Darius Jones, John Edwards and Steve Noble
Cafe Oto, London

A HOT, hot Sunday night in downtown Dalston, made even hotter at the Cafe Oto with the boiling sound of Darius Jones’s alto saxophone, straight from the heat of the USA.

Jones, born in Norfolk, Virginia in 1978 and now a Professor of Music at Wesleyan College, Connecticut, was playing in a superfine trio with two British nonpareils, bassist John Edwards and drummer Steve Noble. And how they coalesced! Their notes bestrode the ocean, as a certain Elizabethan groover might have written, as if no geographical gulf or barrier can stop the free passage of hot music.

I was sitting some two yards away from the blistering Darius, whose belligerent horn belched and guffawed sizzling notes into my ears. He began with ear-splitting shrieks, almost like a nightmare before bedtime, but one calibrated by its own ferocious beauty, and nothing, even this, could take aback the co-operative artistry of the response and challenge of Edwards and Noble.

Noble thrashed his drums with a careworn yet carefully chosen array of sound with his powerful sticks and mallets while Edwards, his bow at the lowest ebb of his strings, plucked with his dauntless fingers and drummed on his faithful bass' enduring frame as if there were two drummers drumming to add more furious sound to Jones’s scalding horn.

Sometimes his saxophone, as if exhausted by its own sounds, seemed to become another woodwind being, as its soundmaker made it sound like an oboe, a soothing bassoon or an overblown clarinet, and interspersed its simmering sound with precious and gentle moments of tenderness.

Certainly, nothing could have sounded less like a professorial encounter than Jones’s dog-days of August educational tryst, and I found myself wishing that my own tutorial days some 60 years ago in the book-filled studies of Leeds, could have sounded so fulminating!