Kaiser Bill Invented Jazz!

Queen's Hall

Alison Kerr

IT could all have gone so spectacularly wrong: a concert based on an unlikely - but catchily titled - premise featuring a band of musicians whose names were not available last week, plus a music director who only arrived in Britain a day or two earlier.

Over its 36-year history, the Edinburgh Jazz Festival has notched up its share of casualties when trying to pull off extravaganzas like this, but Tuesday night's turned out to be a victory, even if it did not quite prove its point about the Kaiser being a jazzer.

The concert was the brainchild of trombonist Dave Batchelor and it's to him and, undoubtedly, to his experience as a BBC radio producer that credit should go for the unusually stylish presentation.

It blended expertly selected readings (by actors/singers Crawford Logan and Sandy Batchelor), with music from the years preceding and during the war being played by a seven-piece band and accompanied by entertaining period dancing.

While all this was going on, images of everything from sheet music of the songs being performed to photographs of the most famous "madams" from New Orleans' celebrated Storyville, the undisputed birthplace of jazz, were beamed on to a screen above the stage.

It went down a storm with the audience which clearly got a kick out of the rare opportunity to hear music exclusively from this often neglected period - not just early jazz but the popular music of the day.

A beautiful duet of John McCormack's First World War hit Somewhere A Voice is Calling - performed by Sandy Batchelor and pianist Conal Fowkes - was particularly affecting, inter-cut as it was with a moving reading of a poignant Oswald Sitwell memoir.