Music

The Society Syncopators

Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh

Rob Adams

four stars

MONDAY Night at the Cotton Club changed venues as bassist Roy Percy’s Society Syncopators brought both sartorial and musical elegance to the Traverse bar’s regular concert series. There was a bumper attendance, too, for a rare outing from a band that celebrates the 1920s and plays the music of Duke Ellington, Fletcher Henderson and their contemporaries with a fidelity that also allows players to express their own personalities in concise form.

Those were the days, after all, when the music had to fit onto a side of shellac that revolved at 78rpm and the players, all drawn from the Scottish scene and quite a few of whom are more used to stretching out over a series of choruses, responded superbly.

Martin Foster, here supplying clarinet and bass, baritone and alto saxophones, barely seemed to have stood up to solo on Bix Beiderbecke’s Borneo when he was back in his seat but he was later given time to shine in his splendid feature of Jimmie Lunceford’s tricky, train-rhythmed Jazznocracy.

With three saxophonists, all doubling on clarinet, two trumpets, trombone and violin, the frontline produced a great variety of tones and colours while the rhythm team, with drummer Stuart Brown matching precision with effervescence, propelled what is essentially pre-swing music with disciplined verve.

Seonaid Aitken, in addition to her very stylish singing of Ill Wind and Am I Blue, captured the sweet pathos of It’s All Forgotten Now with violin playing that elsewhere added to the rich orchestral quality and Percy, with his mirthful faux-muddled bandleader announcements, belied the hard work that goes into putting such a show together with a spot-on blend of infotainment.