The Scottish music writer Rob Adams once described Glasgow guitar legend Jim Mullen’s right thumb as the best blues singer the city ever produced. This was a nod to the voice-like warmth Mullen gives an electric guitar melody by plucking with his thumb rather than a pick, as his short-lived idol Wes Montgomery did. After successful decades with big-time funk groups including the Average White Band, Mullen’s palette of raunchy blues, graceful bebop and purring tenderness still glows. A jam at the Vortex with young UK guitar prodigy Rob Luft – his junior by nearly 50 years – put his formidable resources to fascinatingly fresh use.
Luft’s mother had taken him as a 10-year-old to a Mullen gig. (The elder statesman joked that if he’d known how Luft was going to turn out, he’d have done his best to demoralise him.) The eager compatibility of the pair was as absorbing as their differences of approach to a largely standards-based repertoire – cranked up further by gifted Scottish keyboardist Pete Johnstone on organ, and exciting Italian drummer Enzo Zirilli.
The late Tommy Flanagan’s bebop-swinger Freight Train got the full treatment early in the set, with Mullen’s opening solo a seamless narrative of double-tempo runs and cannily bluesy hooks, Luft’s twisting improv a more episodic sequence of changing angles on the tune and its harmony, and Johnstone’s tersely grooving organ solo locked closely to Zirilli’s driving pulse. The classic ballad Blue In Green was introduced in a sparingly electronic shimmer by Luft, and became a Mullen masterclass in tonal eloquence and variation of attack.
Antonio Carlos Jobim’s bossa nova If You Never Come to Me was typically recoloured in blues hues by Mullen and developed in impulsive sprints, coquettishly skippy figures and then pinging harmonics by Luft. It closed on Luft’s riff-swap with the drums in which they slightly uneasily relocated the original tempo, but breezily slung in quotes from The Girl from Ipanema and A Night in Tunisia in the process. The End of a Love Affair was a burn-up, with Luft at his most uninhibitedly loose, Mullen by now quoting other tunes with Sonny Rollins-like effortlessness, and Zirilli’s solo a mix of subtle tonality and whiplash accents.
It was a gig to demonstrate that while there might be dated jazz material, there’s no such thing as dated jazz when deeply grounded improvisers of fearlessly enthusiastic curiosity can reinvent it.
