Oh Mr Porter, you are proof that proper jazz music can be popular
Audiences in for a treat at city shows and support is great too
Music
Gregory Porter
Perth Concert Hall
Keith Bruce
IF YOU have a ticket for the last of Gregory Porter’s four Scottish dates, at Glasgow Royal Concert Hall, you are in for a real treat. Get there early, for it starts with the support slot from Kandace Springs, who both looks and sounds nothing like your preconceptions of a Nashville musician.
Her debut album, out on Blue Note in July, takes its title – Soul Eyes – from a tune John Coltrane played, and her piano playing, as well as her singing, prove her to be firmly on that track. There was a touch of Ella in the way she introduced herself in song, while her version of Ewan MacColl’s The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face was straight from the grooves of Roberta Flack. Her own songs, including one, Rain Falling, she wrote aged 16, mark her out as someone we’ll be hearing much more of.
Porter, however, is surely already at the peak of his game, and has a sextet of musicians around him making sure he stays there. Sure, there is an immediate echo of Bill Withers in his rich baritone, but when the team tackle Don’t Lose Your Steam it is Lowell George of Little Feat who comes to mind. The track is one of many from the forthcoming Take Me To The Alley album, out at the start of next month, with the simple devotional gospel of the title track and the ballad Don’t Be A Fool both as memorable as Holding On, the opener that has already had the Disclosure dance floor treatment.
There are lessons in history, biology, geography and anthropology in Porter’s set – but the best one was that proper jazz music can still be this popular.
Music
Jeff Lynne’s ELO
SECC Hydro, Glasgow
Teddy Jamieson
A CONFESSION. In 1977 I wasn’t listening to the Sex Pistols. I wasn’t tracking down imported issues of Punk magazine to read about Television or Patti Smith. Mostly I was listening to ELO’s Out Of The Blue and singing along to Wild West Hero.
I tell you this to let you know that maybe there is a touch of nostalgia threaded through the words that follow. But only a touch.
Because on this evidence none but the most churlish could grouch about Jeff Lynne’s unexpected return to frontline duties with the band he led in the 1970s.
Backed here by a large and able band (only keyboardist Richard Tarney can also claim to be a long-standing member) and crisp digital visual imagery, Lynne ran through a set here that leaned heavily –and happily – on ELO’s back catalogue.
Understandably. Now that pop music is effectively post-canonical and we can dispense with the notion of guilty pleasures, Lynne’s capacity to conjure up the sweetest of pop orchestral confections is finally being recognised.
He is no showman and he has even retained his “bedraggled sheepdog in sunglasses” look intact from about 1978, but the voice remains a potent, yearning instrument, one that sits happily in the soundbed provided by his backing band.
There were minor grumbles. At times the keyboards were too washy, the arrangements too old school (though the strings were always eloquent). The fan in me was a little huffy that Can’t Get It Out Of My Head wasn’t dreamy enough.
Then again Don’t Bring Me Down (never a favourite) had a real muscular punch to it and the final run of songs – including Turn to Stone, Sweet Talking Woman and Mr Blue Sky – was quite simply a constant sugar high.
What’s the betting on ELO being this year’s Glastonbury highlight?
Music
Diana Jones
CCA, Glasgow
Rob Adams
THERE’S always been an element of a musical seance – in the best possible way – about Diana Jones’ concerts. Jones’ voyage of discovery, from growing up in New York as an adopted child to finding her natural family with its comingling with Cherokee blood in Appalachia, has given the songs that have resulted and her singing of them a sense of calling up spirits.
Even when she’s the medium for the message of someone completely unrelated, such as the Scottish-born miner Henry Russell, whose last words to his wife, written in coal on a paper bag down a West Virginia mine Jones has turned into a poignant, haunting folk ballad, her lightness of touch takes her deep into the human soul.
She was accompanied here by guitarist-singer Daniel Meade, who variously embellished Jones’ own simple guitar picking with sensitivity, added quietly effective vocal support or slipped into the shadows as required, and with her plaintive alto giving voice to often prayerful words she managed the trick of transporting the listener far from the CCA’s functional atmosphere.
You could almost see the mountains whose fate, as industry moves in and irrevocably alters the topography, she mourns in a heartfelt Appalachia and feel the temperature and texture of the cold grey ground her character asks not to be buried in.
Jones jokes that happiness doesn’t feature much in her work. That’s true. Even among the heartbreak and songs including a prayer of understanding for her delinquent brother, however, there’s an overriding feeling that better times are coming and the kind of melodic optimism that makes O Sinner the sort of parting song that stays with you all the way home.
Theatre
Jackie The Musical
King’s Theatre, Edinburgh
Neil Cooper
THERE aren’t many magazines that could be transformed into a jukebox musical. But then, few publications have the lingering status of Jackie, the teenage girl bible born in Dundee, and which changed lives along with hairstyles, hemlines, hearts and minds.
A couple of decades after Cathy and Claire advised their last and the magazine’s not quite glossy pages finally folded, Jackie appears to have come of age. Or at least their readers have if the pink fizz sipping audience lapping up every moment of a show that began at the Gardyne Theatre in Dundee before being picked up like a small town hot date and given a make-over for its current tour are anything to go by.
The story focuses on Janet Dibley’s fifty-something Jackie (natch), who, after being dumped by her husband of 20 years for a younger model is attempting to get back into the dating game. With her younger self escaping from her psyche to advise her and a box of old Jackie mags providing inspiration for her teenage son, what emerges from Mike James’ script in Anna Linstrum’s production is a cartoon-strip style part rom-com part sit-com. At times this resembles Tell Me On A Sunday rewritten for the teeny-bopper generation.
With each scene punctuated by a series of 1970s smash hits, Arlene Phillips’ choreography is performed with an expressive gusto by a bright-eyed retro-clad ensemble who never take themselves too seriously in the literalism of shapes that probably haven’t been thrown since Pan’s People last shook a leg.
As mid-life crisis turns to emancipation, the unadulterated glee that emanates throughout is life-affirming in every way.