Rudresh Mahanthappa
Pizza Express, Soho

AFTER many records expressing the depth and complexity of his own unique musical essence, alto saxophonist Rudresh Mahanthappa’s new eponymous album with his Hero Trio — bassist Francois Moutin and drummer Rudy Royston, he counts it as “an immense pleasure to record music that is not my own.”

At Soho’s Pizza Express he performed a selection of these tunes with astonishing fluidity, breakneck speed and warm empathy with his confreres. Moutin’s deeply twanging artistry and Royston’s command of every percussive surface created a threesome unity of rampaging and moving sound.

The coda of the sprinting opener, Charlie Parker’s Red Cross, pealed out like some joyous birdsong. Mahanthappa told his listeners how at the age of five, he heard Stevie Wonder’s Overjoyed while watching Sesame Street and how much it affected him. He played its theme with a lovingly emotive remembrance.

A life’s journey carried on singing from his horn as he played Keith Jarrett’s The Windup, which as a teenager he learned from an album he borrowed from a Boulder, Colorado, public library. Full of the fire of discovery and youth, you could believe it when he confessed how much the tune had changed his life.

The album includes tracks remembering Ornette Coleman, Gershwin and Johnny Cash, and as he played such a diversity of themes, you could hear first-hand a musical life relived with love and gratitude.

Hear the trio live or buy the record, the invocation of an age of music savoured and fully lived is powerful and memorable, and provokes our own lives of loved sounds. Here, in the midst of Soho on a warm March night, it had a special magnetism.

Hero Trio is released by Whirlwind Records.

Rudresh Mahanthappa’s Hero Trio will play at Lewes Love Supreme Jazz Festival on July 3 2022.