Lou Donaldson

Despite - or perhaps because of - its utter predictability, the music provided by Lou Donaldson's quartet drew an ecstatic response from a virtually full house at Vicar Street on Sunday. The fare, with few exceptions, was blues played by good musicians to whom the idiom is like second nature; certainly the leader's bop inflected alto was suffused with the blues, as was the work of organist Lonnie Smith, guitarist Randy Johnston and drummer Fukushi Tanaka.

They made a tight group with a capable front line, bound beautifully by the crisp, idiomatic, well-judged drumming of Tanaka - and they put on a show, with some carefully prepared bits of business and a few down home vocals, to keep the punters happy.

There is no doubt that it worked for the audience, but with one 12-bar following another and Donaldson and Smith, in particular, digging deep into the bag of blues cliches, there was a sense that behind the undoubted expertise was mere formula; Blues Walk, Gravy Train, Midnight Creeper, Peekin', Alligator Boogaloo - the last three identical in tempo and time signature - were stereotypical performances with only the drumming and occasional moments from Johnston to add musical interest.

Some standards, among them a medium-up Stella By Starlight, Broadway and, above all, the penultimate offering, Bye Bye Blackbird, which elicited possibly the most engaged playing from Donaldson, Smith and, especially, Johnston, suggested that this quartet could stir itself if challenged sufficiently by the material. Otherwise, a little of what they served up, personally, went a long way.