It's hard to place jazz trio Les Gammas. One minute they are improvising funky electronics, the next Mark Frank, their singing drummer, is yodelling a cheesy love song and telling 20 people to clap quietly so the band can pretend they are playing to an intimate crowd.
Their stage presence suggests novelty, a kitsch in-joke: they're not wearing glitter, fake fur or bargain-bin platforms but they might as well be. And yet, Frank, Jochen Helfert on the Fender Rhodes and PE Spier on bass are deadly serious. The way they play riffs from 70s jazz and film score maestros such as Bernard Hermann, Antonio Carlos Jobim, Lalo Schifrin and Leone Thomas, you'd think they were young lions at the Village Vanguard instead of an empty Jazz Cafe.
They don't always sound this artificial. Signed to lauded Munich jazz-dance label Compost, Les Gammas have become known for having a twisted ear for super-syncopated clubby grooves. Unfortunately, their live sound barely resembles that of their critically acclaimed, aptly titled debut album, Exercises de Style.
Rhythmically at least, Les Gammas are militant with a minimal swing, and what could have been a set of aggravating plastic funk is occasionally engrossing. That's partly due to Frank's melodic, even catchy sensibility. Twinned with Helfert's fascinating dalliance with Larry Levan-style disco and Spier's dubby basslines on Chasing the Double Six, he gets the band off to a good start. Inevitably, though, they fall in a rut and acid jazz jams follow. Frank, Helfert and Spier's good humour remains the one constant through all these improvising set-ups. But when Frank begins to scat badly throughout See the Sun, the joke is on us.
The strongest songs, Love Unlimited and Austrian Shepherd Dance, are saved for last; but although their monumental grooves are highly infectious, it's too late. The band are not shrewd enough to cloak their shortcomings and finish with another acid jazz session. Still, why worry about something as banal and human as an authentic voice when you've constructed a gallery of masks to hide behind?
