Prior to the lockdown I spent on average one night a week watching and listening to live music in venues like Pizza Express, Crazy Coqs and the Pheasantry and about 90 per cent of what went down was more or less interchangeable with the contents of this album.
By that I mean these three musicians – Joe Davidian, piano, Jamie Ousley, bass, and Austin MacMahon, drums – are no better and no worse than, say, Chris Ingham, John Pearce, George Double, Bobby Worth, Arnie Somogyi and Paul Morgan. To put it yet another way, they are professional, highly polished and entertaining.
According to Mouthpiece Music, the band’s PR outfit, the three musicians have played together for several years, releasing three albums as the Joe Davidian Trio and a further album under the name of Jamie Ousley before deciding to form a collective with a new name, The Lost Melody, in which all three are of equal stature.
Over the years they have drawn their repertoire from the standards that comprise the Great American Songbook. For this album they challenged each other to compose 10 numbers in the style of the Great American Songbook and the result is two songs each by Ousley and MacMahon, six by Davidian.
Whilst you will look in vain for another Stardust, All The Things You Are or Night And Day, you will find melodies with chord sequences that lend themselves to inventive improvisation resulting in an album in the best traditions of jazz.
Hear/buy The Lost Melody: New Songs For Old Souls at thelostmelody.bandcamp.com
Discography
Leaving Montserrat; Sol; Won’t You Sing This Song For Me?; A Minor Waltz; Ready Or Not; When First We Met; Before I Forget (Live); A Sea Of Voices; If I Didn’t Need You; Sometime, Somehow (52.25)
Joe Davidian (p); Jamie Ousley (b); Austin MacMahon (d). PBS Studios, Westwood, MA, date unknown.
Tie Records Tie 2000