John Butcher

John Butcher (pictured) stands facing the crowd, staring down the central aisle of the church at some indeterminate point in the distance; people are shuffling in their pews trying to warm their hands, trying to get comfortable. He doesn't seem to blink, his body twitches slightly with every breath he exhales, his face tenses with every note the saxophone produces. Like a jazz version of Greg Ginn, this month's Wire cover star sways backwards and forwards producing music of an intensity and otherworldliness that verges on the uncomfortable.

People crane their necks to see if the sounds he's producing are actually coming out of a saxophone; two notes erupt at the same time like two sheets of metal sliding across each other, swathes of sound like ambient laptop loops veer into burbling throat noises. At points he echoes the frenetic percussion of Mark Sanders, and for a while you genuinely can't tell who is doing what. Butcher and Sanders push and pull the audience, dragging them through quiet and loud, intense and calm for just long enough, leaving us drained and a little bewildered. These two men tonight manage to embody the real power of free improvised music.

Alex Ward and Roger Turner take to the stage next in this evening of duos with an unfortunately long-winded set of all out aggression closer to free jazz than to free improv in its willingness to unleash and let go of constraints. Defiantly loud, and at times unremittingly harsh, they lack the subtle intensity of Butcher and Sanders and whatever power they carry in volume and aggression they undermine by overplaying by a good 15 minutes.

It would be fair to say that most people though are here to see John Tchicai, playing tonight with drummer Tony Marsh. Probably best known for having played on John Coltrane's landmark free jazz record Ascension, Tchicai moved back to Europe in the late 1960s and became an important figure in the European free music scenes. His set tonight is devoid of the screeches, squeals, screams and aggression of the opening acts, but there is a powerful intensity at the heart of his sound; a devotional kind intensity that has its roots in the great free jazz records of Coltrane and Ayler, records that have since gone on to shape all the music around us.

Tchicai plays music that was built to inspire, not confront, and his involvement with American free jazz makes him an important figure to all those of us interested in modern music of any description. His playing is starkly and unashamedly melodic, relying on scale mutations for his freedom, not on the abstract tonality of his instrument. He repeatedly stops playing to either sing long static notes or to chant poetry about rebirth and transformation over the stable foundation of Marsh's heady pulsating free rhythms.

Tchicai could have come across as pedestrian and tame compared to the power, intensity and freedom of the opening acts, but the beauty and honesty of his melodies spoke for themselves and we were left in no doubt that we were watching someone with the spirit and heart of free music at his very core.