Matt Ridley is a classicist and romantic, steeped in jazz tradition with a taste for beauty. It’s led to regular bass gigs with a broad range of bandleaders from Darius Brubeck to Mulatu Astatke, but as his most acclaimed album, The Antidote (2021), and this extension of the eponymous quintet with a new suite at Soho’s Pizza Express Jazz Club both show, Ridley’s own remit extends to choppier waters. While not reaching the Scotch glass-clinking smokiness of the ultimate in-the-room recording, Sinatra/Basie’s Sinatra at the Sands (1966), the basement crowd’s presence is felt here as it clearly was on the night.

The composer favours pianists and saxophonists to transmit his yearningly pretty melodies – see John Turville’s limpid work alongside Jason Yarde’s soprano sax on the Matt Ridley Quartet’s Metta (2016). ‘Suite Part 1: For Joan’ accordingly opens with Tom Hewson’s pensive, dreamy piano before Alex Hitchcock’s ripe tenor swells in sympathy, prior to a blowsily unabashed solo. This leads via Marc Michel’s tumbling, Blakeyesque drums to Hitchcock’s more sourly enquiring sound on ‘Justice and Revenge are Very Different Things’, and his burrowing interchange with Ant Law’s guitar, whose harsh metal edges announce the suite’s brooding finale, ‘Zelensky’, where Michel’s clamorous pawing and winsome, then bleakly anguished. soprano sax befit the titular leader in time of war.

Three revisited tracks from The Antidote, though, show Ridley at his most cogent, and the Hitchock-Law axis developed on their own Same Moon in the Same World at its most symbiotic. ‘Stranger Things’ is slinkily sensual and staccato, Law stinging and Hitchcock finding his own circular-breathing tenor space in a midnight street-corner serenade. ‘Adagio for the Fallen Stars’ is still more accomplished as Hitchcock’s warmly inviting tone sets out the melody in a hazily trance-like state reinforced by tremulous guitar. Jagged funk interrupts this ballad blowing, but true romance wins in a performance for posterity.