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| Jazz Express Presents Late Night Jazz - Smooth Grooves for Night Moves |
VÁLOGATÁS
"Cannonball" Adderley, Al Cohn, Art Pepper, David "Fathead" Newman, Dizzy Gillespie, Eliane Elias, Houston Pearson, Larry Coryell, Miles Davis, Milt Jackson, Pat Martino, Ricky Ford, Sadao Watanabe, Sonny Stitt, Stan Getz, Yusef Lateef, Zoot Sims |
első megjelenés éve: 2008
73 perc |
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| (2008)
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CD |
Kérjen
árajánlatot! |
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Jazz
Late Night Jazz, the second release in our Jazz Express series offers the perfect accompaniment to a night in front of the fire with friends. That illicit, all night feeling is never far away as recordings including classics by Miles Davis, Dizzy Gillespie and Stan Getz create just the right mood.
Hey, welcome to Jazz Express, the only place to be at this time of night. If this is your first time, glad you found us. If you're hip enough to have hung here before, you'll know that Jazz Express is the perfect pad for nocturnal cats and insomniac hipsters to make it one more for the road while digging the classiest small hours jazz. Wait till you hear what we are laying on you tonight, it's worth staying awake for.
Those that know say that Billy Strayhorn and Duke Ellington were two sides of the same jazz brain. Musical partners from 1939 until Stray's demise in 1967, so close were the men that when listening back to their collaborations, they'd claim not to be able to tell who had written what. So the rest of us shouldn't feel too bad when we think that "Chelsea Bridge" sounds like Ellington at his most sumptuous. Thing is, it's a Strayhorn tune. Ricky Ford is a tenor player from a different generation as the composer, but he sure gets into that beautiful, luminous place.
"Willow Weep For Me" was a one-off hit song in 1933 for Hollywood composer Ann Ronell but the song's blend of the earthy and melodic continues to appeal to jazz musicians to this day. Altoist Cannonball Adderley's fiery blend of bop and blues made him one hell of a sophisticated down-home cat and in 1955, he recorded this near-perfect jazz interpretation.
Though Cannonball was a key member of the late-fifties Miles Davis sextet, in 1947 Miles had to settle for Charlie Parker as his saxophone player, moonlighting on tenor rather than his usual alto. On his first ever session as leader, 22-year-old Miles composed the arch bop tune "Milestone" - all long lines and surprising angles - and contributes a pithy trumpet solo.
The beautiful "Chan's Song" was written by Herbie Hancock for the 1986 Bertrand Tavernier movie Round Midnight in which the pianist also appeared. Brazilian pianist Eliane Elias recorded it the same year for her debut album and hired harmonica legend Toots Thielemans to present the lyrical melody. Interestingly, another harmonica legend Stevie Wonder put lyrics to the tune later and it was recorded by vocalist Dianne Reeves as "Never Said".
The gentle side of west coast alto player Art Pepper is on display here in his temperate reading of "These Foolish Things", one the few British songs that became a worldwide standard. Not that he pays much attention to Jack Strachey's melody, preferring instead to weave his own superbly elegant bop melodies through the harmonies. Dizzy Gillespie does that too on "They Can't Take That Away From Me", but we get more of what composer Gershwin was getting at as well, though spot Dizzy's cheeky quote from another Gershwin classic "It Ain't Necessarily So" in the bridge.
A couple of players who have divided their playing time between straight-ahead jazz and fusion. Altoist Sadao Watanabe is known for his Brazilian-flavoured pop-jazz but here is content to recite the lovely melody of Rodgers/Hart's 1941 standard "My Romance" with respect and warmth. Larry Coryell has made some of the most memorable and incendiary jazz-rock of the '70s and '80s yet here he makes a sensitive and rigorous job of a favourite jazz vehicle, Jerome Kern's "Yesterdays". They all come back to the good old good ones in the end.
And they don't come much older or gooder than "Body And Soul". Written in 1930 and regarded as an obligatory harmonic assault course by any jazzman worthy of the name, here Johnny Green's perennial is examined by one of the sincere tenor players in the business, Al Cohn.
Pat Martino's story is one of the most heart-warming you'll hear. A brilliant guitarist until surgery following a brain aneurysm in the late '70s caused him to lose his memory. Learning how to play again by listening to his old records, if his 1974 recording of his beautiful original "Passata On Guitar" is any evidence, he re-learned from the very best. Pat's still playing today and playing better than ever.
Our second Billy Strayhorn classic of the set is "Daydream", delivered by modern tenor bruiser Houston Pearson. Taken a little brisker than usual, the texture is varied by passing the tune around eight bars at a time, from tenor to piano to trombone and back to tenor again, with the delightful solos in the same order.
Although Yusef Lateef is the named leader of the session that produced this mellifluous reading of "Stella By Starlight", the track is dominated by the poetic euphonium of Bernard McKinney (a rarely heard player on a rarely heard instrument in a jazz context) with Lateef only making a fleeting appearance for the final chord. Maybe next time Yusef. Stan Getz would never stand around waiting for the final chord on his own record date and on Stan's Mood - an ingenious chord sequence that is part "Here's That Rainy Day", part "Easy Living", part "You're Looking At Me, among a couple of others - the great tenor man noodles throughout. And why not, when he noodles so prettily?
Sonny Stitt takes on "Angel Eyes" in much the same spirit as Cannonball Adderley and Art Pepper approach a ballad (and on the same instrument), a beguiling blend of the tough and tender. The minor-key setting of Matt Dennis's invites a bittersweet, bluesy reading and Stitt does not demur. Neither does Milt Jackson on "Blues Mood". A 40-odd year veteran of the Modern Jazz Quartet, Bags was always the gritty blues voice in the cerebral MJQ and here, on drummer Kenny Clarke's 1954 date, he's unfettered. David 'Fathead' Newman too - veteran of many a Ray Charles session - is a gentle giant of a horn player and in his moving version of the all-time losers anthem "One For Me Baby" has a stirring, defiant poignancy. He's got the blues all right, but he ain't gonna let 'em beat him.
Ok, I guess it's home time. Be safe and be sure to swing by Jazz Express next time you're in the neighbourhood. There's plenty more sounds where they came from. We're always open and you're always welcome.
---Chris Ingham
Chris Ingham is a jazz musician, songwriter, contributor to Mojo magazine and author of The Rough Guide To The Beatles and the forthcoming Rough Guide To Sinatra. |
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