With his German and Jamaican parents, singer Mike McKoy doesn't have the most obvious background to interpret the samba songs of Joao Gilberto. But if he hadn't announced his roots on stage, only a Brazilian would have known. McKoy, who made a powerful impression playing opposite Elvin Jones at Ronnie Scott's in London last year, is a big man who cares about the little things - and he makes this meticulous attention count without suffocating improvisation. Every drifting nuance and vaporous inflection of this most ethereal of idioms was carefully cherished in a performance of bold coolness, which grew in stature as the battle with a noisy packed house increasingly went McKoy's way.
The essentials of Joao Gilberto's music are low volume, the hypnotic sway of the samba pulse, the speech inflections of Portuguese, and lazy melody lines shaped by very unorthodox harmonies. Instead of opting for the seductively whispered, English-language, Astrud Gilberto version of jazz-samba that made the style such a hit in the 1960s, McKoy went for the real McCoy; as a result the musicality of the speech sounds, the more emphatic percussion and the immense grace of the melody lines had their proper due.
McKoy accompanied himself, Joao Gilberto-style, with softly throbbing acoustic guitar chords, while his rhythm section expertly supplied what this understated idiom demands: a strong but unobtrusive undercurrent of harmonic security and effortlessly shuffling swing, with some telling piano variations later in the show.
If McKoy's own role was tough enough to discharge without drifting into musical tourism, the role of the tenor saxophone - magically invented by the late Stan Getz on the original American-Brazilian collaborations - was an even harder act to follow. But McKoy picked the perfect candidate in Scottish tenorist Bobby Wellins, who achieved that role just as imposingly.
Wellins (who played one of the greatest of all recorded Brit-jazz tenor solos in a Getzian style, with Starless and Bible Black for Stan Tracey in the mid-1960s) is a master of the art of insinuation in an improvised solo. He inhabits the rippling-water rhythms of Brazilian music as if his childhood had been spent in Rio rather than Glasgow. He delicately balanced restrained, coasting-behind-the-beat minimalism with briefly quickening bursts of double-time on Desafinado, sounded smokier and fuller in tone on its percussive successor, and wound himself caressingly around the vocal line in a counter-melody on Girl from Ipanema.
In the wrong hands, jazz-samba can be a great insomnia cure. In the right ones, its understated virtues burst into bloom all over again.
