It’s open week at the Guildhall School of Music’s jazz faculty, a feast of free concerts by the teaching staff, preceded each evening by prize pupils in groups large and small. Department head Martin Hathaway, a bright-toned altoist pitched somewhere between Benny Carter and Phil Woods, introduced his A-team with blanket diplomacy. “Not only are they fantastic players,” he beamed, “but also really lovely people.”

Stylistically a well-mixed bunch, too. Hathaway and trombonist Malcolm Earle Smith played mainstream, whereas trumpeter Nick Smart was more straight-ahead. Trombonist and former principal Scott Stroman, who now teaches voice, scatted in a vibrato-laden Mel Torme manner.

More harmonically advanced were Jean Toussaint, the Virgin Island tenorist and erstwhile Art Blakey Jazz Messenger, plus guitarist John Parricelli and pianist Malcolm Edmonstone, probably the two busiest freelances on view.

Toussaint skated through the I Got Rhythm changes of In Walked Horace with a new fluency, his formerly jagged phrases replaced by longer and more coherent ideas.

Double-bassists Steve Watts (excellent on John Taylor’s lilting piece, Ambleside) and Jeff Clyne (top man for half a century) swapped places alongside drummers Gene Calderazzo and Andrew Bain, the latter virtually ignoring his hi-hat pedal.

Latecomers missed a delightful student sextet. Their set included Driftin’, a Herbie Hancock original from an early Blue Note album, played with touching reverence. To trumpeter Henry Spencer, tenorist Alec Harper, pianist Lewis Sutch and singer Harriet Syndercombe-Court it’s all history but remember their names. They are the future. And thank the sponsors, the City of London Corporation, for showing those sub-prime lenders across the street a more productive way to invest their money.
Tuesday: Gwilym Simcock and Stan Sulzmann.