Review - 30 April 1993 - by Kenny Mathieson

BOBBY WELLINS at the Tron Jazz Cellar, Edinburgh Saxophonist Bobby Wellins belongs to a generation of jazz players who cut their teeth on bop, but now plays in a rather less frenetic, more lucidly mainstream style. He has been based in London for many years, and is a relatively infrequent visitor north of the border, which made the smaller than expected audience a slightly disappointing one.

There were no such disappointments from Wellins, however. His playing is rarely marked by anything too surprising, but concentrates on assured and highly coherent melodic and harmonic developments, played in an expressive, beautifully articulated fashion, even when the tempo is up in the breakneck region, as on an unconventionally lickety-split reading of Love for Sale.

It is that impeccable control, combined with a rich, even luxuriant horn tone, leavened by just a touch of asperity, which makes him such a consistently pleasurable player. He played the kind of mix of standard songs and rather more modern jazz tunes which form the universal jazz language of the pick-up band.

On this occasion, that meant a lively trio which featured pianist Chick Lyall, George Lyle on bass, and Tony McLennan on drums. Lyall is not a "natural" standards player, and his oblique and angular approach to harmony proved to be a good foil to Wellins's more straight-forwardly idiomatic playing, a stylistic disparity which injected a little tension into what could have developed as a rather conventional blowing session.

(c) Kenny Mathieson (First published in the Scotsman newspaper).