Jack Bruce returned for another residency at the home of British jazz — his third in three years — an arrangement which is beginning to echo Eric Clapton’s many annual appointments at the Albert Hall. Bruce was accompanied by a “new” band called the Ronnie Scott’s Blues Experience. Or was it? “Please put your hands together for the Blues Project,” Bruce exhorted the densely packed club of diners and drinkers when he finally arrived on stage following a lengthy preamble by the band without him.
Sitting at the piano, Bruce, 67, began with The Food, a song of fascinatingly bleak emotional colours. Singing a lyric freighted with bitter accusations of betrayal in his baroque Scottish tenor, he sounded every inch the ancient bard that he is — in rock’n’roll terms anyway. However, he was quickly on his feet, strapping on a fretless bass and leading the band into the more upbeat Never Tell Your Mother She’s Out of Tune, a Crossroads-type blues, during which his fingers leapt across the strings with the unerring speed, timing and touch that he has long utilised to elevate the instrument from a supporting into a starring role.
The heroics were never more finely judged than during a splendid version of First Time I Met the Blues, which Bruce sang with a suitably mournful bark while applying his outrageously powerful vibrato to what was really a lead guitar line transposed to the bass. A soulful and funky Neighbour, Neighbour recalled Bruce’s pre-Cream days in the Graham Bond Organisation, as he wandered from side to side bouncing riffs off the three-man horn section and the keyboard player Paddy Milner. The mood darkened to pitch black once more for This Anger’s a Liar, a self-lacerating song from his 2001 album, Shadows in the Air, one of the many overlooked and undersold collections of an erratic career.
From there he eased into more familiar territory with a relaxed swing through Born Under a Bad Sign. If there was a downside to the show, it was in the inevitable harnessing of such a restless artistic spirit to a repertoire from such a very long time ago. White Room and Sunshine of Your Love may be 1960s rock classics, but played by a seven-man band in a supper club now, they sounded like cabaret turns, no matter how earnestly Bruce and the guitarist Tony Remy went into freak-out mode during certain solos. Better by far was a sparse and spooky version of We’re Going Wrong, from the Disraeli Gears album, and a surprisingly menacing finale of the old Willie Dixon blues Spoonful, sung and played by Bruce with a touch that recalled the wonderful pugnacity of old.
At Ronnie Scott’s tonight and Thu, then on UK tour