Music

Helias

Avant Garde, Glasgow

Rob Adams

three stars

TAYSIDE sextet Helias has been developing a following locally over the past year or two and having made an impression at Callander Jazz Festival, where they return on Sunday, October 1, they were invited to make their Glasgow debut on Friday.

Fronted by keyboards player and guitarist Simon Jauncey and featuring a second keyboards player, Alan Sutherland, they cover a range of musical styles. At various times here they called to mind the tuneful prog of bands such as Caravan and Camel, the classical rock of Focus and the Latin American lyricism of Santana as well as playing jazz fusion, all driven with crisp precision by drummer Doug Alec Rees working closely with Ruairidh MacLean on fretted and fretless bass guitars.

Their music majors on melody and many of their compositions incorporate well-crafted, carefully developed unison lines from guitarist Pete Caban and Leon Thorne, who “doubles” on guitar, tenor saxophone and flute. Thorne’s versatility allows himself and Caban to trade high tensile guitar solos and their saxophone and guitar partnership can be redolent of the great British jazz-funk masters Dick Morrissey and Jim Mullen.

They may not have quite the depth of musical personality, or the sheer appetite and soloing stamina, that Morrissey and Mullen brought to jazz venues up and down the country in the late 1970s and early 1980s, but the experienced Caban plays with authority and concision and Thorne can inject heat as well as introducing atmosphere to the music’s more impressionistic passages.

Kudos, too, to Avant Garde as a city centre hostelry prepared to make creative live music the main attraction on potentially the busiest night of the weekend.