In the 1970s both Stan Tracey and Bobby Wellins fell into their own personal black holes and there’s a degree of luck that they both climbed back on to the jazz scene and were thus together on the stage in Oxford on a Sunday in 2009. At ages when most of us would be shuffling from the garden to the armchair these two great figures of the British jazz scene are playing with the same energy they had when they first worked together on Stan Tracey’s ground-breaking album Under Milk Wood.

The delight of this concert was not just the pleasure of seeing these two together on stage but that, in duo, we were able to enjoy unalloyed the precision of their playing. There is an extraordinary musical understanding between them and the contrast between their styles was laid before us without the added complexities of a rhythm section. Tracey’s manner at the keyboard, though richly veined by Thelonious Monk, is quite unmistakable. He doesn’t play through a melody but removes it entirely from its box of lines and harmonies, lays the pieces across the keyboard and then magically puts it all back again without losing the meaning or wavering from the inner pulse. It’s an extraordinary venture of musical recreation that shows how even at the age of 82 he has lost neither technique nor imagination.

Wellins, on the other hand, is able to take the line of a melody and draw it out into a long, balanced thread with a fascinating mix of perfectly expresssed phrases and sudden eloquent bursts of song. Given their recent release of an album of Monk tunes it is not surprising that much of the evening was devoted to this. The contrast of playing was perfectly illustrated in Tracey’s interpretation of Round Midnight, full of clotted chords and dramatic releases followed by Wellins playing Monk’s Mood at a wonderfully slow speed that attenuated the phrases in his very clean unaffected tone.