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PLAYING his alto and soprano saxophones with a rampant, joyous attack like a contemporary Sidney Bechet, from the very first notes Trevor Watts defies his advancing age.
The 80-year-old, a veteran of revolutionary bands like Spontaneous Music Ensemble and Amalgam from the 1960s and 1970s, rises to a seething ascent as he kicks backwards on reaching each sonic summit.
Veryan Weston’s chiming, intricate piano and the artistry of John Edwards’s bass and the mallets of the subtle, ever-inventive drummer Mark Sanders beat out a thunderous salute to Watts’s eight decades.
After Weston’s ruminative, echoing solo conjures a sudden tenderness, followed by Watts’s volleys of triumphant riffs, the sound fades.
In the silence, there’s time to marvel that a man now in his eighties, with his shock of leonine hair, can still blow his horn with such outrageous fire, zest, youth and optimism.
