By Kenny Mathieson

The name may not mean too much outside of his native Scotland as yet, but pianist Brian Kellock has proved over and over again that he is capable of performing at the highest level. The critical accolades in the London press for his second album, Live At Henry's (Caber Music), suggest that the word is now spreading in serious fashion.

The pianist is a notoriously reluctant self-publicist. He has worked with Australian brass virtuoso James Morrison in Europe and further afield, and is a member of trombonist Mark Nightingale’s London-based band, but for the most part his activities have been confined to Scotland. On his home patch, though, he is a star, whether leading his own trio, accompanying visiting soloists or resident singers like Tam White and Sylvia Rae, or playing with bands like John Rae’s Celtic Feet or the Scottish National Jazz Orchestra.

Kellock graduated with a music degree from Edinburgh University in the early 1980s, and has been a prominent force on the jazz scene ever since, but did not get around to recording his debut CD until 1998, with the Fred Astaire-themed studio set Something’s Got To Give for Tom Bancroft's Caber Music label.

He followed that debut with Live At Henry's, which also features his working trio, with Kenny Ellis on bass and John Rae on drums. The live set, recorded at the Edinburgh club which is their favoured venue, is a more spontaneous, free-flowing session than its predecessor. The trio have been playing together for over a decade now, at least since they formed the rhythm section of the highly regarded John Rae Collective in the late 1980s. As the pianist explained, he is now looking to get back to that band's exploratory feel after a period of concentration on the standard repertoire.

"In some ways I am trying to get back to the more experimental feeling we had in that band. I was very much the mainstreamer then, and we used to have big arguments with Phil Bancroft about the music, because he was into Ornette and David Murray and so on. Looking back on it, that tension actually helped to gave the band a real feeling of spontaneity, and my own playing definitely opened out. I still love the standards, but I also feel I want to get back to a more spontaneous approach, and I can do that with this trio."

Live At Henry's, while not quite state of the art in recorded sound terms, is a great calling card for the trio, and a fine example of how unrestricted his repertoire can be, taking in tunes by Phil Bancroft, Hank Jones, Lennie Tristano, George Russell and Kenny Wheeler, among other equally diverse names.

"I wanted it to be a representation of the kind of material we like to play. We do a lot of standards as well, but the first album was very much a standards record, and we went for something a bit different this time. What you hear is how we played it on the night - we haven't edited anything, all we did was choose between takes, because we recorded over two nights, playing basically the same set.

"Recording at Henry's seemed a natural progression. We do a lot of our playing together there, and I think that is maybe where the trio comes across best of all. We can do things very spontaneously in that environment. We do rehearse, obviously, but it's also quite open there – we can really listen to each other and respond to things that happen in the moment, and the music becomes much more of a trio thing."

In addition to his own album, Kellock is also featured on several more discs in the Caber catalogue, including a fine duo album with blues-jazz singer Tam White, The Crossing, and two albums by John Rae's Celtic Feet, the latest of which, Beware The Feet, is released this month. The Edinburgh-based drummer has a long standing interest in combining jazz with folk music, and Celtic Feet, which is essentially a jazz quintet (Rae, Kellock, saxophonist Phil Bancroft, guitarist Kevin MacKenzie and bassist Mario Caribe) with two folk musicians (concertina player Simon Thoumire and fiddler Eilidh Shaw), is the most successful of his projects in that vein.

That combination ensures he has authentic practitioners on both fronts, and they are able to work together in realising a music which does not really attempt a fusion (implying a reduction to a homogeneous lowest common denominator) so much as an intermingling, drawing on the strengths of both sides of the equation, giving them space to breathe and interact, and working with their contrasts as much as connections.

Caber is also home to bands like Kevin MacKenzie's Swirler and Trio AAB, in which the guitarist teams up with the Bancroft twins in one of the most consistently adventurous units on the UK jazz scene. Pianists Chick Lyall and Paul Harrison and saxophonist John Burgess all have good albums on the label, while trumpeter Eddie Severn's recent Moments In Time is also gathering deserved praise.

A new Trio AAB is scheduled for release later this year, along with discs from the Scottish Guitar Quartet and Scylla & Charybdis, featuring the Bancroft twins with flautist Brian Finnegan. See www.cabermusic.com for more information on Caber Music.

Visit Kenny Mathieson’s website at http://www.kenmat.dircon.co.uk/.