Jo Webb Trio
Ronnie Scott’s, London
★★★★

IF YOU are an artist of some kind in the UK and you achieve success which amounts to “celebrity,” you’ll get what Warhol called your 15 minutes of fame. But then, as predictable as a revolutionary Thermidor, you will face “the backlash.”

Except in Wales. 

If you are from the post-industrial belt where the majority of Wales’ proletarian population lies and you manage to “make it” you become like a Greek god. Everyone knows someone who knows you, a story about a connection, and they reel with pride. We hold these Welsh gods to our hearts with a passion we rarely show to our loved ones.

Joe Webb is from Neath and bears a striking resemblance to a young Dylan Thomas, who grew up 20 minutes or so down the road in Swansea. The comparison is apt, because Webb’s amazing music has the depth and colour of the best of Dylan’s prose and poetry.

Much contemporary jazz has the modal hard bop of Miles and Coltrane at its root, or fuses with other popular forms, or leans toward an “anti American” Nordic coolness. But Webb, in his “Negation of the Negation” (as Marxists call it) rejects decades of space and mood, for impossibly happy ragtime. Yes, you read correctly. His piano races along, in chromatic rises and falls, waves of flamboyant music not heard since the 1930s. His influences include Art Tatum and Oscar Peterson and you can hear these odd bedfellows bellow through his dancing tunes. Will Sach’s fingers on bass provide rhythm too fast to tap your feet to. 

It would be a mistake, though, to characterise Webb’s sudden popularity as some kind of nostalgia project. He has only produced two EPs and his current album, Hamstrings and Hurricanes, yet this was a Ronnie Scott’s filled to the rafters with a diverse audience thrilled at the virtuoso, and very unusual, “happy jazz.”

But in those EPs we see another influence competing with the rag. Darker themes accompany titles of everyday life, and these provide the necessary shade. 

Tonight, the highlights were, back to back, a breakneck Cheek To Cheek (yes, Irving Berlin and Fred Astaire) then the approaching menace of CCTV, for which Sach picked up his bow to add atmosphere over rhythm.

I predict we’ll be seeing Webb breathlessly joining Dua Lipa on Graham Norton’s couch having finished a breakneck rag. And racing through melodies on a grand piano with Ant and Dec performing slapstick top-hat-and-tails routines. But he’s much more than that. Either way, he will join Tom Jones, Shirley Bassey and Michael Sheen on the Valleys’ Mount Olympus.

On tour until June 12. For more information see: joewebbmusic.com