Jazz breaking news: Hermeto gets Ronnie’s hips shaking

You dance or you listen, flail limbs on the floor or close your eyes in concentration in a club. This is not relevant to the 77 year-old Brazilian multi-instrumentalist who has been something of a musical law unto himself for five decades. Hermeto Pascoal’s aesthetic is essentially one of relentless, runaway hyperactivity, where torrents of notes engulf if not flood the listener within two or four bars of a composition. Harmony is in near constant flux with key and time signatures shifting so abruptly it sometimes feels as if the sonic train has gone over a cliff without warning. Yet as Pascoal’s saxophonist, vocalist, pianist and bassist unfurl lines that seem impossibly long, with a would-be resolution giving way to another chord sequence, the effect is exhilaration not alienation. On either side of me, there is shoulder movement, whoops and hollers, almost as if the rows were pews in a church, albeit a Baptist praise house.

Regardless of the complexity of the arrangements, the overarching pulse of the music is Afro-samba. It is dance. Motion. Whirl. Dervish dizziness. Consolidating that sensation is the hissing triangle and tambourine beat of percussionist Fabio Pascoal, who has a small climbing frame of objects stationed around him. Often racing into double if not treble time, he is a constant source of hand-made electricity snaking through the whole ensemble, and the fact that the smallest instrument on stage is the most potent in the arrangements says much about the importance of every single rhythmic figure both in Brazilian music and Pascoal’s atomic sound world. Indeed his seamless move from toy piglet to bass flute is anything but incoherent, and stands as a reminder as to why he captured the imagination of many members of the Loose Tubes cohort, and beyond. Special guest, the excellent tuba player Oren Marshall, provided joyous confirmation of this global fraternity.

– Kevin Le Gendre