Rob Adams

****

The Edinburgh Suite becomes a confession box dressed up as a cross between a boudoir and a bordello for Maria Tecce’s beans-spilling jazz cabaret. With a hot-blooded mixture of Irish, Spanish and Italian ancestry, Tecce has emotions to lay bare and memories of sneaky married lovers to recall. First, though, she smoulders.

Alternating between Spanish and English lyrics and working tightly with her accordion, guitar and bass trio, she sings of her gran amor (Gershwin’s The Man I Love) from a distance. But by the time she’s grabbed a man from the audience up to dance and planted his hand strategically, she’s on fire. Her reading of Tom Waits’s Chocolate Jesus, to a bare bones rhythm accompaniment, is sheer class and her almost spoken Nature Boy and a cappella finale are haunting in their very personal delivery.

Ends August 30.

Jazz A Cappella,

C Chambers Street

Rob Adams

***

The Oxford Gargoyles, as this company of students so charmingly call themselves, have established what almost amounts to a tradition of well-supported and enthusiastically received appearances at C Chambers Street.

Essentially a jazz big band without the instruments, they superimpose voices as trumpet, trombone and saxophone sections over dum-dum bass and human beat-box hi-hat while crooning jazz standards and not so standards, from the old Ella Fitzgerald favourite Undecided and Let’s Face the Music and Dance to The Beatles’ Got to Get You into My Life.

They’re a highly mobile, smoothly choreographed team, and if their individual voices are of variable strength and quality, their well-worked-out harmonies, collective discipline and general exuberance make for a show that’s lively, bright and not afraid to be corny or send itself up in the name of entertainment.

Ends August 31.

Kenny Young & the Eggplants, Acoustic Music Centre @ St Brides

Rob Adams

****

Parents of Harry Potter fans wondering how to fill the void after the publication of the boy wizard’s final adventure may wish to consider trading quidditch for Auberginemania.

A “suitable for ages nine to 90” mental health warning would be no exaggeration – in fact, one of these endearingly nutty New Yorkers’ Fringe gigs boasted just such a demographic in attendance – for the appeal of a band whose most popular songs include the tale of T-shirts raging against a despotic washing machine and My Dinner With Elvis, in which our hero not only spots the King’s face in a pizza but gets savvy advice into the bargain. Not only that, they also teach kids to say “please” before granting their requests.

Songs from their brand-new album that look certain to join the Eggplant Hot List include the title track, The House at Creepy Lake, which carries a “scary song alert” but only gets scary because resident poltergeists get freaked when a navel-gazing singer-songwriter arrives next door, and the delightfully silly Attack of the Maniac Librarian. An hour of gentle insanity with irresistible tunes, it ends on Sunday.

Sarah-Jane Morris – Where The Hurt Is,

Queens Hall

Neil Cooper

****

Britney Spears isn’t the obvious choice of artist for Sarah Jane Morris to cover. Morris, after all, is a politically-engaged, big-voiced diva who writes songs about Robert Mugabe and her recent break-up with one of The Pogues after 22 years of marriage. As for Britney she’s, well, the ultimate ambitious production-line pop moppet gone bad. But hey, Toxic is a great song, especially in the acoustic white reggae treatment gifted it by Morris and guitarist and song-writing partner Dominic Miller.

This is Morris’ first Edinburgh appearance in 23 years, when she was vocalist with 22-piece political brass band The Happy End during the height of Thatcherism when “you knew who the enemy was”.

Since then, Morris’ peripatetic career has seen her score chart success with the Communards, dueting with Jimmy Sommerville on Don’t Leave Me This Way, find herself banned

by the BBC for apparent Sapphic overtones on a version of Me and Mrs Jones, and find herself passed over as the title role in a biopic of Janis Joplin in favour of Ms Spears.

Hence the bittersweet cover of Toxic in this intimate, autobiographical and semi-scripted show named after her recent album. Some of this is deeply personal, while other stuff harks back to Morris’ Happy End days over an hour’s worth of full-circle rage that proves once and for all that radical chic is back on-message. Morris has retained the power of her voice over the years and with a bit more flesh on its bones by way of a full band, this could be a show of even more force.

It’s all a long way from Morris’ forthcoming collaboration with Pere Ubu’s David Thomas on a musical deconstruction of the play of the same name, but it’s a heartfelt return for one of the UK’s best-kept secret vocal talents on the scene.