London Jazz Festival

Various venues

The 10-day London Jazz Festival ends tonight, leaving the capital’s jazz community more than usually dazed and confused. We all start off making long and impractical wish lists and end up defeated by musical indigestion and, with the more remote events taking place in Richmond and Croydon, by sheer geography.

My number-one target was Sonny Rollins, the “saxophone colossus”. Seventy-nine is not an outlandish age these days, but of his jazz generation, the one that destroyed itself with hard drugs, there are few survivors and none as eminent as Rollins. His improvisations no longer run to the epic length of a few years ago, but he and his five-piece band played nonstop for more than an hour and a half at the Barbican last Saturday and his phenomenal ingenuity, a kind of musical lateral thinking, never flagged.

In some respects, Rollins is a very traditional jazz musician. He sticks to the structures he grew up with, the 12-bar blues and the 32-bar song, plus some Caribbean ditties he picked up as a youngster. But from these simple materials he draws endless streams of melody, by turns witty, elegant, whimsical and funky. His love of old show tunes is renowned.

As he was in London, he announced, he would now play a piece by Noël Coward, and embarked on “Some Day I’ll Find You”. After rummaging about in it entertainingly for some time, he drew his solo to a close by slyly interpolating the last eight bars of “I’ll See You Again”. A classic stroke.

Rollins is such an individualist that no sane person would ever try to imitate him. On the other hand, Branford Marsalis (who appeared at the Queen Elizabeth Hall on Monday night) should serve as a model for a generation of young saxophonists. In the matter of sheer technical perfection, the only possible comparison is with the late Stan Getz, but Marsalis achieves it on both tenor and soprano saxophones. And, as with Getz, tone is at the heart of it. On tenor, Marsalis’s sound is full and fibrous and his precise articulation at high speed is almost unbelievable. On soprano, in slow ballads especially, his pristine, vibratoless tone is a distillation of calm.

The banjo is the butt of many jokes, mainly because, over the years, it has been so execrably played in jolly, boater trad bands. But there are banjos and banjos. The five-string variety is a virtuoso instrument in bluegrass music and that’s where Béla Fleck started out. It’s a long way from there to playing duets with Chick Corea, which he did on Sunday at the Barbican.

His own band features the brothers Wooten – bass guitarist Victor and percussionist Reggie (playing an electronic box of tricks, slung round his neck like a guitar) – and the phenomenal pianist and harmonica player Howard Levy. They put on quite an act.

The basic rhythmic unit of bluegrass is the semiquaver, which, in layman’s terms, means a million notes going past in a mighty blur. Somewhat rattled by this, plus Victor juggling with the bass while playing it and Reggie (dressed for some reason as a pirate, in a tricorn hat) playing his gadget with one hand and drums with the other, I just sat there in a state of helpless stupefaction. But, as Dr Johnson remarked, the pleasures of sudden wonder are soon exhausted and an hour of it was more than enough.

After joining Fleck for a friendly duet, Chick Corea introduced his Power of Three: himself on piano, Stanley Clarke on double bass and drummer Lenny White – three-quarters of the original Return to Forever, in fact. They are among the finest contemporary players and couldn’t sound merely average, even if they tried.

But to be at once so casual and so sharp comes only after working together over long years. If you saw the classic Oscar Peterson Trio at work, you’ll know what I mean. The half-smile on Clarke’s face, as he followed some of Corea’s trickier moves, said it all. I don’t think you get this kind of interaction in any form of music but jazz.

The London Jazz Festival prides itself on being up to the minute, but I couldn’t help noticing that all the bands (except Rollins, who’s a law unto himself) stuck to the time-honoured programme strategy of building up to hysterical climax, topped off with a spectacular, flailing drum solo. This can be relied on to elicit cheers and whoops and rarely fails to bring a standing ovation. It’s comforting to know that some things never change.