Almost like back on Islay

Well not quite. It wasn't quite the Islay Jazz Festival revisited, but yesterday evening at the Bongo Club (not entirely our scene...), BB and I went to see the Haftor Medboe Group, which was one of the standout acts of the Islay Jazz Festival 2006, as far as we were concerned. The sound was not quite as 'clean' as it was in the remarkable surroundings of the Laphroig Distillery Board Room on Islay, given the background noise provided by the huge extractor fans that inevitably present in a venue such as the Bongo Club, but the inventiveness and the mixture of dissonance and harmony was there just as it was when we first saw them in September. It was the second great gig which we saw in March 2007, in Edinburgh, the first being the Burt/MacDonald Quintet playing with Keith Tippett, by whose lamb chops I was most impressed. I was even more impressed by the fact that Roadrunner (late lamented of this blog) was most impressed that we had been to see Keith Tippett, and rather irritated by my supposed failure to tell him about it. I reminded him that he had announced, a priori, a propos the particular evening that Tippett was on, that he was watching the footie and was not to be disturbed. That was before I had chosen where to take a visitor from the US who was giving us a few lectures and seminars, and who has a known fondness for jazz (so fond is he, that he once filled in on drums for a regular jazz set in a Dubrovnik bar, when the drummer failed to turn up; we were only supposed to be the audience...). Anyway, as regards Roadrunner, how was I to know that I was supposed to reconsult him once I had made the choice of where to go, in case he wanted to dump his footie evening?

Anyway, one good gig often leads to another, and going to the Bongo Club last night drew our attention to a gig by Moishe's Bagel, Scotland's very own Kletzmer Band, who are launching a new CD at the Bongo Club on Easter Saturday. That's a yes from me, and a yes from BB once he discovered that Mario Caribe, his favourite bass player from the Islay Jazz experience, is the bass player for Moishe's Bagel (wonderful soft musical tone...). No question. I'll report back afterwards.