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VETERAN virtuoso of the baritone saxophone, Alan Wilkinson is a scintillating improvising free jazzer and at Cafe Oto he's joined by three young Norwegians in the Akodo Quartet — bassist Ola Hoyer, drummer Dag Erik Knedal Anderson and Kim Johanneson on guitar and banjo.
The elemental power of Wilkinson’s saxophone is like nothing else in European jazz.
His opening colloquy with Johanneson’s chinking guitar reveals the sheer potency of a sound which growls, snarls and wails at his top register and plunges down into the lower depths of his horn in an instant, making height and profundity all of one sonic place.
He follows with an almost gentle, balladic sequence, yet in a moment he's back to a maelstrom of sound with Anderson’s drums augmenting the storm and Hoyer’s bass booming, it seems, from the earth’s centre.
When Wilkinson switches to alto saxophone, the surging power of breath and fluency of cyclonic notemaking continues from the smaller horn.
The power and collective dexterity of these musicians ends with notes as beautifully close as you could come to humans making birdsong.
