London jazz festival – review

I am ending the night in a ramshackle Old Street basement blazing with incandescent noise from thrash-jazz outfit trioVD . This comes right after an evening of elegant grand-piano jazz around the corner at the Barbican. Such behaviour is par for the course at the 30-gigs-per-night London jazz festival. There were at least two other tempting events within 300 yards of Old Street venue The Camp on Wednesday; at least one audience member was breezily commuting between them. It's like iPod-shuffling with live music, only governed by the nimbleness of your legs rather than your thumbs. Three world-class jazz pianists had occupied the Barbican stage: the brilliant young Pole Marcin Wasilewski being followed by two mercurially witty solo performers, the maverick Italian Stefano Bollani and the octogenarian French legend Martial Solal . Wasilewski began his trio's set (largely devoted to his recent album Faithful) in introspective, harmony-dissecting mood on a 1940s Hanns Eisler theme. But the group picked up speed for the pianist's prodding, somewhat Brad Mehldau -like Mosaic, dropped back for an impressionistic episode of moist chords and bowed-bass on Hermeto Pascoal's Oz Guizos , then displayed an all-for-one dynamism on Paul Bley 's crisply boppish Big Foot, and a rolling, ostinato-driven swing on Night Train to You . Bollani opened the second half with a seamless solo mashup of cross-genre quotations and throwaway musical gags, became quietly Gershwinesque, and eventually as contrapuntally flamboyant as Art Tatum . He then brought on his guest Solal, an artist of similarly formidable technique four decades his senior, for an improvised two-piano dialogue loosely hung on standard songs. Both men like treating hard music lightly, and they threw a good deal of mock-startled body-banter at each other. But their impromptu games with After You've Gone, The Man I Love, My Funny Valentine, Take the A Train, and the occasional skid into Yankee Doodle Dandy were exuberantly entertaining – even if, after a while, they sounded like non-stop talkers trying to outwit each other at a party.