A fabulous celebration of witty, oldstyle jazz

Wynton Marsalis Quartet Barbican ★★★★★

There was a time, long ago, when jazz was happy to be a fabulous entertainment, able to make us smile at a witty turn, laugh at a pretended pratfall, and take pleasure in cunningly contrived improvisations.

With Wynton Marsalis, virtuoso trumpeter, long-serving director of the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra, and ardent proselytiser for the civilising qualities of jazz, those long-lost pleasures come roaring back. Marsalis is often accused of being stuck in the past, but the great thing about the 75-minute set he played with his quartet was its sense of surprise.

The first number, Magic Hour, was a case in point, launching off with a set of abrupt phrases at a furious bebop pace, each of which cut off without warning. Jazz playfulness, or avant-garde weirdness? We weren’t sure at first, and the fact that the number proceeded to unwind through several tempos and styles down to a slouching swing didn’t resolve the mystery. Often it was hard to put one’s finger on the idiom, as in Free to Be, which had an intriguing mix of war drums and Latin beat.

This sense of subtlety emerging gradually through playfulness showed the star quality of Marsalis’s band. Bassist Mark Lewandowski is barely out of college, but had the kind of finesse that made a single repeated note seem interesting. Wynton’s brother Jason was an engagingly minimalist drummer. Pianist Dan Nimmer was a model of elegant understatement, with an astonishing feather-light touch in the virtuoso runs of right-hand chords – of which there were many.

And of course there was Wynton himself. Last time he appeared at the Barbican he disappointed by retreating modestly into the background. On this occasion he had a ball, strolling among the audience like the star crooners of old, and regaling us with phrase after phrase of delicious curling grace, often beginning at an incredible altitude and winding down to the depths.

In all it was a tremendous, lifeaffirming display of musicality.