Some time ago for a class I had to read about a major political figure in world history. It is peculiar the things that stick in your memory from these classes sometimes, veritable madeleines. What stuck in my mind was a reference to a biography of that figure; the mouse that roared, metaphorically saying that this was a minor weak individual who acted like a major powerful one. This title returned to mind last night as I watched a group of young lions perform true to form for too many jazz musicians touring in Japan; performing way under their virtuosi and emotional potential, in other words they were the lions who squeaked and darted around, and the audience were the ones thankful for the meagre crumbs that they bestowed on them.

Here was a group entitled The Spirituals to Swing, in actual fact they should have been called The Spirituals Of Pre-jazz, because they certainly neither swung nor played the music of swing, they played a modern bebop version of Dixie. Here was Craig Handy tenor, Donald Harrison alto, Mark Whitfield guitar, Cyrus Chestnut piano, Rodney Whitaker bass, and Carl Allen on drums; a very strong line up. I had heard many of them before live, and/or on CD.

The show was supposed to begin at 7:00, and the usual announcement was made that it was about to begin 10 or so minutes before that. But 7:00 came and went and we were still being entertained by the background music. Ten minutes passed after 7:00, the club manager was obviously displaying signs of feeling hot under the collar, despite the excessive air conditioning, and the road manager raced out of the club to the group's hotel to bring back Cyrus Chestnut moving not over fast straight onto the stage to be joined by the rest, to whom he mumbled some apologies that sounded like he forgot to get out of the bath, I was sitting next to him aside the stage. Did he appologise to the audience who would now have a curtailed show because of the lateness and the policy of clearing the house, cleaning all of the seats, yes, each of the seats are cleaned with a damp cloth, before the next set could begin; no he surely did not. But that is one of the old chestnuts of the jazz players, turn up late; but then you need to really impress to make up for that, unfortunately he did not.

They began to play, and I began to listen, then to hope, hope, hope and despair. Despair indeed after they began pumping out When the Saints Go Marching In, with next to no improvisation away from the melody to make it interesting; we could listen to many of the numerous versions of Solar (especially the one with Scott Lafaro) Blue in Green, or Some Day My Prince will Come, that Bill Evans played with utter fascination, but do not ask me to listen to another rendition of When the Saints Come (because they didn't and they didn't save the situation), or Motherless Child, by Cyrus, unless he improves on simply largely playing the melody on the black keys (was this radical dissonance for him?) In New Orleans it got to be that when the local groups were requested to play that number, they raised the normal charge to the customer because it had become such a hoary old bore to play, and last night was no exception; only this time they should have been paying me to listen. It certainly did not raise the temperature of the show, certainly not with a drummer racing ahead of the sax, or was it the sax running behind the drummer?, with the bassist and the pianist uncertain whether they should be following the drummer or the soloist. The alto sax did have its moments, there sometimes was a beauty in Harrison's tone, and now and again there was the promise of a wonderful ballad rendition coming through, and on the sides he occasionally added small punchy statements in a failed attempt to kick start the soloists, the band into a more emotive, expressive, virtuosic mode. But even the otherwise impressive Mark Whitfield, I saw him with Reggie Workman in New York when he was so so impressive (being driven, of course, by the wonderfully rich, heterogeneous driving rhythmic patterns of Ronnie Burrage on drums, and the rhtymic and harmonic inventiveness of Workman) was plodding along, content to use too many of those filler phrases that are the mundane bane of the rock guitarist; dubididub, dubididub, dubididub, with appropriate facial contortions that excite the audience but in reality they are expressing the pain of the instrumentalist listening to his own lack of imagination, or was it a grimace to suppress their joy at playing to the audience with such ease.

All in all, not a show to recommend, definitely not one of the stature of Roy Haynes / David Kikoski; they arrived on time, and played sparkling, pushing music, music to humour, into the bargain; sheer professionalism, great jazz. Unfortunately, contrary to the statement of an unbending know it all on another list; the audience for the spirituals to sling (intended mis-spelling)was much larger than that for Roy Haynes and Kikoski and others, proving that it takes more than quality music to bring the audiences to the clubs, bad music works better and the audiences can, this one did, lap it up in appreciation. Unbelievably the price for this nonesense was 8,000 yen, a cool 63 dollars, without even a glass of beer to get you into a state sufficiently debilitated to enjoy the dixieland slop rompers. One guy was obviously prepared; he sat with a full bottle of Famous Grouse Scotch throwing it down until traffic signal red in the face, rolling from incapacity, seldom in time to the music, although he seemed to give the impression that he thought it was; or was he as confused as me about what the basic rhythm was; was the source from the drummer, the sax soloist, or the bassist, or the pianist who was late andwho never picked up the tab.

A long, honest, review, I am sad to say.