Hunched over the piano keyboard, his pose akin to that of a statistician analysing code, Benjamin Lackner picked out abstracted blues lines with mathematical precision. His solo on set opener ‘Mosquito Flats’ – in which he demonstrates his gift for melody while slipping a traditional form into his particular sound world – was deliberate, seemingly cautious, emblematic of what was to come. Carefully emphasised minor seconds clanged at the ends of phrases, but in other ways Lackner’s quintet stayed squarely within a certain European jazz idiom. Straight eighths and a dank atmosphere dominated the evening. Most tunes stuck to a minor palette and moderate tempo, which contributed to the blurring together of overlaid legato melodies. The gentle tone and billowing reverb favoured by trumpeter – and label-mate – Mathias Eick complemented Lackner’s aesthetic with a calming assuredness.
Mark Turner and Linda May Han Oh, two New York City stalwarts who feature on Lackner’s new album Spindrift, are absent for this tour, replaced by Polish saxophonist Maciej Obara and bassist Harish Raghavan. Raghavan powered the first set, contrasting drummer Matthieu Chazarenc’s mallet-driven chugging with forceful pounding of the low strings. His solo on ‘See You Again My Friend’, insistently syncopated to the brink of exercise, was a similarly mold-breaking high point. In a world of reverb and repetition, Raghavan’s attack dissipated the mist and gave the two-chord vamps that populate Lackner’s tunes a reason for being.
Obara soared across picturesque harmonic landscapes with ostentatious runs and flitted rapidly from one end of his range to the other. At times; such as over the gleaming optimism of ‘More Mesa’; it was all too much. But at others, Raghavan’s rich, gritty realism did just enough to accentuate the sharper edges of these pieces. On ‘Murnau’, for example, Obara channeled Ornette Coleman with fluttering phrases that were unpredictable yet deeply familiar. The title track, however – a highlight from the album Spindrift, in which an unleashed Turner empties his jazz school bag to typically magnificent effect – didn’t reach those heights here.

To the second set, the band brought more open arrangements and teased greater potential. Lackner strung together ‘Fair Warning’ and ‘Out of the Fog’ with a silencing solo interlude in which he twisted his melodies into atonal ventures. ‘Open Minds Lost’ contained a round of lyrically inventive soloing, particularly from Eick, and Chazarenc expanded on a lovely earlier moment of body percussion with a hand drumming solo that drew awed looks from the piano bench. But the incongruity of the waltz that followed dissipated all tension. Such frustrating illusions abounded: feisty conversations and upper structure comping filled an improvised trialogue that ended too soon; Lackner wove ‘Camino Cielo’ through clever triadic harmony, but under solos opted for yet another two-chord loop.
Dynamic structures, too, were standardised: again and again, Chazarenc drove the band up and down normally distributed slopes. Predetermined solo sections always nestled neatly between two statements of the melody. The horns ritualistically traded phrases, and ‘free’ sections were hemmed in on both sides. The result of all this meticulousness, of course, was that both sets ran without a hitch. Songs climbed, climaxed, and eased back home like clockwork as Chazarenc’s grooves ticked along. Perhaps patrons of Ronnie Scott’s prefer tight choreography for their dinner theatre; but when drama is methodically arranged and everybody knows the script, is it really dramatic? In the absence of a sense that anything could happen, there is a ceiling on the potential exhilaration.
On Chazarenc’s ‘Chambary’, the rhythm section got deep into it. The groove, heavily laid back and deeply funky like a beast from the Berklee practice rooms, freed up Raghavan for interplay and prodded Lackner into his boldest solo of the night. When the horns exploded in and Eick’s warm tones embraced Obara’s virtuosic exultations, Lackner fought his way into the melange, firing off spiky stabs and sprinkling high lines into vacant spaces like rows of icicles falling to a cavern floor. The sequence was explosive, thrilling, and again all too brief. Before things could develop further, the leader signaled to wrap it up. Lackner succeeded in recreating the clear, airy atmosphere of his two most recent records, but a ninety minute live show is an opportunity to stretch out and explore the space, which this quintet is demonstrably capable of doing. It would be a joy to see them loosen up and let the music develop in its own way.