WEDNESDAY night's Dublin Jazz Society concert, featuring tenor saxophonist Tommy Whittle and the young northern pianist, Brian Connor, was something of a curate's egg.
By turns good and unconvincing, it amounted to the old cliche of the whole being less than the sum of the parts.the Best of British in the idiom, Con nor is an excellent, still developing but already impressive player, and the remaining two, drummer John Wadham and bassist Dave Fleming are among the finest here.
It's not that anyone played badly, but the night never reached any consistency in terms of performance levels. For Whittle, wrapping his big toned Coleman Hawkins style tone around Just Squeeze Me, You've Changed or Laura (spoiled by an elaborate coda), the slower ones came off best, but to these ears Connor began to impress even more as the concert developed.
After the interval, the opening bossa, Know It All, held the promise of better things.
And the Stanley Turrentine piece that followed attained perhaps the best groove of the evening. But things began to slip again. A gentle Gone With The Wind was both pleasant and highly competent and no more than that but the medley of I'm Getting Sentimental Over You, Just Friends and Lester Leaps Iii had its share of uncertainties. And though the echoes of other Whittle influences, Lester Young and Stan Getz, subsequently enlivened a lovely It Never Entered My Mind, it was clear by then that the music's merits were only fitfully persuasive caused, perhaps, by too many disparate elements being together at too short notice.
