Tori Freestone Trio
In the Chop House
(Whirlwind WR 4648)

TORI FREESTONE is a young south London saxophonist who blows a very singular horn. When I spoke with her at last November’s London Jazz Festival she told me that the music that she plays has a direct line to her forebears, who were east London watermen and boatspeople’s families.

People who crossed over and came south of the river “at about the same time that the Greenwich foot tunnel was built” (it was opened in 1902).

She remembers how important folk music, particularly shanties and the work songs of the river workers, were to her family and how she would sing and play violin with them when she was a young girl. And it is as if that sound has never left her, passing into her own musical blood.

She studied the flute and then the saxophone at Leeds College of Music, moved into jazz and played with some luminous British jazz figures including Andy Sheppard, Ivo Neame, Jim Hart and the Cuban band Orquestra Timbala.

She also learned from another horn virtuoso, the Stockport-born trumpeter Neil Yates who like her has a very close kinship to folk music. She took inspiration from Yates while rehearsing with his big band at a restaurant in Manchester called the Chop House and that experience provoked the title of her powerful debut album In the Chop House.

When you listen to her live, her tenor saxophone stretches almost the length of her body and how she makes it fly — leviate and fly.

Her deft and empathetic bandmates are bassist Dave Manington and drummer Tim Giles and they play together with the musicianship and joined-up spirit of a single person so that their trio sound has an astonishing oneness.

First course, prefaced by Manington’s chirping bass, is a portion of Bubble And Squeak. Freestone’s almost featherweight tenor hovers over the tables, moving on and around with an astonishing — almost gossamer — flourish. The Universal 4 refers to the counting in before the start of each tune and is dedicated to her old compadre Hart. The lightness of sound is almost tangible. I asked her where she thought she found it and she attributed it to her flute apprenticeship, for her tenor sound sometimes seems that delicate.

Lonesome George is Manington’s tune and its quirky, rapid pace doesn’t seem to reflect the manner of a solitary man. Freestone leaps, skips and saunters doen the road with Giles and Manington bouncing beside her.

When I asked her about her main influences she mentioned two names. One was the epochal tenorist, now an octogenarian, Wayne Shorter, the other was singer Joni Mitchell, a lover of jazz and friend of the great bassist Charles Mingus. She plays her arrangement of Mitchell’s Both Sides Now with a leavening tenderness as if it were coming from a distant place. Giles’s drums are softly resilient and Manington takes a solo full of emotive power.

She almost warbles the ballad But Not For Me, so feathery is her sound. Manington’s earthen bass digs deep and Giles’s rustling drums are beautifully pitched.

Freestone gives a womanish view on Coltrane’s 1959 blues to the momentous bassist Paul Chambers, stretching her lines of improvisation and exploring new spaces rights through Mrs PC.

At the album’s heart is Tori’s sublime adaptation of the Irish folk tune My Lagan Love. Her partners’ rhythmic conception is well-nigh perfect and she plays with such acquiescent beauty you can only feel that the tune was made for jazz as it flows like a lucid stream from horn.

Back to the main stem and Pottering Around, named as a tribute to the US tenorist Chris Potter. She explores some of the deeper reaches of her tenor here while still blowing in her expressive airiness and Giles and Manington show again the power of a trio, for this album above all else is a work of exemplary sonic unity. And one to treasure, that’s for sure.