Alexander Hawkins & Marco Colonna dive into the Eric Dolphy songbook at the Vortex

Having just two musicians on stage brings certain advantages. British pianist Alexander Hawkins and Italian bass clarinetist Marco Colonna prove that less can be loud as well as more. With no drums, bass, horns or strings around them, the duo is heard as clearly as church bells on a Sunday morning, and at times the peaks of volume might well reach the heavens. The premise of the meeting, an exploration of the songbook of Eric Dolphy, the great evangelist of multi-reedists, serves them well as both players faithfully render the dizzying dynamic range of his timeless compositions all the while bringing their own strong personalities to bear on the performance. Hawkins and Colonna, having partnered the likes of Tomeka Reid and Andrea Centra in careers spanning two decades are familiar with intimate settings.

Although there are some fine Colonna originals slipped in tonight, notably the spry, beguiling ‘Un Filo’, the highpoints are songs from Dolphy’s 1964 masterpiece Out To Lunch. The title track, ‘Straight Up And Down’ and ‘Something Sweet, Something Tender’ are launch pads for inventive interpretations that stretch the original harmonic and melodic contours into strikingly whimsical shapes, with Hawkins creating floods of bass with his left hand that are offset by the iciest sprinkles of high sixteenths with his right while his collaborator also boldly pushes the sound palette of his instrument to similar poles, his low notes gurgling with a watery fluency while his harsh split tones evoke artful violence. Nothing is as startling as the take on ‘Gazzelloni’ though.

The gracefully swung tension of the original now jolts and judders into life as the whirling theme is broken into smaller units, introducing provocative new breathing space into the previous breathlessness, implying a slow backbeat at times. The jumpy riffing is brilliant insofar as it shows how strong the blues undercurrent of some of Dolphy’s work was – an uncut umbilical cord to his role model Charlie Parker’s birth in Kansas R&B. And it is indeed the blues, fragmented, scrappy, earthy and funky that emerges as the arrangement unfolds. Colonna’s slap tonguing as well as the sotto voce lines that are like patters of marimbas or log drums increase the sense of external space, an astute tribute to a horn player blowing outdoors with an animal orchestra.