George Cables: I Hear Echoes (High Note HCD 7356)
Having over the years recorded with Art Pepper, and among other things put out a number of albums under his own name on both the SteepleChase and High Note labels, pianist George Cables now qualifies as a seasoned veteran with more than a little know-how at his fingertips.
To be honest, I have no idea what state-of-the-art piano trio jazz is considered to be a quarter of the way through this century. The Cables trio on this outing is a nicely integrated unit specialising in a strain of the modern mainstream which offers unassuming yet timeless music the like of which isn’t as common as it used to be, not least because a fair number of younger pianists, by way of a sweeping generalisation, have by dint of age neither the life experiences nor the know-how to fine-tune their expression.
You’d Be So Nice To Come Home To, a standard now so venerable that Pepper recorded it decades prior to taking up his association with Cables, receives a thoroughly convincing workout here, with the trio thinking as one and making for a performance which emphasises the benefit of experience when it comes to making concise, stimulating jazz.
The solo-piano reading of Horace Silver’s Peace which closes the album is aptly reflective and happily free of empty rhetoric. In the accompanying booklet note Cables declares the piece to be a perfect ending and in that assertion he hits upon a fundamental truth, both musically and otherwise.
Josephine Davies: The Celtic Wheel Of The Year Suite (Ubuntu UBU0180)
I’m similarly ill-equipped when it comes to the state of the art regarding big band (or maybe that should be large ensemble) jazz. Besides which, the sheer economics of putting out such music in some physical form is arguably reflected in the fact that tenor-sax player and composer Josephine Davies had to launch a Crowdfunder campaign to make her large ensemble project happen. The music documented on the album is played by the Enso Ensemble, which I’m maybe wrongly assuming was brought together specifically to bring the music to life.
Had I known about that campaign I might well have donated on the strength of her work with the sax / bass / drums trio Satori, which for me embodies a strain of contemporary jazz which is as far from what might be called the school of quiet yet by-and-large unstimulating jazz, as exemplified by certain European record labels, as it is from the dancefloor, the latter point being especially pertinent for those of us with too many years on the clock and a pair of rickety knees. As it is, the large number of musicians results in an expansive outcome, with as far as I can hear faint but never less than welcome echoes of Kenny Wheeler’s writing for larger groups.
In a better world than this one alto sax player Rachael Cohen would be shining more brightly than she is in the contemporary jazz firmament, and here the point’s made by her soloing on Eos (Summer Solstice) which starts in a mildly declamatory fashion but soon settles for an exploration of the material at hand, rife all the while with appreciation for the writing.
By way of seasonal opposition the writing in Gaia’s Breath (Winter Solstice) is heavy with implications of a hard, frosty one, but ensemble restraint emblematic of never overstating a case and the soloing of trumpeter Robbie Robson bring plenty of nuances to the musical table.
Overall, if I still contributed to end-of-the-year polls this one (even in April) would be there or thereabouts.
Anita Ellis: The World In My Arms / Carol Lawrence: Tonight At 8:30 (Fresh Sound Records FSR V144)
The world in 1960, when the albums on this latest in Fresh Sound’s Best Voices Time Forgot series were recorded, was undoubtedly different to the present day. Although both women had musical-theatre credentials, Lawrence with her portrayal of Maria in West Side Story, it is in a sense Ellis who emphasises the credentials largely associated with that world. Her reading of A Lady Must Live bridges the vocal gestures of Lawrence with the more subtle refinements of the jazz singer, although her probably unconscious tendency to declaim in a manner more suited to musical theatre comes to the fore on A Woman Is A Sometime Thing, whilst dealing with both a tempo and an arrangement which seem to encourage it.
Given her musical-theatre association and the fact that her album’s intended as a tribute to “Broadway’s Timeless Musicals” it comes as no surprise to find an interpretation of Something’s Good heading the programme on Lawrence’s album. By contrast with Ellis, she takes a more nuanced approach and in so doing highlights her rhythmic subtlety.
Do It Again nicely summarises Lawrence adopting a more intimate approach to a lyric in an arrangement that doesn’t explicitly encourage it; in so doing she demonstrates the range of her talent and her awareness of it in a manner entirely lacking conceit. Unless she’s been overtaken by mortality, Lawrence is now in her 90s, an embodiment of an era now passed and just as likely to provoke nostalgia for a diminishing few.