Given the tumultuous events of the past year, you’d be forgiven for looking through a glass darkly. And the prospect of sitting through an hour of the blues might make you reach for the bottle or a blade.

But the blues of vocalist Ali Affleck, pianist Brian Kellock and trumpeter Enrico Tomasso on the closing night of the Aberdeen Jazz Festival at The Blue Lamp (a venue rightfully described by Kellock as “the best gig in Scotland, always has been, always will be”) was just the tonic to blow away the coronavirus cobwebs of lockdown and isolation.

“That is vitamin D in a song,” whooped Affleck after playing Billie Holiday to Tomasso’s Louis Armstrong in a riotous rendition of My Sweet Hunk O’ Trash. “That is enough to lift anyone’s spirits,” she added. “What a hoot!”

And what a hoot their selection of nine toe-tappers were, opening with a joyous take on Nina Simone’s Exactly Like You and closing with an equally uplifting hymn by gospel composer Luther G. Presley, the title of which echoes our hopes as we emerge from the shadow of Covid-19: Life Will Be Sweeter Some Day.

Affleck has never sounded finer: her elongated vowels on Just A Closer Walk With Thee unfurling like a roll of velvet; her presence as radiant as the pink rose in her hair. Likewise the “titans of jazz” by her side with Kellock and Tomasso excelling in a brace of duets: the celebratory Jubilee by Hoagy Carmichael and the aptly named Sweet And Lovely.

The camerawork of some streamed gigs of late have been blighted by excessive zooming and panning; not so Steve Pycroft’s who captured the brilliance of Kellock to a tee: his left hand, the slow and measured strides of an attentive parent; his right, the quick and quirky skips of a carefree child.

And the best way to describe the effervescent excellence of the six-time winner of the British Jazz Awards Tomasso is that he is, quite literally, a blast of fresh air.

Peter Callaghan
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