Mo Scott Trio Splinter @ the Bridge, Newcastle January 12

Mo Scott (vcl); Stuart Collingwood (keys); Paul Smith (dms).

The upstairs jazz room was sparsely populated. Why? I don't know. There are few singers who can deliver like Mo and even fewer keymen who can turn on the Jimmy Smith like Stu. Throw a drummer such as Paul into the mix and you've got the recipe. Seems like folks were dining in tonight. Even so, having said that, although the audience barely hit double figures it was still twice the number of folk in the bar downstairs! And this was on a match day when normally you're tripping over black and white scarves. Admittedly they had lost but what happened to drowning your sorrows?

I digress. The music!

Mo was as brilliant as she always is delivering an epicurean menu of standards and blues although it has to be said that even if Mo was singing  The Bell Song from the opera Lakme it would still come out as a blues. Likewise, I wonder if Sigmund Romberg and Oscar Hammerstein II would dream that their song Lover Come Back to Me from the 1928 operetta New Moon would be being sung as a neo blues in a pub in Newcastle 86 years later! But, those guys didn't know about Mo who knew about them and gave their song the works. They may have turned in their graves but I bet they were smiling.

Yes, a cracking set with Stuart setting down the gauntlet. You want organ? You got it! His version of I'm Beginning to See The Light was stupendous and made full use of the lovely chord progression that tune gives you to work on.

Paul Smith?

The business!
Lance.