Appearing at the Fermanagh Live festival in the Enniskillen hotel, trumpeter, flugelhornist, and singer Mark Bradley led his quartet of keyboardist John Leighton, who has been touring recently with Irish jazz great Gay McIntyre; double bassist Peter Doherty, fresh from last month’s Further into Jazz gig at Jazzeys; and Omagh drummer Aidan Dunphy, for this lunchtime show. “It's a bit early for a jazz gig,” Bradley quipped midway through the first set staring out at the 120 or so in the audience tucking into brunch.
Playing a standards-soaked set that included Cole Porter’s ‘I Get a Kick Out of You’, the Isham Jones/Gus Khan song popularised in recent decades by Harry Connick Jr ‘It Had To Be You’, Duke Ellington’s ‘Don't Get Around Much Any More’ with lyrics by Bob Russell completing the first set, Bradley launched into the next with a burnished Herb Alpert tone and mambo feel.
The standouts ‘Secret Love’ practically synonymous with Doris Day, and Juan Tizol’s ‘Caravan’ later on, Doherty’s steady rhythmic accompaniment a rock to the trumpeter whose soft singing style was very much in the Chet Baker mould, were the standout elements of a well received gig. Dunphy warmed to the latinate rhythmic digressions in the second set as the audience listened every more closely to the quartet. Catch the Bradley band on John Street in Derry tonight at Bennigan’s. SG