You won’t find racks bearing its name in your local record shop. Nor does it crop up on iTunes’ ever expanding list of styles and sub-styles. But there is a genre out there that can only be described as “fluffy dice music”, the sort of Muzak that, back in the bad old 1980s, began pouring out of souped-up motors adorned with said fashion accessories.
It was an era when R&B, still recovering from the onslaught of disco and rap, decided to give up on soul altogether and entrust its future to Whitney Houston. On the instrumental side of the street, Spyro Gyra’s rivals were laying the foundations for that relentlessly bland but lucrative cottage industry known as smooth jazz.
Al Jarreau, now an effervescent and pixieish 71, has managed to straddle both trends, winning Grammys across the spectrum, and retaining enough star power to pack the Festival Hall. Saying anything uncomplimentary about him is almost churlish: after all, he seems a likeable guy in his beret, he still exudes enthusiasm, and he makes praiseworthy noises about the importance of keeping jazz alive on the schlock-dominated radio airwaves. How can you dislike a singer who, treated in hospital on tour last year, now feels free to let us know that “I have to pee a lot these days”?
The problem is, that when you dig beyond the vocalese flourishes, most of his output is every bit as syrupy and formulaic as a Simon Cowell boy band. We’re in This Love Together, After All and the theme from the television show Moonlighting are unbearably tepid. If that sounds like the curmudgeonly response of a jazz snob I can only add that I’m still capable of tapping a foot to George Benson’s earliest crossover hits.
Jarreau’s audience clearly did not mind at all — at the end of two lengthy sets, which included his version of Take Five, he was greeted with a standing ovation before he plunged into Spain, that typically hyperactive homage to Joaquín Rodrigo. He certainly cuts a mesmerising figure as he scats and doodles, his fingers toying with an imaginary saxophone. But his nasal tone and scattergun approach soon grow wearisome: the frenzied leaps in pitch and the bursts of falsetto have taken on an almost random character lately.
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The guitarist Earl Klugh made an unassuming guest appearance before the interval. It was a pity that he did not stay longer, since he provided some respite from the overbearing backing group. As for Jarreau’s erratic versions of Lennon and McCartney’s She’s Leaving Home and Elton John’s Your Song, they were not so much murdered as ritually disembowelled and their remains fried in treacle.
Al Jarreau plays Symphony Hall, Birmingham, July 24 and Bridgewater Hall, Manchester, July 25