Ravi Coltrane Quintet, Cheltenham Jazz Festival, review It can't be easy for a jazz saxophonist, to have one of the great players and jazz innovators of all time for a father. But Ravi Coltrane is no pale epigone of John, and showed no sign of the anxiety that can be induced by an over-achieving father. At this gig he displayed the unflappable, stolid air of a man who likes to get things right. "I mean, why don't we use the word "record" any more?," he mused while telling us about his latest CD. It's a record of an event, right? One wouldn't expect such a stickler for exactitude to come out with wild, John Coltrane-ish "sheets of sound," and he didn't. Ravi explores an idea in a methodical way, and though he'll expand it in all directions, he's not a man for extremes of range or tone. One felt always the pull of the centre ground, which was a kind of modal jazz idiom that wouldn't have seemed out of place in 1970. The contrast with Dave Douglas's quintet, which had appeared on the same stage only two hours previously, was fascinating. Whereas Douglas's music was stylistically spry, calling on many different idioms and never settling definitively into any of them, Coltrane's set was all of a piece. The great virtue of staying within an idiom is that we becomes sensitised to detail. And there was much detail to savour, especially in the interplay between Coltrane and trumpeter Ralph Alessi, who in truth was the most interesting musician on stage. Some trumpeters focus on the abstract play of notes, some lean towards subtle changes of colour and the various ways an instrument can take on a speaking eloquence. Alessi has a magical way of doing both at once. These moments stood out in an interplay that was engaging and civilised but a touch safe. The element of risk seemed to be absent until the very end, when the band plunged into Thelonius Monk's Skippy. The mad vertiginous side-slips of Monk's piece fired everybody's imagination, pianist Dave Virelles plunging dangerously towards the keyboard's end but veering off at the last minute, bassist Drew Gress pulling in the opposite direction. For 10 action-packed minutes the air seemed to crackle.