Edinburgh Jazz Festival
Luca Manning & Irini Arabatzi/Carol Kidd
Piccolo/Spiegeltent, George Square, Edinburgh
Keith Bruce, four stars
SATURDAY was singers’ night in the jazz festival’s tented village, with the vocalists from the West Coast to the fore. Glasgow’s Luca Manning has teamed up with Irini Arabatzi, from Greece, in a quartet with bassist Seth Tackeberry and drummer Sam Every that made a superb debut in front of a capacity house.
Very different in style – Manning is mellow crooner with finely honed improvising and harmonising skills, Arabatzi has very rhythmic, highly articulate abilities – the two singers have found highly accomplished partners in the virtuosic Tackeberry, finger-picking chords on an electric bass, and multi-talented Every, who makes his own important contribution to the vocal arrangements. He also brought the idea of tackling the Beatles’ Come Together to the table, and that is one of the highlights of the set, Arabatzi adding siren topline and Tackeberry sliding into Larry Graham funk mode for his solo.
In a wide-ranging set that includes a revision of guitarist Joe Williamson’s arrangement of Bye Bye Blackbird for Manning, and winds up with the contemporary bluegrass of the Punch Brothers’ My Oh My, excursions into Latin vocalese, French chanson and Stevie Wonder are diverse stops along the way. I’ll wager that some of these make the unique sound of this quartet a YouTube sensation before long.
Manning’s fellow Glaswegian Carol Kidd is also in good company, the septuagenarian working with pianist Paul Harrison as her MD, bassist Mario Caribe and drummer Doug Hough. Of course there are old favourites and well-loved standards, but she explores other areas of repertoire as well. Perhaps her reading of Randy Newman’s I Think It’s Going To Rain Today is a little over-wrought, but her take on Etta James’s version of the country hit If I Had Any Pride Left At All, which she has recorded for a forthcoming album, was revelatory, and a stand-out of the set. But so too was a bossa nova-inflected Embraceable You, which was as near to hearing Ella Fitzgerald as most of us will need.
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