Richard Lloyd Giddens Jr knows how to orientate himself around his instrument and to create a cohesive group sound, but otherwise his debut as a leader has strikingly little to recommend it. Giddens Jr is a protégé of Charlie Haden’s and Mimosas is described as the bassist’s “love letter to Central California”. I’m not certain why such a love letter should include Monk’s ‘Ask Me Now’ (he lived in New York) and a piece name-checking ‘Ayler’ (ditto), and nor would it matter if something was happening in sound. But no one wants to hear Monk underpinned by a tickling pulse and coated with synthetic sweetener; and I genuinely struggle to make any connection between the Albert Ayler I know and this twee, cheesy ditty. Melodic heads are too often smoothed off with slick chromatic polyfilla – a bad habit established by the opening track, ‘Storm’ – and by the time a prim and soporific reading of Paul Simon’s ‘The Sound of Silence’ turned up near the end, I’d long since stopped caring. An uneventful, chanceless debut.