Nova Scotia Jazz Band, Glasgow Royal Concert Hall
By Rob Adams - three stars
Glasgow's latest jazz initiative opened with an amiable session in Glasgow Royal Concert Hall's intimate City of Music Studio, the first of four late-night concerts planned over the coming weeks. Bassist Brodie Jarvie's questing young septet are the next guests this Saturday and the attendance here suggests that there could be a market for a more regular programme.
For long-time followers of the Nova Scotia Jazz Band, this was an unfamiliar line-up, proving that whatever personnel clarinettist and tenor saxophonist John Burgess surrounds himself with, he'll produce music that honours jazz's early architects and bring it alive in the moment.
Trumpeter Colin Steele joined Burgess in a frontline with a largely New Orleans-Chicago flavour, creating concise solos and adding some fine touches in the wah-wah style, and the rhythm section of Ross Milligan on guitar and banjo and bassist Brian Shiels underlined their self-contained strength by duetting on Rock-a-Bye Your Baby with a Dixie Melody.
Burgess, as ever, made for an entertainingly droll host, joking that the organisers had decided to do without a PA system to stop him from singing. He vocalises in essence, however, on his instruments, his sweetly pitched clarinet lines always full of cogently realised ideas and his sparely used tenor saxophone lighting up Duke Ellington's Cotton Club- era hit I Let a Song Go out of My Heart with gruff-toned eloquence.
If Jelly Roll Morton and Eddie Condon are the band's guiding lights, then an influence closer to home also figured as Burgess paid homage to Edinburgh blues man Tam White with a splendid What is this thing called Love played as a slow beguine.
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