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Billy Jenkins

Songs Of Praise LIve!

Babel BDV2768

Featuring one of the Bromley bluesman's most inspired bands – saxophonist Nathaniel Facey, violinist Dylan Bates, trombonist Gail Brand, tuba player Oren Marshall, drummer Charles Hayward, plus Billy Jenkins himself on electric guitar – this album preserves what sounds to have been a great gig, at Leeds's Wardrobe, for posterity (although, as a nineteenth-century politician once famously remarked, we might ask ourselves, before embarking on such projects, just what posterity has ever done for us).

Proceedings begin with a frenetic scramble through a Jenkins/Trimmer classic, 'Brilliant' and then follow an amusing introductory passage themed on bandmembers' ages with, among others, a lengthy slide-guitar-centred visit to 'Blues is Calling Me', an intriguing, multi-textured piece sparked by Ornette Coleman's most celebrated little lick, 'Dancing in Ornette Coleman's Head', and a fierce charge through Bobby Hebb's 'Sunny' before concluding with an audience-participation number, 'Blues Stay Away from Me'.

It shouldn't need emphasising, given that Jenkins has been producing his utterly original music for three decades or so, that he is a superb blues-based guitarist, capable of energising anything he plays with astonishing, blistering solos; he's also an excellent bandleader, drawing committed performances of similar intensity from his sidemen, a skill epitomised on this recording by his setting of Facey's eloquent alto, in particular, against the deft but satisfyingly heavy whump of Marshall's tuba, which underpins the band sound perfectly.

What does mark this album out from much of Jenkins's other work, though, is the inclusion, in a set semi-humorously aimed at 'middle-aged jazz lovers subject to melancholia', of 'Bhopal', a threnody, culminating in chilling tuba death-pangs, for the victims of the world's most appalling industrial 'accident' (in which, it is always worth remembering, 46.3 tons of methyl isocyanite escaped from Union Carbide's pesticide plant in Bhopal, immediately killing an estimated 8,000 people, subsequently killing a similar number from after-effects; injuring half a million, 50,000 of them permanently; and still killing people, over twenty years later, at a rate of between ten and fifteen a month). Like much of Jenkins's work, Songs of Praise is deadly serious at heart.