The New York-based guitarist/vocalist Joel Harrison generates repertoire by using one of the oldest tricks of the trade: messing around with old popular songs. Instead of Tin Pan Alley, however, he chooses to mine a rich seam of country and western, ancient spirituals and the music of his late namesake George.

Harrison and his four-piece band (saxophonist Julian Arguelles, organist Gary Versace and drummer Dan Weiss) played three songs by the former Beatle, beginning with Beware of Darkness and continuing on through Here Comes the Sun and While My Guitar Gently Weeps. In each case the source material was refracted through the kind of swampy textures and propulsive rhythms beloved of post-Bitches Brew Miles Davis.

Moving backwards in time, the band also explored songs by Merle Haggard and Jimmy Webb, along with gospel tunes whose origins are lost in history. Often the effect was powerful and transporting. Oh Death became a shimmering evocation of the dust-blasted open spaces of rural America, Harrison's guitar hovering stylistically between Ry Cooder and Pat Metheny. Elsewhere, the arrangements lumbered rather earnestly.

The first half was ruminative, but in the second the band stepped on the gas. Merle Haggard's White Line Fever turned into a maelstrom of shrieking Hammond organ and tangled, barbed-wire guitar, the whole thing fusing into an electric swamp. Arguelles played a saxophone solo that sounded like God explaining how he'd made the universe, before the band barrelled headlong into a climax of thundering synchronised stabs. Anti-climac tically, the tune then petered out in a protracted coda of self-indulgent guitar atmospherics. All in all a mixed bag of a performance, but when Harrison's crew hit the mark they did it with considerable gusto.

· At the, Glee Club, Birmingham, on Sunday. Box office: 0870 241 5093.