Star rating **** Guitarist Lee Ritenour hadn't been to Scotland before. His drummer, Will Kennedy, said he hadn't either - although this may be news to fans of his old band, fusion A-team Yellowjackets. Let's not read anything into that, however, because neither Kennedy nor the Ritenour band could have been accused of forgetting about, or short-changing, this Scottish audience.
"We're just having fun," said Ritenour in the middle of the closing number's extended series of hot-shot exchanges. The fun was contagious, as well as clear, with bass guitarist Melvin Davis finally standing up to thumb-slap filthy, guttural lines with smiling impudence. Davis normally sits, because he's playing, says Ritenour, "a tree" - a seven-string monster that his fingers get around with ridiculous ease.
Ritenour in concert is an entirely different proposition to his recordings' pristine Los Angeles sheen. Switching between electric and acoustic guitars, he paid homage to Wes Montgomery with bluesy warmth, evoked a cool, soulful Brazilian mood with Tom Jobim's ageless Stone Flower and Agua de Beber, and interacted keenly with Davis's virtuosic lines, Kennedy's percussive depth charges and the superb Patrice Rushen, a physically diminutive but musically mighty presence.
A talent who combines serious jazz-piano chops with pop-soul sensibility, Rushen insinuated the blues with her sly synthesiser pitch bends, simulated congas with no trace of kitsch and then rose to regale us with her hit song Forget Me Nots, conducting its strategic, groovy hand-claps and threatening to party like it was 1982.
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