For all its incandescent sermonising power and roaring volume, the Hammond organ can sometimes be strangely dispiriting - like being stuck at a bar with a non-stop talker. Barbara Dennerlein, the young Munich-born jazz organist who turned an early obsession with the veteran American Hammond-preachers into a reputation as one of the world's leaders on the instrument, isn't always invulnerable to these snags. But she hasn't copied the master Hammond-blasters she must have spent her childhood listening to.
Although the instrument's dominant repertoire (gospel-like wailing, rhythm and blues) is certainly Dennerlein's too, it is often shrewdly woven into original materials. Moreover, her harmonic sense and ear for fresh melody can make even the most road-battered blues sound like she only just thought of it.
Dennerlein played with Britons Phil Lee on guitar and Martin Drew on drums. Drew was cannily effervescent while Lee was in full flow, and the group's sense of united purpose was considerably the sharper for it. She dedicated her first piece to bluesman Jimmy Smith, a mid-tempo blues right out of the amaze-your-friends-on-the-Hammond kit, but opened it with a stealthy walking bassline of accelerating swing on the pedals (Dennerlein's balletic footwork is one of the attractions of her gigs), attacked it amicably over Drew's unerring backbeat, then took it out into flying double-time.
In the early stages, for all its seamless virtuosity, the show sounded as if it might slip into Dennerlein's downside - an over-dependence on Hammond hot-licks, and a shortage of dynamic contrast that can blunt the impact of even the most telling phrases.
But on the Latin follow-up to the opener, Dennerlein sounded increasingly relaxed in her layering of the music's harmonies and choppy polyrhythmic chord-playing. She replaces the rawness of a bluesman like Jimmy Smith with sophisticated inner voicings that work when she lets them breathe, and, although a fairly anonymous ballad passed by with little trace, a rearrangement of the Stones' Satisfaction was a triumphant journey from slow funk via sly pedalwork to roaring rhythm and blues.
A slow, raunchy blues and a fast, beboppish one displayed Dennerlein's range from the rugged to the flat-out jazzy. When she had the mostly young audience hand-clapping to another bluesy groover in the finale, it was as if the soul-jazz 1960s had never gone away. Which, of course, it didn't.
