From his involvement with the ground-breaking Perfect Houseplants through his Scratch Orchestra and Big Idea, Mark Lockheart is constantly shifting the focus of his talents as a composer. With the Big Idea he used four reed players and a lot of close harmony, then recorded all the parts himself for the album. Now with The Mark Lockheart Group he has moved to a quintet with Dave Priseman on trumpet, marking a distinct contrast of sound. Lockheart has a penchant for tightly written scores with sudden shifts of time and colouring, so again in this new formation with a complete set of new compositions there were a lot of complex arrangements in which a single number often had up to three ‘movements’.

The overall sound was very different from what has come before. With Dave Smith on drums and Jasper Hoiby on bass there was a head-on approach that was deliberately hard edge and driving. Liam Noble worked at the extreme effects from the keyboard to produce fuzzy stabs and modulated wails behind longer-phrased melodies from sax and trumpet. The result was Lockheart’s characteristic multi-layered arrangements but with a distinct jazz/prog rock feel that jumped well away from the easy torpor of conventional jazz. The sharp explosive drumming from Dave Smith with Jasper Hoiby’s exceptionally powerful and rhythmically expressive bass playing were key to the overall effect. Lockheart’s soloing was a powerful as ever, particularly on soprano where his technical brilliance lifted the sax lines above the rest of the band. Dave Priseman can also play with both muted restraint and full-on vibrancy with a clear tone and wondrously flying clusters of notes.

This was an evening of music that again lit the fuse of jazz from the past and showed another route forward. Yet at the same time there was nagging sense of over-control. With such exceptional musicians playing so sensationally well together the thought floated in that if much of the complex scoring had been thrown aside and improvisational skills pushed to the fore something even bigger would have happened.