Snake Davis has been a highly respected session musician for many years, working and recording with some of the big names in rock, blues and Tamla. A glance at his website shows he’s also a busy gigging musician in his own right. Nevertheless, the big names and the big stages he has worked on have not been in the mainframe of jazz, so he is not an obvious choice as guest musician at the Spin Jazz Club. But you don’t get to have such a reputation in those circles without a weight of musicianship, which Chris ‘Snake’ Davis has. Playing both flute and the whole family of saxes he’s the sort of player who can whip up a storm on a blues or throw out eloquent phrases on a ballad with equal musical intention.

Concentrating mostly on alto sax at the Spin, Davis played two delightfully mixed sets with the house band, including several pieces for which, as he happily admitted, he had to polish his glasses to read the dots. Which is just what great session musicians can do. Notable among these pieces was Pete Oxley’s Slow, Slow, Spin, a number well-known to Spin audiences if new to the main player of the evening. It is nevertheless the sort of tune that perfectly fits Davis’s uncomplicated, straight up approach resulting in one of the best and most honest interpretations of Oxley’s infectious melody. In sharp contrast, this was preceded by a Brazilian influenced ballad, The Gentle Rain, on which Davis’s flute playing drew maximum emotion in long seductive phrases drawn from the melody. This is the essential quality of his improvisations, that he works on a horizontal form, taking the food for his improvisations from the phrases of the melody rather than the underlying harmonic structures. It’s an approach that is direct and easily appreciated.

And to give a good evening an extra edge there was a moment in Jobim’s No More Blues when proceedings were delightfully high-jacked by a bass and drum duo from Raf Mizraki and Mark Doffman, reminding us once again just how good the house band’s rhythm section can be.