IT would be a brave saxophonist who tried to re-create Stan Getz's Focus.

Not only did Getz himself describe this masterpiece, a setting for tenor and strings by composer-arranger Eddie Sauter, as his favourite among countless high-quality albums, but the emotions Getz was feeling on the recording dates, so soon after his mother and his brilliant young bass player, Scott LaFaro, had both died suddenly, must have been significant factors.

Fortunately, Konrad Wiszniewski didn’t have to be brave. In staging a programme that took its cue and certain selections from Focus, he didn’t try to sound like Getz. But with a marvellous string quartet, augmented occasionally by concert harp, much astute arranging, a super-sympathetic bass and drums team and a major contribution from pianist Euan Stevenson, Wiszniewski captured the recording’s spirit while confirming his status as a singularly expressive, hugely imaginative and technically assured improviser on both tenor and soprano saxophones.

The Focus pieces all came in the first half: the staccato, mischievous I’m Late I’m Late, the sincere, soulfully effusive I Remember When and the turbulent Night Rider, each arranged and played so that this reduced ensemble near as dammit matched the original for depth and tonal colour. It was perhaps Wiszniewski and Stevenson’s own compositions, however, that registered this as a project with, as they say, legs. It would be criminal indeed if this audience was the only one ever to hear Wiszniewski’s dancing Illuminate in this form, to say nothing of Stevenson’s El Paradiso, with its ear-catching cello ostinato, or his compelling Parsons Green, enriched by Alyn Cosker’s brilliantly measured drum solo.

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