Benet McLean - The Bopped and the Bopless

The Guardian 40

(33 Jazz)

Strange to be pinning two stars on any venture from the remarkable pianist, violinist and idiomatically wacky singer Benet McLean – one of the London jazz scene’s most valuable sidemen, notably as an adventurous violinist in the chamber-jazzy Partikel. This melange of bebop, punk, horn-riffy swing and McLean vocals that occasionally seem to splice Mark Murphy and a Scottish Jeff Buckley, just slips back from the brink of being a quirky gem. A distantly Kurt Weillian vocal, Duncan Eagles’s sax and the leader’s Monkish piano solo make the title track an arresting start, but desultory solo spots for bass guitar and harp sit strangely on the tracklist and McLean is overly heartsore on the Gil Fuller/Dizzy Gillespie classic I Waited for You. The Ruts’ punk hit Babylon Burning is melodramatic, while the jazzy Electric Bopland veers between attractively ragged and halting. It sounds like an all-comers small-hours jam session with fleeting agendas set by the latest arrival. Despite exhilarating bursts, I’d rather let Benet McLean just improvise on piano and violin all night.