Edinburgh Jazz Festival

John Nemeth

West Princes Street Spiegeltent

Rob Adams

three stars

JOHN Nemeth knows how to make an entrance. The singer and harmonica player from Boise, Idaho, and now resident in Memphis, arrived on stage proudly wearing a set of overalls whose yellow-fading-into-white tones looked like they might have been the result of a dry cleaner’s faux-pas.

Despite the contrasting wrist and shin flashes suggesting the possible absence of a pantomime animal’s head-mask, he was, the message seemed to say, here to work.

And work he and his band did, throughout two sets of material that wasn’t always as memorable as Nemeth’s attire, with no little physical effort from Nemeth in conducting his guitar, bass and drums team through arrangements and rhythmical punctuation.

Nemeth has a gruff voice that suits the hard-rocking roadhouse blues that forms the spine of his repertoire and can put across a testifying gospel-style declaration of his love. His songs mostly follow the well-worn blues path – his baby’s left him and if it weren’t for bad luck, he’d have no luck at all – and his band help him to deliver them with solid accompaniment and guitar solos that, like Nemeth’s harmonica playing, tend to settle into a familiar pattern.

He forms a good rapport with his audience, with his rogue-ish chat about learning to play harmonica while driving an 18-wheeler and the possibly aphrodisiacal properties of a kool-aid pickle, and he isn’t above singing Happy Birthday to a fan in the stalls. The most enjoyable bits, though, were his ventures into Southern soul, where the band’s well-worked and effective vocal harmonies introduced a fresh dimension and the songs’ unashamed pop element added sweetness, light and shade.