Tom Harrell Moving Picture Quartet
Ronnie Scott's, London

THERE'S something modestly heroic about trumpeter Tom Harrell (pictured). His physical frailty as he walks onstage is manifest — his wild, white hair and beard, his unsteady and shaking gait, his bent back, his languid demeanour, his frustration with the microphones.

Yet, as he blows either trumpet or flugelhorn, his sound is one of beauty, power and ascendant lucidity, shaking the rafters and startling every listener into sudden moments of acute surprise.

Harrell, born in 1946, spent his early musical years in the big bands of Stan Kenton, Woody Herman and George Russell and made his debut at Ronnie Scott's with Horace Silver in 1974.

With him now are three remarkable and much younger confreres — German-Nigerian bassist born Ugonna Okegwo, Latino-based drummer Adam Cruz, veteran of the Mingus Big Band and David Sanchez Quartet and pianist Danny Grissett, Harrell's piano partner for more than a decade.

Harrell's compositions are strongly melodic. He finds his high notes almost without stretching for them and the sculpted clarity of his choruses is sublime and, in his duo with the ever-inventive Grissett, his sky-pitched flugelhorn sound seems to stream from the past, with everything that is human expressed.

Ukegwo's delving, dancing bass and the Latin subtlety and tempestuousness of Cruz's drums create surging rhythms. This is a quartet born and forged in cosmopolitan fire and their sonic unity blows up Frith Street and out into the heart of Soho.