Gig review: Bonobo, Picture House, Edinburgh

The weekend came early here, as a sold-out contingent of young clubbers emerged in the early evening for an extensive two-hours-plus show by Bonobo, aka Leeds musician and composer Simon Green, and a live band that was sized more like a commune.

Bonobo

Picture House, Edinburgh

Star rating: * * * *

While Green has been releasing his style of jazz-influenced downtempo electronica for nearly a decade and a half on the Tru Thoughts and Ninja Tune labels, it was this year’s fifth album The North Borders that brought him tangible success in the form of a top-30 record.

It was a production befitting of a band on the up. Blending bright but often laid-back electronic beats with textured live playing, it was often hard to tell how many people were involved in playing the set. One count, amid the gloom and the hot bank of pixelated lights behind the players, had it at nine musicians and a singer, including a couple of string players and two trumpeters whose interludes lent a triumphant air to certain songs.

This no-expense-spared willingness to get it right and the pleasing authenticity of not just programming these parts into a laptop endeared greatly, particularly amid the soulful vocal of First Fires, Green’s absolutely fitting flute part on We Could Forever and the winningly bravura drum and saxophone solos of El Toro. Yet this was essentially a club set whose particular mix of loping beats, ramped-up bass and soulful inflections might signal the first stirrings of a late-90s Acid Jazz scene revival, and it was all the more thrilling for that.