Gig review: Leroy Jones Quintet

Published on Sunday 24 July 2011 21:05

Leroy Jones Quintet Spiegeltent, Edinburgh ***

THE 33rd Edinburgh Jazz Festival started with a whimper rather than a bang. Why? Because the early evening gig in the Spiegeltent felt like an exercise in time-filling until something more exciting came along.

Trumpeter Leroy Jones may tick all the boxes – he's a born and bred New Orleans musician, he's served as a sideman to Harry Connick Jr and he's got an entertaining stage presence which helps draw in the audience. However, the reality was that his gig was lacklustre; the playing largely unremarkable.

Sharing frontline duties with his wife, the trombonist Katja Toivola, Jones offered one hackneyed standard from the trad repertoire after another. Fine for the tourists on Bourbon Street, perhaps, but really, if we have to hear yet another version of China Boy or Chinatown in our lifetimes, it should be something spectacular and/or different.

That said, Jones's peculiarity is that he sounds like a modern player – shades of Clifford Brown and Miles Davis were evident in his solos which veered between fast flurries of notes and cool minimalism – but playing in the New Orleans style.

Based on the evidence onstage on Friday night, however, it's not always a winning combination. Much more appealing were his vocal numbers, but the star of the show was his pianist-for-the-night, David Patrick, whose colourful, rollicking solos should have been the spark that ignited the band…