A sprawling curiosity from McLean, a regular over at the years at the Wednesday night hard bop jam upstairs at Ronnie Scott’s also with a track record as a leader already well established and now several low-key albums on, the problem is far more than his earlier work this flits about far too much, McLean’s sometimes floridly hyperactive vocals are not ideal at all and certainly hardly a match to his highly accomplished bop piano playing.
He’s also a violinist (heard to better effect on the latest Partikel release) and the album incorporates this element of his artistic range too and while most of the tunes are McLean's, nods to classical music and a toe-curling version of the Fuller/Gillespie standard ‘I Waited For You’ also find their way in. McLean has also arranged the lot. The band line-ups come in a variety of small to medium-sized groupings and are shaped around the bass of Jonathan Harvey (whose easily dispensable solo track ‘The Planets’ comes far too early on), and the lively saving-grace drumming of Saleem Raman who deserves to be far better known.
There are a good deal of comings and goings, plenty of welcome glimpses of Loose Tubes trombonist Ashley Slater and acres of space for flautist Gareth Lockrane for instance plus plenty of other notables cropping up including saxophonists Jason Yarde and Duncan Eagles. There’s even a glistening harp solo track in the second half of the album, a counterpart to the earlier solo bass spot, for no obvious reason again besides filler, but I suppose why not although they achieve little given how much McLean and co elsewhere charge forward like bats out of hell.
The version of ‘Babylon's Burning’ is too jarring McLean turning snarly punk momentarily but it’s too pantomime villain-like in the delivery. So, all in all, definitely a case of throwing everything but the kitchen sink at the microphones, the many talents of McLean (he even picks up a viola and lulling guitar too on the reggae-fied classical mash-up ‘Shizannah’) claiming their spot, this exhausting album is just too all over the place for its own good.
Stephen Graham
Released in June