In a belated end to his UK tour, Oscar Jerome had enough strong material and bewildering virtuosity to compete with the very best of his UK jazz peers. It’s unfortunate he was let down by a patchy setlist, limiting instrumentation and questionable sound design.
For a moment I questioned whether I’d ever actually see Oscar Jerome in Leeds as we suddenly found ourselves at the front of a lengthy queue outside Belgrave Music Hall & Canteen. It wasn’t the first time; this gig in particular has been toyed with by the pandemic. It was postponed twice from its now quaintly ambitious original date in October 2020 and a third attempt a year later tragically coincided with a city-wide venue boycott amidst a completely seperate, equally uncontrollable epidemic of syringe spikings in nightclubs across the country.
It was only once we had been let in to the chic yet understated Belgrave Music Hall that reality set in for me and my friends Emma and Fionn. Despite arriving at a leisurely 8pm, we really had benefitted from a quirk in the queuing system, and sauntered up to a gloriously quiet and queueless bar like royalty before taking our pick of standing spot in front of the stage (in the middle, right at the front, of course). At one point Oscar himself even walked across the near-empty audience space (just a few feet away from us!), prompting palpatations. Shadowy in a trench coat and with his two emmaculate mirrored locks of hair, we had to check with each other our anticipation for the gig hadn’t led to hallucination. No, Emma’s astonished face confirmed, it hadn’t.
To add to our pleasant surprise, it wasn’t particularly long before the man himself was just a few metres in front of us, with his trench coat now cast aside to reveal a playful striped t-shirt behind a chunky Ibanez guitar. I’ve spent good chunk of the 18-month build up to the gig daydreaming about just how good inevitable opener Sun For Someone would sound and feel live. That purring bassline paired with Ayo Salawu’s nimble jazz-funk drumming could surely be nothing but electrifying in the flesh. Indeed it was, especially after meditative solo guitar musings of Searching for Aliens, which worked well as a calm before the blissful storm that followed.
In truth, I felt some niggling disappointment as Sun For Someone segued into the decidedly less exciting Coy Moon. The levels were all off. The kick drum and that bass line – however competently played by Tom Dreissler – swallowed up both Jerome’s guitar and vocals, leaving the melody often noticeably warped and the need for a bit of wishful thinking in order to hear one of Jerome’s finest tracks in its full glory. Whilst it was a recurring frustration on the night, on balance I think the main cause of the issues was in a lack of gigging experience from me, Emma and Fionn. In our front-of-the-queue giddiness we had inadvertently selected sonically the worst spot in the house, resulting in a face full of kick drum whilst Jerome’s dulcet tones were directed into the space behind us by speakers beside the stage. We might have been close enough to examine the glossy sheen on Jerome’s faintly dyed hair or assess whether he needs to trim his nose hairs (he doesn’t), but in return the sound would never quite feel professional quality throughout the night.
Somewhat consolingly, it wasn’t just us. I overheard talk about the haphazard levels immediately after the gig had finished, and even in the middle of the set there was evidence that there was issues for the performers too. Jerome requested his mic to be turned up during and after Sun For Someone; Dreissler needed time to fiddle with his bass between songs later on and a misbehaving kick drum mic was a repeated concern for both Jerome and Salawu, at one point completely taking the limelight from a blistering Richie Smart conga solo. Whilst I’ve learnt my lesson that the front row isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, I’m sure there’s more the sound engineers could have done to make it a less significant drawback on the night.
If the jazz fans around me were annoyed by the sound issues, they didn’t show it. The mood in the room was one of celebration, with Jerome humble enough to engage with every slightly over-eager heckler. There was the obligatory marriage proposals (“I will if you can get me an EU passport,” Oscar offered) and an accepted request for happy birthday from a very possibly intoxicated fan. One man even managed to buy Oscar a pint and hand it up to him between songs. The resulting chant of “chug! chug! chug!” crossed a line. “I don’t do shit like that anymore,” Oscar laughed before taking a grateful sip.
Just as it had done for Declan McKenna, Orla Gartland and Nubya Garcia, the pandemic has created an unusually big gap between the release of Jerome’s strong debut album Breathe Deep and a subsequent tour. As a result, Jerome caved into temptation to devote a good deal of the gig to unreleased songs from the upcoming follow-up album. It’s a risky, and in my opinion a little impatient, decision to take, and the four new songs aired on the night proved to be a mixed bag. Groovy and hooky Berlin 1 was the pick of the bunch, but Feet Down South also provided a great opportunity for an arresting bass solo from Dreissler. Sweet Isolation, on the other hand, was the flattest moment of the whole evening: a drab, meandering track that did little to inspire movement from the audience beyond a polite nod of the head. Devoting so much time to new songs also meant less time for tried-and-true hits. Give Back What U Stole From Me and Fkn Happy Days ‘N’ That – both highlights from Breathe Deep – were the two most obvious set list casualties.
As the sound levels improved, the highlights came with the songs that relied most on Jerome’s guitar virtuosity. Joy is You, a heartwarming ode to his newborn nephew, saw Jerome have the stage all to himself yet still provide ample soul and colour with some dextrous plucking. “As the past slips through the window / The joy is you” he sang with a smile, revealing some tender vulnerability that was well recieved by the crowd. By contrast, sophisticated and dynamic Gravitate was powered by Salawu’s brilliant, stumbling drum groove, but still saw Jerome improvising at his scintillating best amidst sumptuous melodic bass playing from Dreissler. An extended guitar solo was the only opportunity Jerome had to display his full jazz solo prowess, developing a seed of an idea into an all-consumming spectacle before kicking into one last chorus.
Jerome’s lack of saxophonist was not as fatal as Orla Gartland’s lack of keyboardist a few months ago, but certain songs did lose a good deal of their original detail as a result. 2 Sides and fan favourite Do You Really sounded simply incomplete without the great hooks that had been offered by saxophone and backing vocals on the originals. The three of us certainly tried our best to fill in the melodic gaps with our own voices on the latter, but there was only so much we could do. That said, sax or no sax, Do You Really remains a career highlight for Jerome, and a strong chorus was rapturously recieved by the crowd, prompting demands for an encore, with which the band happily obliged.
There was mock horror just before the start of the gig when we spied on the setlist taped to the stage floor that underwhelming recent single No Need was scheduled to be the final song of the night. We were in for shock: No Need was easily one of the best tracks of the night, taking us from rapid swing to hypnotic funk and back again and at last turning Belgrave Music Hall into a proper dancefloor. Salawu’s tastefully played real drums and Jerome’s rhythmic guitar made perfect replacements for the studio version’s drum machine and wishy-washy keys, and the transition from jazz to dance was executed with a thrill lost on the original song. To my huge relief, Jerome assured us that the concert was being recorded; I’m already desperate for a second listen.
As he bid farewell with No Need‘s slap bass and pounding kick drum, I was reminded that Jerome, for all his outstanding musical ability, is still in the early stages of a very promising career. With little more than an album’s worth of material at his disposal, conjuring up a five-star set was always an uphill battle, and dealing with less experienced sound engineers at the smaller venues may just be par for the course. Even so, after having had a brief chat with him after the gig, the post-gig high was very sweet indeed. The three of us practically skipped through central Leeds and back to the car, jubilantly singing Do You Really with a tote bag full of signed vinyls swinging from my shoulder. At last, there was no gig left to postpone, no songs left to wishfully daydream. The long wait had been worth it.