Spargo: Of Not What's Not ... But What Is

By GRAHAM REID

(Herald Rating: * * *)

This Auckland jazz quartet plus guests is helmed by trumpeter Kingsley Melhuish and there's a joyous, slightly anarchic and amusingly heretical approach taken throughout. But while stylistic barriers fall or are leaped in a single bound it can lack cohesion: Guitarist Nigel Gavin's effectively dirty, ear-scouring jazz-rock solo in the lightly funky King Kudos bumps up against the moving Matemihi, which looks to 50s Miles Davis and an operatic waiata before branching off into some ordinary bandstand swing.

Then it is into Edmond's Tang, a stately and slightly woozy New Orleans-styled horn ballad with a rippling piano solo from David Lines. The second half settles after the refined Mr Bell, which is the album's standout. Spargo draw on some exceptional local talents but while the separate parts work within themselves they don't make for a coherent vision, and ultimately not quite as inventive as it thinks it is.

Label: Pacific Echoes