There’s something about a Monday night at Pizza Express Jazz Club, Soho that always feels like it’s holding something back… like the room knows more than it lets on. You walk down those steps, past the hum of the street, and the world tightens. Sound sharpens. Conversations soften. And then, without fuss, five musicians walk on and remind you why this place still matters.
Five-Way Split don’t arrive with ego.
They arrive with intent. A collective in the truest sense—no bandleader, no
hierarchy, just five voices moving as one. You feel that immediately. Not in
what’s said, but in how they listen to each other. Space is shared, not taken.
There’s a danger in calling a band a
democracy—it can sometimes feel like a soft compromise, a levelling out where
edges are dulled and nothing quite catches. That’s not what’s happening here.
With Five-Way Split, the democracy is
the engine. Any one of them can bring a tune forward for consideration. No
hierarchy, no deference, no sense that one voice carries more weight than
another. And what that does—what you feel as a listener—is a shift. Your ear
stops searching for a focal point in a person and instead finds it in the music
itself. The composition becomes the centre of gravity. The conversation becomes
the point.
You hear it in the way ideas are offered
rather than imposed. A melody introduced not as a statement, but as an
invitation. A solo that doesn’t push forward to claim space, but opens out to
let the others in. It creates this constant state of awareness—five players
listening as much as they’re playing. No one stands out… and because of that,
everything does.
And then there’s the picture.
Because this—this is what people think
of when they think of jazz, whether they realise it or not. A room like this,
tucked away below the noise, the light just low enough, the air carrying that
quiet anticipation. Five sharply dressed musicians, understated but completely
assured, stepping into that space at the top of their game. Not performing at
it, just existing within it.
Other projects, other directions,
everything else they each carry—that’s all put to one side. For this moment,
it’s just this. A shared space. A shared intent. And you can feel that
commitment in every note. It’s not casual. It’s chosen.
The set unfolds almost conversationally.
Stories drift between tunes—Greek mythology, Soho in-jokes, a penchant for
expensive brandy, the kind of detail that folds the audience further into the
room rather than holding them at arm’s length. It never feels like filler. It feels
like part of the music.
A tribute to Wayne Shorter opens things
out early on—not in imitation, but in spirit. They introduce the opening piece
as one of their own (written by Vasilis Xenopoulos), a song from their first
album and a tribute to one of his great heroes following his passing.
So rather than covering Footprints or Speak
No Evil, they lean into Shorter’s language: that sense of harmonic
ambiguity, lines that don’t resolve where you expect, that feeling of searching
rather than stating.
That’s why it lands the way it does.
It’s not about recognition—it’s about
spirit. A 10-minute opener that sets the tone for the whole night, not by
looking back, but by absorbing what Shorter represented and letting it filter
through their own writing.
If anything, it tells you more about the
band than playing a standard ever would. a sense of searching, of lines that
don’t resolve where you expect them to. You hear it in the writing, in the way
the band leans into those ideas rather than trying to contain them.
Dr.
Stol—that neat
inversion of Lots Rd, home to the 606 Club—sits right in that late-night
pocket. Cool, unforced, the kind of tune that belongs in a room like this.
Glasses paused mid-air, the audience leaning in without realising they’ve done
it.
The title track, Modus Operandi,
reveals itself slowly. Built from a melodic idea that circles and reshapes, it
becomes less about destination and more about process. You start to hear the
individuality of each player not as something that pulls away from the whole,
but as something that strengthens it.
XO
Blues lowers the
temperature completely. All atmosphere. A slow burn that doesn’t rush because
it doesn’t need to. It lingers, hangs, lets the room settle into it.
And then, without warning, you’re taken somewhere else entirely. Viennese Whirlwind shifts the palette again, like a change in light. You can feel the shift immediately—the band opening the windows, letting something brighter, more expansive flood in. There’s a sense of movement to it, not rushed, but alive… like turning a corner into a city that’s steeped in music at every step.
You hear that classical weight in it—not
in a heavy-handed way, but in the architecture of the tune, the way it holds
itself. It swirls, lifts, then settles just long enough for you to take it in
before moving again. And just as you think you’ve found your footing, it begins
to dissolve, almost imperceptibly, reshaping itself in real time.
What follows feels less like a
transition and more like a quiet sleight of hand.
Suddenly, you’re somewhere else entirely
slipping seamlessly into the world of Henry Mancini, handled with the same
sense of restraint and respect for the material.
Out of that European elegance emerges
the unmistakable shape of Dreamsville, drawn not with words but
with tone. And in that moment, the room tightens again. The energy drops, not
in intensity, but in weight—everything becoming more intimate, more exposed. In
the hands of Quentin Collins, the melody isn’t delivered, it’s revealed.
Unhurried, unforced, every note given the space to land exactly where it needs
to.
It’s that same feeling of stepping from
a grand, open boulevard into a quiet, late-night street.
I remember walking into Ronnie Scott's
Jazz Club for the first time, years ago now, to hear Stacey Kent sing Dreamsville.
One of those moments that doesn’t fade, just settles somewhere deeper over
time. The kind that becomes part of how you understand this music, this part of
London, this whole world that exists just beneath the surface.
That tune has stayed with me ever since.
So when it appeared here tonight, it
didn’t arrive quietly. It carried all of that history with it. All of that
weight.
But what unfolded wasn’t nostalgia.
No words this time. No familiar phrasing
to guide you. Just the melody, laid bare. And in that space, it shifted.
In the hands of Quentin Collins, it
found something else. Something unforced. The tone sat perfectly—no need to
push, no need to decorate. Just breath, line, and that instinctive sense of
space. The kind that makes a room lean in without realising it.
And you could feel it happen.
It took the tune back to its beginning.
Before the associations, before the memory. To that place where someone,
somewhere, heard it for the first time. And for a few minutes, so did we.
That’s the trick. That’s the art of it.
To take something so familiar and make
it feel like it’s just arrived.
Still beautiful—of course it is. That
never leaves. But here it felt more immediate. More present. Not tied to what
it was, but fully alive in what it had become.
From there, the set continues to open
out. Soho Soirée feels like a love
letter to this pocket of London, full of movement and quiet energy.
By the time they close, the room has
shifted again. The Monday has disappeared. The outside world feels further away
than it should.
And maybe that’s what stays with you
most.
Not a single standout moment. Not one
player rising above the rest. But the collective. The trust. The sense that
five musicians, each with their own paths, have chosen—deliberately—to meet in
the middle.
To put everything else aside and let the
music speak.
This their second album launch feels
like the start of a musical journey, it has that freshness, not one celebrating
its sixth birthday.
And then, almost reluctantly, you’re
climbing back up. That wrought iron staircase, step by step, leaving the
underworld behind. The air changes before you even reach the top. You can feel
Soho waiting.
The door opens and it spills out at you.
Dean Street alive again—bars breathing
onto the pavement, voices layered over one another, laughter cutting through
the night. Music drifting on the breeze, impossible to place—Bossa rhythms
tangled up with something rawer, bluesier, something that belongs to the street
as much as the stage. It’s messy, vibrant, alive.
You stand there for a second, caught
between the two.
And as Dean Street gives way to
Chinatown, the colours, the noise, the movement—it all folds into itself.
Suddenly Soho Soirée isn’t just a tune from the set. It’s
here. It’s this. A heady mix of everything the night has been building towards.
The room, the music, the street. Glenn Wright
No comments :
Post a Comment