MIRACULOUS are the changes within jazz lifetimes.

The last time that I heard the sublime Canterbury-born saxophonist Tony Coe play, he was in the Humphrey Lyttelton Band of the early ’60s, blowing Humph’s version of mainstream.

Now 81, he’s playing at the Vortex alongside two master tenor saxophonists of different generations.

Also in the line-up are septuagenarian Evan Parker and the 20-years-younger Julian Arguelles, with pianist Frank Campbell as the only man without a horn.

I always thought that Coe’s serpentine reedsong was just about as close to that of the great Ellingtonian Paul Gonsalves as any other saxophonist has ever got.

But to hear him in a much freer improvising context shows the immensely wide dimensions of his music.

Co-veteran Campbell is the unifying presence all evening and his duet with Parker, mysteriously blues-like, has him plucking the piano’s strings while Parker’s deep beauty rumbles beside him.

Campbell then leads Arguelles into the ballad Nancy With the Laughing Face, played with a muscled yet fragile power.

His subsequent duo with Coe’s soprano saxophone is a skyward dance, with the pianist’s earthen chords as its shining floor.

The quartet move on with a set of Campbell’s structured compositions, ensemble pieces in which their free impulses are ploughed into some astonishing harmonies, with Coe’s soprano filigreeing in and out of his confreres’ pungent tenors.

A Dalston chamber foursome indeed, blending with the half-muffled sounds of crashing dominoes, reggae and Caribbean-London voices in the square outside.

Review by Chris Searle