Irish Times writers review David Sanborn at Vicar Street and Jon Sanders and Mark Crickard at the Cobblestone in Dublin.

David Sanborn

Vicar Street, Dublin

Ray Comiskey

Midway through David Sanborn's concert a well-known jazz musician came over to me and exclaimed: "What a waste of good musicianship." It was difficult to disagree with him. Sanborn is a technically gifted alto-saxophonist, with a signature sound that has earned him, and a host of copiers, more than a few dollars over the years. He also filled his working band with good players; Ricky Peterson (keyboards) and the heavily rock-influenced guitarist Nicky Morach, in particular, are more than highly capable musicians and, with bassist Richard Patterson and drummer Gene Lake, could switch into a groove at the tap of a foot.

Trouble is what they were doing was a cliché-ridden amalgam of jazz, funk and rock. Admittedly, the jazz elements were emphasised, but this was a simple-minded watering down of everything from great jazz altoists like Charlie Parker and Sonny Stitt, to muscular exponents of so-called soul jazz like Gene Ammons, King Curtis and Hank Crawford.

Unsurprisingly, the concert opened with the blues. Both Comin' Home Baby and a medium rocker, Full House, built up a head of steam and unambiguously signalled what was to come. With the precision of a well-oiled machine the band clicked into position, while Sanborn, peddling you've-heard-it-all-before clichés, largely confined himself to the middle and upper registers of the alto. Initially the music was exuberant, exciting even, but it quickly palled. There was little sense of light and shade, of nuance or variety, whether in up-tempo tracks like Tequila, Relativity and Snakes, or medium-slow ballads, like Lisa and Joni Mitchell's Man From Mars.

It was the jazz equivalent of painting by numbers. Paradoxically, the kind of excitement they generated also came across as clinical; amid seemingly passionate solos there was a kind of hallucinatory sense that the musicians' minds could well have been somewhere else - wondering had they left the lights on in the hotel bedroom, or forgotten to pay the garbage disposal bill back in New York. When you're as instrumentally capable as these players, this kind of simple-minded stuff is undemanding and uninvolving. Perhaps the last word should be left to another jazz musician, one of our finest, who was at the concert.

"I loved David Sanborn when I was a kid," he said, "but, as St Paul says, when I became a man I put away the things of a child." Amen to that.

Jon Sanders and Mark Crickard

The Cobblestone, Dublin

Siobhán Long

West Kerry rarely enjoyed such tropical highs before. Kent guitarist Jon Sanders and Belfast fiddler Crickard have spent long years inhaling the infusions of Corca Dhuibhne, but here it was the rhythms and melodies of Portugal, Spain, north Africa and Brazil that shaped their session. Fiddle and guitar have long been cosy bedfellows in the tradition (witness Martin Hayes and Dennis Cahill), but the Sanders/Crickard axis brings a whole new flavour to this particular duetting and duelling combo.

From the minute they kicked off with Rhumba Negra to their closing Wildlife Set (featuring The Swallow's Tail, The Otter's Den and The Bucks Of Oranmore), Sanders and Crickard didn't so much break boundaries, as blithely skip over them on their journey from Slea Head to Lisbon via Barcelona and Budapest, with a brief interlude outside the Four Courts.

From the opening chords, Crickard engaged in sotto voce communion with his fiddle, tucking not just his chin but somehow, his entire being inside its curvilinear frame. He fiddles with the intensity of a player who's been lately reunited with an old acquaintance, engaging impishly in hiccupping two-toned couplets, while Sanders traces intricate pathways alongside him on Spanish guitar.

With their first album barely off the presses, they resist all temptation to limit themselves to its decidedly fine repertoire, choosing instead to marry its exuberant title-track, Salsa Summer, with a goose-stepping Romanian borrowing, a vastly expansive meditation, King Size Blue (that would surely be right at home soundtracking Annie Proulx's Montana landscapes) and an angular evocation of dancing bears in Crickard's tune titled, eh, Dancing Bears.

With Sanders choosing a found harmonium to colour and shade, and Crickard willing to forego any notions of genre in favour of a free-spirited meander across Atlantic shores, into northern Europe and beyond, this was a night for music that simply resists the fetters of the tradition, and at the same time, basks in all their glories.

Two musicians: original thinkers, bold explorers, refreshing co-conspirators on a journey from the foot of Mount Brandon to the peaks of Andalusia - and beyond.