There is one overriding image of Jools Holland you can’t shake off. Derived from his role as the tailored ringmaster in the musical circus that is his television show, Later, it’s that of the charming but slightly dodgy salesman, flogging second-hand goods with the cheesiest of patter.
Fancy a good time? A bit of pick ’n’ mix? Jools is your man. If there is any member of the current crop of grown-up pop ’n’ roll stars who hasn’t been accompanied by inappropriate smatterings of Holland’s cheekie chappie piano, they probably aren’t worth knowing about.
Yet, ever since he outgrew his role as Squeeze keyboardist, Holland has also savvily used his public persona to garner attention for his own musical pursuits.
His Rhythm and Blues Orchestra has been on the go for some years now, providing steady employment for an entire generation of session musicians, as well as bringing into the fold the odd genuine musical legend, such as trombonist Rico Rodriguez.
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It’s a family firm, and Jools’s kid brother Christopher has moved up the ladder from organist and occasional guest singer to fully fledged support act. On the rainiest of Monday nights, he brightened up a short set of Mike D’Abo-styled retro English originals with a couple of sneaky Squeeze covers in the shape of Tempted and Black Coffee in Bed — songs he must have first heard when knee-high to a baby grand.
He has also inherited his big brother’s nasal vocal inflections and bumbling, why-say-one-word-when-fifty-will-do stage patter. “This is a song I wrote with Dr John,” is a phrase Jools probably never tires of. Nor indeed, one suspects, do the other 15 likely lads and a lass on stage, most of whom looked like they had done a runner from an East End wedding.
Anyway, it was a plausible opening gambit. Within minutes he had a couple of big mamas on their feet, shaking their booties for all they were worth, while a barefoot hippy chick in a floral frock skipped up and down the rain-sodden aisle. This is the Jools Holland effect. There was boogie, there was woogie, there was jumping jive and bump ’n’ grind, all impeccably delivered with generously highlighted solo turns for all.
Everybody was happy. Why? Because, like the masterful George Melly before him, Holland has taken badass, lowdown and dirty ghetto music, and, as his version of St James Infirmary showed, wrung out all the pain.
What he’s turned it into is a cross-generational light-entertainment knees-up, with Jools as Mr Showbiz, right up to the band’s extravagantly co-ordinated curtain call.
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Nothing wrong with that, even if sometimes you want to hear it done straight in an after-hours dive, where it so magnificently belongs. If Holland finally does — as rumoured — turn the old BBC building in Edinburgh’s Queen Street into a jazz club, we might yet.
On Monday, though, you couldn’t help but be carried away by the joie de vivre of it all. Holland’s appealingly studied croon was a million miles away from the adenoidal whine of his patter, though it took Sam Brown, daughter of the original “diamond geezer” Joe Brown, to add power and class to three numbers.
Her powder-blue raincoat offset the boys’-club feel as well as her red-tinged hair. As she swooped through Dinah Washington’s Sounds Innocent, Brown’s voice recalled that of the former Lone Justice chanteuse Maria McKee, with whom she once sang.
As things took a calypso turn, followed by the inevitable Count Basie bounce, a pair of nattily dressed disco dads in the audience lived out their matinee idol fantasies on the floor. They were having too much fun to be embarrassed.
Up at the back, the original Squeeze drummer Gilson Lavis, introduced by his boss as the “fabulous engine room and nuclear reactor” of the band, took his cue from Charlie Watts, keeping things simple as they stomped through Tumbling Dice. Winston Rollins’s wonderfully incongruous trombone played the harmonica part.
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Perhaps the good time rolled on a tad too long. Shake, Rattle And Roll and a jive take on Iko-Iko got in the way of Brown’s I Told the Truth and I’ll Be Seeing You, and Lavis went and spoilt it all with a virtuoso extended display on the tom-toms. But what the heck. Like the man said, Enjoy Yourself. And we did.