Some guitarists see a solo recital as the pretext for endless displays of mercurial fingerwork. No chord substitution left unturned, and all that. It’s a measure of John Etheridge’s talent that a fair proportion of his opening set was devoted to unpretentious, globe-trotting themes that other jazz musicians might have felt slightly beneath their dignity.
Etheridge’s gentle cross-rhythms imbued them with genuine dignity. Few of his peers handle an electric instrument with such delicacy. He combines a jazzman’s sophistication with a folksy sense of drama. While Pat Metheny may have more harmonic colour in his palette, the Englishman’s penchant for simple, unaffected melodic lines makes him ideal company in a venue as intimate as this.
The lilting, circular phrases in the opening sequence found him paying homage to his fellow guitarist the late Francis Bebey, a dominant figure in modern Cameroonian music. Even without the help of a percussion section, Etheridge had no difficulty at all in generating a seductive dance pulse. In more reflective vein, he sketched serene lines across Richard Thompson’s The Dimming of the Day, and the programme took a more orthodox, boppish turn with a medium-tempo version of Sonny Rollins’s Doxy, underpinned by a sultry walking bass line.
An eagerly awaited series of acoustic duets with John Williams did not disappoint, unless anyone was expecting virtuoso one-upmanship. Instead the two players — who had previously joined forces on Williams’s album The Magic Box — settled into a restful waltz from Cape Verde. Later, a performance of traditional griot songs — originally written for the kora — demonstrated just how much the pair could glean from the starkest of chords.
After a reunion with members of Soft Machine, Etheridge will be in introspective mood again at the end of his season on Sunday when he teams up with that superb violinist Christian Garrick.
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