Colin Steele Quartet, Glasgow Jazz Festival review: 'a measured tribute to The Blue Nile'

Colin Steele Quartet, Glasgow Royal Concert Hall Green Room ★★★★★

A sultry midsummer Glasgow evening: a fitting setting, perhaps, for trumpeter Colin Steele and his peerless quartet to launch their album The Blue Nile. The third of their trio of “songbook” albums which have already re-imagined the music of Joni Mitchell and the Pearlfishers, this tribute to the fabled Glasgow band and its urban nocturnes was on its second sitting, an earlier extra concert having been organised due to demand.

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Colin Steele PIC: Archie MacFarlane

You’d think the Blue Nile’s Heatwave might make an appropriate opener but, no, they went for Downtown Lights and almost immediately, even over Alyn Cosker’s rumbustious drumming, you were conscious of Steele’s measured mute trumpet phrasing evoking Blue Nile frontman Paul Buchanan’s wistful vocals (some of us thought Buchanan might just make a brief appearance on stage to endorse this superb jazz tribute: in the event, he blessed the occasion by sending flowers).

The musical homage continued with the slow yearning of Let’s Go Out Tonight, with its cool drift of trumpet, while pianist and arranger Dave Milligan delivered a lovely, almost baroque piano solo. Then it was Heatwave, trumpet singing sparely over gently ticking piano and Cosker letting off steam in a drum break. Steele’s penchant for ballads was well exercised, not least with the beautiful stillness of Easter Parade, its plaintive melody introduced by double bassist Calum Gourlay.

There was further ruminative bass and eloquent mute trumpet in Because of Toledo then, suddenly, during the unhurried bluesy- gospel roll of Happiness, the mute came off, Steele sky-pointing to discharge a jubilant cascade of brazen notes. The mute was back on, though, for an eagerly greeted encore, declaring pithily over the shuffle of the unseasonably titled Tinseltown in the Rain.