Music review: the Session

Jazz Bar, Edinburgh

Edinburgh got a taste of the young New Orleans jazz scene over two nights last week.

The Session is a quintet of the Crescent City's rising generation of players, including one, baritone saxophonist James Partridge, who learned his craft in London but is now settled in Louisiana.

It's a very accomplished, vibrant band with clear roots in the Nawlins tradition - strong blues connections and grooves strong enough to run trains on - that it brings into post-Kind of Blue and beyond developments.

Baritone and trumpet isn't exactly a standard frontline pairing and Partridge and the forthright, sure toned Stephen Lands present an uncommon, sumptuous sonority that sounds like more than two musicians might be responsible, working closely together and in relays as the arrangements require. Meanwhile the rhythm section of pianist Andrew McGowan (a good New Orleans name - remember, Dr John's actually called Malcolm), bassist Jasen Weaver and drummer Miles Labat work as one behind and alongside them as the music ebbs and flows.

McGowan contributes much of the repertoire, including the opening, mature-sounding Persistence, which featured bravura, superbly ordered soloing from Lands, the first of many.

The pianist's improvising has a real sense of pace and purposeful imagination, not to say explosiveness when Labat opens up and drives him on with an exciting splash of cymbals and snare drum emphasis.

Horace Silver's classic Doodlin' and Land's arrangement of Sting's An Englishman in New York underlined the sense of jazz tradition moving forward with sensitivity and awareness and Stephen's Samba duly danced with an air of Mardi Gras-cum-Carnival celebration in both the typically sharp ensemble execution and the deeply resourceful individual playing.