Colin Steele Quintet, Pizza Express Jazz Club, London

Jazz breaks through the border

A year on from when I caught him at the Vortex promoting his first album, Twilight Dreams, Colin Steele was back in London last week as part of a mini-festival for Caber records, Scotland's leading jazz label. Scotland's leading jazz label? It would be easy to mock, but it would be a mistake to assume that because the pond is small, there are no big fish in it. It is on the independents that much of the most interesting British jazz (not just English jazz) is to be heard, and Tom Bancroft's Edinburgh-based Caber holds its own with any of them.

Steele is certainly a delightful trumpeter, with a modest dose of showmanship about his delivery. He's not afraid to sway and lean back as he coaxes a mellow middle register line from his horn. He has quite simple things to say, but he says them with eloquence and expression.

His greater claim to the bandleader's chair, however, lies in his compositions, which interweave echoes of traditional Scottish music with mostly major-key structures. The bolder, more open, whole-tone key shift is used instead of the semitone slides more common in jazz, and these lend his tunes a buoyancy and optimism unlike that produced by younger English players, many of whom seem to have had any such attributes they once possessed wrung out of them by the college courses' endless pursuit of substitution, and the consequent burying of melody. This is what a Steele composition has that makes it so unusual: it is the sound of hope.

His band, with the excellent Dave Milligan on piano and John Rae on drums, was joined by a gifted young double-bassist, Aidan O'Donnell, and Tom Bancroft's twin Phil on sax (the regular saxophonist, Julian Arguelles, was away). It may have been one night only, but Phil Bancroft was the complete master of Steele's material, which contains some tricky conversational lines. I thought that his more full-bodied tenor and soprano actually improved the balance; perhaps it was the adrenalin of the night. He is certainly a very assured player.

The same applies to Milligan, a pianist of quite astonishing verve and subtlety. On one number, he employed Les McCann-type repeated notes and surrounded them with chords as though a forest was springing up in slow motion. He can turn his hand to the thoughtful as much as to the raucously gospel, and he was rightly accorded several open-ended breaks that became whirlwind tours de force.