Last night was Baseline (Hein Van de Geyn, Ed Verhoeff and Hans van Oosterhout) and John Abercrombie, a lovely gig. It hit just the right tone for me, enough original compositions and serious soloing to be out-of-the-ordinary, but still not really experimental in the “I’m lost” sense. Still, they were on-to-it enough that it felt like the choice of ‘Autumn Leaves’ as an encore was a deliberate message: “We’ve finished now, have a standard and quiet down won’t you?”

The Canadian poet Billy Collins has a piece, “The Many Faces of Jazz”, which begins

There’s the one where you scrunch up

your features into a look of pained concentration,

every riff a new source of agony,

then goes on to chart some ten variations on the theme. These guys were all over the map: Van de Geyn bowed over his bass with eyes closed in exstasy while Van Oosterhout was arched back on his drumstool grinning at the ceiling, Verhoeff apparently furious with himself and Abercrombie furious with everyone else… it’s almost better to shut your eyes completely and avoid the distraction, except then you miss the occasional glance from the one to the other, sharing some musical joke you’ve missed.

Van de Geyn and Van Oosterhout are playing next month with Toots Thielemans, by all accounts this is going to be something special.