It would be fair to call the crowd at the Concert Hall last night a mixed bag! There were all shapes and sizes, hipsters with their carefully cultivated beards, and concert hall regulars, younger generation and older, but all lovers of music. I guess people have come at their music from all angles, some jazz fans of Scofield and some from Mendoza’s orchestral world. However you got there, the Concert Hall was a good place to be!

The first track of the night was a rather low key ‘Door Number 3’ which had me worried we were in for a night of easy listening, but the next one up was the rather tantalizing ‘Carlos’ which set the blood boiling. It’s unusual to hear jazz tracks so filled out, as it’s more the world of a smokey bar room than the concert hall. While you often get brass instruments with jazz, you rarely get a brass section, and never string and woodwind sections.

In their first show of defiance, Vince Mendoza told the crowd that the order of songs in their programmes was going to be ignored, but that were allowed, as it is jazz after all! Mendoza seems the happier talking to the crowd, but the microphone was forced into Scofield’s hand on occasion, for a few short words.

What came across is how much effort it takes to make a night of music like last night, with such a large group of musicians having to learn the work for one night only. Vince and John arrived in Ireland three days earlier for rehearsal with the RTÉ Concert Orchestra, and their time was not wasted.

The majority of the set was from the Grammy award winning album 54, but we did get a Hank Williams track, with a stripped down verison of ‘Angel of Death’. The final track of the evening was their ‘hit single’ Peculiar, a song with more false endings that the average monster movie. It’s great to hear music of this quality and invention played live, and the standing ovation at the end was well deserved.