Reviews: Music

City Hall, Glasgow

Michael Tumelty

You know, there is no real reason why the SCO's concert on Friday night should have worked as well as it did, or, indeed, should have worked at all.

After all, what was it? What did it comprise? And what held it together? It was essentially a collection of bits and pieces, with incidental music by Schubert and Beethoven, separated by a gorgeously-played, unknown Ballade for soprano, horns, harp and strings, written by Alexander von Zemlinsky, hardly the flavour of the month on the wireless, whether Radio 3 or Classic FM.

Yet cohere it did, partly due to the consistency of composition, with Schubert's Overture and Entr'actes to the drama Rosamunde reflecting the composer's dramatic, melodic and harmonic genius and providing the stylistic glue to hold the music together; while, in Beethoven's incidental music to Goethe's Egmont, you could hear and feel the composer's typically bloody-minded determination in the fiery Overture for the thing to cohere and make sense.

And all this was reinforced by the iron man, the mighty Finn, conductor John Storgards, who has a way of compelling music to reveal its logic and make its points with clarity and confidence; though having an orchestra of the quality of the SCO, with razor-sharp attack and real meat on its bones at his disposal, more than capable of delivering this, no doubt helped.

Two other factors made the night: the laser-like intensity of soprano Katherine Broderick's singing, and the delivery of the narration by David Hayman who, a few moments of uncertainty apart, had the heroism of Goethe's Egmont in his belly and the spirit of Beethoven in his voice.

Nigel Price Organ Trio

Glasgow Art Club

Rob Adams

Possibly British jazz's longest tour this year is the one that brought guitarist Nigel Price to Glasgow on Thursday.

This was gig number twenty-six of forty he's playing this autumn and although there are personnel changes along the way as players drop out to keep up their own commitments and be replaced by others, there was a sense of familiarity about this line-up of Price, Ross Stanley on Hammond organ and Matt Home on drums.

Price unashamedly champions the Wes Montgomery-Grant Green school of guitar heroes and there was much Montgomery-style double stopping and Green-like going for it in solos that gave ample evidence of his ability to negotiate the fretboard and get creative with chord positioning.

His is an essentially exciting, bluesy style of playing, even if occasionally his note choices didn't entirely please the ear.

Sometimes his trio expands to include a saxophonist and it would be interesting to hear that aggregation as there are saxophone influences audible in Price's playing too, not least on the uptempo treatment of Lover Man that he gleaned from the late, great Dick Morrissey.

The star of the show, however, was Stanley who explored the Hammond's every appropriate tonal possibility and produced a consistency of touch that was missing in the others as well as providing creative, punchy bass lines with his left hand while taking soulful solos or wrapping Price's extrapolations in warm, often luxuriant accompaniments with his right. Stanley's contrasting contributions - one gritty, the other lush - to Emily Remler's Blues for Herb and bossa master Luiz Bonfa's Gentle Rain especially showed why he's such an in-demand player around London.

Kenny Wayne Shepherd

Queen's Hall, Edinburgh

Rob Adams

Bluesmen don't do shy and retiring. It's in the tradition from Guitar Slim promenading through the audience in his red suits through to Joe Bonamass strutting around a kind of onstage castle that they assume the mantle of a force of nature and although Kenny Wayne Shepherd stops short of such visual extravagances, he's not short of power and magnetism.

Shepherd may have a spokesman in singer Noah Hunt, who sings lead on most of the songs, possibly because Shepherd's voice doesn't have quite the same defiant believability that Hunt brings to a broken hearted lyric.

But with his emphatically blue collar guitar pickin' and stingin' lending extended chapters to Hunt's storytelling, Shepherd doesn't half put it out there.

Hunt and Shepherd have been partners for some seventeen years and it shows. The former has the latter's moves down pat as they put on a show that sells a song to all corners of the auditorium. Meanwhile the deeply impressive rhythm team of Tony Franklyn (bassist with Paul Rodgers and Jimmy Page in the Firm) and Chris Layton (drummer for one of Shepherd's heroes, Stevie Ray Vaughan) fulfil their roles with more diligent but hugely stylish aplomb.

Shepherd can back up the swagger, too. A B. B. King medley that spliced the swinging Woke Up This Morning with a You Done Lost Your Good Thing Now that was full to the brim with terse disappointment found him stoking a veritable furnace of sustained hot licks.

Yet when the tempo drops he has the nous to make one note played with the right touch and tone say much more than words can express.