfolds in a spontaneous chorus feel both fresh and ultimately coherent. There must be surprise, but also a sense of completion.  At the London club, Kenny Barron did this with such ease. There was never a moment when the narrative thread, a piece of piano poetry didn’t hold one’s attention. In the more up-tempo numbers, his sense of rhythm, his mastery of pacing, and the interplay between left hand and right, were a joy to behold – whether he was playing around with the contagiously happy bounce of a calypso or the sensual lilt of a bossa nova. When he slowly meandered his way into a standard – as with a deeply moving take on “The Very Thought of You” – his touch was unbelievably delicate, displaying a control of the keys that was both seductive and gloriously melancholy.

He was more than ably supported by the Japanese-American bass player Kiyoshi Kitagawa, the perfect foil, as sensitive as the pianist himself, with a supple walking stroke, and some very original glissandi chords, that made the most of his instrument’s fretless neck. Barron’s generosity is also reflected in the fact he gives Kitagawa plenty of solo space. He does the same for the drummer Johnathan Blake, exchanging fours with him on several numbers, and then giving him a showcase spot on his own, when he builds up, time and time again, in a series of beautifully controlled explosions. During Barron’s chorus, whether on sticks, mallets or brushes, Blake demonstrates perfect technical control as well as a capacity for invention, always alert to what is happening on the keyboard, as well as gently coaxing a kind of rhythmic aside from Barron or the bass player at his side. A shimmering mallet stroke on a cymbal here and a hard-edged tap on a drum’s rim – it’s as if were building in space, a shifting territory in which the music can most beautifully evolve.

This isn’t just a series of well-told tales from a brilliant pianist, but a conversation – in which each is listening to the other, and taking the story forward, one bar at a time. There is delight in being part of it, and a club rather than a concert hall makes this so much more tangible: you can sense the audience’s hearts leap, as the trio repeatedly takes off, sharing their own joy in the play.

The set is sadly a little short, at the end Barron apologises: it’s a matter of age, he ventures, he has an early rise the next morning, on his way to play in Milan. Touring for a man of his advanced years cannot be easy, not least as he gives so much of himself, even though he makes it seem so incredibly easy. This was perhaps a less vigorous performance than the ones he’s given elsewhere in the past year or two, but the moments of sheer magic, plenty of them in the set, compensated for a lack of the energy of which he is still capable on most occasions.

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