Gig played on 14/11/05

About three-quarters of the way through jazz wunderkind Jamie Cullum's epic show, an old gag springs to mind: an anthropologist conducting research in the Lower Congo had discovered an obscure, unrecorded tribe and what fascinated him the most about the tribe's culture was its musical heritage which included constant drumming from a nearby hill-top.

Despite being thrilled at his discovery, the drums kept the anthropologist awake all night so the next evening he asked the tribe's chief when the drumming would stop. "You don't want to hear drums stop," replied the chief. "After drums stop something terrible happens!" This goes on for weeks and, suffering from a severe lack of sleep, the tired and emotional anthropologist approaches the chief, falls to his knees and begs to know what happens when the drums stop. The chief frowns and replies, "When drums stop, bass solo starts."

And so it is tonight as the Royal Albert Hall is treated to the dubious delights of individual solos from the rhythm section and predictably, the results are very worthy and very dull. It's certainly a low point in a show that veers from the creative to the mediocre in the blinking of an eye and at its centre is the diminutive yet energetic figure of Jamie Cullum.

More than any other artist working within the field, Jamie Cullum has dragged jazz out of the smoke-filled clubs to the masses with surprising results. Indeed, this is a man unafraid to work with more contemporary collaborators including Pharrell and Dan The Automator and in and of itself, Cullum's music is exactly where popular jazz should be in the 21st century. What's problematic is Cullum himself.

Cullum's detractors have approached his work from a rock'n'roll perspective and while this may be a disservice to his oeuvre, it doesn't especially help when the man himself attempts to apply a bit of rock'n'roll to his performance. The sleevenotes to his latest album, "Catching Tales", reference his love for pubs at least twice and it's hard not to groan when he bounds onstage holding a can of Guinness aloft in a misguided attempt to set himself up as a lad.

He simply doesn't need to when he has the ability to turn Hendrix's "Wind Cries Mary" into a smouldering blues with a voice that's infused with a maturity beyond his years and it's an approach that works on Dinah Washington's "What A Difference A Day" makes. Sadly, this isn't something that he applies to his own work. "Get Your Way" is denigrated by unnecessary clowning while the political sentiments of "21st Century Kid" are let down by a shrug of the shoulders that suggests ignorance rather than impotence.

Until Cullum can reign in his more infuriating characteristics he's more likely to be viewed as an irritating little oik rather than an artist with a huge potential ahead of him.

by James Marshall