Last night’s concert at the Bimhuis was pretty extraordinary. I hadn’t heard of any of these folks before, so many thanks to Marijn and Frans for prodding me into going!

The Belmondo brothers are I believe Paris-based, a brass duo, do not miss an opportunity to see these guys play. Yusef Lateef is apparently a bit of a legend, despite changing his name at the drop of a hat (he called himself “William Evans” at one stage, which for a jazz musician just seems perverse). He’s 86 years old.

Let me repeat that. He’s 86 years old, and appearing in the Bimhuis and making me nod “almost imperceptibly … in total and absolute agreement” for two hours, then sitting signing cd covers and chatting with the fans for another 45 minutes. Maybe there’s something to this not-drinking-not-smoking caper after all…

So what’s the music like? I’m hopeless with naming genres, and in any case the two short sets they played were all over the map. I’ll try to describe some pieces and maybe you’ll get a sense of it. (The lineup is the Belmondo brothers and Lateef on various brass, and piano/bass/drum backing.)

They played one piece from the new album (which I bought, yes, mea culpa), “Morning”: a gentle melodic number with trumpet and double sax mainly in unison but drifting apart occasionally for some dense harmonies (intensified by their rarity), and understated accompaniment. This was maybe the most conventional thing they played, and takes the joint high-point prize, tied of course with the least conventional.

I’m not actually sure the first-equal was really jazz, if you want to be old-fashioned about it. Lateef sang (the only number with vocals), and my first association was with spirituals. “Hold your light up high (hold your light up), gonna cross over that river, gonna take my mother with me, gonna take my father with me, hold your light up high, so I can see across that river”… and the arrangment was like nothing you’ve ever heard. Lateef also plays lots of interesting small whistles (on the album credits they’re listed as “ethnic flutes”), and used them in between choruses in surprising little bursts of colour; Stephane Belmondo switched between two conches (yes, conches), and if I remember correctly Lionel Belmondo was herding a little family of wooden flutes. The rhythm section stayed right out of it at first, so that between the flashes of weird instrumentation and the open repetitive lyrics there didn’t seem to be any structure to grab hold of… then somehow as they crept in (and I hardly noticed when they did) the structure they filled in had always been there, in the gaps around what the others were doing. Magical.

But just so you don’t think they’re extremists, they showed that they can mix it up too: take a down-to-the-ground boring-basic blues pattern, and a down-to-the-ground trad solo style, and play it on an oboe in a vaguely middle-eastern mode and tweak the timing as though you’re an 86-year-old man halting through a half-remembered music… and it’s not boring or trad anymore, it’s strange and beautiful.

And finally, so everyone can go away happy, they encored with a series of solos so wild and weird that they were totally incomprehensible. After all, it’s not really jazz if it’s comfortable, right?

If you get a chance to catch these guys, grab it with hands, feet and tail.