Edinburgh Jazz Festival
Dumpstaphunk
Spiegeltent George Square
Rob Adams
FOUR STARS
Only the midnight curfew put the brakes on Dumpstaphunk delivering a New Orleans groovefest straight to the heart of Saturday night. The seven-piece band that keeps the Meters’ flame burning with its tighter-than-tight interlocking guitars, bass guitars – sometimes two of the them driving the music forward – and drums seemed unstoppable up to that point.
Theirs is the sound of celebration and jubilation, even when their songs are dealing with social issues. Keep on through the blues and bad news is the message and with three distinctive voices – keyboardist Ivan Neville joining bassist Nick Daniels and guitarist-bassist Tony Hall at the mics – their chants are rich and their shared vocal lines characterful and persuasive.
All New Orleans’ musical life is in here: soul, funk and blues, of course, and even if their trumpet and trombone section come from “out of town”, they do a fine job of incorporating Crescent City marching band-style howling and riffing into their veritable tower of brass power.
If Neville is the band’s spokesman, Hall is its court jester, the jack the lad who gets the crowd animated and involved, although truth to tell, the music, with its slinky guitar and Hammond licks, big bottom end and super-precise, super-punchy drumming, is animating and involving in itself.
A new feature of the festival this year is the nightly sessions in the Traverse Café Bar. Saturday’s, with Rumba de Bodas, was very much at the festival’s party end as the Italians filled the dancefloor with non-stop, energetic music that began with the baritone sax riff from Charles Mingus’ Moanin’ and veered off into Latin America, swing-chanson and good time bump and grind.
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules hereComments are closed on this article