Jazz and Blues Festival At the Spiegeltent; Run ended

SEVENTY MINUTES.  That's how long this year's Festival lasted before the first appearance of Osama Bin Laden.  I was expecting him, of course, in a dozen earnest Fringe plays, and a good half of  the the Book Festival's programme.  But I did not expect him to feature in a jazz set.

He popped up courtesy of The Syncopators (From Melbourne), who opened the Jazz and Blues Festival at the Spiegeltent last night.  Whoever had been playing, this was one show I wouldn't have missed for the world, since the first jazz event has the distinction of raising the curtain on the whole of the Festival season.  No doubt The Syncopators were proud of the honour - and the Festival were certainly proud to have attracted their Antipodean guests, making so much fuss of their Melbourne origins I half-expected them to kick off with the Neighbours theme.

But I needn't have worried, as The Syncopators served up a solid 90 minutes of classic trad jazz, performed with a distinctly American accent.  You had to admire the technical side: Peter Gaudion trumpeted perfect tremelos while Richard Miller sprinted up the scales on the clarinet and sax, jumping between the instruments with faultless ease.  The improvised solos, too, were uniformly impressive.  But the group never quite attained that intense, free-wheeling, toe-tapping rapture that the best old-school jazz inspires; they'd flown into town at 4:30 that morning, and perhaps it showed.

Their programme admirably avoided all the cliches of the American Songbook, but the stand-out highlight was Richard Miller's own composition, Hoopla.  With quirky, surprising riffs and constant shifts in tempo and key, it was a delightful musical adventure, full of fun and energy.  And if there were flashes of brilliance, there were also hints of humour.  Not all the audience were quite alert enough to spot the warped lyrics to You Always Hurt The One You Love - dead-panned in a close harmony which wouldn't have disgraced a local choir - but the later introducion of Loch Lomond to a New Orleans standard all but brought the house down.

And then, oh dear - Osama.  A crude and contrived number involving the world's most wanted man and a bomb made out of Viagra, The Syncopators' perplexing party piece cocked one giant Australian snook at global terror.  It was fun in a way, and for a brief moment I wondered whether trumpeted mockery might after all be the right response to one man's doomed effort to destroy our world.  But the ill-judged sign-off - the sound of an aeroplane crash - shocked me back to my senses.

It was a bum note to end on, an unwarranted intrusion of harsh reality to a chilled-out evening of fun.  For all that, though, the Festival's very first event set a high standard to live up to.  And the fact this talented ensemble made the trip from Down Under speaks volumes about the growing appeal of this, our own burgeoning Jazz Festival.