Music

Szymon Mika Trio

Jazz Bar, Edinburgh

Rob Adams

four stars

IT ALMOST goes without saying that jazz musicians are composers. Their music, at its best, is in a constant state of recreation and ideas happened upon while exploring one piece might well reappear in some form as another composition entirely.

Even so, Polish guitarist Szymon Mika and his group take an approach to performance that’s composer-like in the extreme. Without giving any impression of repeating a previous gig, Mika, bassist Max Mucha and the wonderful New York-based drummer Ziv Ravitz played two sets here that were carefully structured and beautifully balanced.

Mika’s improvisations are thoughtful explorations that contain little hint of displaying chops, although he clearly has the jazz guitar vocabulary at his disposal. He’s all about creating fluent variations and diversions that have a logical, always melodic thread. Storytelling is the useful shorthand and he uses his technique – a combination of fingerstyle and plat-picking – in a sort of conversation with himself that he projects easily to the listener.

With an attentive audience the trio rewarded concentration with subtle interplay, painstaking detail and a huge range of colours. Mika can play with crunch as well as gentleness and Ravitz, who can motor very intensely at low volume, injected an indie rock-like urgency on occasion to great effect.

As is composers’ wont, Mika also occasionally integrates existing melodies into his own style. His reading of Sleep Safe and Warm, Krzysztof Komeda’s lullaby from Rosemary’s Baby became a soul ballad that sang directly through his warm tone and expressive extemporising, and his own opening number reappeared in a different guise at the end to give a satisfying feeling of resolution to a thoroughly involving group performance.