Gig review: Jazz Sabbath at Leeds City Varieties

As unlikely musical backstories go, Jazz Sabbath’s is particularly entertaining in its preposterousness.

According to the prestige music documentary-style video introduction to tonight’s performance as part of Leeds Jazz Festival, British jazz pianist Milton Keanes’s trio conceived a series of compositions in the late 1960s. Due to various varieties of misfortune and rip-off, these original jazz recordings of undeniable classics such as Iron Man and War Pigs lay lost and forgotten until Jazz Sabbath’s re-emergence in 2020.

In the meantime, the misappropriation of the same gems by a certain remorselessly heavy Birmingham quartet (referred to tonight as either ‘that group’ or ‘Back Stabbath’) turned them into arguably one of the most influential bands ever to exist.

If an actual jazz trio had cut these exact arrangements in the late 1960s, they probably wouldn’t have gone very far, regardless of the potential of the compositions.

That was the era when creeping influence of psychedelia, free jazz and electronic instrumentation (heralded by the pioneering work of Miles Davis) stretched the boundaries of jazz, whilst psychedelic rock acts such as Santana and Jimi Hendrix acted on their jazz-curious instincts with similarly adventurous results.

Led by pianist Adam Wakeman, Jazz Sabbath’s channelling of Black Sabbath’s regal Ozzy-fronted early 1970s peak years is rooted in a more classicist interpretation of jazz.

Ask someone without an active interest in the genre to describe jazz, and the gently bebop-hued, steadily pulsating bass and drums vamps (on which Wakeman liberally sprinkles variations of the tunes’ vocal melodies and Tony Iommi’s iconic riffs) that monolithic tunes such as Fairies Wear Boots mutate into tonight would be quite a likely answer.

Dressed in a shiny sequinned suit and looking not entirely unlikely Black Sabbath bassist and lyricist Geezer Butler with his mane of 1980s hard rocker hair, Wakeman (who steps out of the ‘Milton Keanes’ persona to reminisce about playing the City Varieties with his keyboardist dad, prog-rock royalty Rick Wakeman, in 1992) has worked with both Black Sabbath and Ozzy Osbourne.

This gives the project a genuine connection to the source material, as well as potentially explaining why such frequently repeated, albeit very tongue-in-cheek, public claims of intellectual theft haven’t led to a flurry cease and desist legal letters.

Whether indulging in ludicrously far-fetched, dad-joke riddled origin stories for the tunes (apparently War Pigs was originally an educational song about the dangers of undercooked meat called ‘raw pigs’) or offering self-deprecating anecdotes from the trio’s globe-trotting touring, Wakeman is effortlessly entertaining company.

But as the evening progresses, anyone who is into both Black Sabbath and jazz could be excused for wishing that some of the wild imagination that fuels the backstory could also be applied to the music.

There are moments when the trio ease off the gas to probe affectingly into the melancholy core of Sabbath’s peerless classics. A minimalist solo piano exploration of Paranoid’s vocal melody is a treat, but eventually that, and every other song aired during tonight’s nearly two-hour performance adheres to the same conservative piano jazz trio templates.

Jazz Sabbath offer plenty of entertainment value, and both the comedy elements and the music get an enthusiastic response, but it’s hard to shake off the sneaking suspicion that we’re experiencing a rehearsal room gag that has unexpectedly blown up to become a globally successful enterprise.