Trevor Watts and Peter Knight
Purcell Room, London, October 2008
Review from The Wire by Julian Cowley

There is a personal quality to the music Trevor Watts and Peter Knight play together that’s involving and intimate; an experience to be shared rather than simply witnessed.

Knight and Watts are in touch with a wide world of music. Their opening improvisation was built around a repeated figure plucked on the violin strings. It had a distinctly West African feel and the vibrant tone and flow of Watts’ alto made that impression still more distinct. Later pieces alluded to Indian, Celtic, Indonesian and Middle Eastern musical practices, as well as to post-bebop jazz and rock. But these multiple rhythmic, melodic and harmonic points of reference have been internalised to a point where they are integral to the improvisatory language that these two fine musicians continue to evolve in dialogue. Their broad musical scope forms a perspective on playing rather than a bag of tricks.

Watts’ credentials as an improviser are firmly established, but Knight is a revelation in this partnership. His deft and intricate pizzicato patterning, harmonically adventurous bowing and occasional use of an electric violin for other timbres provided imaginative settings and a rich creative foil for Watts’ lyrical alto and soprano lines. The coupling of violin and sax is a bold one, a highwire act requiring adaptability and a well balanced sense of give and take. There’s no room for either player to cruise.

Each piece they played grew from a firm melodic base or rhythmic idea. In the course of nearly two hours there were occasional passages that drifted, mild miscalculations and moments of fraying – that’s all part of an improvised music. Far more often there were inspired exchanges, passages of agile intertwining and the unpredictable magic of music that can carry you outside of yourself. During the second half the the duo galvanised the weary folk song ‘Shenandoah’, using it as Albert Ayler used his own simple themes, finding new accents, unexpected coloration and texture, so that potentially banal material crackled with life and tension. The crisp acoustics of the Purcell Room served them well throughout. Unpretentious and unconstrained by stylistic prejudice, Watts and Knight form a singular combination and in the course of this performance they showed how potent that can be.