The good news from Bridge Music, who organise the Jazz Thursdays series at Glasgow Art Club, is that, contrary to expectations, the series will now continue when the club's gallery renovations begin shortly.
This means uninterrupted promotion of jazz across a range of styles which, this coming Thursday, sees pianist David Patrick putting a jazz slant on Stravinksy's The Rite of Spring.
Thursday past's instalment went back to jazz's earliest decades as the Nova Scotia Jazz Band opened up the band books of Jelly Roll Morton, Louis Armstrong and Bix Beiderbecke and recalled some of these players' British disciples in Monty Sunshine and Alex Welsh. There is no sense of early jazz being portrayed as if having been stored in aspic with this quintet. They celebrate great tunes such as Kansas City Stomp and At the Jazz Band Ball with due reverence for their forebears' endeavours but with an approach, one might say an attack, that lets their own personalities shine through.
Thus, John Burgess, here playing clarinet a lot of the time as well as adding serviceable vocals, will switch to tenor saxophone and imbue Beale Street Blues with something more akin to rhythm and blues heat without betraying the original's intentions. Trumpeter Lorne Cowieson brings a certain taut elegance to this music and contributed many fine solos, not least his concise variations on Hoagy Carmichael's New Orleans.
The rhythm section, despite some slightly overzealous snare drum cracks from Andy Rankin, produced consistently swinging momentum, with Duncan Findlay shining on both banjo and guitar and Andy Sharkey lending a just-so presence in a band that radiates enjoyment.
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