The two significant things about Kerry Moffit are (1) this is his debut album, and (2) he has been a professional musician for 41 years, 25 of which were spent as a member of United States Air Force bands.
This means that at best he is on the threshold of senior citizenship and at worst he has crossed that threshold well and truly; either way he is seriously long in the tooth in terms of debut albums. That would appear to be largely irrelevant given that the chops are more than up to the task of going the distance with Old Father Time.
The eight musicians, who along with Moffit are known collectively as Turning Circles, are all from the Midwest and are, so the sleeve notes tell us, amongst the finest in the region. Moffit, who arranged the entire album, has selected four standards by Hank Mobley, Shorty Rogers, Buddy Shaw and Jimmy Van Heusen and complemented them with four originals from his own pen.
The resultant sound smacks of West Coast laced lightly with hard bop and if nothing stands out particularly neither does anything fall below the standard we might expect from seasoned professional musicians. In short, a well-earned three stars.
Discography
This I Dig Of You; Just A Few; Free For All; Katrina Ballerina; Life, Love, Loss; 10-4 Jam; M.I., But Beautiful (58.26)
Moffit (t, flh); Seth Ebersole (as, ts); Rob Killips, Aftin Sinclair (tb); Arlene Pritchard McDaniel (Fender Rhodes, Casio Prive); Luther Allison (Fender Rhodes); Terri Newman (b); Ian LeVine (d). Troubadour Recording Studios, Lansing, Michigan. December 2017, February 2018.
Turning Circles Music TCM 001
