AFTER a succession of serious health ailments and for the first time in over a year, one of jazz’s great virtuoso pianists, veteran Keith Tippett performs again at an old and beloved haunt.

Virtuoso: Keith Tippett (Pic: Bohdan Warchomij)

He’s part of the Dartington Improvising Trio with his old saxophone confrere Paul Dunmall and the ever-innovative wordless voice of Julie Tippetts — the Julie Driscoll of Brian Auger’s Trinity in the 1960s and This Wheels on Fire fame.

The decades tumble away in an amalgam of brilliant contemporary invention in combinations of sounds that you’ve never heard before, even after half a century.

The sounds take root, from Dunmall’s first haunting clarinet notes —  straight from New Orleans — Tippetts’s shimmering voice and Tippett’s mysterious chords and, uncannily, they seem to embrace the entire century of jazz.

Tippetts creates a new language and shapes creative meaning from the absence of words, while Keith’s rumbling piano and Dunmall’s flute, alto and soprano saxophone engage them both in the closest palaver.

Tippett plays his keys as if his fingers were drumsticks, shaking maracas while plucking the piano’s innards and Tippets picks up and plays a succession of toy instruments.

It’s like kids on castanets, triangles, tambourines and cymbals accompanying a piano teacher and that sense of childlike discovery emanates from the trio, as if they are themselves eternal children.

The beauty and revelation in this music is like hearing the creation of sound for the very first time.