Performance: St Germain

Bruce Mason Theatre

Review: Graham Reid

French "boffin du studio" Ludovic Navarre makes great jazz-into-cool clubland music. And he calls himself St Germain.

That's courageous because it's the name of the district in Paris that after the last world war was a hot-bed of jazz. Monsieur Navarre is associating himself with some pretty illustrious company.

But with a finely honed six-piece live band and two excellent trip-hop and dub reggae-to-jazz albums behind him, St Germain proved worthy of the association with a classic and vibrant period in French jazz.

In more than 90 minutes of terrific jazz-rock, sometimes tedious clap-after-the-solo funk'n'Afrobop and many more blurring styles besides, his group proved itself a polished crowd-pleaser. And one which did not mind revisiting its addictively percussive Rose Rouge again late in the evening.

This was a band which had its stage routines down pat and knew just how to entertain.

But there were trumpet, sax and percussion solos which, despite being of admirable efficiency and constrained invention, were hardly engaging. They sometimes had the feel of a routine worn smooth and thus less improvised than they might have appeared.

There was the nagging suspicion that this proficient showing had the musicians going through very familiar motions and emotions.

And good though it was, for a few - for remarkably few, actually - the great unanswered question of the night might have been: Which one is the Saint?

He was the modest guy in the shadows at the back pulling together the basslines and superb samples while the band delivered his genre-blurring music and got the audience moving.

This was a night to take your loosest hips to, and certainly one to make you return to those two excellent albums.