Yaron Herman and Pat Thomas are both pianists, they both explore improvisation and they’ve both played in Oxford’s Holywell Music Room. But the music they create illustrates the diversity within contemporary jazz.

Pat Thomas, whose album Derek Bailey and Thelonius Monk was recorded at the Holywell Music Room and the Jacqueline du Pré Music Building, is a well-recognised figure in free improvisation throughout Europe. Yaron Herman, born in Tel-Aviv and now resident in Paris, is a young man making waves in the jazz scene worldwide.

The often repeated irony is that Herman’s music, being more tightly bolted to the expectations and structures of jazz, is more widely known. Pat Thomas, being more individual and more demanding, is less known, though his work is musically far richer and more rewarding.

Thomas uses transcriptions by Chris Burn of work by the unique Derek Bailey as a basis. Knowing that Bailey would have disapproved of a straight reading of his own guitar lines, Thomas creates pieces that both elucidate and enrich the original, using the full force and diversity of the piano. The result has the complexity of the best classical contemporary music but maintains extraordinary originality by being improvisation with the Bailey scores as just a set of guide posts for further musical investigation.

In between these tracks the albums contains Thomas’s interpretations of Thelonious Monk. The result is music in which the original Monk tunes rise and fall like waves of sound interspersed with extensions and inversions of endless originality in which is the original tune is never lost.

Herman also takes the work of other players and welds them into his own. His album A Time for Everything begins with Bjork’s Army of Me and also includes the Britney Spears hit Toxic. Both tracks retain the flavour of the original overlaid with dense yet remarkably supple playing that quickly lifts into a jazz stratosphere full of strength. It is music with its own voice that still fits into the mould of European jazz of today.