It was chilly outside in Gillett Square, but the December weather was soon forgotten upon entrance to the cosy atmosphere of Dalston’s Vortex Jazz Bar. Squeezed into the upstairs room of north-east London’s bastion of contemporary music-making, the crowd waited in eager anticipation of the London debut of Craig Taborn’s trio, featuring Thomas Morgan on upright bass and Gerald Cleaver on drums.

The American pianist is no stranger to Glasperian genre straddling, but the music we were presented with here was rooted firmly in jazz’s avant garde. The tone was immediately established with ‘Bodies We Came Out Of’, from 2001’s Light Made Lighter, with Taborn bruising the keyboard’s higher octaves with his exorbitant technique while his left hand vamped in unison with Morgan’s bass.

The trio tackled the bandleader’s difficult tunes with maturity and aplomb, skilfully moving from complex through-composed passages to extended technique-laden free sections and even occasionally hinting at the blues. Compositionally, some of Taborn’s hypnotic melodies perhaps nod towards his earlier dalliances with electronic music and techno but one gets the feeling that the rhythmic whirlpools that swell beneath them are unlikely to be storming the nation’s dance floors any time soon.

Noise, however, was something of an issue in a performance that was being recorded for broadcast on BBC Radio 3. One couple were apparently expecting an evening of relaxing dinner jazz to provide a back drop for their inane chatter, and there were glares all round for someone whose phone could not have loudly rung at a quieter, more heartfelt moment in the set if it had tried.

Though not immediately accessible to all, the number of high calibre British jazz musicians that were in the audience this evening is evidence enough of Craig Taborn’s position at the vanguard of contemporary jazz in the minds of those truly in the know.

 Review - Sam Braysher