REVIEW:

Perfect Houseplants

A perfect houseplant requires minimum attention, looks attractive and then blooms beautifully and quite unexpectedly. The jazz quartet, Perfect Houseplants, led by pianist Huw Warren and saxophonist Mark Lockheart is by this description quite aptly named, though more than minimum attention does give greater rewards. The group’s tightly structured compositions that begin from relatively uncomplex ‘pastoral’ lines and build into more dense melodies allow one to sit back and listen to the unfolding with a degree of expectation, sometimes with longing, for the formal arrangements to break out into the blossom of a variegated solo. When this happened at the Spin Perfect Houseplants created some great moments of contemporary jazz.

This was particularly true under the fingers of Huw Warren whose fleet and funky soloing always lifted the band into a higher gear. Mark Lockheart on the other hand, whose immaculate tone quality on both tenor and soprano and magisterial rendering of the written arrangements did not blossom until well into the second half. For a player with a well documented record as a virtuoso player he seemed unusually restrained for much of the evening. A great strength of this quartet, like the roots of our botanical epithet, lie in the bass of Dudley Philips and drums of Martin France. Philips’s bass lines are remarkable in combining a loose flowing form that still knits and drives the music. A pity that much of his soloing on six-string bass was rather drowned by the rest of the band. On several numbers Martin France’s sharp, edgy, off-beat, pistol-shot work on drums was more forceful and attractive than the front-line melody and working in antithesis to it. That said, Salvador, dedicated to Dali, and Clec (Welsh for gossip) were examples of sharp articulate writing that generated some excellent solos from both sax and keyboard.

Last time Perfect Houseplants played the Spin I was moved to buy their recent album. This time, though the musicianship was just as good. the sudden beautiful blooms came less often and less forcefully and the writing often felt a little fussy.

© Paul Medley