Playful Kidd’s an absolute delight from start to finish
Carol Kidd & David Newton Spiegeltent St Andrew Square, Edinburgh Alison Kerr
WELL, well – just when you’re beginning to wonder if the days of five-star reviews for Carol Kidd concerts are in the past, she turns in the performance of this reviewer’s jazz festival.
Thursday evening’s concert may only have been an hour long, and the singer and her pianist may have had to contend with an unacceptable amount of external noise, but it was an absolute delight from start to finish, with Kidd on top form as she powered through ten songs with a minimal amount of chat in between.
Reunited with David Newton, her pianist/MD in the early 1990s, Kidd revisited many favourite numbers from her earlier career, notably a rare outing for How Little We Know, which featured the singer at her playful best, clearly enjoying herself whether she was getting a kick out of the cheekily sexy lyrics or bopping around on the stage during Newton’s elegantly swinging solo.
She also, undoubtedly, got a kick out of the effect her singing had on the sold-out Spiegeltent audience. There wasn’t a sound to be heard in the tent (outside was a different matter – yapping dogs, drinkers’ chatter and sirens were just some of the sounds listeners had to blank out). Everyone was spellbound and riveted, not least by Kidd’s ever-mesmerising way with a ballad. How Do You Keep the Music Playing was heartwrenchingly lovely while The Ballad of the Sad Young Men was a masterclass in painting a vivid picture in song – and, with its line “All the news is bad again; kiss your dreams goodbye”, painfully poignant and apt.
Here’s listening to you, Kidd ...
Diplomats of Jazz City Art Centre, Edinburgh Alison Kerr
FOR several years, it was a tradition for this reviewer to request a ticket for the Friday afternoon gig at the Royal Overseas League – and to be told it had sold out days before and there were no spare tickets. So it was great to see in this year’s programme the ever-popular Edinburgh band the Diplomats of Jazz were playing their annual Jazz Festival gig at this event’s new venue, the City Art Centre’s fifth floor, which clearly holds a larger audience than the ROL.
It’s no wonder the Diplomats have such a strong following and can easily pack out venues, even at a time of year when there are plenty of out-of-town bands to choose from. They are wonderful purveyors of classic jazz, which they play with good humour and style. And it’s always a delight to hear the combined sound of cornet, clarinet, banjo and sousaphone.
Last year, the band’s cornetplaying leader Jim Petrie had a not-so-funny turn during their gig and had to be taken to hospital, but he was looking and sounding good on Friday – though his cornet had less of a work-out than his gravelly vocals, and he was suffering from the intense heat from the stadium lights on the stage.
Despite their discomfort, the fully dinner-suited quartet served up an hour’s worth of swinging tunes. Among the catchy highlights were East Coast Trot and Yearning, both of which showcased this band’s top-notch ensemble playing as well as some terrific clarinet solos by Bob Busby, whose spiky-round-theedges sound brought the great Sandy Brown to mind..
Earl Thomas City Art Centre Rob Adams
THERE was no pact with the devil at a crossroads for Earl Thomas. The Tennessee-born bluesman with the BA in music was a 22-year-old dentistry student when a climbing accident left him wondering if he might survive and deciding that, if he did, he’d become a singer.
Thirty-four years on he’s winning audiences over on his first trip to Edinburgh, a selfprofessed 21st century bluesman who combines his classical training with an awareness of the blues’ deep connections with gospel music, a plausible way with a storyline and a natural salesman’s charm.
Whether he’ll ever deliver on the protagonist in North Country Blues’ rather shortbread tin-like intentions to find a little place to settle down in Scotland is another matter. For now, though, he’s having and creating fun with a solid, focused band with a nice line in song-framing guitar and organ riffs and a voice that, as his off-mic testifying illustrated, is strong and inflected with as much Stax soul as Chess blues.
If some of the songs he sang in this late afternoon hour were a mite cheesy, the best of them showed why he’s placed material with stars such as Etta James, and he sings lines about thinking he was his woman’s rock only to discover he was just a steppin’ stone with the same level of hurt as his serially two-timed victim elsewhere does humour in detailing a list of possible mystery callers from landlord to stockbroker to lawyer. He’s possibly more suited to a slot closer to the midnight hour but broad daylight didn’t stop converts complying with his handclapping, arm-waving directions.
Warren Haynes Queen’s Hall Rob Adams
WE got there in the end, with some eye-poppingly good instrumental work delivered by a band of conspicuous talents on fiddle, electric banjo and mandolin plus an ultra-together rhythm team. But much of former Allman Brothers Band guitarist Warren Haynes’ first visit to Scotland was marred by a poor sound quality that had some people walking out only a few songs into the set and even seemed to cause an altercation at the back of the hall that briefly diverted attention from the stage.
Haynes is a fine guitarist in the Southern rock-blues style but doesn’t come across as a natural frontman. He’s certainly not the sort who’s going to introduce the next song with a bon mot or two, and the promised “honeyed vocals that cut straight through to the soul” were largely reduced to an indecipherable moan, so there was quite a lot of guesswork as to what was being presented.
Little Feat’s Skin It Back was recognisable by its guitar lick and Elton John’s Madman Across the Water might have cut through the fog, but if they were punctuated by skilful instrumental breaks, as appeared to possibly be the case, these weren’t reaching row P.
It wasn’t really until the encore of bluegrass-gospel standard Angel Band that the vocals became genuinely and enjoyably audible and as it segued from churchy fivepart harmony into a lengthy medley based on the Allmans’ favourite Jessica, with its familiar guitar melody enhanced by the band’s kilted fiddle virtuoso, the full swinging, rocking, rootsy flavour of the ensemble became apparent. Little consolation if you were back home by then, though. NYOS Junior Orchestra Perth Concert Hall Michael Tumelty THE NYOS summer-season ball got rolling on Friday night with a cracking concert into which the orchestra of 13-year-olds and under packed five numbers in a 90-minute event. I did wonder if the youngsters’ stamina and concentration was slipping towards the end, and if perhaps a bit less might have eased the strain on the strength and focus necessary to deliver the goods at a consistently high level, that’s a discussion for another place.
With conductor Holly Mathieson, soon to take up her new role as assistant conductor at the RSNO, the young musicians tore into the repertoire with their terrific discipline and bottomless musicianship unleashed in a tremendous account of Strauss’s Fledermaus Overture, brilliantly-characterised with all the push-me pull-you flexibility of pacing required to animate the piece.
Solo trumpeter and former NYOS principal Calum Tonner gave a dazzling performance of Oskar Bohme’s acrobatic, tuneful and winning little Trumpet Concerto, before the musicians of the Junior Orchestra laid down the full pack of credentials in Brahms’ Fifth Hungarian Dance, delivered with real string depth and bite, and a Dvorak Slavonic Dance with incisive impact.
But the climax, unquestionably, arrived with Khachaturian’s Spartacus Suite and a gloriously-sustained performance of that ‘Onedin Line’ movement which featured the best string playing of the night. Just one thought: they should watch it with Copland’s Hoe-down, a favourite encore. It’s tricky; it needs more discipline.