Larry Goldings impresses at solo London gig

Solo gigs are a new thing for Larry Goldings, who is more often seen leading his long- established organ trio with Peter Bernstein and Bill Stewart.

Tonight the 606 was packed to the rafters - even more than it was for the trio’s gig here nearly three years ago. And once again at least half the audience was composed of musicians, many of them top-level pianists.

This time he had come straight from a UK tour with James Taylor, and played a musically eclectic set. There was a piece that combined elements of Chopin and Fauré (“I’ve done Fauré, so now I guess I’ll be moving to 4B,” he quipped.) The opener, Bacharach’s ‘Close to You’, was followed by Abdullah Ibrahim’s ‘The Mountain’. Next he moved from piano to electronic keyboard where, in typical style, something unfamiliar gradually evolved into something recognisable - in this case, the Ellington calypso ‘Purple Gazelle’, aka ‘Angelica’, which he played swing style.

Goldings could have made a living from stand-up comedy. Like all the great clowns, he wears a permanently baffled expression that suggests everything is about to go horribly wrong. But of course the secret of clowning is total control. He played ‘Besame Mucho’ with a tango backing loop generated from his laptop which he had to prod every couple of bars in order to change the chord.

Fans also love the running gag about his alter ego, Austrian pianist Hans Groiner, who has made it his life’s work to improve the music of Thelonious Monk by rescuing it from its strange rhythms and dissonant chords. Having already played a version of The Beatles’ ‘I’ll Follow the Sun’, Goldings now did Groiner in reverse by applying Monkian harmony and rhythm to to two more Beatles tunes - ‘Yesterday’ and ‘Michelle’. A little later he improvised a piece based on the digits of someone’s phone number.

Any way you looked at it, the whole evening was a masterclass.